Open Review of ‘Responsibility Towards the Planetary Nothing: For Infrapolitical Preparation’

2 November 2023

Dear Rafael,

I have read your article ‘Responsibility Toward the Planetary Nothing: For Infrapolitical Pre-paration‘ with great interest. Thank you for writing it. I think it is a profound, subtle, demanding, and very well-written piece, worth re-reading many times. Clearly, it merits publication. My commentary will thus necessarily be quite partial and limited. It is essentially concerned with the framing of the development offered by you, and some of its consequences, which I will only just be able to outline…

As I have been asked for my commentary in the manner of an Open Peer Review, I have given a bit of thought to the nature of such an exercise. Open Reviewers voice their opinions in their own name, rather than that of the Journal. This shift has many consequences than can, and perhaps must, be explored at more length. The formal invitation by a Journal to act as Reviewers invests the latter with the authority of an expert. Yet I only come to your writing as a reader among others, or as some sort of (future) discussant.

I realize that, in response to your remission, I have only one thing to say. I believe such singleness in fact results from the focus of your proposal. My own wanderings no doubt imply and presuppose your development – even when, or precisely because, they enact –at least partially– an apparent inversion of them. I am not, in fact, stating an opinion contrary to your own, but rather underlining the fact that your argument can, and perhaps should, also be turned inside-out. For, if what you say holds, then my own dérive must also hold.

You open your piece by acknowledging that we are entering terra incognita. And you go on to thematize infrapolitical ‘pre-paration’ as a ‘vigilant immersion’ into such terra incognita. All good. At the same time, I ask myself if such an affirmative ‘pre-paration’ does not call to be conceived, too, as some sort of active responsibility –response-ability– in the face of the effectuation of a kind of terra cognita, or, to keep to your usage, eco-logica. In more ways than one you yourself say and imply as much. And yet as a reader I am left feeling the need to emphasize more keenly such a supplementary infrapolitical constellation, and some of its aspects, as a way to double upon some of your concerns and motifs, as they later emerge in your essay.

Since, at least in principle, the abysses associated with such terra cognita would have been brought about by a politica eco-logica, the paradox is that the domain of the terra incognita which we already inhabit –insofar as it also inhabits us– would therefore not correspond to nothingness and the unknown but rather, in the first instance, to the very spoils of being and know-ledge. I am suggesting that the infrapolitical pre-paration to which you refer must therefore be oriented as much towards the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ as toward the ‘future’ – since the loss at stake is precisely that of indeterminacy. To use the powerful metaphor deployed by Freud in relation to the drives (cfr. The Ego and the Id) the politics of eco-logia would have brought about a growingly catastrophic unmixing of being and nothingness, bringing about the ‘generic and anonymous reality’ to which you yourself refer. For living diversity, of the sort whose loss has been notably accelerating on the planet since the Industrial Revolution, requires the very kind of indeterminacy recurrently thematized by infrapolitics.

Which is why we might feel less inclined affirmatively to pre-pare for it, than to respond to its accelerating consolidation. Both dispositions might be sustained simultaneously – or they might even be understood to be one and the same, in differing form.

What are some of the implications of this broad proposition, understood as supplementary to yours?

You write:

Such a situation attests to the proximity of the nothing that informs being, namely that being is always already on the edge of the nothing. (…) To think of existence as an immersion into the uncharted territory of the current climatic reality also implies a turning in into the essence of the nothing—in our case, the planetary nothing—that extends to every level of being.

I wonder whether the Freudian notion of unmixing runs along, or against, the ‘inconsistent consistency or the non-coincidental coincidence that informs being and nothing’. My impression is that it actually runs against it, since such unmixing in fact amounts to a kind of breakdown. It is this unmixing to which I believe it is necessary to respond infrapolitically in order, precisely, to salvage the non-coincidental coincidence that sustains being and nothing in their mix.

Such a response no doubt has consequences further along the way: the supplementary line of thought which I am trying to convey here would eventually bring up matters pertaining to the body, materiality, performance and praxis in infrapolítical key. Quite a challenge, yet an inevitable one.

Which is why I am fully in agreement with you when you describe:

(…) this pre-paration is impossible as long as we are compromised by academic-secular thinking. It thus calls for a step outside academia in search of a nonsecular path of thinking. This path must be anonymous or embedded in the anonymity of the nameless name of existence that extends in ‘the subtle voice of silence’

Yet, alongside you, I cannot help thinking that it is not only a matter of ascertaining a ‘nonsecular path of thinking’ in proximity to anonymity, namelessness and sacrality, but also immediacy, personification, monikers and the profane…

Again, I do not disagree with you:

This paper is inscribed within antiphilosophy that (…) strives to present what lies underneath the surface and remains unpresentable (…). As such, it aims to think that dimension of being that is held up in an infranscendence of sorts. It is an aimless aim, devoid of object or purpose, merely wearing itself out in the attempt to think the passage of undecidability where existence lingers between being and nothing.

However, for the same reasons, something like an inframanence is surely also in order. Because, as you do well to point out, ‘such alternative thinking is non-academic and, above all, anti-philosophical’: thus it must also be empirical, trial-and-error, approximative, vernacular, and even uncannily straight-forward. At least in part.

Likewise, I follow you when you affirm:

This anxiety is without anxiety in the face of ‘the collapse of the ecological foundations of existence,’ acclimatizing us to existence as it extends unconditioned, without oikos, into the unknown. It is thus ‘a peculiar calm’ (…) insofar as it affirms existence as thrown into planetary nothingness.

I confess, however, to sensing the risk of a certain aestheticization of our juncture here, which –again– is more about an abyssal push into homogeneity, than it is about renewed non-coincidence. As you yourself repeatedly underline.

I second you (in philosophical key) when you write:

(…) It is thus suspended in the planetary nothing, a situation to which only non-eco-logical anxiety can attune us through its atmospheric indeterminacy.

Yet I wonder (psychoanalytically) whether such a formulation does not harbor too much faith in anxiety, insofar as anxiety ultimately corrodes its subject. Which gets us back to the question: does the unmixing run along, or against, ‘non-coincidental coincidence’?

As for the relation between your piece and my own very initial commentary on it, I suppose it can precisely be described as that of a non-coincidental coincidence – with a view to the impossible question: how might we respond to the prospect of planetary unmixing…?

7 November 2023

Dear Benjamín,

I truly appreciate you taking the time to comment on my article. I hope this is the beginning of a fruitful conversation. What I am about to say might not be the response that one would expect in relation to your response. It is, as I will explain later, a weak response, which tries to speak of a certain silence affecting my article. I pick up on the theme of unmixing being and nothingness you mention, however, I elaborate on it in a direction other than the one indicated in your response. This response thus ventures perhaps on a path of its own, trying to voice a certain silence present in my text.

It is true that there is a mixing or indeterminacy affecting being and nothing in my text. I see this mixing as a gesture towards an existential dimension that remains overlooked by a need to secure a foothold in being, that is, a need for ontology. I cannot help but sense such a need everywhere as a sign that one is evading a certain spectral instability. Such a drive is clear in academic work, which is always striving to unmix being from nothingness in order to have a foothold in the former.

To resist ontology is risky business indeed (it can literally put one out of business). I am fully aware of that. However, the practice of existential thinking, which I am attempting in my text to engage in, requires a certain honesty that exposes one to the instability emerging from being as nothing. It is this instability that I experience in the current times of climatic emergency. The type of thinking that occurs as a reaction to this exposition is a step aside from the ontological everydayness required for minimal survival within academia; that is, it is a step aside from the unmixing of being and nothing. As I see it, the task of unmixing informs the responsibility of academic or institutional thinking to disentangle being from what is not: in other words, an ontological response that affirms being as being. In this sense, being must always be responsive to itself. The task of unmixing seems to be guided by a certain restraint on being’s wandering— a restraint on the dérive of being into nothing.

My article attempts to wander outside the order of such a task, toward the internal dis-placement of being as nothing and thus away from the need for restraint. Is there a space for thinking outside the order of unmixing? A space for thinking outside the responsibility of ontology—or the habit of responding to a logic of being (a logic that goes from being to being)? This space is indeed catastrophic: a space informed, following the etymological root of ‘catastrophe’, by the sudden turn of being as nothing. This sudden turning is constantly at play in being, so much so that being is always already nothing. However, catastrophic does not need to be heeded as the negative turn of being, but can instead be the neutral disposition of existence.

I see how neutralizing the catastrophic turn of being might be taken as an anesthetic move, one which leads to paralysis or inaction. I am aware of the risk. However, my intention is not to reduce the responsibility of being to mere inaction (nor is it to point to the need for action), but rather to pause and think in/through the very experience of the sudden turning of being as nothing, a turning that is happening unbeknownst to ourselves as the silent event of existence.

The exposition to this silent event cannot be marked by the encounter between a concrete individual and an object; it cannot be measured by my standards or someone else’s. Such an exposition is thus not subject- or object-centered; it does not concern the ontic situation of a particular individual. It is perhaps what Claude Romano, in his book There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing (2016), describes as a calmness of sorts that seeps in moments of ‘impersonal lucidity’ (58). This lucidity cannot be equated to knowledge or the result of any active acquiring of it. Instead, it is the extended anonymity from within which one is exposed to that which is-not—an instant of lightness where no difference stands. Is not this the instant—the sudden turning of being as nothing—that is overlooked by the ontological-like endeavor of unmixing being from nothing that pervades institutional thought? An endeavor whose aim is to persevere on its insistent guarding of itself from any sudden turn or dis-placement?

Perhaps these are not clear-cut questions and might be more misleading than clarifying. However, my point in raising them is to note that there seems to be an instant of indifference, an infrapolitical instance (as I see it), that is left uninterpellated by the insistence placed on the ontological course of academic thinking. To me, this very non-interpellation is the infrapolitical dimension of existence insofar as it manifests a moment of suspension in an unbound sense of nothingness, or perhaps a subtraction that informs the path of being (or that it is being itself). A vigilant attentiveness to the submersion into the nothing of being names a turn toward a sort of impersonal lucidity, the pause or calmness that engulfs one in the ek-static moment of existence, which is not one moment but the recurrent ‘catastrophic’ instant of being.

I am aware that my response evades, to some extent, the concerns of your response. It is a fugitive response. Fugitivity is the term that best describes my article insofar as it attempts to think in/through an instant that escapes the hastiness of ontological pressure. This is an instant of lightness and indifference, of ‘catastrophic’ calmness. It is an instant of warning, of silent warning, where we step in as the very outside of our fixed ontological itinerary—a dérive of sorts that we are always already part of.

My response follows in part from such a dérive, moving forward as an extension of it. It is perhaps a non-response, or a weak response, unable to uncouple itself from the article about which it should be responding. This response is speaking from within what perhaps has been left unsaid in the text, or precisely as that which is not explicitly said in it (the silent text of the text). Such silence signals what prompted the article to be written in the first place: the push against the uncoupling itself that is required in the instituting thought of academia.

Such a squared dérive was perhaps not called for in this circumstance. A formal and strong response would have been the most sensible option. However, I hope that you can hear the weakness of the present response as a call to the silent mover of my text.

Abrazos,

Rafael