By Héctor Silva
Latin America has suffered through almost three decades of the so-called war on drugs. U.S. President George H.W. Bush formally declared the war in the late 1980s, but from the Andes to the Rio Grande it started when the Colombian cartels and their Mexican partners (then exclusively involved in distribution) created a multi-billion-dollar business to satisfy the growing U.S.
In an extremely thought-provoking essay written by Roberto Esposito, he quotes Foucault, “As soon as power takes up life itself as an object of calculation and an instrument for its own ends, it becomes possible, at least in certain conditions for power to decide to sacrifice one part of the population to benefit another.” Esposito thinks Foucault was accurate in this but he also thinks there is more to it than this. His term and idea to further understand how this occurs is immunization in which simply is the idea that an immunization is a protection from a particular threat. Usually what we think of is the idea of an infectious agent crossing over into a space that is free of any contagion. In his essay Nazism and Us Esposito writes, “what Nazism wanted to avoid at all cost was the contagion of superior beings by inferior beings.”
One of the things he discusses in this provocative essay is how Nazism ”brushes up against a dimension that is part of our experience as post-moderns”. Even quoting Mein Kampf, “if the power to fight for one’s health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends.” Pushing this agenda of health Hitler and the Nazis ”launched the most powerful campaign against cancer by restricting asbestos, tobacco, pesticides, and colorants, encouraging the distribution of organic and vegetarian foods”. Some of the details of this can be found here. As Rudolph Hess (Nazi politician who helped Hitler with Mein Kampf) wrote, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”
I am reminded of Jonathan Littell’s excellent (dare I say it was excellent) book The Kindly Ones where the protagonist writes, “The real danger for mankind is me, is you”. It is just with this that Esposito’s point of immunization becomes clear in the sense to immunize we often need to use the virulent that causes the contagion in order to cure us of it, or as he writes, “genocide was the result of not the absence but the presence of a medical ethics that was perverted into its opposite.”
As Esposito makes clear in the final paragraph of this essay, as theorist we have produced a certain amount of “antibodies” to ward off a collapse into hell where National Socialist ideology resides but global conditions such as the extreme disparity between rich and poor, and the extreme presence of power acting upon biological bodies where doctors have become priest exactly as Gerhard Wagner foretold, or where The Golden Dawn openly asserts its Nazi ideology while providing food for the hungry, we must reinvent the terms of the political, and as Esposito writes at the end of his essay, “we must consciously cross through that darkness once again and respond quite differently to the same questions that gave rise to it.”
Most quotes are from Esposito’s book Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.
Julio Cortazar opens his short story axolotl with this paragraph:
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jarden des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, the fain movements. Now I am an axolotl.
There is no doubt this story takes on characteristics of the Aztec myth of a Xolotl. Xolotl is the god of death and misfortune in Aztec lore. Depicted as a sleeping dog in one of Frida’s paintings (below), he is the guardian of the underworld much like Virgil in Dante’s myth. In some stories Xolotl is the “larval form assumed by Quetzalcoatl in the Land of the Dead, from which he is later spiritually born.” Quetzalcoatl is the god of the Aztecs, often associated with learning and knowledge.
For science this creature is Ambystoma mexicanum often called the Mexican walking fish. Not actually a fish but classified as an amphibian which puts it closer to a frog or toad. Genetically the creature is interesting; 28 chromosomes, 14 from the mother (egg) and 14 from the father (sperm), however during meiosis ’cross over’ takes place which creates many random variations that can come from the parent’s parents. Also, this creature has the ability to completely regenerate limbs. Lastly the axolotl remains in a neotenic state.
Neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics within an adult species. Cortazar makes note of this when he writes, “They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour?” Cortazar often uses adjectives describing the “affect” of the creatures: indifference, immobility, inexpressive features. This moment of lucidity marks the transitory or even illusory nature of life. It is very similar to the moment in Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion of G.H. when the narrator crushes a cockroach.
This intrusion in the banality of the everyday is something Martin Heidegger wrote about and called augenblick. Once the narrator looked at the crushed insect, she become guilty, fascinated, and even a bit enlightened. Here Clarice writes like a great existentialist:
Now I’ll tell you how I entered the inexpressive, which was always my blind and secret quest. About how I entered what exists between the number one and the number two, about how I saw the line of mystery and fire, which is the secret line. Between two musical notes another note exists, between two facts another fact exists.
Clarice writes that her protagonist G.H. begins to think about her comportment towards the future (again Heideggerian) which of course this future is always in a dialectical interaction with her past, not only in a psychoanalytical way of compulsion to repeat but in a very ontological way of creating dasein or existence itself by leaving now other possibility. This brings us to the other writer who is fascinated by the axolotl.
Giorgio Agamben writes, “Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience.” This is exactly what Clarice writes about through her character G.H. and Cortazar eludes to when asking the question are the axolotl the remnants of the fallen Aztec?
All these questions are bound up with what Aristotle first asked about; potentiality. He defines this as, “a principle of change by which a thing is acted upon or acts upon itself.” Agamben takes his cue from this idea and states that potentiality must also imply the negation of potential which would mean impotential. An act must also be able to not not be which would mean that once I finish and stare at this post then I am not not thinking of the post, you may ask then what are you doing, my answer would be, “breaking from the dictates of an incapacity in capacity”.
Here we need to get back to the star of this show, the axolotl. Agamben finds this creature interesting just like Cortazar (for slightly different reasons) because of its neonetic larvic state. The amphibian remains in a state of potentiality because it is not impossible for the larval state to evolve into an adult state, then the aquatic creature becomes a fully adult salamander (this is rare but it is not impossible–if the creature is fed iodine it will change into an adult). For Agamben this is the paradigm he is looking for, “(speaking of a child now)who so adheres to its lack of specialization and totipotency that it refuses any destiny and specific environment so as to solely follow its own indeterminacy and immaturity.” What we see here is what Cortazar is writing about, the border between creatures falling away, the idea of categories dissolving, impotential as an act that is just as potent as actuality, “possibility suspended between occurrence and nonoccurence or as Lispector alludes to finding the space between the number 1 and 2.
An excellent interview: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/7/cavalier-history-situationism-interview-mckenzie-w/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rhizome-fp+%28Rhizome+%3E+Front+Page%29
Roberto Esposito's Third Person is reviewed at NDPR.
Let me put my claim simply: The “new materialism” is neither new nor materialism. It is, in fact, the old vitalism. Now I don’t mean to disparage the new materialism when I say this, or to position myself as some old Wise One who goes around proclaiming that there is nothing new under the sun. What I want to do is actually make a point that the historian of science Georges Canguilhem makes in his book, Knowledge of Life (Fordham 2008, orig.
The alteration of nature or what is natural is one of the most interesting questions when life is a philosophical concern. What is natural or nature? The word nature in Latin derived from natura which is a translation of the Greek word physis which originally meant the intrinsic qualities of a plant (Homer). It later took on much of what we call natural today. However, what we call natural seems to be shifting and the great debate socially and politically will be what can be altered since we have not only eaten from the tree of knowledge but we have begun to see the effects of killing God.
In an interesting article written by Lorraine Daston she explains that modern philosophers have followed ancient and medieval Scholastic sources, “In opposing the natural to at least three other categories (in addition to the artificial): the supernatural (supra naturam), the preternatural (praeter naturam) and the unnatural (contra naturam)” The preternatural in this thought is equanimous in morality because it is something that occurs “outside the quotidian order of nature, but still due to natural causes, however oddly concatenated” Her article traces the trajectory of this idea of the preternatural, the idea of the marvelous but not the impossible. The idea behind changing nature is often dispersed among these ways of looking at what is natural and what is not. One of the least controversial modern aspects of changing what is supposed to be natural is Plastic surgery or what in the land of plastic surgery calls plastica.
In the ”land of the future” plastica is looked at as a right and in a lot of cases as an economic necessity; you will often hear Brazilians state something like, “Here in Brazil there is no prejudice” In Brazil the plastic surgery doctors are celebrated in magazines, and often shown with movie stars. Brazil boast this “aesthetic nationalism” and it searches for the form of beauty under the blade of a scalpel. As anthropologist Alexander Edmonds states, “economic dependency has often been linked in Brazil to the problem of cultural authenticity and imitation. Roberto Schwarz argues that ‘the artificial, inauthentic and imitative nature of our [i.e., Brazilian] cultural life” has been experienced as a ‘malaise’ for Brazilian elites” Some would claim that is only natural to want to improve upon ourselves, but others will state this is not natural and even unnatural to the point of macabre.
Is this idea of changing nature an ill of modernity replacing the Big Other providing us with an emancipation of ourselves without looking to a God to act out a blue print of our lives? Henri Atlan thinks this question is timeless, even creates time in a sense, “The (re)production of living beings has always been the chief business of humankind. It provides us with our awareness of passing time, the time of individuals and the time of generations. the prize it offers is control over death, individual or collective, a control that may be real but ephemeral, or eternal and more or less a fantasy” He later goes on to say however that at this moment we are equipped with the tools to refashion our biological fashions, “Today, however, thanks to theoretical and technical discoveries in reproductive biology and heredity, this age-old quest for control has brought us up to and over a threshold never crossed before”
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is considered to be a great European intellectual and a preeminent Portuguese modernist. Born in Lisbon, he grew up in South Africa and had an English education at St. Joseph’s, a Dominican convent school, in Durban. In 1901, he passed the Cape School Higher Examination with distinction, and in 1903, he won Queen Victoria’s Memorial Prize for the best essay in English.
I decided to write some quick thoughts before I go to sleep. My thoughts tonight are on the obvious trend in culture that seems to have some basis in reactions against reductionary thinking such as our present day scientism or our past positivism. I wrote an article for www.undergroundwriter.com with some of these thoughts in mind regarding the great poet Pablo Neruda. Tonight I am struck with the similarities (I understand there are differences) between these new ideas in Continental Philosophy such as Speculative Realism and the literary genre of Magical Realism.
Magical Realism is quite an interesting genre because even using this term we are actually asking questions such as: What is quotidian? What is the marvelous (maravilloso)? and of course Post-Colonial theory asks us the question: Is the term racist and does it fall in line with the ideology of Eurocentrism and the like?
The most famous writer within the tradition is the great novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo). Gabo’s masterpiece of course is his Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The general idea which is incorrect of course is that the 1960′s Latin American boom brought us the new idea of Magical Realism. However we find in 1798 the German poet-philosopher wrote in his notebooks a speculative treaty that described ‘a true prophet’ an ‘isolated being’ who would not be bound by the laws of physics or particular laws. He explained further that this prophet would be called a ‘magical idealist’ or a magical realist’.
The very basic definition of Magical Realism is hard to come by, but many attempts have been made. The general idea is that Magical Realism is the marvelous within the quotidian. It happens to be as Michael Bell wrote, “the great difference commonly noted in this Latin American generation is the conscious recovery of the marvelous.” The difference between fantasy such as Octavia Butler and Gabo’s Of Love and Other Demons is the way the narrative mingles the description of banal things with the marvelous or magical. For example in Of Love and Other Demons a doctor states with all seriousness, “That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress…If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.” Is this an argument for speciation or something else? It seems this is a strange and “exotic” idea, however our ’modern’ culture still is interested in this idea; think the Horse Whisperer.
The current litany of fantasy elements in pop culture is staggering: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Spider Man, Super Man, Skyfall, etc. Skyfall is a good example of what we are speaking of because he seems just like a government agent, however he bounces off trains, lives after falling through ice, gets shot, etc. These elements of “the marvelous are naturalized” in this film.
In 2002 a Newsweek article asked the question is Magical Realism dead and now we must answer that it is stronger than ever. Consider quickly (because I am getting tired and starting to possibly babble) the Speculative Realism of Quentin Meillasoux which posits that the word is not a deduction of Newtonian cause and effect but instead a Hyper-Chaotic possibility which calls into question necessary laws of nature and speculates that they are instead contigent. The marvelous doesn’t exist but it could, Melquiades the gypsy of One Hundred Years of Solitude could stay young forever, or die more than one death in our future.
Just writing this last sentence brings up technology and Melquiades and possibility, but I will save this for another time.
