Infrapolitical Literature

Hispanism and the Border

Alberto Moreiras
Texas A&M University

What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgot-

ten experience from which it lives.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 28

The villains and heroes get all mixed up.

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, 159

1. On Exteriority

Immanuel Levinas’s “Preface” to Totality and Infinity opens with the ques-
tion of war and morality. War and morality are incompatible. If war, then
perhaps no morality. “War is not only one of the ordeals—the greatest—of
which morality lives; it renders morality derisory. The art of foreseeing war
and of winning it by every means—politics—is henceforth enjoined as the
very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 183–204, issn 1532-687x.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

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naiveté” (1994, 21). Politics and war are the same, or rather, politics is the art
of winning wars. And of course, Levinas says, “we do not need obscure frag-
ments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical
thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but as the
very patency, or the truth, of the real” (21). So, for philosophical thought,
Levinas says, being reveals itself as war, that is, as politics. War is “the pure
experience of pure being” (21).
But Levinas does not leave it there, because something haunts war.
Levinas calls it “the eschatology of messianic peace” (1994, 22). There is an
exception to war, an exception to politics. “Eschatology institutes a relation
with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond
the past and the present” (22). The point is that eschatology does not refer to
the past or the present or the future; that is, it does not refer to temporality
or to the supratemporal, understood as what sustains the temporal. It refers,
rather, to what is beyond the totality. Eschatology is, therefore, not a teleol-
ogy. It is not a teleology because it does not have a temporal structure. It is,
simply, the announcement of something beyond the totality, which means
beyond the totality of time and thus outside time, outside finitude (but then
again not simply as what is beyond time but still within ontology). If it is
outside war, and outside politics, it is not because it comes at the end of war
or at the end of politics. What is that something named in the expression
“messianic peace”? And how do we access it? He says: “Infinity” (23). And
he says: “It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience”
(23). Although it is outside totality and outside history, that is, outside the
purveyors of experience, it is nevertheless reflected within them, and thus
reflected in experience. Indeed, Levinas will say, it constitutes experience,
because “[t]he idea of being overflowing history makes possible existents
. . . that can speak rather than lending their lips to an anonymous utterance
of history. Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech. The eschatological
vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not
speak” (23).
Experience is linked by Levinas to this capacity for speaking, for speech
or language, for saying. A vision of experience makes speech possible, and
speech is only possible out of this vision. Without it there would be no
 Alberto Moreiras 185

language. This would be a “vision without image,” and a “signification with-

out a context” (1994, 23). In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, for instance,
the kid speaks not only when he tells Sproule “I know your kind . . . What’s
wrong with you is wrong all the way through you” (1992, 66), but also when
he tells the Mexican mummy “¿No puedes escucharme?” (315). As we will
see in what follows, Immanuel Kant’s notion of a need for exposure without
ulterior purpose is matched by Javier Marías’s understanding of the need for
writing and by McCarthy’s thematization of an inner fold in the practice of
war. All of three of them are glimpses of Levinas’s experience of an overflow in
objectifying thought: a signification without a context, immemorial as such,
beyond history, atemporal; without which, I add, any narrative, provided it
could happen, would be just another narrative of effective war.
That something is infinity, as precisely the presence that “overflows the
thought that thinks it” (Levinas 1994, 25). It is an excess or a beyond, and it
is reflected within experience to the extent that experience comes into itself
in that haunting: “if experience precisely means a relation with . . . what
always overflows thought, the relation with infinity accomplishes experience
in the fullest sense of the word” (25). Haunting is first and foremost the trace
of infinity in the thought that is overflown. And it is beyond war, beyond
history, beyond totality, beyond politics.
But it is not that there is a haunting, and therefore infinity. It is not that
there is infinity, and therefore a haunting. No: both haunting and infinity
are simply the consequences of an essential “non-adequation” (1994, 27). It
is factic, essential facticity: thought “contains in itself what it can neither
contain nor receive by virtue of its own identity” (27). Whatever arises is new,
yet thought must welcome it. Haunting is the condition of all hospitality, or
hospitality is the condition of haunting. “To contain more than one’s capacity
is to shatter at every moment the framework of a content that is thought, to
cross the barriers of immanence” (27). This is the essential violence: “What . . .
breaks forth as essential violence is the surplus of being over the thought that
claims to contain it” (27). It is the call of redress within war, outside revenge,
that guides every infrapolitical narrative, perhaps all literature.
Experience is therefore the essential non-adequation to the reality of war,
to the reality of politics. Experience is always the experience of an essential
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violence. Essential violence is the condition of infrapolitical narrative. For

Levinas it is also the condition of ethics. Indeed, Levinas says, to that es-
sential violence, understood as the experience of metaphysical exteriority, as
the relation with the absolutely other, “ethics is the royal road” (1994, 29). But
what if, before ethics, there were another practice that makes of the double
suspension of the ethical by the political and of the political by the ethical its
very possibility? This practice, which finds its expression in literature, but is
not limited to literature, is infrapolitical practice. It exposes us without ulte-
rior purpose, and therefore remains, itself, beyond the double suspension. A
minor road to essential violence, perhaps? It remains haunted, and lives in
the haunting. So haunting, like literature, may not be beyond war, and it is
not outside war, it is no exception to war. Just a fold within it: infrapolitical.
As infrapolitics, it is also a suspension of ethics, and not just of war, not even
of just war.

2. Obscure Ground

Infrapolitics is the kind of practice that refuses to totalize the political as its
own sphere of action. It affirms a break away from the political not in the
name of politics but in the name of an essential affirmation that, although in-
volving ethics, is not itself limited to ethics. There is an infrapolitical dimen-
sion of the literary, for instance, that would not be specific to Hispanism, but
that determines Hispanism in the same way it would determine any other
form of intellectual endeavor. This essay is about intellectual politics, then,
or about intellectual infrapolitics as political practice in the academic field.
If we understand Hispanism, not as the secular history of reflection on the
destinies and particularities of Spanish culture, but rather civilizationally, as
the history and practice of reflection on territories, peoples, languages, and
worlds marked by the Castilian language, all too often through gestures of
war, of domination, conquest, and oppression, we could perhaps understand
Hispanism as yet another modality of war practice. I will suggest the op-
posite. As I seek the infrapolitical dimension of Hispanism, I also seek the
possibility of understanding Hispanism as democratic practice. In any case,
I think Hispanism is today up against a border, living in such a border, and
 Alberto Moreiras 187

that crossing the border is the fundamental task of an inevitable renewal. I

look not for the separation between the different and distinct fields of study
within Hispanic Studies but rather for their juxtaposition, encounter, com-
parison, and contrast.
This is a poem by José Angel Valente, the first in his collection Al dios del
lugar, published in Barcelona in 1989 (13):

El vino tenía el vago color de la ceniza.

Se bebía con un poso de sombra
oscura, sombra, cuerpo
mojado en las arenas.

Llegaste aquí,
viniste hasta esta noche.

El insidioso fondo de la copa

esconde a un dios incógnito.
Me diste
a beber sangre
en esta noche.
Fondo
del dios bebido hasta las heces.1

The poem can be read as an allegory of infrapolitical work. The key for
such a reading can be found in a text Valente himself knew well, which
is María Zambrano’s book Los intelectuales en el drama de España y otros
escritos de la guerra civil. Zambrano uses in that book repeatedly an expres-
sion that will reappear in other moments of her work, and in particular in
her magnum opus El hombre y lo divino, from 1955. The expression is “fondo
oscuro,” which does not translate well into English: dark ground, dark or ob-
scure primal ground. Zambrano speaks about thinking the obscure ground,
“pensar el fondo oscuro,” in the same way that Valente wants us to drink the
“obscure shadow” of the wine, that “ground of the god” that the poet wants
to “drink to the dregs” or the last drop. The “insidious bottom of the cup /
188 Infrapolitical Literature

hides an unknown god”: to encounter the god is the promise. To know the
god implies, however, to drink ash, also blood and sand.
The analysis of Zambrano’s expression through the different critical con-
texts where she uses it will be left to another essay, but I suggest that for
the Andalucian philosopher to think the obscure ground names the central
endeavor of her thought, whose alternative denomination, “poetic reason,”
posits an attempt to overcome the metaphysical, Cartesian rationalism of a
Modernity that Zambrano herself saw dying in the very trenches of the Span-
ish Civil War. Zambrano favors an excessive or transcendent element that
in the end constitutes what calls for thinking and what needs thought—an
element that remains utterly resistant to either philosophy or science. The
“obscure ground” is the lost object of knowledge for Zambrano, and for Va-
lente, and the secret motor of their work. What if we were to risk a definition
of the civilizational task of Hispanism in the present as thinking the obscure
ground? How should we understand literature, in the first place, as a thought
of the obscure ground?
Let me turn to Jorge Luis Borges, and concretely to his story called “The
Maker,” because it begins with a warrior and ends with a poet. It is blindness
that mediates between the two, in such a way that the experience of litera-
ture comes, in Borges’s text, to be associated with blindness as such, or with
a certain blindness. The warrior is he who “had never lingered among the
pleasures of memory,” as everything was for him “satisfaction and immediate
indifference” (1998, 292). Even stories are for him sheer immediacy, which he
takes in as he takes in “reality—without asking whether they were true or
false” (292). But blindness sets in, and “the splendid universe began drawing
away from him” (292). This withdrawal of the world, which at first causes
despair, is also however the return of the world, as the man “[descends] into
his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from
that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain” (293).
His memories, memories of love and adventure, Ares and Aphrodite, war and
encounter, come to him “without bitterness, like some mere foreshadowing
of the present” (293). It is then that he understands that he is Homer, as he
hears “the rumor of glory and hexameters . . . , of the Odysseys and Iliads that
it was his fate to sing” (293).
 Alberto Moreiras 189

The story tells us little else. It recounts simply the experience of literary
memory upon the withdrawal of the world in blindness, and it is an experi-
ence of (the memory of) war and love, of war or love. These are the elements
of a haunting only encountered in vision’s withdrawal from the world, only
encountered through memory like, the text says, “a coin in the rain.” In “The
Maker” Borges gives us a reflection on poetic practice as a thinking of the
obscure ground from blindness itself.
Borges’s notion of blindness refers in this text to something like the
Levinasian notion of essential violence. If essential violence is the surplus of
being over the thought that claims to contain it, then literature is an opening
to the facticity of such an overflow. Literature is an opening to eschatological
vision, that is, to that vision without an image that nevertheless, as literature,
necessitates the image to express itself. Hence the haunting. Literature is
the haunting of the image. Literature is idolatrous dwelling. Blindness is the
haunting of the image. Blindness is the cult of images.
Of the two memories that haunt “without bitterness, like some mere
foreshadowing of the present,” the first memory is, for Borges, a deeply au-
tobiographical one:

Another boy had insulted him, and he had run to his father and told him the
story. As though he weren’t paying attention, or didn’t understand, his father
let him talk, but then he took a bronze knife down from the wall—a beautiful
knife, charged with power, that the boy had furtively coveted. Now he held
it in his hands, and the surprise of possession wiped away the insult that he
had suffered, but his father’s voice was speaking: Let it be known that you are
a man, and there was a command in his voice. (1998, 293)

We know how deeply disturbing such memories can be, indeed how disturb-
ing this particular memory was for Borges himself. But this text recovers it,
and it says: “It was the precise flavor of that moment that he sought for now;
the rest didn’t matter” (1998, 293). The rest didn’t matter: only the memory
of an experience that can now be recovered in its difference with itself, in
a “flavor” whose trace is a witness to the fact that we contain more than
our capacity. If the young warrior could once think or unthink of himself as
190 Infrapolitical Literature

wandering the cities of men “with no law but satisfaction and immediate
indifference” (292), the blind poet is now subject to an entirely other law. Is
it the moral law? Would the poet who dreams of the child in Borges’s story
be calling, in his attempt at recovering the imageless vision, the “flavor” of
the encounter with a despotic father, for a moral reenactment that could
provide an abstract “foreshadowing of the present”? No. The return of the
despotic father does not seek an ethical reaccommodation in the prefigu-
ration of the present. “In this night of his mortal eyes” (293) the poet lives
through the haunting of his images, experiences the haunting as that which,
in the image, stands beyond the image. This is poetic dwelling in the obscure
ground: what literature, what the tradition of one language gives from a life
without texture.2
I believe all of it is also the very vortex or the silent affirmation of Va-
lente’s poem. We arrive here, we come to this night or opaque and forsaken
limit of thought with the task of drinking up the obscure shadow of the cup,
of encountering the hidden god, the god that has been forgotten. The goal,
for Valente, for Zambrano, for Levinas, for Borges himself is to understand
the “life without texture” that Zambrano theorizes in El hombre y lo divino,
compared to which every cultural manifestation is secondary and derivative.
But it is not possible to recover that ultimate ground of knowledge without
undergoing the objectification of a concrete experience, and without then
surpassing it and overflowing it toward ultimate experience itself. That is for
me the task that awaits whoever, as a Hispanist, wants to think Hispanism
through. And I call that infrapolitical experience.

3. Infrapolitics

Infrapolitics is related to the obscure ground. I would like to propose it as

a general category of Hispanism, or rather as a general category of cultural
and literary thought, for which Hispanism is a specific determination, or a
series of specific determinations. But what is infrapolitics, or better, what is
infrapolitical action? Infrapolitical action is the type of symbolic action in the
real that refuses an identification with the political. That is, it refuses to un-
derstand itself as political action, as an action in the political sphere, which
 Alberto Moreiras 191

is the sphere of power relations between people. It enacts a rupture from

the political, not in the name of the political, but rather in the name of an
essential affirmation that, while involving the ethical, cannot confine itself to
the ethical. Infrapolitical action exceeds the political and it exceeds the ethi-
cal, but it is still a practical action oriented to the relation between people.
So: How do we relate this to literature? What is infrapolitical literature?
Zambrano says that “the reason of the vanquished is the seed of future
reason” (1991, 115) in words that Don Quijote himself would have praised, and
that, for instance, Roberto Bolaño makes his in the hundreds of pages that
he devotes to the women murdered in Ciudad Juárez in his novel 2666. Don
Quijote’s actions are already precisely infrapolitical actions: Don Quijote, ef-
fectively influenced by literature, radicalizes his militancy in an infrapolitical
form to the extent that his actions cannot be reduced to the ethico-political,
even though his behavior frequently has political implications or should be
measured in every case from an ethical perspective. What overflows the
ethico-political dimension in Don Qujote? He is one of the great vanquished
in the Hispanic literary tradition, and to that extent he stands metonymi-
cally for a very long and ancient history, not only or especially literary. What
overflows the ethico-political dimension in any of the hallucinated, so-called
“visceral-realist” poets that circulate through Bolaño’s pages, and for whom
literary practice in its totality is the practice of seeking the infrapolitical in
literature itself ? It would be easy to show that, for Bolaño, literature is the
very name of infrapolitical practice: the excess of desire’s materials, the over-
flow that, although perhaps contained or restrained by the ethico-political
relation, cannot confuse itself with it.
In the last pages of his book, Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant says,
“The human being is a being meant for society (though he is also an unso-
ciable one), and in cultivating the social state he feels strongly the need to
reveal himself to others (even with no ulterior purpose)” (1996, 216). Let us
reflect on that need for antimoralist revelation, for a self-exposure without
calculation. I call it antimoralist because it does not have an ulterior purpose:
moralism pertains for Kant to whatever is “pathological,” or even radically
evil, that is, to whatever invokes the moral law in order to put it at the service
of private interest and private advantage. Moralism is thus opposed to ethics,
192 Infrapolitical Literature

which is the labor of free and unconditional self-subjection to the moral law,
the nonpathology that is also freedom’s law. That need for self-revelation to
others is not yet ethical, as nothing in the moral law suggests it or commands
it, and it certainly has nothing to do with politics (it could even be thought
of as antipolitical). It is something else, perhaps enigmatic, as it does not
have a reason, it is without reason, or without a reason that we can reason-
ably understand, and in its massive facticity, it points to a realm of practical
reason that can hardly be captured by the conventional division of the latter
into ethics and politics.
Aristotle adds rhetoric to the regions of practical reason. Is the need
for self-exposure a rhetorical need? But no: It conditions all rhetoric, but in
doing so it also expresses its distance from all rhetoric. It is perhaps from
the incalculable abyss of this need—we want to expose ourselves, and we
want to expose ourselves to others, without calculation, without interest, in
our truth, in our pathology, and that is so, according to Kant, not out of our
human character as insociable or antisocial, but out of our deepest and most
intimate relation with the socius, with the other—that there can be some-
thing like an infrapolitical position, which is in itself neither properly ethi-
cal nor properly political, but which nevertheless abhors moralist betrayal.
We should wonder whether this need, which I am calling the infrapolitical
position, condition, or determination, is not the reason why there should be
literature. And, if there should be literature, is it also the reason for why there
should be a reflection on the literary, and for instance, the reflection on the
literary and on other things as well that we call Hispanism.
We can discuss whether a novel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
is a Hispanic book. It is certainly a frontier book, as it narrates a historical fact
along the border, all the way from Texas to California: the incursion across
the border of the Glanton Gang in the period after the Mexican-American
war. I think Blood Meridian is a decisive work, not only as a North American
novel but as a novel of the violence in the civilizational confrontation im-
plicit in its very structure: a novel that I therefore think should be vindicated
as Hispanist thought. It is a novel that occurs entirely in Mexican territory
and that makes ample use of the Castilian language.
Critics often refer to McCarthy’s comment in an interview by David B.
 Alberto Moreiras 193

Woodward: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. . . . I think the

notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could
live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this
notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire
that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous” (quoted in
Woodward 1992, 36). The confrontation between Judge Holden and the kid
must indeed be read in the context of that statement. War is primary, Blood
Meridian insists on telling us, and a resistance, not to war, but to the general-
ized positing of war as universal ground, will enslave you. As the judge says,
“it makes no difference what men think of war. . . . War endures. As well ask
men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war
waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That
is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way” (McCarthy
1992, 248). And further:

In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the
decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of
cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of
war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification.
Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and
the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is
therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a
forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. (1992, 249)

War is god. These are strong words. Would that be the unknown god in
the dark bottom of the cup that Valente holds? Would the god of war be the
god we seek? Modern Hispanic literature begins, in fact, in a quite similar
affirmation, which is the very first line of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina,
from 1499: “Todas las cosas ser criadas a manera de contienda o batalla,
dice aquel gran sabio Heraclito en este modo: ‘Omnia secundum litem fiunt.’
Sentencia, a mi ver, digna de perpetua y recordable memoria.” (“Every thing
is created in the manner of a struggle or battle, says that great sage Heraclitus
in this way: ‘Omnia secundum litem fiunt.’ Sentence, to my mind, worthy of
perpetual and memorable remembrance.”) Is there, however, anything else,
194 Infrapolitical Literature

anything beyond war? There is, obviously, the dangerous temptation of resis-
tance to the god of war. Things are as they are, and the very idea that the mere
thought of “better places and better ways” could improve the world is a dupe,
and a self-dupe, the hermit shows the kid. McCarthy’s novel anticipates the
ultimate confrontation between the judge and the kid in the conversation
the kid has with the hermit early in the narrative:

But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he
liked better.
I can think of better places and better ways.
Can ye make it be?
No. (1992, 19)

No, the kid says. The idea that the very thought of “better places and
better ways” could improve existence is self-deluding. The judge will make it
explicit in words that would have made Kant turn around in his grave: “Moral
law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful
in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view
can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead
in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His
very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view”
(1992, 250).
In other words, the moral being must still engage in war, the war of the
weak against the strong, and his triumph or his defeat proves nothing except
the prevalence of war as such. Morality is an internal fold against the back-
ground of absolute war, and participates in war on the side of the weak, only
to make them stronger. “The mystery is that there is no mystery” (McCarthy
1992, 252). As a weapon of war, that is, as a tool of the weak against the
strong, morality is not morality but war. It is therefore always already false
as morality. And if it were to renounce to itself as war—for instance, in Kant,
if morality wanted to institute itself as true morality—then, Blood Meridian
says, the fold of morality does not alter destiny. It could not even oppose
itself to the action of the strong, and must be seen as strict self-enslavement,
self-restriction. These are strong words, terrible words, and they are so in the
 Alberto Moreiras 195

first place because they totalize the political universe as sphere of action, and
leave nothing outside. They choke. If everything is war, then everything is
politics, everything pertains to the sphere of power relations between people,
and everything is regulated by power. To think the obscure ground would
in such a case be nothing but to think the truth of war, to think the truth of
politics, as there would be nothing else, no other truth to seek. If everything
is war, then infrapolitical literature is just another dupe, a self-dupe for the
weak, or so that the weak can dominate the strong, impossibly. In the in-
sidious bottom of the cup there would only be ash, blood, and sand. Or, as
McCarthy puts it, “this desert upon which so many have been broken is vast
and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is
barren. Its very nature is stone” (330).
Blood Meridian’s challenge is the radical suspension of the very possibil-
ity of the infrapolitical dimension. That this is something deeply serious for
McCarthy is confirmed by his interview with Woodward, where he speaks in
his own name. It would seem that McCarthy himself cannot see or cannot
articulate theoretically the possibility of an exception to war as ontological
principle. The powerful polemological epistemology of Judge Holden reaches
the rank of implied author or author’s alter ego. We learn from the Judge
about the hardness of stone and the consistency of war as the unity of being,
and it is difficult to give up the impression that the Judge’s perspective is the
dominant perspective. We have a lot at stake here, in this literature at the
border and of the border, at the very frontier of the human. Among other
things at stake is to know whether what we do in university work, as teachers
and thinkers, is something other than a game of power, a strategy of war,
or whether we are merely dupes. If the very word “democracy” must find a
substantial and positive sense, and it cannot refer only to domination, then
it is necessary for us to find, in McCarthy or against McCarthy, an exit from
the universe he seems to offer us.
But I believe such an alternative universe is already included in Blood
Meridian. There is another level of discourse that is subtle and almost hid-
den, even though it registers the very force of the narrative as self-exposure.
If a narrative is always already self-exposure without ulterior purpose, if a
narrative can reach that register, then a narrative is an exception to war.
196 Infrapolitical Literature

Like the Iliad, Blood Meridian is not to be confused with the war it describes
and exalts and laments.3 There is a sentence in the novel that we could con-
sider an allegory of such an exception: “We left little more than bones for
the lobos, but I would never shoot a wolf and I know other men of the same
sentiments” (1992, 129). Why not? Why the renunciation? In it, I believe, and
perhaps against McCarthy (and then again perhaps not), the possibility of
an essential respect even in the face of violence, as abstention from violence,
shows up—and it is not simply fear. Confronted with the lobos, those beings
that the text lets exist in Castilian, somebody, a character, refuses to use his
more powerful violence, refuses to kill or to give the lobo death. Why?
The exception to war as an ethical (not yet infrapolitical) exception reap-
pears in what critics have identified as the kid’s “three moral decisions to be
compassionate rather than predatory” (Rothfork 2004, 33), and perhaps also
in the fourth decision to help the “eldress in the rocks” (McCarthy 1992, 315).4
It also reappears in the action of the woman who brings the Glanton Gang’s
men “bowls of beans and charred tortillas on a plate of unfired clay”: “She
looked harried and she smiled at them and she had smuggled them sweets
under her shawl and there were pieces of meat in the bottom of the bowls
that had come from her own table” (1992, 71). I would think that the very
possibility of an infrapolitical dimension of the narrative begins to be found
there, in those narrative nodes that seem to escape the judge’s totalizing
ontology of war without however committing themselves to a counterphil-
osophy, at the level of a nonmoralist betrayal of war. Joshua J. Masters insists
upon the fact that what he calls “the kid’s capacity for mercy,” although it
does “confound the judge,” remains “an impotent one that only accentuates
the totality of the judge’s law” (1998, 35). How impotent is it? Does it not carry
within itself the promise of a violence superior to the violence of war? The
fold of morality does not alter destiny—the kid will succumb to the judge’s
embrace, and the judge will therefore reestablish the might of his law. But
those subtle narrative events that point, still too ethically, still only ethically,
to the infrapolitical dimension of the narrative persist.
They become decisive, perhaps, if obscurely, in the final pages of the
novel, when the judge, already become a sort of supernatural creature, the
devil itself, accepts the historical falsification of the dance. The judge opts.
 Alberto Moreiras 197

In a first moment, “Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the
blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the
round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man
can dance” (1992, 331). Yes, but there is a second moment, historical or tem-
poral, the time when the frontier has itself crossed the frontier, when “as war
becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable
men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the
dance” (331). That moment is the moment of the law, the moment of the
state, or the ethical moment, the moment whose constitution is the true
secret of the border. Once it happens, the dance will become a false dance.
But the falsification of the dance is not salvation. It does nothing except
to exclude the total right of the warrior to the dance. It forces the judge to
abandon its place as dance master. It displaces the judge. War is no longer
the unity of existence. A dupe? It is the precise moment when literature,
writing itself as a dupe or as the falsification of war, not on the side of the
state but as whatever is able to find in the state its ground itself, emerges
as a witness of something that breaks the polemological unity of being, not
on the side of ethics, but beyond ethics.
Blood Meridian is entirely contained in this sentence: “We left little more
than bones for the lobos, but I would never shoot a wolf and I know other
men of the same sentiments.” Not shooting the wolf: an exception to war.
With it, Blood Meridian reaches its own self-exposure. “Things are seldom
what they seem” (1992, 255). Perhaps now we are ready to move briefly, but
decisively, to another novel, from another planet, far from the hard, border-
like, subalternist, cruel sensibility of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: to Javier
Marías’s Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí.

4. “Despair and Die.”

I have tried to find in Blood Meridian something like a nonmoralist betrayal

of war—I insist on “nonmoralist” in the sense that it does not seek its own
advantage, does not negotiate on calculation, does not proceed on the basis
of an ulterior purpose. That minimal refusal of war, or of the ontology of war,
is not however based on the presentation of an ethical counterthesis to the
198 Infrapolitical Literature

ontological thesis of the prevalence of war in the unity of existence: How

does it ground itself ? Can it ground itself ? It is only a matter of sentiment
for McCarthy, perhaps in the Kantian way. “I would never shoot a wolf, and
I know other men of the same sentiment.” It just happens, it is a factical
position for which we should not look at the principle of sufficient reason.
Like the rose, the sentiment is without a “why.” Without it, however, why
write Blood Meridian, or even why write the writing of the end of writing?
Why seek self-exposure, in a context in which self-exposure will limit your
capacity to remain free, to wage war, to dance the dance? Perhaps haunting
is the answer: a matter of sentiment, indeed, and always beyond morality,
indeed always a symptom of a betrayal of morality, of a necessarily previous
embrace of war.
Is haunting the region mentioned by Emmanuel Levinas when he talks
about the insistence of the forgotten experience, whose form of existence
is precisely the overflowing of reason, of objectifying thought? Haunting
might be the answer to the question about the obscure ground of that which
exceeds reason, the reason of reason, or as Zambrano said, “the reason of un-
reason, the seed of future reason” (1955, 115). Being inhabited by an insistent
but unavowable, unwitnessable, elusive, and eluding sentiment is beyond
moralism, beyond ethics even, the symptom of a betrayal of morality but also
of a betrayal of a previous embrace of war, originary, always prior, but always
forgotten, always overflowing.
Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí is a novel of being inhabited by
something that overflows, by haunting, or about haunting. Nobody knows
in advance what will haunt. Nobody ever thinks, as the novel begins, “that
one can find oneself with a dead woman in one’s arms and that one will not
again see the face whose name one remembers” (2000, 11). And yet that is
what happens to the novel’s narrator, Víctor. His would-be lover dies in his
arms when they are already in bed, but before they make love. Hence, they
never become lovers. And the process of haunting begins.

I could not simply restart my days and my activities, as if the link created be-
tween Marta Téllez and me could never be broken, or as if it were going to take
too long to break it. At the same time I ignored how it was going to perpetuate
 Alberto Moreiras 199

itself, there would be nothing further from her, with the dead there are no
more dealings. . . . There is an English verb, to haunt . . . to dwell, to inhabit,
to lodge permanently. . . . Perhaps the link was just that, a kind of haunting,
which, rightly looked at, is nothing but the doom of remembrance, the doom
that the facts and the persons keep recurring and appearing indefinitely and
never entirely cease, never entirely pass, never abandon us altogether, and
from a certain moment on they dwell or inhabit in our head, in wakefulness
or sleep, stay lodged there in the absence of more comfortable places, fighting
their dissolution and wanting to incarnate in whatever remains for them to
keep some patency, for the repetition or infinite reverberation of what they
once did, or of what happened to them one day: infinite, but increasingly
tenuous, more tired. I had become the thread. (2000, 100)

Is that not the structural position of the Hispanist in a strange land? But
every land is strange for the Hispanist, who is a perpetual expatriate in virtue
of, precisely, being a Hispanist. Is our task not always to follow the thread of
the structure of sinister inhabitation, in the perpetual attempt at fidelity to a
past that dooms us as at the same time imborrable and borroso (“unerasable”
and “hazy”)? Is that not the malediction of the border itself, the border that
a Hispanist can only inhabit in the mode of she who lives in the obsession of
that which, forgotten, returns to cast a spell and overflow our poor objectify-
ing and disciplined thought? We dwell in expatriation, and Hispanism, in its
civilizational dimension—cruel, complex, crossed through by war and death,
by murder and domination, by blood and sand, but also by everything else,
by everything that crosses us—is an abyssal relation, or a relation without
relation. We have lost access to untextured life, and we insist on its impos-
sible rememoration; but, I should say, such a passion is a joyful passion and
has nothing to do with moralizing and identitarian self-enslavement. The
mystery is that there is no mystery. Hence the need for literature, and the
need to reflect on literature. The words Javier Marías read at the Rómulo
Gallegos Award Ceremony, on the occasion of his award for the novel under
discussion, refer to fiction, and to the need for fiction, as the consequence
of an essential haunting:
200 Infrapolitical Literature

Every [life’s] trajectory is also composed of our losses and our wastes, of our
omissions and our unfulfilled desires, of what we once laid aside or did not
choose or did not reach, of the numerous possibilities that never material-
ized—all of them but one, at the end—, of our hesitations and our daydreams,
of our failed projects and our lukewarm or false longings, of the fears that
paralyzed us, of what we abandoned or of what abandoned us. We perhaps
consist of, equally, at the end, what we are and of what we have not been,
what can be ascertained and quantifiable and remembered and the most un-
certain, undecided, diffuse, we might be equally made with what happened
and what could have happened. And I dare think it is precisely fiction that
tells us that, or better said, that serves as a reminder of that dimesion that
we chose to leave aside at the time of narrating to ourselves and explaining
ourselves our own life. (2000, 453)

Fiction is therefore radically self-exposure on the basis of a haunting—

what could have been haunts us, as it is half of what we are, but the dis-
avowed and ghostly part that will recur to exact its toll. Fiction is a reaction
to the fact that “every thought is sick, and that is why nobody ever thinks too
much, or almost everybody tries to avoid it” (2000, 313). Telling is a defense,
apotropaic, or evasive, against haunting: “Only the fatigue that the shadow
brings compels to narrate the facts, in the same way that the person in hid-
ing lets himself be seen, the pursuer or the fugitive, simply so that the game
ends, to get out of what has become a kind of haunting” (282). I think that is
the secret of Hispanism as a human activity, that is, in its overflowing reality
vis-à-vis academic disciplining. Marías points to the forgotten experience
that organizes hispanist desire and that we must rediscover as a condition
of our own practice.
“The others never end,” says Marías (2000, 394), and their haunting pres-
ence has nothing to do with having behaved properly or improperly toward
them: “No behavior is ever right, we never know” (431). But there is always a
war with time, with the time of the others that have left us and that, for that
reason, refuse to leave us: the others are always there, in haunted time, and
they never end, and they are always wounded by us to the very same extent
that they wound us. This is the originary violence, essential or infrapolitical
 Alberto Moreiras 201

violence regarding which, I claim, war is derived and hardly faithful. The novel
ciphers it in some verses from Shakespeare’s Richard III. In King Richard’s
dream the ghosts of his past come back and impose a curse on him: “Let me
sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow. Think how thou stabbed’st me in my prime
of youth at Tewkesbury. Despair therefore, and die” (1996, 5.3.124–26). “When
I was mortal, my anointed body by thee was punched full of deadly holes.
Think on the Tower and me. Despair and die!” (5.3.132–34). “Tomorrow in the
battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless word. Despair and die!” (5.3.142–43).
Our past and our present always tell us to despair and die. This is the
haunting that comes from essential war, but that is beyond war. Hence, an
originary violence, nonmoralist, both beyond morality and perhaps beyond
war. For Marías,

[t]he teller decides to tell and even to impose the telling, and the teller re-
veals or denounces himself and he decides when to do it, it usually is when
the fatigue brought about by silence and the shadow is too big, that is the
only thing that compels at times to tell the facts without anybody asking or
expecting it, it has nothing to do with guilt or with remorse, nobody does
anything knowing himself in abjection at the moment of doing it if he feels
like doing it, it is only later that the restlessness and the fear come, and they
don’t come much, it is really more restlessness or fear than remorse, or it is
more the tiredness. (2000, 359)

And then we tell, and we write, from a history that inhabits us, regarding
which our self-exposure is redeeming. To understand that, to recover such a
forgotten experience and to seek its explicitation—that is for me the wonder
and the poison that justify my work, and that give it a political path in the
name of infrapolitics.

G
202 Infrapolitical Literature

notes
1. This is only an imperfect and approximate translation: “Wine had the vague color of
ash. It was drunk with dregs of obscure shadow, shadow, body wet in the sands. You
arrived here, you came to this night. This insidious bottom of the cup hides an unknown
god. You made me drink blood this night. The bottom of a god drunk to the last drop.”
2. The renunciation of war and politics is not therefore the immediate shelter in moral-
ity. This is what seems important for me to emphasize, perhaps against Levinas, but
certainly also with Levinas: that literature points beyond being, as the unity of war,
and remains in the space of an overflow where a dwelling that is not yet ethical, except
in a rather elementary or trivial sense, absolutely refuses a political definition. To the
poet a second image comes: “A woman, the first woman the gods had given him, had
awaited him in the darkness of a subterranean crypt, and he searched for her through
galleries that were like labyrinths of stone and down slopes that descended into dark-
ness” (Borges 1998, 293). The overflow: the infinite displacement between awaiting and
encounter, the void of a haunting where only images dwell or vanish (un-dwell). Borges’s
“The Maker” could be taken to be an illustration of the Levinasian position according to
which “consciousness is the impossibility of invading reality like a wild vegetation that
absorbs or breaks or pushes back everything around it. The turning back on oneself of
consciousness is the equivalent not of self-contemplation but of the fact of not existing
violently and naturally, of speaking to the Other” (Levinas 1997, 9). Things, for the young
warrior, sensual things “could flood the entire circuit of his soul” (Borges 1998, 292).
Blindness is consciousness for him, and it is experienced first of all as a deprivation of
images: “Now (he felt) I will not be able to see the sky filled with mythological dread or
this face that the years will transfigure” (292). The return of the images is the encounter
with infinity or messianic peace precisely insofar as it is experienced as a return, as the
creation of a dimension of inwardness: “Days and nights passed over this despair of his
flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay
about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a
voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also
with joy and hopefulness and curiosity” (292–93). What he understands is then, “with
grave wonder,” that his work was destined for others: that it would remain “echoing in
the cupped hands of human memory” (293).
3. A beautiful essay by Simone Weil on force and poetry, about the Iliad, holds that litera-
ture never identifies itself with force, that the very fact that there is literature is already
an exception to war.
4. The three decisions are the ones regarding Brown, Shelby, and the Judge himself. In all
of them the kid either helps someone at his own risk or in fact refrains from killing, also
at his own risk. See Rothfork (2004, 33–34). Regarding the episode of the eldress in the
rocks, when the kid tries to help a figure he later discovers as long dead, see Masters
(1998, 35–36).
 Alberto Moreiras 203

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