the logic of the infrathin - community and difference

ESSAYS

The Logic of the InfrathinCommunity and Difference

Raul Antelo

Le possible est un infra mince. . . . Le possible impliquantle devenir—le passage de l’un à l’autre a lieu dans l’infra mince.—Marcel Duchamp, Notes

An Infrathin Postpedagogy

Correspondence, or the art of letterwriting, that difference between two subjects, can boast of having keptalive a long process of humanization in literature thanks to which we cannow speak of traditions, texts, and canons. One could even suggest thatwithout it, without this oft deferred or lacunar correspondence, we wouldnot even have what we call philosophy, to the point that (now invertingthe terms) the Western cultural tradition of critical thought could be con-ceived of as nothing more than a letter whose addressee is always, strictlyspeaking, unknown. We never know who is on the receiving end of ourtexts. Nonetheless, we are educated through these texts we write and de-bate among ourselves, even if each of us does so in a different way; letters,after all, always reach their destination.

Recently I was given the opportunity to edit two volumes of lettersby Mário de Andrade. One of these volumes contained letters that werevirtually unknown. At first glance, this set of letters seemed to deserveno more than a mention in literary histories. Andrade’s letters to New-ton Freitas, however, yielded more than a few surprises, beyond even theunexpected discoveries of literary limits. I would like to briefly comment

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 3.3

Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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here on just two of these surprises in terms of narrative and fictional sup-plements. The narrative supplement is comprised of two short stories, “Lacolonia” and “La bodega,” which reconstruct, in Spanish and from exile,Freitas’s imprisonment on Ilha Grande, the same prison immortalized inGraciliano Ramos’sMemórias do cárcere. The fictional supplement emergedin Portuguese and in exile, much like a tourist-apprentice facing the cul-ture of the other, in the form of the more than fifty chronicles that Freitascompiled in Buenos Aires and in his mother tongue for a magazine run byexiles and symptomatically entitled Correo literario.

Beyond supplements, yet without making Freitas’s letters a caseof “happy writing,”1 my attention was drawn to an infrathin phenomenon.I am referring to a certain phantasmagorization or spectralization of theimage. Not only of the text as image but also of the image as discourse. Or,at least, of the image we may have of Newton Freitas, the most famousof which is undoubtedly that portrait taken by the German photographerGrete Stern, one of the most active Bauhaus members, who in those yearsalso photographed writers such as James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, and JorgeLuis Borges. There is nothing superfluous in her portrait of Freitas. Ittraces, with great precision, the course of a correspondence, now one be-tween not individual subjects but symbolic activities and collective agents.

During the same years that Stern took her photograph of Freitas,she embarked on what would be a disquieting experience, illustrating inthe Argentine magazine Idílio a column titled “Psychoanalysis Will HelpYou.”2 The compositional logic was simple: the female readers of Idíliowrote letters spelling out their dreams, nightmares, and anxieties. RichardRest, a social technician, interpreted these anonymous yet collective dreams.In truth “Rest” was a pseudonym for the Italian sociologist Gino Germani,later famous for his ideas on modernization in Latin America (cf. Germani1962, 1971, 1978, 1981). From these anonymous stories Stern composedphotomontages, a Dadaist technique that the Argentine press had alreadyexplored to satiric ends in Caras y caretas, and for decorative purposes inViva cien años. But Stern’s photomontages are the first and most impres-sive expression of certain pioneering images of thought that denouncedthe oppression and servitude of women in Argentine society by using thevery codes of a feminine grammar of the masses, in ways not unlike theescapist dreams represented in heroine-centered films or in magazines likeRadiolandia.3

Stern’s photomontages thus function as the theoretical supplementto Mário de Andrade’s letters. In their own fashion, they are the reply of

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a culture in transition, a populist culture, to the autonomous and letteredstyle of the first modernism. They are also its swan song, a “friction” of theReal.4 They show that the art of writing letters, aimed at creating a nationof friends of the written word, was by then already unable to keep alivetraditional humanist ties. Peter Sloterdijk (2000a) sees beginning here thedecline of life as bios and the reign of life-zoë for which immaterial zoosare built.5 The neoliberal geopolitics that abound today are, in this sense,nothing more than the effective and final walls of these zoos.

But this archeological construction of the course of a postal rela-tion, which I call a postpedagogy, was only possible thanks to the infrathin,a dimensional difference, mediated by image, between the letters of a mod-ernist humanist and those anonymous mass letters. Against a confinementwithout correspondence, an infrathin pedagogy, a frictional fiction, a simul-taneity without simulation, pragmatically gives back to cultural criticism acritical sense of immanent rupture.

How to define, then, the infrathin? It is impossible to submit thisquestion to an ontological perspective. On the contrary, the infrathin is,above all, a drifting and an event. It is an event overdetermined by a presentstate that, in turn, can be either a quality or a quantity. The infrathin thusarises from a given situation and simultaneously generates a new situation,a new and more effective manner of power. Guy Debord reserved theconcept of dérive (drifting) for this phenomenon, in which the necessaryand the aleatory are associated.6 We face a theory of games that is abstractand a mode of intervention that is specific.7

Infrathin DriftingThe infrathin, then, is that which lays down a bridge between what isfictional and what is feigned. On the one hand, imagined truth and, onthe other, a falsified or hidden truth. We know that dissimulation, whichfeeds falsification, acts on a particular undesirable fact, either removingit from the field of vision or euphemizing it until it is annihilated. Wetend to refer to feigning as an effect of simulation, that is, of imitation orcopy. It should be remembered, however, that while something is simulatedbecause that something is similar (because there is, in other words, a similis,an expression of likeness), simulation also implies the simul, that whichforegrounds the coexistence between things that are unlike. Si duo faciuntidem, uno est idem.8

We can conclude that the element of feigning in dissimulation,as an either active or offensive replica, belongs to the order of simulacra,

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whereas the infrathin experience of simultaneity allows us to go beyondverification, to behold the disquieting forces that perturb all notions ofvalue and unfold them into multiplicity.

The infrathin thus produces a system that is not one of presence butof difference. Not verification but verisimilitude. It is a system in whichthe value of truth is a mere function inscribed in and circumscribed bythe circle of values received and reconstructed through writing. For thisreason, the infrathin critiques identitarian or disciplinary constructionsof totalization, without, however, simply negating them, since a directnegation would fall prey to the same positivity. The infrathin works insteadby constantly reopening these constructions, betokening in this way aninassimilable negativity. The infrathin reinscribes itself within the play oflanguage. It consists of the infinite substitutions, superpositions, remissions,and interferences that take place within a given or closed set.

The infrathin’s operations are theoretically infinite precisely be-cause its field of action is limited. Because, that is, in contrast to the indefinitebut inexhaustible space of the classic episteme, this theoretical field lacksa center and consequently a primordial hierarchy capable of sustaining theplay of the infrathin.

Precisely because they proliferate unceasingly, infrathin phenom-ena carry out the indeterminacy of all free action. At the same time, theset of resonances rendered possible by the infrathin is not chaotic, aleatory,or capricious. It is neither destructured nor asystemic. On the contrary, theinfrathin mimics—since it is after all a fiction—what it deconstructs. Itproduces a chainlike effect, networks that, situated beyond the part and thewhole, beyond the finite and infinite, constitute the very systemicity of thesystem: its incessant dislocation.

The compositional or syntactic excess of such dislocations is re-sponsible for the undecidability of combinations. This excess furthermoreproceeds from the fact that its formal dispositions and distributions al-ways refer to a supplementary difference whose characteristic is to makeevery infrathin double back on itself, so that it simultaneously becomes theparadigm of the norm that every infrathin enunciates, per se, in singularfashion.

Since they are laid out in successive and simultaneous folds, theinfrathin dislocate themselves incessantly without assuming a stable ororganic identity.9 They are not purely semantic, as historical materialismwould have it, or exclusively syntactic, as autonomous formalism preached.They manifest the aperture articulated from an interstitial position.

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An Infrathin HeterologyInfrathin elements, for all their heterological insertions, do not constitutehomogeneous entities. Their movement is neither uniform nor unequivocal.On close examination they act according to a disseminated heterogenesis ofirreducible multiplicities. They are not purely syntactic because they do notact like mere fragments generated by the aleatory decision of an individualsubject. Neither are they semantic or ideological, since they are located priorto this very conflict, by virtue, precisely, of their own compositional excessin relation to meaning.

Thus conceived as proliferating articulations between presencesand absences, infrathin elements signal points of resistance to the systemicdialectalization that incessantly discriminates the national from the foreign,or the internal from the external. Precisely by composing and decomposingpreviously consolidated syntactic links (such as that of a national literature,for example, or the value of a work of art within this very system), infrathinevents render the very opposition between interiority and exteriority obso-lete once they postulate a synthesis—let us call it an originary synthesis—inwhich difference installs itself prior to meaning.

One example will clarify this idea. In his essay on the hour ofcrime and the time of the work of art, Peter Sloterdijk postulates themonstrous character (das Ungeheure) of all of man’s spatial interventions,arguing that the characteristic of modern times is not the discovery ofvirgin spaces but the opening up of vast possibilities to new operationalroutines. Thus Iberian nautical habits created both Americas in 1500 assecondary material products. The principal effect of this revolution in thepractical arts manifested itself in the construction of globes, the two oldestof which—that of Martin Behaim, the merchant from Nuremberg, andthe globe of Laon in France—spurred incursions on the new continent andyet still reveal the precise contours of the pre-Colombian world (Pülhorn1992).

Behaim brought Lisbon’s nautical novelties to Nuremberg; andhis globe, the first cartographic simulacrum, can be read as the profane sig-nifier of a world put at our fingertips, much like Johannes de Sacrobosco’sTractatus de Sphaera (1220). However, the globe in question, an authenticinfrathin, rather than a metaphysical symbol, demonstrates a form of circu-lation incorporated into a cultural patrimony in a normal, if not banal, way.Definitive banalization came about with cinematographic sacralization inNazi Germany and Veit Harlan’s film Das unsterbliche Herz (1939).

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Unlike the cartographies of Borges or Gilles Deleuze, which arenot identical with the territory they describe, every single point on the sur-face of these globes can be described according to the postulate of homoge-neous availability, thus inaugurating the era of globalization as a monstrousintervention in space (Sloterdijk 2000b).

This monstrosity is rigorously infrathin. Allegory in general—Duchamp used to say—is an application of the infrathin. Let us stop here.Systemicity is the irrefutable demand of a complete and self-sufficient foun-dational order in which truth-values find internal coherence and causalnecessity, thus responding to a disciplinary desire for objectification andself-realization. Nevertheless, infrathin events are constellations or distri-butions of radically heterogeneous enunciations, strategically minimal butstill barely relevant, from an economic point of view.

However, the ambiguity or ambivalence that infrathin events makeavailable to the gaze is not exactly a mistake, an absence in clarity inthe determination of factors, or even a negativity produced by a lack ofconceptual precision. The infrathin does not imply confusion, laziness, orsemantic parasitism. On the contrary, the ambiguity of the infrathin is theconsequence of a meaning seemingly identical to itself that, by taking onanother appearance, concretely demonstrates the ambivalence inherent inall value.

The value of the infrathin is therefore derived not by unveiling analready formed truth but by deciphering and rearticulating verbal enigmasthat are above systematized discourse. It is not the product of a chain ofdeductive judgments on the existent but an objective virtual coordinationof visible elements, a legible constellation of recognizable traces and trails.They produce the materials without which the infrathin could not transfig-ure the existence of such elements, turning them into writing. As we know,politics, art, and even specific, technical knowledges constantly constructfictions that act like the material agents of signs and images, establishingrelationships between what is seen and what is said, what is done and whatwe are allowed to do. The infrathin is more than this: it is the friction of fic-tion, the fold of fiction, the fiction of fiction, a heterotopical reconfigurationof the impossible.

Rather than pointing out the systemic stability of a transient setorganized for the purpose of its own overcoming—which is after all theobjective pursued by the model of transculturating modernization—theinfrathin is unreservedly grounded on the irreducible hybridity of LatinAmerican culture, without deriving from it either semantic exaltation or

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syntactic virtuosity. On the contrary, the hybrid lays bare a plurality oforigins and its own acephalous condition. It is ergative.10

One last consideration with respect to the infrathin deserves men-tion here. Whenever it is possible in a determined event to identify theinfrathin, there are traces and residues that help us recognize it more easily.We can thus say that the infrathin is read in its specter but never gazed onin its specific materiality. In this sense, once the infrathin is legible, it is alsothus invisible. It is the object of witnessing and not of confirmation.11 Thistrait brings us finally to a paradox. If we read the infrathin it is through theinfrathin itself, where the infrathin is both what is read and the reader. Weread difference in it and through it. The infrathin constitutes the in-betweenof separation and ethico-political reparation.12

The Infrathin and CommunityWhat is the function of the infrathin? Can it effectively insert itself, as acritical instance, against the shadow of the zoological park that menaces oursociety? We know that man is a political animal because, symptomatically,he is a literary animal, adrift from his nature because of the institutional na-ture of the written word. As Deleuze first said, man does not have instincts;he creates institutions. This institutionality, or even literariness, functions atthe same time—or, as Derrida would say, à la fois—as a condition but alsoas an effect of a circulation, that is, of a correspondence of literary values.

Such enunciations, however, have nothing to do with specific em-pirical bodies because they are not bodies but quasi-bodies. They are, ineffect, phantoms or infrathins, that is, discursive groupings with no recog-nizable parent which wander in search of an authorized addressee. They donot produce collective bodies but introduce, within these bodies, select linesof friction or fracture that call into question the institution of literature. Infact, nineteenth-century writers, and even representatives of a certain mod-ernist nationalism, were largely inclined in this direction, that is, towardthe importance of impeding, at all costs, the disaggregation of the literaryinstitution in the name of an imaginarily homogeneous body. Perhaps thecurrent reconversion of the canon is merely a similar attempt.

I would argue, therefore, that the infrathin produces relativelyaleatory interpretive communities, which in turn contribute to designingenunciative collectives that redistribute roles, territories, and languages. Inthe words of Jacques Rancière (2000, 64), “un collectif politique n’est pasun organisme ou un corps communautaire. Les voies de la subjectivation

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politique ne sont pas celles de l’identification imaginaire mais de la désin-corporation ‘littéraire.’”

A “purloined” letter exemplifies this idea. I am referring to a textby Denis de Rougemont written at Lake George, New York, on 3 August1945. On this day Rougemont engages in a debate with Marcel Duchampthat is extremely revealing of this question of community. De Rougemont(1968, 44) writes:

Avant d’aller se coucher, je lui donne leNouvel Esprit scientifique

de Bachelard. J’ai souligné le paragraphe où l’on explique que

selon la théorie de Millikan sur les rayons cosmiques, le mouve-

ment se produit dans des conditions de vide matériel, d’inanité

telles qu’on peut bien dire que c’est le mouvement lui-même

qui crée la masse corpusculaire, alors que naguère le physicien

matérialiste croyait qu’il fallait une masse préexistante pour

qu’un mouvement s’y appliquait.

—Je l’ai bien lu, m’a-t-il dit ce matin en me rendant

le livre. Je crois que je comprends tout, ou presque tout, à part

épistémologie, j’ai oublié et le mot m’agace . . . Inanité par contre

me plaît beaucoup. Mais il y a cependant une expression que

je ne comprends pas du tout, c’est mouvement. Qu’est-ce qu’il

appelle mouvement, votre type? S’il le définit par opposition

au repos, ça ne marche pas, rien n’est en repos dans l’univers.

Alors? Son mouvement n’est qu’un mythe.

The episode has all the ingredients of a correspondence. It is theproduct of an actual dialogue (between Duchamp and de Rougemont),a virtual dialogue (between Duchamp and Gaston Bachelard), but alsoa deferred dialogue (between de Rougemont and his readers, who learnof it almost twenty-five years later). In this brief event, Duchamp definesmovement as a nondialectical value, since in fact it does not oppose itselfto rest. Movement is therefore infrathin: movement is the (dimensional)difference between two objects manufactured in a series (cast from thesame mold); maximum precision is obtained from the contrast between thetwo.

However, beyond the ontology in this essentially epistemologicaldefinition of infrathin phenomena, Duchamp underlines his peculiar formof listening13 since, on the issue of movement, he retains only an infrathin

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attribute (inanity) which is, without a doubt, a Mallarmian specter, that ofun insolite vaisseau, or, in its definitive version, which empowers negativity,that of a simple aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore. In any case, it is a cipheredscene, in high contrast (Mallarmé wanted it to be illustrated by etchings),that configures the allegory of the text itself moving, in its immateriality,between Stéphane Mallarmé and Duchamp.

However, this completely infrathin movement of inanité, this playof shared syntax, is responsible for a decision, that is, for an ethics and evenfor a politics of form. There is no imaginary identification in Duchamp’sperception. Inanity works, on the contrary, as an infrathin phenomena ofliterary or institutional deincorporation. As in scopophilia, Duchamp lis-tens to himself listening to Mallarmé14 and understands that this experiencehas nothing to do with the projection of the subject-of-perspective but isunequivocally linked with the introjection (if not abjection) of the subject-of-the-gaze. I would even say that the inanity which allows him to listento his own listening is a trompe l’ouïe, a triumph of listening over audi-tion. The politics of form implied in the episode illustrates, furthermore,a fairly relevant question that links Duchamp’s position to certain contem-porary elaborations of Georges Bataille (1971 [1933], 637), who argued that“l’hétérogène, c’est le mouvement.”

Unlike the myth of movement (as antirest) defended by Bachelard,Duchamp postulates a nondialectical negativity of the concept of move-ment, in which he discerns not only a myth but a ritual. Or, better, theconcept of the infrathin—the dimensional difference between two objectsmanufactured in a series—is defined both as a myth and as a ritual.

From the perspective of myth, the infrathin adopts the movementof a writing whose productivity consists paradoxically of expenditure. Itexpresses, on the one hand, enthusiasm, imaginary identification of thecreator with totality. On the other hand, it exhibits the value of expiation orinstitutional disincorporation, through which the artist faces the closure ofrepresentation, the limit, that is, of his or her own practice, and yields up hisor her vicarious power, ejecting finally the sacred element that grounds thepower of representation.15 It is in this sense that the infrathin functionsalternatively as myth and ritual. But according to the opposite, ritual-institutional perspective, the artist, conceived as the symbolic transgressorwho expiates the excesses of power until he arrives at the entropy of nudavita, turns to the other, understood as the double of language, in order tointegrate it into a disidealized ritual.

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There are various schematic definitions of this extremely complexphenomenon. Duchamp wrote that “ce sont les regardeurs qui font lestableaux” while Bataille, in turn, affirmed that “le lecteur est discours.”16

In any case, the infrathin concept of writing does not seek to transcendhistory from somewhere beyond experience but intends instead to rebelagainst it, through measures both ambivalent and infrathin, so that thecritical and sacrificial aspects of experience are inseparably bound.

Duchamp did not develop the theoretical consequences of his con-cept. His epigrammatic style is the very opposite of argumentation. How-ever, if we adopt the perspective of erroneous citations, we can affirm thatit was Bataille who in fact furnished us with a peculiar interpretation of theinfrathin phenomena conceived by Duchamp.17 By postulating a hetero-logical or sacred domain, composed of phenomena that elude intellectualreduction and can only be defined in negative terms, as nonlogical differ-ence or difference unexplainable in argumentative terms, Bataille thoughtto point out a certain likeness between heterology and formations of theunconscious (which pushed him finally to include, in the wake of Apolli-naire, “la pensée mystique des primitifs,” that is, the Aztecs, as the sourcefor the renovation of modernity).18

The same could be said about the concepts of heterology and theinfrathin, even with regards to their mutual ambivalence. The same move-ment of the infrathin concept of experience, which I pointed out earlier,can also be verified in the diverse—right- or left-wing—interpretations ofthe heterological phenomena. A right-wing, ascendant, or superior hetero-geneity adopts sovereignty as the completed form of power. A left-wing,descendant, or inferior heterogeneity works with the elements excluded bysymbolic homogeneity, since they threaten homogeneity’s very stability.

From this differentiation between two types of social heterogene-ity, Bataille identified one of the attracting poles of heterology, that ofhagiology or the knowledge of the sacred, and the repulsing pole of het-erology, that of eschatology or the knowledge of expelled wastes.19 Yet,rather than being mutually exclusive, as in the infrathin event, both polesare integrated in a complex way in mass phenomena like fascism, whichcaught Bataille’s interest early on. The paradoxical association of the im-perative and subversive aspects of heterogeneity, which turn fascism into areactive modernism, suggest new phenomena of excitement and aggrega-tion that react similarly against the unidirectionality of humanism and thehomogeneity of democratic representation.

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Where pedagogical modernity used to locate the divided subject,postpedagogical modernity disposes of the mass as an infrathin phenomenathreatening the concept of sovereignty. More specifically, within the aes-thetic experience, writing occupies the ambivalent position of conservingbut also of using up experience; operating alternately as critique and prac-tice, aesthetic and anesthetic, as a questioning and reactivation of symbolicvalues. The best example is Bataille’s L’érotisme, the infrathin supplementto Duchamp’s eroticism.

This paradox of conservation allied with expenditure does notexclude aesthetics since contemporary political regimes, whose hegemonyis legitimately grounded in the masses, exclude precisely these masses fromevery moment of decision so that the masses are absent from their ownplace, or from the place of power, which, because it is dissociated fromdesire, is merely an infrathin.20

At this point it is worthwhile to remember to what extent Bataille’sencounter with ethnology was decisive for his theorization. In all probabil-ity it had something to do with the double value of the very disciplineof anthropology, oscillating always between myth and ritual, betweenexpanding Western instrumental knowledge and rescuing a poetics ofalterity. Bataille’s encounter with his friend Alfred Métraux, who special-ized in those years in Tupi-Guarani ritual anthropophagi, was especiallyimportant.21 The impact of this limit experience can be perceived in one ofthe first texts of sacred sociology, “L’Amérique disparue.”

This text insinuates the paradox of sovereignty: the subject mustmanifest itself in those places where it can no longer be present. For Bataille,once sovereignty presupposes expiating the authority it attains with its owninstitution, there can only be one definition of community: a negative onewhose possibility is opened up with death. As Giorgio Agamben has madeclear, sovereign community, rendered manifest by death, does not create apositive link between subjects but is organized according to disappearanceor annihilation, to its infrathin condition, understood as that which cannotbe transformed into shared or common substance or work.22 In Bataille’s(1988, 443) pioneering text on the Aztecs we read: “It would seem thatthis people of extraordinary courage had an excessive taste for death. Theysurrendered to the Spaniards in a sort of mad hypnotic state. Cortez’s victorywas won not by strength, but rather by the casting of a true spell. As if thispeople had vaguely understood that once they had reached this degree ofjoyous violence, the only way out, both for them and for the victims withwhich they appeased their giddy gods, was a sudden and terrifying death.”

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That said, the question of the viability of a community of equals,initially foreseen by letter writing, inserts itself here. For this communityto be in fact communitarian, Alain Badiou (1998, 121–27) argues, it is notenough to desire it; one must postulate it. This postulation, however, canbe of two kinds: those judgments that peremptorily negate equality (andwhich we can name “right-wing”) and those which, desiring equality, ad-here programmatically to it (“left-wing” enunciations). I prefer to suspendBadiou’s dichotomy since it would take us back to the material reality ofcorrespondence. Instead, I orient myself by the idea that community, espe-cially because of its “literary” condition, is never a fully attained communitybut always a real community, or, in other words, an infrathin community,since its aim is always to postulate, here and there, the impossibility ofunequal enunciations, that is, those that in fact do not correspond. Insteadof collaborating with zoos, infrathin sovereignty allows us to reopen un-ceasingly the condition of the acephalous and exceptional (ex capere), whichtraces, if I am not mistaken, an authentic pedagogy of difference.

Translated by

Adriana Campos Johnson

Notes1. I am alluding to Claudio Guillén’s (1998) concept of “escritura feliz.”

2. It was a pioneering intervention similar to Enrique Pichon-Rivière’s contributions to

Primera plana after 1966. Let us not forget that this was when psychoanalysis

assisted anthropology in interpreting great popular narratives. Two examples

from the 1930s of this collaboration are the work of Arthus Ramos in Brazil

and Bernardo Canal Feijóo in Argentina.

3. For the photomontages see Stern 1995.

4. Two paragraphs ago I referred to “the phantasmagorization . . . of the image.” One

could argue that Stern’s photomontages part from the same premise as does

Jacques Derrida. In his text for Droit de regards (Plissart, Peeters, and Derrida

1985), Derrida writes that a photograph must domesticate the referent but

can infinitely postpone the visible referent. In this sense, Maurice Blanchot

evokes the death mask as a shadow that goes beyond use-value, much as the

surrealists of Documents proposed. Roland Barthes suggests something close

to my notion of “friction” when, in “La chambre claire” (1995 [1980], 1188),

he writes that a photograph is an “image folle, frotée de réel.” In any case,

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the friction of the image with the other of the referent points in the direction

of its negativity, its specter, its dispersion.

5. Laurent Milési refers to this question of the limits of humanism in Milési 1999.

6. In his magazine Potlach, whose title evokes Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and

Georges Bataille’s theory of expenditure, Guy Debord begins to use the con-

cept of psycho-géographie, from which he culls the more specific dérive, de-

fined in the first issue of Internationale situationniste (June 1958, 13) as “the

form of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: the

technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. It is also used to

designate, more specifically, the duration of the continual exercise of this ex-

perience.” In “Théorie de la dérive” (December 1958), Debord defines dérive

as a ludic-constructive behavior opposed in every sense to the common use

of concepts such as journey or stroll, since dérive requires an abandon to the

solicitations and encounters it presupposes. Later Lacan proposed dérive in

French and adopted the term drive in English to translate from German

the concept of pulsion (Trieb), something that answers instinct and inscribes

itself in the order of the institution precisely in order to dislodge it. Neces-

sity and happenstance cohabit in the concept of dérive. From this ambiva-

lence, Catherine Malabou (1999, 12) underlines the concept of dérive as the

in-between of pulsion and counter-current: “L’arrivée—ce qui échoit—peut

aussi parfois contredire, déranger, empêcher l’arrivée—l’accomplissement ou

l’achèvement d’un processus.”

7. It is worth recalling that Debord elaborates his theory of the dérive from the baroque

map of the imaginary country of Tendre (1656), where the main geographical

feature is the “Lac d’indifférence.” The lake is the place where both the society

of the spectacle and the beauty of indifference (Duchamp) meant to transcend

it are produced. Cf. Andreotti 2000.

8. This is what Roberto Lehman-Nitsche (1919, 195) was driving at when he observed

that among the Bakairi and the Carajás, the solar hero turns himself into a

rotting corpse so as to more easily to steal the sun from its owners. Duchamp,

who conversed at length with Lehman-Nitsche during his stay in Argentina,

wrote in hisNotes (1999, 21): “Semblabilité / similarité / Le Même (fabricat. en

série) approximation pratique de la similarité. Dans le temps un même objet

n’est pas le même à 1 seconde d’intervalle. Quels rapports avec le principe

d’identité?”

9. There have been studies on infrathin friction in formal and informal institutions as

a consequence of European integration, proving that such friction can be ob-

served either when formal and informal aspects of sovereignty or democracy

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contradict themselves institutionally, when formal decision-making struc-

tures are at odds with informal cooperative procedures, or when formal and

informal institutions clash in regards to criteria for legitimation. Cf. de Moor

1995.

10. Georges Dumézil (1979) uses the ergative case to defy the evolutionist thesis that

Romance languages are derived from Latin. For Dumézil, in this infrathin

survival of the ergative case, they are, on the contrary, Latin itself. Recently

Paul Ricoeur (1999) argued that there are two possible paths to difference: (1)

transferring or transporting the content of one system to another (as Antoine

Berman did in Epreuve de l’étranger), or (2) interpreting a value from within

the same linguistic-cultural community. Ricoeur illustrates this latter attitude

with George Steiner’s After Babel, but Borges’s fictions—especially “Las dos

maneras de traducir” (1926)—provide fitting examples as well. In this sense

the ergative Ménard is almost emblematic of the infrathin.

11. Like Agamben, I understand witnessing as a process of desubjectivization and not

as a proof of observation or mediation.

12. I want to call attention to Derrida’s valuable observations on sexual difference in

“Fourmis” (1994) as well as Michel Lisse’s reading of this text in “On peut

toujours rêver” (2000).

13. Louise Bourgeois (1998, 241) observes that “Duchamp, he didn’t say very much, but

he was a good listener.” In this regard, Marcel himself would say that “depuis

que mon père est mort, je me sens privé de repères. Pères et repères . . .” (de

Rougement 1968, 44), deriving from this ready-made listening a truncated

evolutionary theory, of impossible maturity, subject to an infrathin movement

without a verifiable end.

14. His concept of movement parallels Mallarmé’s pli and appears in the steeple-chase

and the filters of Grande vidro.

15. In his notes, Duchamp associates the infrathin phenomena with certain bodily

discharges—such as urine or feces—that so fascinated Bataille. One need

only recall the beginning of Bataille’s Le bleu du ciel (1957) or his book Les

larmes d’Eros (1961).

16. Bataille (1970 [1943], 75) argues that “le tiers . . . c’est le discours” and that “le

lecteur est discours, c’est lui qui parle en moi.” He likens this notion to that

of literature as witnessing, that is, as a process of desubjectivization, aiming

upward.

17. Walter Benjamin is Duchamp’s other alter ego. His essay, “The Work of Art in

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” reads like the autobiography of the

creator of the ready-mades.

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18. In his essay “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” Bataille (1971 [1933, 347]) af-

firms that the structure of knowledge of a heterogeneous reality “en tant que

telle se retrouve dans la pensée mystique des primitifs et dans les représen-

tations du rêve: elle est identique à la structure de l’inconscient,” thinking,

most certainly, as he admits in a footnote, of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s “primitive

mentality,” Ernst Cassirer’s mythical thought, and Freud’s interpretation of

dreams.

19. Taking up observations from the Genealogy of Morals in “La valeur d’usage de D.

A. F. de Sade,” Bataille (1970 [1933–34], 61) observes that agios, like sacer, is

an ambiguous word that can mean both dirty and saint. In L’homme et le sacré

(1939), Roger Caillois underscores the same amphibology, which Agamben

would later use in his theorization of the homo sacer.

20. In her essay on the passing of collective utopias, Susan Buck-Morss (2000, 134–37)

stipulates the deficiency of mass experience in relation to the phantasmago-

rization of the image: “Mass society is a twentieth-century phenomenon. How

it differs from mass military institutions is an organized question. Whereas

communication in the latter follows hierarchical lines of command, society

as a mass is addressed directly. Modern media technologies are indispensable

here, not only for the manipulation of the masses but for mass solidarity in

a positive sense. Speed is a decisive factor in media effectiveness. . . . How

the words look matters. Letters take on modern shapes; graphic design gives

the masses a revolutionary identity; and identity is the new means of mass

organization. Mimesis replaces written argument. People become part of the

collective by mimicking its look. Mass cathexis onto one person is a powerful

organizer, but it requires at least the trace of physical presence: an image, a

voice, clothes worn by, objects touched by, beds occupied by the person in

whom the mass’s psychic energy is invested. The written word, in contrast,

is decorporalized. The materiality of the text acts like a screen, prohibiting

the author’s physical attributes—gender, age, ethnicity, attractiveness—from

being seen. As a consequence, a certain kind of mass cathexis is impossible,

and although there have long been best-selling writers and popular political

leaders, there were no heroes as media stars before the photograph.”

21. See Métraux’s La religion des Tupinambá et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus tupi-

guaraní (1928). In the following decade Métraux published various studies

on the same theme in the Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad de

Tucumán. Among them there was a study on cannibalism among the Kain-

gangue and another on mythic indigenous representations of the universe and

nature in Argentina. In both La religion des Tupinambá and the later Myths

of the Toba and Pilagá Indians of the Gran Chaco (1946), Métraux takes up and

448

Nepantla

develops observations Lehman-Nitsche made in “Mitología suramericana,”

a text first published in 1918, when the anthropologist from the Río de la

Plata region met a young French artist living in Buenos Aires named Marcel

Duchamp. Both are linked in an infrathin experience: deciphering the po-

tential of a starry sky. Duchamp following Mallarmé’s lesson, so exalted by

Valéry; Lehman-Nitsche exploring the beyond of the ethnocentric consensus;

and both deepening a heterological conception of time and space.

22. Cf. Agamben 1987. He returns to these ideas in Agamben 1999.

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