DIEGO SZTULWARK

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Diego Sztulwark studied Political Science at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. He teaches and coordinates philosophy and politics study groups. He was a member of the Colectivo Situaciones -investigación militante-, of the publishing house Tinta Limón and was co-editor of the work of the philosopher León Rozitchner. He is a columnist in the program Siempre es Hoy, radio of Madres de Plaza de Mayo and in several publications such as Página/12, El cohete a la luna or La Tecla Ñ. He is the host of the blog Lobo Suelto. Among other books, he has published “Vida de perro. Balance de un país intenso. Del 55 a Macri”, together with journalist Horacio Verbitsky, and ”La ofensiva sensible. Populismo, neoliberalismo y el reverso de lo político”. He currently has a book in preparation, “El temblor de las ideas” about the extreme-right in Argentina.

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Kafka’s man is condemned to live in a world in which the only human dignity is confined to the interpretation of that world; while other forces, beyond the control of any individual, determine the course of the world’s development and change.

Karel Kosic

To Luis Mattini

1. First Essay

In thinking about the relationship between extinction and hope as addressed by this encounter, I would like to begin with some rather obscure notes, which I trust will nevertheless give rise to a theme enabling us to not give up on a path to follow. On 18 November 1920, Max Brod recorded in his diary the following dialogue with his friend Franz Kafka:

K: -We are nihilist thoughts, that rise up in God’s head. Our world is just a bad mood of God, a bad day.

MB: – So outside, would there be a world that knows hope?

Smiling, Kafka responded: “Plenty of hope for God, infinite hope. Just not for us.”

If Brod is right, and what Kafka was suggesting was that optimism arises from pessimism, we need to find out how that happens.

***

A month before this note by Brod, on 19 October of that very year, Kafka wrote this in his diary: “how incomplete a moment is human life.” He was not speaking in function of quantitative length, but of a lack of resolution that turns life into a desert pilgrim: “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life was too short but because it is a human life.” As a “leader of the people”, throughout his life he experienced the premonition of a land that he would never come to see. One of the traits of life, therefore, is its unfulfillment. Nothing can be carried out in the lapse of a human life. Another of its traits, which is patent in that same diary entry, refers to those who do not know how to live life, to those who must use their hands to “to somewhat divert desperation for life’s fate.” Life for them is a labyrinth with no way out. If only one of these desperate people could free up a single hand, it would be possible to “make note of what can be seen beneath the ruins.” He was a writer who “sees things differently, and in greater abundance than all others.” The desperate individual, who searches for a way out where there is none, is also a visionary.

For Borges, Kafka’s main themes were unfulfillment and the labyrinth, themes set forth against the eternal God-Nature of Spinoza.

***

In his biography of Kafka, Max Brod transcribes a quote from Kierkegaard that Kafka had sent him in a letter: “But as soon as a man comes along who brings something primitive with him, so that he does not say that one takes the world as it is […] but says: Whatever the world may be, I relate to an original principle which I do not intend to change at the world’s discretion—the moment this word is heard, a transformation takes place in the whole of life. Just as in the fairy tale when the word is spoken and the castle which has been under a spell for a hundred years opens up and everything comes alive, just so life becomes sheer awareness. Angels get busy, watch curiously to see what will come of it, for this interests them.”

It is enough for one person to refuse to adapt his way of life to the demands of the times for transformation to raise its head, for the angels to become uneasy, since uncertainty and transformation are part of their task.

***

In 1934, a decade after Kafka’s death, when Hitler was already in power in Germany, Walter Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem had a fascinating exchange of letters on the Czech writer. In one of these letters, from 17 July, Scholem (who was already living in Jerusalem) observed the following: “Kafka’s world is the world of revelation […] in which it would be returned to its own ‘nothingness’.” (After Benjamin asked him to clarify, Scholem explained that “nothing of revelation” meant a situation where revelation would be “empty of meaning”, like a communication “lacking in sense”. In Kafka, says Scholem, revelation “makes his nothingness visible”.) Benjamin responded to his friend on this question in a letter from Paris, dated 20 July of that year. He writes: “I aimed my remarks against that unbearable posturing of the theological ‘professionals’, who—you won’t deny—have held sway over all Kafka interpretations.” He then added: “I endeavored to show how Kafka sought—on the nether side of that ‘nothingness’, in its inside lining, so to speak—to feel his way toward redemption.”

Benjamin reads Kafka’s desperation in non-theological terms, and from it witnesses the birth of a fragile hope from out of the abyss. Revelation does not tell us anything about “redemption”, nor how to achieve it. And yet, this absence of meaning does not lead to an attitude of resigned acceptance, but of probing, of searching from within nothingness, on its nether side. Only from the perspective of ruins might an undetermined hope arise from a void of meaning. Benjamin is interested in this perception of a liberating power that is not an automatic given.

***

A few days later, in a letter from 11 August, Benjamin wrote again to Scholem: “you take the ‘nothingness of revelation’ as your point of departure”, while “I take as my starting point the small, nonsensical hope, as well as the creatures for whom this hope is intended and yet who on the other hand are also the creatures in which this absurdity is mirrored.”

As absurd as this hope might be, it does exist, there in the creatures it is mirrored in.

***

The correspondence on Kafka was revived on 14 April 1938, in a letter where Benjamin tells his friend he is reading the Brod biography. In it he has found a “Kafkaesque formulation of the categorical imperative” he had appropriated. The formulation goes like this: “Act in such a way that the angels have something to do.” In response, Scholem asks him to tell him more about his readings from the Kafka biography. In response to this request, Benjamin writes his beautiful letter of 12 June, where he reflects that Kafka’s genius had consisted in having tried “something entirely new”, a rupture with tradition in favor of “transmissibility”. Kafka’s writing, observes Benjamin, is not in the service of wisdom, of which “only the products of its decay remain.” What transmissibility expresses is nothing other than “the rumor about true things”, so that Kafka’s stories are a “sort of theological whispered intelligence” dealing with “matters discredited and obsolete”. Yet, in that persistence of a particular kind of resistance in Kafka that Benjamin calls folly, finding it above all in his animal characters, like the investigative dog or the ape in “Report to an Academy”, human wisdom is renounced (out of shame). They quite unabashedly reject human wisdom, which relies on the pretension of an overly clear or direct significance between language and the world. Shame and folly come together in the attitude of someone who refuses to be subject to the demands of being updated, as imposed by the present. In confirming the state of things (which makes angels sleep). In his stubbornness, the fool activates the memory that things could take place in another way.

Benjamin finds the redemption of the present in this “Kafkaesque formulation of the categorical imperative”: it works in such a way that it is just foolish enough that the angels, awakening with the alterations of the world, can no longer remain asleep. This is thus the meaning of the statement “there is plenty of hope, just not for us”. Hope is minor and absurd and solely exists as a reflection on the faces of certain desperate creatures. This hope, which Benjamin finds in Kafka, is then maximized for redemptive action in dark times, as the action that arises from probing and searching on the nether side of nothingness.

***

Benjamin finds in Kafka the realization of the figure of “a failure”, so that only “once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream”. “There is nothing more memorable,” says Benjamin, “than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.” This achievement of an aim by means of repeated failures is something we are invited to reflect upon.

2. Second Essay

I would like once again begin thinking of the relationship between extinction and hope, with some rather obscure notes on the notion of desertion by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. A few days ago, after watching the movie Joker 2, Bifo wrote the following: “it is a movie about irony, but the irony is so sad and desperate that I wonder if it is right, if it is legitimate to continue telling the truth when the truth is so horrible it might dissuade us from wanting to live.” With his writing’s poetry of extinction—a bitter chronicle of the end—being reflected in the film, Bifo wonders if they are not doing a disservice to a younger audience, which resists as it can the collapse into the abyss. The solution he finds appears to be this: “I try to draw a map of the abyss, to know where we are right now”, because the map could be useful to help us find the best way to live within the abyss. The map of horrors should guide us to refuge “in the suffocating, twisted crannies of the unpredictable.”

Is that all that is left, to slip away and live within the disaster as best as possible?

***

Quite rightly, Bifo has written that “Since September 11, 1973, when General Pinochet killed off Chilean democracy to indulge his liberal American masters, democracy has become a farse and life is that much sadder for everyone. Since the defeat of worker internationalism, war has reappeared everywhere. The wars breaking out in so many places around the world are above all colonialist and genocidal, with Gaza their symbol and center.”

These, without euphemisms, are the coordinates of our circumstances.

***

In late May 2024, Bifo wrote his “Libertarian Supremacist Brutalism: Reflections on the Madrid Summit, Meeting of the World Leaders of Gore Capitalism and on the Creation of Anthropos 2.0”. If the transatlantic summit of right-wing extremist leaders came with its political interpretations (an encounter of white Western supremacists seeking to conquer key positions of power in the European Parliament and the upcoming American elections, proposing a strengthening of their agenda of rearmament, war and climate denial), the most pressing challenge for Bifo was to understand the “anthropological dynamic” at work beneath this political phenomenon, able to “wipe out the organized labor movement and deactivate international organizations of liberalism, one after another.” It is a question of understanding the brutalism of our time as a modification of sensibility, on the basis of the humiliation fed by neo-liberal competition over the course of five decades.

Brutalist refers to “the profound dynamic of the Nazi-libertarian wave”, that is not understood on the basis of a merely “enunciative and programmatic” level (where political categories like democracy, liberalism, socialism, fascism and so on are at work), without moving into an “anthropological and psycho-cognitive” realm, which grounds itself in “the techno-anthropological mutation experienced by humanity in the past four decades.” While hyper-liberalism left interhuman relationships mired in competition (that is, in social war”), desire abandoned the erotic dimension of bodies so as to project itself directly onto screens. Brutalism arises from this desperation, simmering over such a long period of time.

Rather than being a new political form (liberals err when speaking of “authoritarian sovereignty”, and the left does as well in decrying “the return of historical fascism”), we are faced with a mass reactionary staging of an underlying phenomenon, of an anthropological and psychic order. Brutalism is not a means to reach certain ends, but a full-fledged “inversion of ethical judgement”: the extreme right, says Bifo, does not incite support despite brutality but thanks to it. This inversion is not simply the result of a political theory, but rather the consequence of a related catastrophe, forced by intense competition raised to “the universal principle of interhuman relationships”, which leads to the ridiculing of “empathy for the suffering of others, eroding the foundations of solidarity and, in consequence, destroying social civilization.”

***

Bifo’s hypothesis makes a claim, in sum, for the submission of the human mind through the ongoing bombardment of electronic impulses that, quite apart from their ethical content, give rise to a break with the operative character of the alphabetic mind, “which had the capacity to distinguish between true and false information, and which was able to construct a path for individual processing.” Indeed, that capacity was dependent on “time for emotional and rational processing, which in the case of a child who lives thirteen hours a day in the electronic infosphere, is absolutely nothing.”

A corollary of the attack on the mind is a parallel attack on nature and on bodies: “Environmental devastation is making increasingly broader parts of the planet uninhabitable, making it impossible to grow crops in entire regions. It is understandable that the populations of the south (an expression that means zones that have undergone the effects of colonization and have especially suffered from the effects of climate change) seek to move towards the north (meaning the zones that have enjoyed the advantages of colonial exploitation and have suffered less harshly, up to now, the consequences of climate change.)”

***

Faced with such an offensive against the mind and body of the individual and of entire populations, Bifo detects in the “collective unconsciousness” a “tendency to disinvest the totality of all energy, in retreating from the social game itself.” This is not the time to suggest that this collective unconsciousness possesses a certain familiarity with post-operaista readings of the evolution of Marx’s general intellect, nor that this “tendency” might recall the method of Italian operaismo, nor that this “retreat” from the social game might take us back to Deleuzian “lines of flight” and autonomist “exile”. For in this case, all these evocations are extremely debilitated, despite the references being there. They assist in affirming that, despite everything, the supposed identification between life and power, existence and domination, between reality and capitalism, is totally false, and thus is questioned by what Bifo calls an “abandonment wish”, which even if taken as individual passivity could however “become a powerful force”, a condition whereby we might return to consciousness and system. But how? Bifo goes out on a limb with a slogan: the path of desertion. What he tells us is the following: we reactivate our non-alliance to the present, made manifest in desertion from wars and from neo-liberal competition.

Desertemos [Let Us Desert] (2023), his most recent publication, ends with the text De me fabula narratur (“The fable speaks of me”), where Bifo explains how his own ageing is related to that of the world, and calls on the youth to not listen to him too seriously, but to read him with “a compassionate, ironical smile”. Personal ageing, experienced as a “decline in the senses”, is laid out as a compassionate organ able to capture the ageing of capitalist society, leading to “a decline in sensibility” and “humanity”. In both cases, this involves a breaking of ties between desire and pleasure, and an experience of time as the decomposition of matter and “becoming nothing”. The elderly man, and the life of capitalism, share a common de-sexing of desire. The older person processes through irony and sublimation, while youth does so by means of a multiple desertion of the senile, white, northern mind, abandoning war, reproduction and, ultimately, oneself.

Whether it be an accident or not, on the last page of the posthumous publication by Horacio González, Fusilamientos, muerte en primera persona [Firing Squads: First-Hand Death], published after the pandemic, he speaks of the ethical substance of the deserter. The tear on the cheek of whoever is leaving, when it is not out of shame—being the fear of the coward—but part of a simple good-bye—leaving the last town behind—does not speak to us of fleeing brought on by sadness, but by curiosity. His renouncement of war—refusing to be shot, but also to shoot—comes from his desire to see what is there on the other side of the border. González’s deserter, inspired in the wars of independence of the nineteenth century, seeks to find out what there might be on the other side of war. He renounces the combat imposed upon him, but does not desert the hope of life.

3. Third Essay

I would like to again begin by thinking of this relationship between extinction and hope through an older text by León Rozitchner, which he gave as a talk in early December 1984 for a debate on “culture and power” (in the context of an encounter of Argentine intellectuals organized by Saúl Sosnowki, at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland, near Washington.) In that lecture, “Exilio, guerra y democracia. una secuencia ejemplar” [Exile, War and Democracy: an Exemplary Sequence] (included in the compilation Represión y reconstrucción de una cultura: el caso argentino: Bs-As, 1985 [Repression and Reconstruction of a Culture: the Case of Argentina]), Rozitchner poses the need, during a period of democratic opening after the years of Argentine state terrorism, to create a new political force rooted in something other than confrontation and politics itself.

During his decade-long exile in Venezuela, Rozitchner sought to summarize what had taken place in Argentina, studying—and turning on its head—the formula of Clausewitz, the Prussian general for whom war is the continuation of politics by other means. Perón, who since 1930 had been a member of the Argentine Armed Forces and Full Professor of Military History at the Escuela Superior de Guerra [Superior School of War], had taught Clausewitz’s theory of war as a purely “objective” theory, focused on the “annihilation of the adversary”, “the rise of extremes” and “the pre-eminence of war over politics”. In this understanding, war works as a duel between two leaders on the offensive. The brilliance of Perón, for Rozitchner, consisted in transferring these principles of military theory to the realm of Argentine politics. In a dependent country, where the army does not carry out wars of liberation but tasks of internal repression of its own people, Perón’s policy was able to win over proletarian hearts without firing a single shot, including them in a conception of force where armament continued to be a monopoly of the Armed Forces. Yet the military leaders, constituted as the armed branch of the block representing the dominant classes, kicked Perón out of the country, and a decade and a half later the guerilla (of a left-wing Peronist nature) rose up against the armed forces in power, seeking to apply against it the aggressive strategy of war. The problem for Rozitchner, however, was that this offensive strategy relies on techno-military power, and therefore corresponds to the conception those with power have of the exercise of force, in its quest for dominance and conquest.

***

Nevertheless, Rozitchner discovers in Clausewitz a second theory of war, what the Prussian called a “strange trinity”, made up of the people (blind natural power), a political cabinet (which rationalizes the process of war), and a commander, who provides the soul and articulates political rationality with natural force. This second theory, by introducing the popular and the political as fundamental aspects of a different nature than force, makes it possible to formulate another kind of understanding of confrontation, on the basis of a different strategy of a defensive character. It was a matter therefore, in a democracy born from defeat, to pass on the principles of a defensive strategy to Argentine politics.

If politics continues war by other means, democracy should be considered a truce between opposing forces. The terms imposed by those who were victors, applying terror, tended to consolidate the illusion of peace as a merely judicial space and an institutional formality without violence, conceded by the dominant classes thanks to their willing generosity, and not because of any requirement derived from the relationship of domination itself.

The defensive strategy, in contrast, arises from the articulation of the people in time and in function of the territory. It is adjusted to the constitution of a force of the weak, which measured in materiality and thus forged of a new physical force, also becomes a new moral force. Rozitchner proposed the creation, from out of and in benefit of the truce (referring to the Argentine truce of the 1980s), of a defensive force of the people, and a conception of enmity in democracy able to make it possible for those defeated in the previous confrontation to increase their power and contain their enemies. To achieve this, it became necessary to deactivate three traps: the illusion of politics without power, formalist, based on pure representation (the Alfonsinist Movement); mass mobilization as a simulacrum of confrontation subordinated to electoral politics in a neo-liberal framework (Peronism); and bellicose politics, which made it possible for the right to again open up the domain of armed confrontation in terms of military superiority, which had already been proven (the revolutionary left). The efficacy of such a political position was meant to question a new, multitudinous materiality of bodies (which is not based on the power of being able to kill), sidestepping armed confrontation and presenting a new kind of moral authority able to “confront and contain the enemy.”

Has there ever been something similar to this new kind of power during these last forty years of Argentine democracy? There were important moments along the way (though they were likely incomplete, from the point of view of the confirmation of permanent political power), highpoints or references to make note of. I can name three cases, although there are more: human rights organizations (the Grandmothers, Mothers and Children of the Plaza de Mayo); the emergence of new social activism during the crisis of 2001, particularly though not exclusively the activism of unemployed workers then known as piqueteros [picketers]; and feminisms. I name three, but there are more, as it is not easy to lay out the myriad of experiences, which run from trade unions to activism against neo-extractivism, or those associated with mental health, education and community life in working class neighborhoods. They are forces of resistance that arise from dispersion and seek ways to move forward in democratic politics, repeatedly running impotently up against constituted political power (with advances and regressions).

***

In an interview that began to circulate in early June 2024, the current president of Argentina announced that the government was studying delegating state reform to AI (artificial intelligence). The larger holdings of computer capital were responsible for driving his imagination in this regard. Quite beyond the obvious depoliticization involved in doing such a thing, what is interesting is the fact that in the same interview, the President of Argentina confirmed his idea of destroying the state from within. Does destroying it mean depoliticizing it? Following that, what exactly would it mean to depoliticize the state? Would it involve cutting back its functions in social reproduction, in favor of purely repressive functions meant to ensure the reproduction of capital? All of this makes us think that this depoliticization, which manifests itself as a capillary-level technological intervention on the social fabric, is in fact an attack on thought. Miguel Benasayag has shown how the algorithmic machine neutralizes large sections of the human brain. The exalted comparison between AI and the human mind is already enacting an erasure of the fundamental difference (that is, not merely a difference in degree) between them. Given that wherever the algorithmic machine processes an unattainably large amount of information at high speed, projecting a certain idea of depoliticized functionality, the human mind thinks on the basis of its organic and sensitive ranges, grounded in the experience of the human body. The current colonization of existence on the part of the algorithmic machine is thus functional for the depoliticization of life, leaving it defenseless.

There is an unquestionable correspondence between the advance of digital innovation and the hyper-liberal modelling of existence. The “hero” of the new millennium, characterized by the premises of an economy of platforms that debilitates the subject while disciplining it, no longer plays a role in a conflict between divergent forces. Depoliticized society drags it into a struggle for its own particular interests. Personal vengeance, and not collective work in transformation, is what motivates action in and about the world. The same AI that allows the Israeli army to broaden its power of destruction over the Gaza Strip—a power being debated at the Court of Justice in The Hague under the category of “genocide”—could substitute the unwanted mediating role of social intermediaries for a post-political consensus on the type of state aspired to and the pattern applied for the pillaging and distribution of wealth.

***

So then, what should be done when we get to the end? But then: have we not always been there? Was not Kafka on the edge of Nazism (which ended the lives of his sisters and Milena)? Has not Bifo’s generation lived through other endings? Is not Argentina a country of survivors, and thus subjects who live in a period of stoppage time? Ricardo Piglia said that cinema had substituted the classic novel as a narrative model, and that since then there had been a certain death of the novel, which in turn was, in its own way, a good thing—principally for the novel itself, as it was then freed of restrictions, allowing it to become an experimental field. I do not, of course, seek to avoid the dire nature of the present with illusory emancipations (the work of Max Esteban leaves no margin for such bypasses). Yet Piglia, for his part, was not interested in literary criticism in and of itself either, but only inasmuch as it provided strategies for social critique. With this idea in mind, we have read Kafka, and his redemptive negotiation with nothingness. And we have read Bifo this way as well, so as to ask what type of desertion would be truly effective and possible. Rozitchner should be included as well, to understand the role of enmity not just in democracy, but against the depoliticizing front that seeks to liquidate the presence of bodies in the conception of meaning. It is a question, quite clearly, of there being insufficient paths to take when faced with the threat of extinction. Yet without them, there would not be that tiny, absurd ray of hope that beams out from certain faces, where we can still contemplate the justice of rebellion.

Buenos Aires, 25 October 2024

Translated from Spanish by Jeffrey Swartz