Gareth Williams - The Mexican Exception and the 'Other Campaign'

Gareth Williams

TheMexicanExceptionandthe“OtherCampaign”

There can be no critical consideration of diver-gence, difference, or dissidence without attend- ing to the political realities and philosophical figurations of sovereign power. It is this, after all, that lies at the heart of the notion of the political as the origin of all forms of social exclusion/inclusion. Moreover, in the history of modern Latin America few cultural artifacts shed as much light on the inner figurations and fragility of sov-ereign power as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo does. In this essay I will approach this remarkable nar-rative from the perspective of sovereign power—from the terrain of a performative language of force and ruin—in order to bring its insights to bear on contemporary Mexican cultural and political realities. I will then apply these realities to the interminable question of democracy: to the possibility of a question for a nondetermining yet unconditional vision of democracy ( for the cracy of the demos: the power of the people) in the period immediately preceding the Mexican presidential elections of July 2006. Events in Mexico during the summer of 2005 lend enormous philosophical and political weight to Jacques Derrida’s observation in Rogues that

South Atlantic Quarterly 106:1, Winter 2007 doi 10.1215/00382876-2006-018 © 2007 Duke University Press

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the idea of nation-state sovereignty as indivisible singularity is currently being put to a critical test. As Derrida observes, the contemporary world bears witness “more and better than ever (for we are not talking about something absolutely new) to the fragility of nation-state sovereignty, to its precariousness, to the principle of ruins that is working it over—and thus to the tense, sometimes deadly, denials that are but the manifestations of its convulsive death throes.”1 But what can be understood by this reference to the principle of ruins that lies at the very heart of, and that works over, sovereign power? For Der- rida it is a Benjaminian principle of ruin (a mournful event) that haunts the very relation between reason, force, law, and their potential unbinding in the name of democracy. This can be considered in conjunction with Jacques Rancière’s important distinction between the police and the political: “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this dis-tribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police.”2 For Rancière police refers to the biopolitical calculations of a power that continually lays claim to the notion of the political as the management of abundance and consent. It inscribes the disappearance of politics (102). The democratic notion of the political, however, is the opposite of police, while remaining at all times bound up with it, for, as Rancière puts it, in order for politics to occur “there must be a meeting point between police logic and egalitarian logic” (34). As such, democracy—egalitarian logic—is the nondetermining disruptive appearance of a people, rather than the consolidation of a particular biopolitical life-form: “Democracy is more precisely the name of a singular disruption of this order of dis-tribution of bodies as a community that we propose to conceptualize in the broader concept of the police. It is the name of what comes and inter-rupts the smooth working of this order through a singular mechanism of subjectification” (99). Democracy—the disruptive, ruinous appearance or mournful arrival of the demos—is therefore that which lies in the wake of the unbinding of the relation between administration (calculation) and society’s immanent life: “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise” (Rancière, 30). Derrida affirms that “there is no sov-

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ereignty without force, without the force of the strongest, whose reason—the reason of the strongest—is to win over everything” (101). The sovereign reason of the strongest (police) characterizes those included under the banner of their own exclusion (the subaltern) as mere noise, as the murmurs of the incomprehensible, spontaneous, or irrational within the field of the political. If this is the case, then the egalitarian principle of ruin that always haunts the reason of the strongest is central to any notion of democracy, since it brings forth the language of something other than the mere organization and reproduction of bodies in a fully subjected com-munity; that is, it announces something other than the order of a citizenry located within the calculated management and proportioning of places, powers, and functions. The egalitarian principle of ruin brings forth onto the terrain of police a language not set up in advance, precisely at that place where mere noise was audible before. In Pedro Páramo we are confronted with a powerful portrait of reason’s link not only to force and law but also to the mournful principle of ruin that simultaneously constitutes and potentially suspends that relation. The novel provides us with a classic architecture of the passage from one epoch and social order to another. It is the story of a tragic abandonment of rural life to a sovereign power emboldened by its ongoing and incom-plete conversion from the universal principles of Catholic feudalism to the secular principles of bourgeois accumulation and individualism in modern Mexico. Jean Franco’s words are particularly illuminating in this regard:

Pedro Páramo can be seen as a novel that reproduces not a coherent worldview but the actual fragmentation and breakdown of a social and moral order, the survival within a new social order of remnants of previous codes and the conflicts and confusions which arise from this mingling of the new and the old. . . . As Marx has pointed out, money is the fetishistic element which introduces a new kind of rela-tionship between man and society. In Pedro Páramo, money dispenses the overlord from any personal confrontation, absolves him from the moral consequences of his actions. . . . The social structure of feudalism appears to be preserved in Pedro Páramo but it has been demol- ished from within by money, which imposes a new kind of relationship, one based on value. . . . The Mexican society of Pedro Páramo is a feudal and tribal structure onto which has been grafted a money economy which is connected with the existence of a bourgeoisie. . . . The fetish of bourgeois society exists (i.e., money) without the substance.3


The novel narrates the conditions of a feudal order that just refuses to vanish. As the narrative unfolds, the figure of Pedro Páramo slowly evolves as he appropriates the land and establishes himself as the sov-ereign power with the right to life and death. The fragmented story of his life is the very means by which money and accumulation steadily become sanctioned, organized, and socialized in Comala. In his reading of the text Patrick Dove coincides with Jean Franco. He observes that Pedro Páramo is a parable of postrevolutionary modernization that “could be described as the search for a decisive image for the Mexican Revolution and its claim upon modernity.”4 However, as in classical tragedy Pedro Páramo is also “a story of strife between two orders or ‘worlds’—in Rulfo’s case, the domains of tradition and modernity, or colonialism and the nation-state—whose temporalities and codes are at first glance irreconcilable with one another” (Dove, 100). As such (and as suggested already by Franco), the novel inscribes Mexican secular modernization as a temporality “bordering on suspension between epochs: between a modernity that has visibly not yet arrived or taken hold and the vestiges of a past that at various points remains firmly entrenched” (Dove, 135). The figure that lies at the heart of this apparently nondialectical ren-dering of modern rural life—the narrativization of modernity as simulta-neous societal breakdown and temporal suspension—is, as already sug-gested, the sovereign figure of the cacique Pedro Páramo himself. He is the forceful figuration of the strongest, whose calculative reason has won over everything, including the land (property), the bodies of the women and men of Comala (labor), the Church (salvation, damnation), the Revo-lution (history), and the law (Right). He is the embodiment of a profoundly contradictory tendency within the extension of the town’s relation to capital: he represents the values of bourgeois society but does so without social content, for the only civilizing mission linked to his accumulation of wealth is his sustaining of feudal social bonds. Through him money saturates private and public life, but it is not the only foundation of society and production, for the perseverance of feudal forms both grounds and limits the new order—and the sovereign power that inaugurates it—from within. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga has indicated that the cacique is the origin of all things in Comala: “Everything is born from him, everybody lives (and dies) from him and under him.”5 But it is also more complex, more pre-carious, and therefore more vital than this. The novel begins and ends with

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the abandonment of the town to a form of death that appears to be life. Or, and this amounts to the same, it begins and ends with the abandonment of the town to a form of life that is indistinguishable from the murmurs of the dead that inhabit and reveal the town’s past/present. Comala, with Pedro Páramo as the lurid face of the feudal socialization of capital in the town, lives a collective form of “death without end” (Dove, 160). This death without end—which amounts to its very institutionalization—is the result of a particular moment of the novel in which the poor people’s egalitarian logic asserts itself, thereby challenging, disrupting, and undermining the power of accumulation of the sovereign and the feudal institutions that his wealth has captured as its own. The momentary assertion of a tumultuous mode of popular subjectification creates an anomic third term that repro-duces neither the archaic figures and belief-systems of feudalism nor the presuppositions of accumulation that have brought sovereign power into being. The logic of the section I am referring to escapes ordinary measurement. It is an incommensurable scene that brings the people and the nonpeople (the poor and Pedro Páramo) together. Their encounter is nonrelational, since the sovereign views and reacts to them inaudibly, from afar. Even so, there is a relationship that suspends the power of the sovereign, for he realizes that in the people he is exposed to a mournful horizon of ruin that reveals the sheer contingency of the power of the strongest and of the social order he seeks to embody and reproduce. The exposure of his fragility through the appearance of the poor is the political principle of ruin against which he ultimately reacts, as he swears to exercise once and forevermore his supreme sovereign right over life and death. He therefore plunges the town into its death throes and, in the process, anticipates the ruin of his own law as a schism is opened up between the power of the ruler and his ability to rule. I am referring, of course, to the section of the novel that immediately follows the death of Susana San Juan. The “madwoman” Susana has re- fused her predetermined place in the world by systematically resisting her physical, psychological, and spiritual colonization by the unholy patrilineal trinity of her biological, religious, and economic fathers: Bartolomé San Juan, Father Rentería, and Pedro Páramo, respectively. She has struggled and finally succeeded in escaping the grasp of their feudal/modern reason and calculation (which, of course, is precisely to say that she is not irrational). Upon her quite contented demise we encounter a scene that

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brings to the forefront the very relation between law, the political, and col-lective life in Comala. This scene conjoins three elements: the official public mourning for the death of the sovereign’s loved one; the Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8); and the people’s reversal of both public mourning and the feudal (Catholic) law that links the sovereign domain to God. In this episode there is neither domination nor revolt. However, there is certainly a politics at play in which what is at stake is the very relation between law and life. On December 8 the poor of Comala awake to the mournful sound of bells. They begin to congregate in the town without understanding the significance of the “rumor-producing lament of sounds” that envelops them.6 After three days of continual bell ringing, everyone grows deaf to the sounds of the sacred order of sovereign power, at which point people begin to arrive from all over. Comala slowly begins to experience an anomic mourning-fair “in which life’s maximum subjection to the law is reversed into freedom and license”:7

People began arriving from other directions, attracted by the never-ending peals of the bells. They arrived from Contla as if on a pilgrim- age and from even further away. Who knows from where? A circus arrived with whirligigs, flying chairs and musicians. First they came over like onlookers but after a while they joined in and soon there were even serenades. And so little by little the whole thing became a fiesta. Comala bustled with people, merriment, and noise just like the feast day when it was an effort just to walk through town. The bells ceased pealing but the fiesta continued. There was no way to make them understand that it was a period of mourning, days of mourning. There was no way to make them leave. On the contrary, they just kept coming. . . . They buried Susana San Juan and few in Comala even realized it. There was a fiesta going on with cockfights, music, drunks and lottery winners howling. The lights of the town could be seen from over here. It looked like a halo on a gray sky because they were sad, gray days at Media Luna. Don Pedro did not speak. He did not leave his room. He swore to avenge Comala: “I will fold my arms and Comala will die of hunger.” And that is what he did. (186–87)

This—the cacique’s folding of his arms and his quiet announcement of revenge from the withdrawn space of his private quarters—is the actu-


alization of the paternal law (the original juris-diction) that will abandon the people of Comala, and the lands upon which they toil, to their death without end, return, or recourse. This is the sovereign ban that renders the threshold between life and death both indistinguishable and everywhere apparent within the destitute space of Comala. Indeed, abandoned being lies at the very origin not just of Comala itself but also of the narrator’s vengeful journey back at the beginning of the novel, as Juan Preciado’s mother (Pedro’s abandoned wife, Dolores Preciado) tells him to go back to Comala after her death and “demand what’s ours”: “Make him pay dear for the oblivion he held us in, my son” (Rulfo, 64); or, later, “Make him pay dear for the abandonment he held us in, my son” (Rulfo, 84).8 Pedro Páramo is the writing of collective experience from within the state of exception: that is, from within the “no-man’s land”—the páramo—“be-tween public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life” (Agamben, State, 1). It narrates the absolute applicability of the law as a result of its active suspension. It thereby reveals the invisibility of the distinction between the law and a collective life that is akin to death. Pedro Páramo folds his arms and announces a new inaudible law (the silent command “Die!” is applicable to all but himself ) that is suddenly in force everywhere but that means nothing for the town, even though it saturates life, captures the collective, and guarantees that inclusion will be indistinct from exclusion or that life in the sovereign ban will be indistinct from full abandonment to death without end. The relation between the purely immanent and incommensurable egali-tarian logic of the people and the cacique’s ban (as seen in the folding of his arms and his swearing of revenge) stages “the very contradiction between police logic and political logic which is at the very heart of the republican definition of community” (Rancière, 41). The immanent anomic appearance of equality on the streets of Comala—an appearance that emerges from within the shadow of both sacred and secular orders but which par-takes of neither of them—challenges sovereign power by suggesting the possible suspension and alteration of social relations between labor (the people) and capital (the cacique). The people’s immanent and anomic egali-tarian logic implicitly suspends (and therefore hails the death of ) the order of the sovereign. Indeed, he recognizes this. Pedro Páramo ups the ante, however, and responds by abandoning them to a law of death without end and without reserve, as the last (and perhaps desperate) guarantee of his own exceptional status in relation to the law. As a result, he becomes the


embodiment of a zone of anomie—a páramo—in relation to a law that will become the norm for all but that, in the end, will inevitably capture him too. Sovereign anomie anchors the essential dynamic of the novel, for it crystallizes the relation of exception between the law and law’s capture of abandoned life as death without end in Comala. What is striking about this episode is that the people’s egalitarian logic does not consist of the accomplishment or representation of a determined subject within a permanently ordered and ordering time. Rather, it renders egalitarian logic—demo-cracy, the momentary appearance of an existence beyond abandonment and capture—as “the proper character of the hap-pening and exposure of existence . . . a ‘we’ happening as the togetherness of otherness.”9 This egalitarian immanence does not survive. But neither does it become the police. Rather, it remains as a haunting principle of ruin: as the spectral appearance, through a singular mechanism of apparently incommensurable subjectification, of a momentary yet essential unbinding in the relation between power (the reason of the strongest) and the life of society. Ultimately, egalitarian logic is the principle of ruin that announces, for the first time, the fragility and precariousness of a sovereign power that is destined to crumble to the ground like a pile of stones because, in spite of the mythic authority of his ban, in the end the sovereign will lose the vital reserve (the labor-power) that grounds his capacity to rule. The folding of his arms represents perhaps the cacique’s most impressive display of force (“I will fold my arms and Comala will die of hunger”), because after the disruption of popular egalitarianism it is an act that re-sutures vio-lence to the law. As a manifestation of sovereign presence, it is mythical in its proportions.10 However, it is also the recognition of precariousness and ruin, for its gesture inaugurates a moment in which the rule of law over the living will have to cease to exist at some point. As a result, it is through this fateful act that the cacique also “loses himself in the ecstasy of power: he falls victim to the disproportion between the unlimited hier-archical dignity, with which he is divinely invested and the humble estate of his humanity.”11 Ultimately, he relinquishes his capacity to rule, for the announced death of Comala’s labor-power is equivalent to the dissolution of all relations of production and, indeed, of the world.12 However, the vio-lence of the sovereign’s response to egalitarian logic also teaches us that the only true political act is the coming event, which de-sutures (suspends, neutralizes, invalidates) the nexus between force and the law, for in this pleasurable yet momentary unbinding (prior to sovereign revenge) what “loses its pertinence . . . is the concept of war . . . of enemy” (Derrida, 154).


But what does all of this have to do with contemporary events in Mexico? Quite simply, the momentary ruinous encounter in Pedro Páramo between egalitarian logic and sovereign power foreshadows the constellation of forces that are currently at play in the months prior to the presidential elec-tions of 2006. What is at stake in this constellation is the very figuration of the political event: the notion of the political in its relation to (and possible unbinding from) the reason of the strongest; the appearance of the incalcu-lable and unmeasurable on the political terrain; the nomic distribution and proportionality of powers; and the hospitality of a potentially egalitarian anomie. But first let us try to account for the current constellation of forces in contemporary Mexico. There appear to be at least three major ruinous figurations in play simul-taneously. However, the first two figurations are actually a manifestation of the same law-preserving violence in two distinct yet intimately related spheres. They are the result and perpetuation of the norms and calculations of constituted power (that is, the police), and they represent historically determined attempts to continue to bind reason to a state-form anchored in the violent workings of the sovereign exception and the biopolitical disap-pearance of the political. The sphere of one is purely juridical, while the sphere of the other is the effective organization and administration of the economy as a relation to the force of law. Meanwhile, the third principle of ruin that works over sovereign power does not even indicate a force in its own right, even though it is political. It is an abdication of force and therefore represents a wager in the name of the incalculable, since it does not attempt to install a biopolitical means to any end in particular. Rather, it is an attempt to trace an exteriority in relation to the state. As seen in our reading of Pedro Páramo, what is always at stake for sovereign power is the extension and perpetuation of the state of exception—“the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension”13—as origin and guarantee of sovereign power’s monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, to use Max Weber’s famous formula. In postrevolutionary Mexico the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force is regulated by the Constitution of 1917. In this document the president of the republic is the holder of the sovereign right to decide on the state of exception. In particular, Article 29 of the Constitution defines the Mexican juridical exception as follows:


In the event of invasion, serious disturbance of the public peace, or any other event which may place society in great danger or conflict, only the President of the Mexican Republic, with the consent of the Council of Ministers and with the approval of the Federal Congress, and during adjournments of the latter, of the Permanent Committee, may suspend throughout the country or in a determined place the guarantees which present an obstacle to a rapid and ready combating of the situation; but he must do so for a limited time, by means of preventive measures without such suspensions being limited to a specified individual.14

In modern times the Mexican state of exception was first implemented during the Second World War, when the government of President Avila Camacho declared war on Germany. However, Article 29, which was appli-cable “for a limited time” only, was never rescinded when the war was over. As a result, the modern sovereign state of exception has been the norm in Mexico for decades. Like most constitutions, the document of 1917 is an exercise in systemic self-preservation. However, after seventy-one years of single-party rule, sovereign autoimmunity has been gravely jeopardized. In November 2001 President Vicente Fox announced the creation of the Special Counsel for Social and Political Movements of the Past (Fiscal Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, or FEMOSPP) to promote and defend human rights, combat impunity in cases of state violence against social movements, and investigate the truth of political crimes committed against Mexican citizens in the past. This has led to an unusual situation in which the state, which is now the object of public and juridical scrutiny and judgment, questions the historical grounds of its own legality and, in the process, interrogates the legitimacy of a self-suspending legal order that grounds the reason of the strongest. In particular, the creation of FEMOSPP calls attention to the absolute contingency of state authority, since it not only reveals the extent to which the state of exception is the very limit concept of the management, administration, and distribution of power but also shows us the way in which the calculative reason of the state turns against itself, by itself and in its own name, supposedly in order to strengthen its historical and bio-political justifications. But it hereby shows us the way in which, in almost suicidal fashion, the state’s quest for relegitimization exposes sovereign power to the figurations of its own ruin. The Mexican juridical order has been struggling recently with numerous


attempts by FEMOSPP (and by Special Counsel Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, in particular) to indict former President Luis Echeverría and others for their responsibility in the deaths of twelve students in Mexico City on June 10, 1971. On June 15, 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the thirty-year statute of limitations on genocide (which is the charge FEMOSPP was pursuing) had not come to an end. However, the Court did not rule on the responsibility or innocence of the accused; it passed that decision on to a lower court. On July 26, 2005, Magistrate Antonia Herlinda Velasco ruled in favor of the former president on the grounds that it could not be proven that the murdered students had been victims of genocide, for it was not clear that they belonged to a homogeneous national group. In her ruling she said that on the day they were killed by the government’s political cronies (the infamous halcones) there were many different banners expressing many different political affiliations and interests on display in the street, and therefore the students could be considered neither members of a national group nor victims of genocide. They were victims of simple murder. However, the statute of limitations had run out on that pos-sible indictment on June 10, 1985. As such, and as in the Supreme Court decision, the responsibility or innocence of the accused was never actually a factor in the case.15 While it appears that one of the functions of FEMOSPP is to situate the sovereign’s ability to suspend the law firmly within the legal sphere (thereby establishing the precedent by which the state can be held legally accountable for its anomic violence), the juridical order itself wants no part of it. Rather, it prefers to exclude the state of exception (guaranteed by Article 29) from the juridical realm, thereby situating it as a purely political figuration tracing the very limit of the juridical order in such a way as to guarantee the futility of all legal challenges to the state’s historical use of force. In the meantime, the state is at odds with itself about the conditions of its own powers because the state of exception is neither fully part of the juridical order nor fully external to it. Rather, in the continual to and fro that has been opened up, what we see is that “the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (Agamben, State, 23). Mexico is currently living in the shadow of that blurring threshold of in-difference—an anomic threshold that has been opened up because the end of one-party rule has made explicit the fact that the state of exception


is indeed the rule—and this can be seen in the fact that on September 20, 2005, Special Counsel Ignacio Carrillo Prieto of FEMOSPP asked the courts once again to indict former president Echeverría, along with seven other members of the military and his administration, for their involve- ment in the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, and the forced disap-pearance of student leader Héctor Jaramillo.16 The state game to perform the quest for justice, while at the same time sustaining, preserving, and extending the state of exception as juridical norm (since Article 29 itself is not up for discussion in any of these proceedings), appears to be entering its next phase. However, and as if to bear witness to the ruinous fragility of such forms of state autoimmunity, on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre (October 2, 2005) a voluminous crowd gathered in the Zócalo in Mexico City to the exasperated cry of “¡Ya basta poder judicial! ¡37 años de complicidades con el genocidio!” (“Enough judicial power! Thirty-seven years of complicity with genocide!”).17 The juridical organism that had been established by the state to promote and defend human rights, combat impunity in cases of state violence against social movements, and investigate the truth of political crimes committed against Mexican citizens in the past does everything it is sup-posed to do. However, by carrying out its charge to the full extent of the law it fails on all counts, because the state of exception (Article 29) remains the norm that rules and limits the relation between the law and the life of society, while simultaneously threatening the autoimmunity of the state’s sovereign power from within. The second major ruinous figuration in question—which is not wholly unrelated to the first because it too involves the state’s attempt to immunize itself from its own crisis of legitimacy—is a quest for “consensus” on the terms of political and economic interaction in the run-up to the elections. On September 26, 2005, high-ranking representatives of the PAN and PRI parties pointed fingers, looked the other way, or publicly denied that they had met or had even known of the existence of a secret meeting, in the home of disgraced former PRI president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in a private conclave that was designed to achieve consensus on the terms of fiscal reform in 2003. Salinas de Gortari—who came to power in 1988 after the electoral process was suspended and public order saved through vote counting rigged to defeat the leftist PRD Party—was the only one who owned up to meeting anyone in his home.18 Four days after the revelation of these clandestine fiscal policy meetings


between PAN and PRI officials, the wealthiest man in Latin America, Carlos Slim Helú, presented to the nation the “Pact of Chapultepec Castle” (this time with the explicit knowledge and recognition of the Fox administration). This pact—sponsored by Slim’s “National Accord for Unity, Law, Development, Investment and Employment” (Acuerdo Nacional para la Unidad, el Estado de Derecho, el Desarrollo, la Inversión y el Empleo), a powerful “probusiness” alliance of more than three hundred entrepre-neurs, politicians, intellectuals, and media figures—is designed to urge the political and economic elites to collaborate in the electoral process; to re- spect its outcome and the ruling of the Federal Electoral Institute; to uphold the decision of the Judicial Electoral Tribunal of the Federation in the case of a disputed election; and to “move forward consensually” on all questions of fiscal, social, and juridical policy in the future: “It is not a question of exercising pressure or of tugging on anyone’s ears,” assured Slim on September 29, 2005. “It is a question of really offering a process of collaboration. Let’s see if by working together we can diminish all these political vapors that sometimes impede us from taking decisions in the short run.”19 What is at stake, of course, is the biopolitical disappearance of the political, which depends on the fiscal elites’ ability to keep the nexus between calculative scientific and economic reasoning sutured to the force of law throughout the electoral process and beyond and to regulate that nexus, against all its compulsive death throes, across all spheres of state administration. What Slim and others propose is obviously a response to the bane of sovereign power. However, “consensus” is always a ruinous response to the principle of biopolitical ruin. The consensus-desire is a desire to shore up the administrative figurations of constituted power once and for all in the name of a binding homogeneity, stability, and regulation. It is an attempt to cure the precariousness of sovereign power with the disappearance of the political and the collective silence which that disappearance requires. As Slim puts it, consensus displaces the political in the name of administrative expediency and short-term decision making. Brett Levinson observes in his important discussion of Jacques Rancière that in consensus, “wrong survives.” But he adds:

It draws no remark. It is unremarkable. Without the inscription, suggestions, or “digestion” of something “disagreeable” within the body politic, the consensus “goes without saying.” It slides down well


enough, with no ill. . . . Consensus thrives; an increasing number of individuals enter the fold. But they do so as subjects separated from a whole that remains wrong, that goes untouched by this entire process. New subjects are inserted into society, but the social space remains untouched.20

Consensus strives to cover up autoimmunity troubles with the language and reason of full accord. However, it “leaves the pillars of the building standing.”21 In consensus-regimes, wrong is just not recognized as such (cannot have a language of its own) because it disrupts and possibly sus-pends the foundations of the consensual. The consensus-desire is a desire for the full extension of the state’s law-preserving violence and the reason of the strongest, as a means of guaranteeing alienation from the truth of wrong. It is the extension of a principle of silence that does little more than try to cover over the fragility and precariousness of nation-state sovereignty with a (not-so-)commonly agreed-upon language. The quest for universal consensus and the visible agony of the juridical order are without doubt two faces of the same index of ruin that is working over nation-state sovereignty in contemporary Mexico, along with the democracy it claims to be its own. However, there is also a third ruinous figuration that comes from elsewhere. This principle of ruin marks the possibility of a divergence away from all of the above, since it signals the horizon of an other principle of ruin working over the Mexican nation-state. Furthermore, this third figuration also carries within itself the possibility of something other than its other principle of ruin. It is, quite simply, a principle of abandonment or of exodus from the time-honored distributive arrangements that have characterized the internal dynamics of Mexican political culture since the late 1920s. As previously suggested, this third principle of ruin strives to occupy an exteriority in relation to the Mexican state apparatus.22 In June 2005 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) pub- lished its “Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona” (“Sixth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle”), in which the organization announced its “Other Campaign”: a shadow movement devoid of intrinsic properties and/or battle lines that distances itself from the electoral processes to come.23 The EZLN endorses none of the institutional political parties (including the leftist PRD, which is led by the populist former mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and withdraws from the 2006 electoral


process. The Other Campaign inscribes the possibility of an egalitarian lan-guage that emerges in the wake of, and in spite of, the state’s biopolitical calculations and administrative pacts. Moreover, it emerges in the name of something other than sovereign abandonment to life in the state of exception, or to the law-preserving violence of an increasingly flailing juridical and political order. Here are the terms of the EZLN’s dissenting hospitality in June 2005:

In Mexico we’re going to go all over the country, through the ruins that have been left behind by the neoliberal war and the entrenched resistances that flourish within it. . . . We’re going to search from La Realidad to Tijuana for whoever wants to organize themselves, struggle for, and construct what may be the last hope that this Nation . . . not die. We’re after democracy, freedom, and justice for those who are denied us. We’re after another politics, a program of the Left and a new constitution. We invite the indigenous, workers, peasants, teachers, students, housewives, tenant farmers, small landowners, small business owners, micro-entrepreneurs, retired people, the handicapped, religious men and women, scientists, artists, intellectuals, the young, women, the old, homosexuals and lesbians, boys and girls to participate directly, individually or collectively, with the “Zapatistas” in this national campaign for the construction of an other way of doing politics, for a program of national leftist struggle, and for a new Constitution. (EZLN, 5–6)

As the EZLN proposes, this is a campaign not for electoral victory (that is, not for hegemony, counterhegemony, consensus, or homogeneity) but for a life-giving communication in the wake of ruin.24 Indeed, it is a campaign for just language itself: “a national campaign, visiting every corner of our country, to listen and organize the word of our common people [nuestro pueblo],” as they put it (EZLN, 5). It sounds simple, perhaps even naive, but there is an important political stake and promise being raised by the EZLN’s proposed exodus from the neoliberal democratic state-form. There is no specific architecture or proportioning of forces in their lan-guage. There is certainly calculation, though it is a calculation opened up to the need for an absolutely unconditional critique of the grounds of sov-


ereign power. There are no defined ends, no expectations, just a certain renunciation of the sovereign ban that “presupposes that we think at once the unforeseeability of an event that is necessarily without horizon, the singular coming of the other, and, as a result, a weak force. This vulnerable force, this force without power, opens up unconditionally to what or who comes and comes to affect it” (Derrida, xiv). It is important to understand that the EZLN’s hospitality—its opening up to what or who comes and comes to affect it—is indeed unconditional and incalculable. But it is also conditioned somewhat by a disjunctive guest list. The “our common people” who are the object of the invitation does not necessarily reference “the People” or “Mexico.” The EZLN is quite inclusive in its invitation, but there is no totality in its gesture. For example, “politi-cians, mestizos, the police, the wealthy, whites, conservative people, law- yers, army officers, the bourgeoisie, media moguls, bureaucrats, members of Opus Dei, yuppies, the People, etc.” are neither invited nor defined as enemies. Of course, many of the aforementioned might be able to fit into the Other Campaign under categories other than those suggested above, but they could do so only if they were willing to assume the charge of “an-other way of doing politics.” As such, the phrase “our common people” signifies a common people fundamentally split from the commonality of the people and, indeed, from the People as absolute commonality. Many people fit, if they so desire, but not everyone fits completely, thereby making the “our common people” of the Other Campaign a “part of those who have no part that makes the whole different from itself ” (Rancière, 38). In other words, the “Sixth Declaration” is an announcement of hospitality and inclusiveness that is designed to present a partial subjectification of a collective that cannot be counted either as a specific social group (class, identity, subject) or as an illusory totality. “Our common people” refers to those who do form part of the whole yet that have no part in it now and will continue to have no part in it in the future if neoliberal democracy follows its course. We are dealing, then, not with just any figuration of community but with the basic grounds of the proletariat:

The proletariat are neither manual workers nor the labor classes. They are the class of the uncounted that only exists in the very dec-laration in which they are counted as those of no account. The name proletarian defines neither a set of properties (manual labor, industrial


labor, destitution, etc.) that would be shared equally by a multitude of individuals nor a collective body, embodying a principle, of which those individuals would be members. It is part of a process of subjec-tification identical to the process of expounding a wrong. “Proletarian” subjectification defines a subject of wrong—by superimposition in relation to the multitude of workers. What is subjectified is neither work nor destitution, but the simple counting of the uncounted, the difference between an inegalitarian distribution of social bodies and the equality of speaking beings. (Rancière, Disagreement, 38)

In their “Sixth Declaration” the EZLN “inscribes the uncounted in a space where they are countable as uncounted” (Rancière, 38–39). The “our common people” of the Other Campaign—its invited guests—are a mode of proletarian subjectification whose very existence is “the mode of mani-festation of the wrong” (Rancière, 39). That wrong is the wrong of a sov-ereign power that includes by abandoning the included to uncountable exclusion from the whole and its parts. Therefore the interpellation of “our common people” by the Other Campaign situates the proletariat as the political itself, for “when ‘the people,’ which plays the part of those who have no part—of the part that is the whole—situates itself into or appears within the totality as if one part among others, politics goes to work.”25 This is the work of an alternative politics that dissents by withdrawing from, and by suspending, established biopolitical police forms. As the politics of those who have no part, and therefore as a grouping that does not and will never fit because it inscribes “the notorious crime of the whole of society” (Marx, “Contribution,” 254), this subjectless political community—without norm, law, telos, identity, specific principles, prophesies, hegemonic or counterhegemonic designs, common horizons of expectation, or, indeed, explicit common interests—cannot be subject to nomic reparations. They have no specific idea regulating their relation to each other or to the state. As such, theirs is a relationship that is and will always be out of joint. But this disjunctive relationship means that they cannot be reassimilated into the whole under the banner of an all-inclusive consensus, or as the self- perfecting auto-critique of administrative power. They are just the appearance of a possible mode of subjectification that is (perhaps) capable of dispelling the illusion that the political state is the embodiment of the totality. There is no predeterminable fraternity possible among the EZLN’s


“common people.” Rather, as the simple counting of the uncounted—and therefore as a subjectified community of “nonbrothers” (Derrida, 63)—they appear in the EZLN’s language as the name of an immanent democracy-to-come that wards off, and perhaps remains irreducible to, state capture and populist fraternization. The EZLN is calling for a deterritorializing shift in the dimension and plane of consistency of what is to be understood by the term democracy in Mexico. In order to do this they call attention to the existence of two formally distinct conceptions of the political that share a threshold between the “too late” (the “consensual” order of the police as it remains and undermines itself continuously) and the “not yet” (the promise of a politics still to come). As already seen, the sovereign logic and bureaucratic language of the police is in an agonized state of ruin. The mythic and law-preserving vio-lence that underlies the smooth reproduction of the state of exception’s legislative powers is increasingly vulnerable and roguelike in its attempts to make the political disappear at all costs. On the other hand, the radi-cally anomic appearance of the EZLN’s Other Campaign is potentially an even more ruinous force, since, as already suggested in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, its mere appearance as an egalitarian horizon indicates the possi-bility of an essential unbinding in the relation between the reason of the strongest—the “consensual” order of the sovereign exception—and the life of society. The EZLN’s proposed withdrawal from formal democracy—the appearance of a potentially expansive and constitutive process of political-theoretical redefinition in which the word democracy is both the adversary and the unconditional promise of a new foundation for social life—is, like Benjamin’s notion of divine violence, potentially “lethal without spilling blood” (“Critique,” 249–50). Needless to say, it is still too early to grasp fully the meaning of the “eventness” of the event or even the vague contours of its messianicity. After all, the event can only be made to signify retroactively. Moreover, the language of the Other Campaign—that is, the “word” and indignation it strives to assemble—might not even be allowed to arrive in the end. It could well become object of the compulsive violence that bears witness to sovereignty’s convulsive death throes. However, we can conjecture as to the stakes of this still incalculable political and social wager for life, democracy, and humanity in contem-porary Mexico (EZLN, 6). In Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (the “Kreuznach manuscript” of 1843) the political is, as Stathis Kouve-


lakis observes, “subjected to a crucially important displacement: distin-guished from all that pertains directly to the state, it is stripped of the last remnants of transcendence, to appear from now on as a transformative power immanent in the various social practices.”26 The EZLN’s proposed withdrawal from democracy (as a biopolitical life-giving form, or police) is related directly to the displacement of the political effected by Marx in this critique. The EZLN’s “Sixth Declaration” is designed to be a first step toward the self-determination of the people in spite of the state’s continued (and continually troubled) biopolitical administration of its juridical and economic powers, privilege, and abundance. It is a call for the possibility of an expansive self-determination of the people grounded in (1) a constituent process resulting from the “permanent self-criticism of a civil society which has become conscious of itself ” (Philosophy and Revolution, 310); and (2) the sustained critique of a representative democratic state that is still trying desperately to hang on to the notion of concrete universality in spite of the seemingly unending autoimmunity ailments caused at least in part by its juridical exception. As in Marx’s notion of “true democracy,” the political in the “Sixth Decla-ration” appears not with man as legal existence: that is, not with man as cap-tured in, and subsumed under, a sovereign ban that grounds the abstract form of the state as a quasi-religious totality administering and regulating the life of the people. Rather, the Declaration proposes a horizonless, pro-gramless, yet ethical subtraction from this top-down relation between state and people. What it appears to suggest is the possibility of a “constitution” of the political which is immanent in social practice itself and in which all vestiges of state transcendence are undermined and neutralized. In his Critique Marx contrasts what he calls “true democracy” with monarchical and republican state-forms (the police): “In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its modes of existence, the political constitution; in democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, and indeed as the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution, in democracy the constitution of the people. . . . Democracy relates to all other forms of state as their Old Testament. Man does not exist because of the law but rather the law exists for the good of man. Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only legal existence” (29–30). Stripping away the last remnants of state transcendence through a “constitution” of the political that is immanent in social practice itself is, he says, “the fundamental difference of democracy”


(30). Kouvelakis expands on this insight with the following observation on the relation between revolution and immanence: “The law, the consti-tution, and the existing forms of power are human realities. As such, they are susceptible to transformation through human action, which is subject to no limits other than those that are internal to such action, as is demon-strated by the entire history, with its triumphs and defeats, of the revolu-tionary experience” (Philosophy and Revolution, 305). With this in mind, what the Other Campaign invites us to think is the possibility of an expansive act of political abandonment in which what is abandoned is the sovereign ban that captures man as a legal manifestation within a state of exception that has been the norm for decades. It inscribes a notion of the political not grounded in adding more biopolitics to the already biopolitical police state. It entails not making the state more inclusive or more efficient because it recognizes and regulates the rights of more sub-jects, identities, or social groups. Rather, it involves a politics of withdrawal (exodus or flight) that is designed to subtract from the state the “illusion that it stands above civil society even while claiming to dominate it” (Phi-losophy and Revolution, 309). As in Marx’s notion of “true democracy” the EZLN’s “Sixth Declaration” is an appeal “for a democratic political practice that does not yet exist or, more precisely, has not yet been recognized—and cannot yet be ‘named’—rather than a stable concept awaiting its systematic presentation” (Philosophy and Revolution, 314). The “Other Campaign” is a movement of political displacement in the name of language—that is, a line of flight in the name of “a word” capable of rendering the suspension of the current political state (its law, its norms, its juridical, political and economic calculations, i.e., its reason and police function) imaginable and perhaps nameable. It should be noted, however, that the EZLN does so not in the name of anarchy but in the name, precisely, of “a new Constitution” (6). As when Marx states that “in democracy the constitution, the law, the state, so far as it is political constitution, is itself only a self-determination of the people, and a determinate content of the people” (Critique, 31), the displacement of the consensual democratic state-form proposed by the EZLN in the “Sixth Declaration” “does not in any way signify the pure and simple absence of law, a constitution, or even state institutions . . . but, rather, a constant effort to decenter that frees juridico-political forms of their ‘determinate- ness’ [Bestimmtheit: abstract, passive determination] in order to restore their ‘self-determination’ [Selbstbestimmung], defined as the self-determination


of the people” (Philosophy and Revolution, 309–10). Withdrawal and sub-traction are the first ethicopolitical steps in the EZLN’s proposed unbinding (or deconstruction) of the reason of nation-state sovereignty. Withdrawal in this context is not a negative force fully dependent upon, and circum-scribed by, the characteristics and maneuvers of its negated object. It is the advent-word for the conceivability of a politics-to-come: that is, for the pos-sibility of an affirmative suspension of the state in the name of the arrival of “a new historical epoch” (Benjamin, “Critique,” 252). In the final pages of Rogues Derrida notes the following: “It is no doubt necessary, in the name of reason, to call into question and to limit a logic of nation-state sovereignty. It is no doubt necessary to erode not only its principle of indivisibility but its right to the exception, its right to suspend rights and law, along with the undeniable ontotheology that founds it, even in what are called democratic regimes” (157). The EZLN’s announcement of the Other Campaign in June 2005 is designed to be a performative first step in defining the language of an exteriority to the state (and therefore the language of an exteriority to Article 29 of the 1917 Constitution). It is certainly the announcement of a coming appearance, through a singular mechanism of previously undetermined and still incalculable subjectifi-cation, of a potential unbinding in the nexus between sovereign power and the political life of society. Indeed, perhaps not even the compulsive will, the law-preserving violence, or the calculative reason of the Pedro Páramos of the world will be able to capture fully either the quiet messia-nicity that breathes life into this deconstructive principle of ruin, or the “Sixth Declaration”’s incalculable wager that the order of the political can indeed become other.

Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 154. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

2 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 28. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

3 Jean Franco, “Journey to the Land of the Dead: Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo,” in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, 429–46 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 441–44.

4 Patrick Dove, The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 131. Hereafter cited paren-thetically in the text.


5 Quoted in Franco, “Journey to the Land of the Dead,” 442. 6 Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, ed. José Carlos González Boixo (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra,

1990), 186. All translations are mine. 7 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2005), 72. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “State.” 8 I refer here to the notion of “ban” and “abandoned being” in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth

to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993): “The origin of ‘abandonment’ is a putting at bandon. Bandon (bandum, band, bannen) is an order, a prescription, a decree, a permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal. To abandon is to remit, entrust, or turn over to its ban, that is, to its proclaiming, to its convening, and to its sentencing. One always abandons to a law. The destitution of abandoned being is measured by the limitless severity of the law to which it finds itself exposed. Turned over to the absolute of the law, the banished one is thereby abandoned completely outside its jurisdiction” (43–44). The banished are outside jurisdiction but they are also completely captured by/as their exposure to abandonment. Also see the notion of the ban in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998): “He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order” (28–29).

9 Nancy, The Birth to Presence, 157–58. 10 For the notion of mythic violence, see Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected

Writings Volume 1 (1913–1926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 236–52 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 248–49. Hereafter cited parentheti-cally in the text as “Critique.”

11 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1990), 70.

12 Pedro Páramo therefore upholds Marx’s thesis, in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970): “If the sovereign is the actual sovereignty of the state then the sovereign could nec-essarily be considered vis-à-vis others as a self-subsistent state, even without the people. But he is sovereign in so far as he represents the unity of the people, and thus he is himself merely a representative, a symbol of the sovereignty of the people. The sover-eignty of the people is not due to him but on the contrary he is due to it” (28).

13 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 3. 14 See “The 1917 Constitution of Mexico” (14), available at www.ilstu.edu/class/hist263/

docs/1917const.html (accessed September 29, 2005). 15 Alfredo Méndez Ortiz, “Carpetazo al 10 de junio; exoneran a Luis Echeverría y Mario

Moya,” La Jornada, July 27, 2005, available at www.jornada.unam.mx (accessed July 27, 2005).

16 Alfredo Méndez Ortiz, “Pide la Femossp que se aprehenda a Echeverría por la matanza del 68,” La Jornada, September 21, 2005, available at www.jornada.unam.mx (accessed September 21, 2005).


17 Karina Avilés, “Repudian al Poder Judicial en la marcha por la matanza de Tlatelolco,” La Jornada, October 3, 2005, available at www.jornada.unam.mx (accessed October 3, 2005).

18 Redacción, “Confirma Salinas la reunión en su casa para pactar la reforma fiscal,” La Jornada, September 26, 2005, available at www.jornada.unam.mx (accessed September 26, 2005).

19 Roberto Garduño and Víctor Cardoso, “No buscamos el todo o nada sino el consenso: Carlos Slim,” La Jornada, September 30, 2005, available at www.jornada.unam.mx (ac-cessed September 30, 2005; translation mine).

20 Brett Levinson, Market and Thought: Meditations on the Political and Biopolitical (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 66–76.

21 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843–44),” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Pelican Books, 1975), 253. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “Contribution.”

22 Deleuze and Guattari would call it a “war machine”: an a-signifying becoming that through its abdication, exodus, or flight impedes the further concentration of sovereign power. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423.

23 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, “Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona,” available at www.ezln.org/documentos/2005/sexta3.es.htm (accessed July 27, 2005). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “EZLN.”

24 The EZLN states that what they propose “is like a campaign, but it’s very other, because it is not electoral” (5). This has created a significant rift in the relation between the EZLN and certain sectors of the intellectual Left. See Nelda Judith Anzar, “Monsiváis disiente de la opinión del EZLN sobre López Obrador,” La Jornada, September 9, 2005, available at www.jornada.unam.mx (accessed September 9, 2005).

25 Levinson, Market and Thought, 61–62. 26 See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph

O’Malley (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2003), 303, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

Gareth Williams - The Mexican Exception and the 'Other Campaign'

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