Let me start with a brief definition of what I call infrapolitics. Infrapolitics is the kind of politics that refuses to totalize the political as its own sphere of action. It affirms, and even enacts, a break away from the political, not in the name of politics, rather in the name of an essential affirmation that involves ethics but that is not itself limited to ethics. An enigmatic sentence towards the last pages of Immanuel Kant´s Metaphysics of Morals might point us towards that essential affirmation: “The human being is a being meant for society (though he is also an unsociable one), and in cultivating the social state he feels strongly the need to reveal himself to others (even with no ulterior purpose)” (216). The need for anti-moralist revelation, for a self-exposure without calculation—it is not yet ethical, and it certainly has nothing to do with politics. It is something else and points to a realm of practical reason that can hardly be captured by the division of the latter into ethics and politics. Is it a rhetorical need? It conditions all rhetoric. It is perhaps from the incalculable abyss of this need that there can be something like an infrapolitical position, which is in itself neither properly ethical nor properly political, but which nevertheless abhors moralist betrayal. We should wonder whether this is not the reason why there should be literature.
My question is about literature and the possibility of democracy. I am not too concerned with the idea of a democratic literature, however. The need that Kant registers for self-exposure without ulterior purpose seems to exceed the very mandates of unsocial sociability. It would seem to send us towards an alternative realm of inquiry: an excess, or a beyond. Within the totality of the social, there is this need that is not justified by the social, although it needs the social. What is this revelation of oneself to others without purpose? This excess beyond justification, beyond justice even, does not seem the locus of a democratic right. It points towards the unfamiliar, towards the radicality of an outside that will not be domesticated within democracy itself. It reminds me of the verses pronounced by the Chorus in Sophocles’s Antigone, where the human is described as pantoporos aporos, where the site of politics is described as hipsipolis apolis, and of course of the Heideggerian interpretation of those verses in Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’. This is the same book in which Heidegger claims that Holderlin’s poetry stands outside metaphysics (“this poetry must stand entirely outside metaphysics and thus outside of the essential realm of Western art” [18]) to the extent to which, in it, an essential thought of historicality as homecoming is enacted. “Coming to be at home is thus a passage through the foreign. And if the becoming homely of a particular humankind sustains the historicality of its history, then the law of the encounter [Auseinandersetzung] between the foreign and one’s own is the fundamental truth of history, a truth from out of which the essence of history must unveil itself” (49). I want to associate Kant’s self-exposure without calculation to this passage through the foreign, through the Auseinandersetzung with the other and with every other as fundamental truth of history. My question is whether this excess from subjectivity out of subjectivity—an excess that literature, beyond Holderlin, can express—first opens the possibility of democracy or sends us elsewhere.1
