ESSAYS

The Logic of the Infrathin

Community and Difference

Raul Antelo

Le possible est un infra mince. . . . Le possible impliquant

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

An Infrathin Postpedagogy

Correspondence, or the art of letter

writing, that difference between two subjects, can boast of having kept
alive a long process of humanization in literature thanks to which we can
now speak of traditions, texts, and canons. One could even suggest that
without it, without this oft deferred or lacunar correspondence, we would
not even have what we call philosophy, to the point that (now inverting
the terms) the Western cultural tradition of critical thought could be con-
ceived of as nothing more than a letter whose addressee is always, strictly
speaking, unknown. We never know who is on the receiving end of our
texts. Nonetheless, we are educated through these texts we write and de-
bate among ourselves, even if each of us does so in a different way; letters,
after all, always reach their destination.
Recently I was given the opportunity to edit two volumes of letters
by Mário de Andrade. One of these volumes contained letters that were
virtually unknown. At first glance, this set of letters seemed to deserve
no more than a mention in literary histories. Andrade’s letters to New-
ton Freitas, however, yielded more than a few surprises, beyond even the
unexpected discoveries of literary limits. I would like to briefly comment

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 3.3
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

433
 434
Nepantla

here on just two of these surprises in terms of narrative and fictional sup-
plements. The narrative supplement is comprised of two short stories, “La
colonia” and “La bodega,” which reconstruct, in Spanish and from exile,
Freitas’s imprisonment on Ilha Grande, the same prison immortalized in
Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do cárcere. The fictional supplement emerged
in Portuguese and in exile, much like a tourist-apprentice facing the cul-
ture of the other, in the form of the more than fifty chronicles that Freitas
compiled in Buenos Aires and in his mother tongue for a magazine run by
exiles and symptomatically entitled Correo literario.
Beyond supplements, yet without making Freitas’s letters a case
of “happy writing,”1 my attention was drawn to an infrathin phenomenon.
I am referring to a certain phantasmagorization or spectralization of the
image. Not only of the text as image but also of the image as discourse. Or,
at least, of the image we may have of Newton Freitas, the most famous
of which is undoubtedly that portrait taken by the German photographer
Grete Stern, one of the most active Bauhaus members, who in those years
also photographed writers such as James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, and Jorge
Luis Borges. There is nothing superfluous in her portrait of Freitas. It
traces, with great precision, the course of a correspondence, now one be-
tween not individual subjects but symbolic activities and collective agents.
During the same years that Stern took her photograph of Freitas,
she embarked on what would be a disquieting experience, illustrating in
the Argentine magazine Idílio a column titled “Psychoanalysis Will Help
You.”2 The compositional logic was simple: the female readers of Idílio
wrote letters spelling out their dreams, nightmares, and anxieties. Richard
Rest, a social technician, interpreted these anonymous yet collective dreams.
In truth “Rest” was a pseudonym for the Italian sociologist Gino Germani,
later famous for his ideas on modernization in Latin America (cf. Germani
1962, 1971, 1978, 1981). From these anonymous stories Stern composed
photomontages, a Dadaist technique that the Argentine press had already
explored to satiric ends in Caras y caretas, and for decorative purposes in
Viva cien años. But Stern’s photomontages are the first and most impres-
sive expression of certain pioneering images of thought that denounced
the oppression and servitude of women in Argentine society by using the
very codes of a feminine grammar of the masses, in ways not unlike the
escapist dreams represented in heroine-centered films or in magazines like
Radiolandia.3
Stern’s photomontages thus function as the theoretical supplement
to Mário de Andrade’s letters. In their own fashion, they are the reply of
 435
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

a culture in transition, a populist culture, to the autonomous and lettered

style of the first modernism. They are also its swan song, a “friction” of the
Real.4 They show that the art of writing letters, aimed at creating a nation
of friends of the written word, was by then already unable to keep alive
traditional humanist ties. Peter Sloterdijk (2000a) sees beginning here the
decline of life as bios and the reign of life-zoë for which immaterial zoos
are built.5 The neoliberal geopolitics that abound today are, in this sense,
nothing more than the effective and final walls of these zoos.
But this archeological construction of the course of a postal rela-
tion, which I call a postpedagogy, was only possible thanks to the infrathin,
a dimensional difference, mediated by image, between the letters of a mod-
ernist humanist and those anonymous mass letters. Against a confinement
without correspondence, an infrathin pedagogy, a frictional fiction, a simul-
taneity without simulation, pragmatically gives back to cultural criticism a
critical sense of immanent rupture.
How to define, then, the infrathin? It is impossible to submit this
question to an ontological perspective. On the contrary, the infrathin is,
above all, a drifting and an event. It is an event overdetermined by a present
state that, in turn, can be either a quality or a quantity. The infrathin thus
arises from a given situation and simultaneously generates a new situation,
a new and more effective manner of power. Guy Debord reserved the
concept of dérive (drifting) for this phenomenon, in which the necessary
and the aleatory are associated.6 We face a theory of games that is abstract
and a mode of intervention that is specific.7

Infrathin Drifting
The infrathin, then, is that which lays down a bridge between what is
fictional and what is feigned. On the one hand, imagined truth and, on
the other, a falsified or hidden truth. We know that dissimulation, which
feeds falsification, acts on a particular undesirable fact, either removing
it from the field of vision or euphemizing it until it is annihilated. We
tend to refer to feigning as an effect of simulation, that is, of imitation or
copy. It should be remembered, however, that while something is simulated
because that something is similar (because there is, in other words, a similis,
an expression of likeness), simulation also implies the simul, that which
foregrounds the coexistence between things that are unlike. Si duo faciunt
idem, uno est idem.8
We can conclude that the element of feigning in dissimulation,
as an either active or offensive replica, belongs to the order of simulacra,
 436
Nepantla

whereas the infrathin experience of simultaneity allows us to go beyond

verification, to behold the disquieting forces that perturb all notions of
value and unfold them into multiplicity.
The infrathin thus produces a system that is not one of presence but
of difference. Not verification but verisimilitude. It is a system in which
the value of truth is a mere function inscribed in and circumscribed by
the circle of values received and reconstructed through writing. For this
reason, the infrathin critiques identitarian or disciplinary constructions
of totalization, without, however, simply negating them, since a direct
negation would fall prey to the same positivity. The infrathin works instead
by constantly reopening these constructions, betokening in this way an
inassimilable negativity. The infrathin reinscribes itself within the play of
language. It consists of the infinite substitutions, superpositions, remissions,
and interferences that take place within a given or closed set.
The infrathin’s operations are theoretically infinite precisely be-
cause its field of action is limited. Because, that is, in contrast to the indefinite
but inexhaustible space of the classic episteme, this theoretical field lacks
a center and consequently a primordial hierarchy capable of sustaining the
play of the infrathin.
Precisely because they proliferate unceasingly, infrathin phenom-
ena carry out the indeterminacy of all free action. At the same time, the
set of resonances rendered possible by the infrathin is not chaotic, aleatory,
or capricious. It is neither destructured nor asystemic. On the contrary, the
infrathin mimics—since it is after all a fiction—what it deconstructs. It
produces a chainlike effect, networks that, situated beyond the part and the
whole, beyond the finite and infinite, constitute the very systemicity of the
system: its incessant dislocation.
The compositional or syntactic excess of such dislocations is re-
sponsible for the undecidability of combinations. This excess furthermore
proceeds from the fact that its formal dispositions and distributions al-
ways refer to a supplementary difference whose characteristic is to make
every infrathin double back on itself, so that it simultaneously becomes the
paradigm of the norm that every infrathin enunciates, per se, in singular
fashion.
Since they are laid out in successive and simultaneous folds, the
infrathin dislocate themselves incessantly without assuming a stable or
organic identity.9 They are not purely semantic, as historical materialism
would have it, or exclusively syntactic, as autonomous formalism preached.
They manifest the aperture articulated from an interstitial position.
 437
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

An Infrathin Heterology
Infrathin elements, for all their heterological insertions, do not constitute
homogeneous entities. Their movement is neither uniform nor unequivocal.
On close examination they act according to a disseminated heterogenesis of
irreducible multiplicities. They are not purely syntactic because they do not
act like mere fragments generated by the aleatory decision of an individual
subject. Neither are they semantic or ideological, since they are located prior
to this very conflict, by virtue, precisely, of their own compositional excess
in relation to meaning.
Thus conceived as proliferating articulations between presences
and absences, infrathin elements signal points of resistance to the systemic
dialectalization that incessantly discriminates the national from the foreign,
or the internal from the external. Precisely by composing and decomposing
previously consolidated syntactic links (such as that of a national literature,
for example, or the value of a work of art within this very system), infrathin
events render the very opposition between interiority and exteriority obso-
lete once they postulate a synthesis—let us call it an originary synthesis—in
which difference installs itself prior to meaning.
One example will clarify this idea. In his essay on the hour of
crime and the time of the work of art, Peter Sloterdijk postulates the
monstrous character (das Ungeheure) of all of man’s spatial interventions,
arguing that the characteristic of modern times is not the discovery of
virgin spaces but the opening up of vast possibilities to new operational
routines. Thus Iberian nautical habits created both Americas in 1500 as
secondary material products. The principal effect of this revolution in the
practical arts manifested itself in the construction of globes, the two oldest
of which—that of Martin Behaim, the merchant from Nuremberg, and
the globe of Laon in France—spurred incursions on the new continent and
yet still reveal the precise contours of the pre-Colombian world (Pülhorn
1992).
Behaim brought Lisbon’s nautical novelties to Nuremberg; and
his globe, the first cartographic simulacrum, can be read as the profane sig-
nifier of a world put at our fingertips, much like Johannes de Sacrobosco’s
Tractatus de Sphaera (1220). However, the globe in question, an authentic
infrathin, rather than a metaphysical symbol, demonstrates a form of circu-
lation incorporated into a cultural patrimony in a normal, if not banal, way.
Definitive banalization came about with cinematographic sacralization in
Nazi Germany and Veit Harlan’s film Das unsterbliche Herz (1939).
 438
Nepantla

Unlike the cartographies of Borges or Gilles Deleuze, which are

not identical with the territory they describe, every single point on the sur-
face of these globes can be described according to the postulate of homoge-
neous availability, thus inaugurating the era of globalization as a monstrous
intervention in space (Sloterdijk 2000b).
This monstrosity is rigorously infrathin. Allegory in general—
Duchamp used to say—is an application of the infrathin. Let us stop here.
Systemicity is the irrefutable demand of a complete and self-sufficient foun-
dational order in which truth-values find internal coherence and causal
necessity, thus responding to a disciplinary desire for objectification and
self-realization. Nevertheless, infrathin events are constellations or distri-
butions of radically heterogeneous enunciations, strategically minimal but
still barely relevant, from an economic point of view.
However, the ambiguity or ambivalence that infrathin events make
available to the gaze is not exactly a mistake, an absence in clarity in
the determination of factors, or even a negativity produced by a lack of
conceptual precision. The infrathin does not imply confusion, laziness, or
semantic parasitism. On the contrary, the ambiguity of the infrathin is the
consequence of a meaning seemingly identical to itself that, by taking on
another appearance, concretely demonstrates the ambivalence inherent in
all value.
The value of the infrathin is therefore derived not by unveiling an
already formed truth but by deciphering and rearticulating verbal enigmas
that are above systematized discourse. It is not the product of a chain of
deductive judgments on the existent but an objective virtual coordination
of visible elements, a legible constellation of recognizable traces and trails.
They produce the materials without which the infrathin could not transfig-
ure the existence of such elements, turning them into writing. As we know,
politics, art, and even specific, technical knowledges constantly construct
fictions that act like the material agents of signs and images, establishing
relationships between what is seen and what is said, what is done and what
we are allowed to do. The infrathin is more than this: it is the friction of fic-
tion, the fold of fiction, the fiction of fiction, a heterotopical reconfiguration
of the impossible.
Rather than pointing out the systemic stability of a transient set
organized for the purpose of its own overcoming—which is after all the
objective pursued by the model of transculturating modernization—the
infrathin is unreservedly grounded on the irreducible hybridity of Latin
American culture, without deriving from it either semantic exaltation or
 439
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

syntactic virtuosity. On the contrary, the hybrid lays bare a plurality of

origins and its own acephalous condition. It is ergative.10
One last consideration with respect to the infrathin deserves men-
tion here. Whenever it is possible in a determined event to identify the
infrathin, there are traces and residues that help us recognize it more easily.
We can thus say that the infrathin is read in its specter but never gazed on
in its specific materiality. In this sense, once the infrathin is legible, it is also
thus invisible. It is the object of witnessing and not of confirmation.11 This
trait brings us finally to a paradox. If we read the infrathin it is through the
infrathin itself, where the infrathin is both what is read and the reader. We
read difference in it and through it. The infrathin constitutes the in-between
of separation and ethico-political reparation.12

The Infrathin and Community

What is the function of the infrathin? Can it effectively insert itself, as a
critical instance, against the shadow of the zoological park that menaces our
society? We know that man is a political animal because, symptomatically,
he is a literary animal, adrift from his nature because of the institutional na-
ture of the written word. As Deleuze first said, man does not have instincts;
he creates institutions. This institutionality, or even literariness, functions at
the same time—or, as Derrida would say, à la fois—as a condition but also
as an effect of a circulation, that is, of a correspondence of literary values.
Such enunciations, however, have nothing to do with specific em-
pirical bodies because they are not bodies but quasi-bodies. They are, in
effect, phantoms or infrathins, that is, discursive groupings with no recog-
nizable parent which wander in search of an authorized addressee. They do
not produce collective bodies but introduce, within these bodies, select lines
of friction or fracture that call into question the institution of literature. In
fact, nineteenth-century writers, and even representatives of a certain mod-
ernist nationalism, were largely inclined in this direction, that is, toward
the importance of impeding, at all costs, the disaggregation of the literary
institution in the name of an imaginarily homogeneous body. Perhaps the
current reconversion of the canon is merely a similar attempt.
I would argue, therefore, that the infrathin produces relatively
aleatory interpretive communities, which in turn contribute to designing
enunciative collectives that redistribute roles, territories, and languages. In
the words of Jacques Rancière (2000, 64), “un collectif politique n’est pas
un organisme ou un corps communautaire. Les voies de la subjectivation
 440
Nepantla

politique ne sont pas celles de l’identification imaginaire mais de la désin-

corporation ‘littéraire.’”
A “purloined” letter exemplifies this idea. I am referring to a text
by Denis de Rougemont written at Lake George, New York, on 3 August
1945. On this day Rougemont engages in a debate with Marcel Duchamp
that is extremely revealing of this question of community. De Rougemont
(1968, 44) writes:

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

de Bachelard. J’ai souligné le paragraphe où l’on explique que
selon la théorie de Millikan sur les rayons cosmiques, le mouve-
ment se produit dans des conditions de vide matériel, d’inanité
telles qu’on peut bien dire que c’est le mouvement lui-même
qui crée la masse corpusculaire, alors que naguère le physicien
matérialiste croyait qu’il fallait une masse préexistante pour
qu’un mouvement s’y appliquait.
—Je l’ai bien lu, m’a-t-il dit ce matin en me rendant
le livre. Je crois que je comprends tout, ou presque tout, à part
épistémologie, j’ai oublié et le mot m’agace . . . Inanité par contre
me plaît beaucoup. Mais il y a cependant une expression que
je ne comprends pas du tout, c’est mouvement. Qu’est-ce qu’il
appelle mouvement, votre type? S’il le définit par opposition
au repos, ça ne marche pas, rien n’est en repos dans l’univers.
Alors? Son mouvement n’est qu’un mythe.

The episode has all the ingredients of a correspondence. It is the

product of an actual dialogue (between Duchamp and de Rougemont),
a virtual dialogue (between Duchamp and Gaston Bachelard), but also
a deferred dialogue (between de Rougemont and his readers, who learn
of it almost twenty-five years later). In this brief event, Duchamp defines
movement as a nondialectical value, since in fact it does not oppose itself
to rest. Movement is therefore infrathin: movement is the (dimensional)
difference between two objects manufactured in a series (cast from the
same mold); maximum precision is obtained from the contrast between the
two.
However, beyond the ontology in this essentially epistemological
definition of infrathin phenomena, Duchamp underlines his peculiar form
of listening13 since, on the issue of movement, he retains only an infrathin
 441
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

attribute (inanity) which is, without a doubt, a Mallarmian specter, that of

un insolite vaisseau, or, in its definitive version, which empowers negativity,
that of a simple aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore. In any case, it is a ciphered
scene, in high contrast (Mallarmé wanted it to be illustrated by etchings),
that configures the allegory of the text itself moving, in its immateriality,
between Stéphane Mallarmé and Duchamp.
However, this completely infrathin movement of inanité, this play
of shared syntax, is responsible for a decision, that is, for an ethics and even
for a politics of form. There is no imaginary identification in Duchamp’s
perception. Inanity works, on the contrary, as an infrathin phenomena of
literary or institutional deincorporation. As in scopophilia, Duchamp lis-
tens to himself listening to Mallarmé14 and understands that this experience
has nothing to do with the projection of the subject-of-perspective but is
unequivocally linked with the introjection (if not abjection) of the subject-
of-the-gaze. I would even say that the inanity which allows him to listen
to his own listening is a trompe l’ouïe, a triumph of listening over audi-
tion. The politics of form implied in the episode illustrates, furthermore,
a fairly relevant question that links Duchamp’s position to certain contem-
porary elaborations of Georges Bataille (1971 [1933], 637), who argued that
“l’hétérogène, c’est le mouvement.”
Unlike the myth of movement (as antirest) defended by Bachelard,
Duchamp postulates a nondialectical negativity of the concept of move-
ment, in which he discerns not only a myth but a ritual. Or, better, the
concept of the infrathin—the dimensional difference between two objects
manufactured in a series—is defined both as a myth and as a ritual.
From the perspective of myth, the infrathin adopts the movement
of a writing whose productivity consists paradoxically of expenditure. It
expresses, on the one hand, enthusiasm, imaginary identification of the
creator with totality. On the other hand, it exhibits the value of expiation or
institutional disincorporation, through which the artist faces the closure of
representation, the limit, that is, of his or her own practice, and yields up his
or her vicarious power, ejecting finally the sacred element that grounds the
power of representation.15 It is in this sense that the infrathin functions
alternatively as myth and ritual. But according to the opposite, ritual-
institutional perspective, the artist, conceived as the symbolic transgressor
who expiates the excesses of power until he arrives at the entropy of nuda
vita, turns to the other, understood as the double of language, in order to
integrate it into a disidealized ritual.
 442
Nepantla

There are various schematic definitions of this extremely complex

phenomenon. Duchamp wrote that “ce sont les regardeurs qui font les
tableaux” while Bataille, in turn, affirmed that “le lecteur est discours.”16
In any case, the infrathin concept of writing does not seek to transcend
history from somewhere beyond experience but intends instead to rebel
against it, through measures both ambivalent and infrathin, so that the
critical and sacrificial aspects of experience are inseparably bound.
Duchamp did not develop the theoretical consequences of his con-
cept. His epigrammatic style is the very opposite of argumentation. How-
ever, if we adopt the perspective of erroneous citations, we can affirm that
it was Bataille who in fact furnished us with a peculiar interpretation of the
infrathin phenomena conceived by Duchamp.17 By postulating a hetero-
logical or sacred domain, composed of phenomena that elude intellectual
reduction and can only be defined in negative terms, as nonlogical differ-
ence or difference unexplainable in argumentative terms, Bataille thought
to point out a certain likeness between heterology and formations of the
unconscious (which pushed him finally to include, in the wake of Apolli-
naire, “la pensée mystique des primitifs,” that is, the Aztecs, as the source
for the renovation of modernity).18
The same could be said about the concepts of heterology and the
infrathin, even with regards to their mutual ambivalence. The same move-
ment of the infrathin concept of experience, which I pointed out earlier,
can also be verified in the diverse—right- or left-wing—interpretations of
the heterological phenomena. A right-wing, ascendant, or superior hetero-
geneity adopts sovereignty as the completed form of power. A left-wing,
descendant, or inferior heterogeneity works with the elements excluded by
symbolic homogeneity, since they threaten homogeneity’s very stability.
From this differentiation between two types of social heterogene-
ity, Bataille identified one of the attracting poles of heterology, that of
hagiology or the knowledge of the sacred, and the repulsing pole of het-
erology, that of eschatology or the knowledge of expelled wastes.19 Yet,
rather than being mutually exclusive, as in the infrathin event, both poles
are integrated in a complex way in mass phenomena like fascism, which
caught Bataille’s interest early on. The paradoxical association of the im-
perative and subversive aspects of heterogeneity, which turn fascism into a
reactive modernism, suggest new phenomena of excitement and aggrega-
tion that react similarly against the unidirectionality of humanism and the
homogeneity of democratic representation.
 443
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

Where pedagogical modernity used to locate the divided subject,

postpedagogical modernity disposes of the mass as an infrathin phenomena
threatening the concept of sovereignty. More specifically, within the aes-
thetic experience, writing occupies the ambivalent position of conserving
but also of using up experience; operating alternately as critique and prac-
tice, aesthetic and anesthetic, as a questioning and reactivation of symbolic
values. The best example is Bataille’s L’érotisme, the infrathin supplement
to Duchamp’s eroticism.
This paradox of conservation allied with expenditure does not
exclude aesthetics since contemporary political regimes, whose hegemony
is legitimately grounded in the masses, exclude precisely these masses from
every moment of decision so that the masses are absent from their own
place, or from the place of power, which, because it is dissociated from
desire, is merely an infrathin.20
At this point it is worthwhile to remember to what extent Bataille’s
encounter with ethnology was decisive for his theorization. In all probabil-
ity it had something to do with the double value of the very discipline
of anthropology, oscillating always between myth and ritual, between
expanding Western instrumental knowledge and rescuing a poetics of
alterity. Bataille’s encounter with his friend Alfred Métraux, who special-
ized in those years in Tupi-Guarani ritual anthropophagi, was especially
important.21 The impact of this limit experience can be perceived in one of
the first texts of sacred sociology, “L’Amérique disparue.”
This text insinuates the paradox of sovereignty: the subject must
manifest itself in those places where it can no longer be present. For Bataille,
once sovereignty presupposes expiating the authority it attains with its own
institution, there can only be one definition of community: a negative one
whose possibility is opened up with death. As Giorgio Agamben has made
clear, sovereign community, rendered manifest by death, does not create a
positive link between subjects but is organized according to disappearance
or annihilation, to its infrathin condition, understood as that which cannot
be transformed into shared or common substance or work.22 In Bataille’s
(1988, 443) pioneering text on the Aztecs we read: “It would seem that
this people of extraordinary courage had an excessive taste for death. They
surrendered to the Spaniards in a sort of mad hypnotic state. Cortez’s victory
was won not by strength, but rather by the casting of a true spell. As if this
people had vaguely understood that once they had reached this degree of
joyous violence, the only way out, both for them and for the victims with
which they appeased their giddy gods, was a sudden and terrifying death.”
 444
Nepantla

That said, the question of the viability of a community of equals,

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

Translated by
Adriana Campos Johnson

Notes
1. I am alluding to Claudio Guillén’s (1998) concept of “escritura feliz.”
2. It was a pioneering intervention similar to Enrique Pichon-Rivière’s contributions to
Primera plana after 1966. Let us not forget that this was when psychoanalysis
assisted anthropology in interpreting great popular narratives. Two examples
from the 1930s of this collaboration are the work of Arthus Ramos in Brazil
and Bernardo Canal Feijóo in Argentina.
3. For the photomontages see Stern 1995.
4. Two paragraphs ago I referred to “the phantasmagorization . . . of the image.” One
could argue that Stern’s photomontages part from the same premise as does
Jacques Derrida. In his text for Droit de regards (Plissart, Peeters, and Derrida
1985), Derrida writes that a photograph must domesticate the referent but
can infinitely postpone the visible referent. In this sense, Maurice Blanchot
evokes the death mask as a shadow that goes beyond use-value, much as the
surrealists of Documents proposed. Roland Barthes suggests something close
to my notion of “friction” when, in “La chambre claire” (1995 [1980], 1188),
he writes that a photograph is an “image folle, frotée de réel.” In any case,
 445
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

the friction of the image with the other of the referent points in the direction
of its negativity, its specter, its dispersion.
5. Laurent Milési refers to this question of the limits of humanism in Milési 1999.
6. In his magazine Potlach, whose title evokes Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and
Georges Bataille’s theory of expenditure, Guy Debord begins to use the con-
cept of psycho-géographie, from which he culls the more specific dérive, de-
fined in the first issue of Internationale situationniste (June 1958, 13) as “the
form of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: the
technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. It is also used to
designate, more specifically, the duration of the continual exercise of this ex-
perience.” In “Théorie de la dérive” (December 1958), Debord defines dérive
as a ludic-constructive behavior opposed in every sense to the common use
of concepts such as journey or stroll, since dérive requires an abandon to the
solicitations and encounters it presupposes. Later Lacan proposed dérive in
French and adopted the term drive in English to translate from German
the concept of pulsion (Trieb), something that answers instinct and inscribes
itself in the order of the institution precisely in order to dislodge it. Neces-
sity and happenstance cohabit in the concept of dérive. From this ambiva-
lence, Catherine Malabou (1999, 12) underlines the concept of dérive as the
in-between of pulsion and counter-current: “L’arrivée—ce qui échoit—peut
aussi parfois contredire, déranger, empêcher l’arrivée—l’accomplissement ou
l’achèvement d’un processus.”
7. It is worth recalling that Debord elaborates his theory of the dérive from the baroque
map of the imaginary country of Tendre (1656), where the main geographical
feature is the “Lac d’indifférence.” The lake is the place where both the society
of the spectacle and the beauty of indifference (Duchamp) meant to transcend
it are produced. Cf. Andreotti 2000.
8. This is what Roberto Lehman-Nitsche (1919, 195) was driving at when he observed
that among the Bakairi and the Carajás, the solar hero turns himself into a
rotting corpse so as to more easily to steal the sun from its owners. Duchamp,
who conversed at length with Lehman-Nitsche during his stay in Argentina,
wrote in his Notes (1999, 21): “Semblabilité / similarité / Le Même (fabricat. en
série) approximation pratique de la similarité. Dans le temps un même objet
n’est pas le même à 1 seconde d’intervalle. Quels rapports avec le principe
d’identité?”
9. There have been studies on infrathin friction in formal and informal institutions as
a consequence of European integration, proving that such friction can be ob-
served either when formal and informal aspects of sovereignty or democracy
 446
Nepantla

contradict themselves institutionally, when formal decision-making struc-

tures are at odds with informal cooperative procedures, or when formal and
informal institutions clash in regards to criteria for legitimation. Cf. de Moor
1995.
10. Georges Dumézil (1979) uses the ergative case to defy the evolutionist thesis that
Romance languages are derived from Latin. For Dumézil, in this infrathin
survival of the ergative case, they are, on the contrary, Latin itself. Recently
Paul Ricoeur (1999) argued that there are two possible paths to difference: (1)
transferring or transporting the content of one system to another (as Antoine
Berman did in Epreuve de l’étranger), or (2) interpreting a value from within
the same linguistic-cultural community. Ricoeur illustrates this latter attitude
with George Steiner’s After Babel, but Borges’s fictions—especially “Las dos
maneras de traducir” (1926)—provide fitting examples as well. In this sense
the ergative Ménard is almost emblematic of the infrathin.
11. Like Agamben, I understand witnessing as a process of desubjectivization and not
as a proof of observation or mediation.
12. I want to call attention to Derrida’s valuable observations on sexual difference in
“Fourmis” (1994) as well as Michel Lisse’s reading of this text in “On peut
toujours rêver” (2000).
13. Louise Bourgeois (1998, 241) observes that “Duchamp, he didn’t say very much, but
he was a good listener.” In this regard, Marcel himself would say that “depuis
que mon père est mort, je me sens privé de repères. Pères et repères . . .” (de
Rougement 1968, 44), deriving from this ready-made listening a truncated
evolutionary theory, of impossible maturity, subject to an infrathin movement
without a verifiable end.
14. His concept of movement parallels Mallarmé’s pli and appears in the steeple-chase
and the filters of Grande vidro.
15. In his notes, Duchamp associates the infrathin phenomena with certain bodily
discharges—such as urine or feces—that so fascinated Bataille. One need
only recall the beginning of Bataille’s Le bleu du ciel (1957) or his book Les
larmes d’Eros (1961).
16. Bataille (1970 [1943], 75) argues that “le tiers . . . c’est le discours” and that “le
lecteur est discours, c’est lui qui parle en moi.” He likens this notion to that
of literature as witnessing, that is, as a process of desubjectivization, aiming
upward.
17. Walter Benjamin is Duchamp’s other alter ego. His essay, “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” reads like the autobiography of the
creator of the ready-mades.
 447
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

18. In his essay “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” Bataille (1971 [1933, 347]) af-
firms that the structure of knowledge of a heterogeneous reality “en tant que
telle se retrouve dans la pensée mystique des primitifs et dans les représen-
tations du rêve: elle est identique à la structure de l’inconscient,” thinking,
most certainly, as he admits in a footnote, of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s “primitive
mentality,” Ernst Cassirer’s mythical thought, and Freud’s interpretation of
dreams.
19. Taking up observations from the Genealogy of Morals in “La valeur d’usage de D.
A. F. de Sade,” Bataille (1970 [1933–34], 61) observes that agios, like sacer, is
an ambiguous word that can mean both dirty and saint. In L’homme et le sacré
(1939), Roger Caillois underscores the same amphibology, which Agamben
would later use in his theorization of the homo sacer.
20. In her essay on the passing of collective utopias, Susan Buck-Morss (2000, 134–37)
stipulates the deficiency of mass experience in relation to the phantasmago-
rization of the image: “Mass society is a twentieth-century phenomenon. How
it differs from mass military institutions is an organized question. Whereas
communication in the latter follows hierarchical lines of command, society
as a mass is addressed directly. Modern media technologies are indispensable
here, not only for the manipulation of the masses but for mass solidarity in
a positive sense. Speed is a decisive factor in media effectiveness. . . . How
the words look matters. Letters take on modern shapes; graphic design gives
the masses a revolutionary identity; and identity is the new means of mass
organization. Mimesis replaces written argument. People become part of the
collective by mimicking its look. Mass cathexis onto one person is a powerful
organizer, but it requires at least the trace of physical presence: an image, a
voice, clothes worn by, objects touched by, beds occupied by the person in
whom the mass’s psychic energy is invested. The written word, in contrast,
is decorporalized. The materiality of the text acts like a screen, prohibiting
the author’s physical attributes—gender, age, ethnicity, attractiveness—from
being seen. As a consequence, a certain kind of mass cathexis is impossible,
and although there have long been best-selling writers and popular political
leaders, there were no heroes as media stars before the photograph.”
21. See Métraux’s La religion des Tupinambá et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus tupi-
guaraní (1928). In the following decade Métraux published various studies
on the same theme in the Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad de
Tucumán. Among them there was a study on cannibalism among the Kain-
gangue and another on mythic indigenous representations of the universe and
nature in Argentina. In both La religion des Tupinambá and the later Myths
of the Toba and Pilagá Indians of the Gran Chaco (1946), Métraux takes up and
 448
Nepantla

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

a text first published in 1918, when the anthropologist from the Río de la
Plata region met a young French artist living in Buenos Aires named Marcel
Duchamp. Both are linked in an infrathin experience: deciphering the po-
tential of a starry sky. Duchamp following Mallarmé’s lesson, so exalted by
Valéry; Lehman-Nitsche exploring the beyond of the ethnocentric consensus;
and both deepening a heterological conception of time and space.
22. Cf. Agamben 1987. He returns to these ideas in Agamben 1999.

References
Andreotti, Libero. 2000. “Play-Tactics of the Internationale Situationniste.” October 91:
37–58.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1987. “Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità.” In Georges Bataille:
Il politico e il sacro, edited by Jacqueline Risset. Naples: Liguori.
. 1999. “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter
Benjamin.” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited and
translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Badiou, Alain. 1998. “La communauté des égaux.” In Abrégé de métapolitique. Paris:
Seuil.
Barthes, Roland. 1995 [1980]. “La chambre claire.” In Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3. Edited
by Eric Marty. Paris: Seuil.
Bataille, Georges. 1970 [1933–34]. “La valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade.” In Oeuvres
complètes, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard.
. 1970 [1943]. L’expérience intérieure. In Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5. Paris:
Gallimard.
. 1971 [1933]. “La structure psychologique du fascisme.” In Oeuvres complètes,
vol. 1. 2d ed. Paris: Gallimard.
. 1988 [1928]. “Expiring America.” Translated by Annette Michelson. In
“October”: The First Decade, 1976–1986, edited by Annette Michelson et al.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bourgeois, Louise. 1998. Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings
and Interviews, 1923–1997. Edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and
Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in
East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Caillois, Roger. 1939. L’homme et le sacré. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
 449
Antelo . The Logic of the Infrathin

Debord, Guy. 1958. “Théorie de la dérive.” Internationale situationniste, December,

51–55.
de Moor, B. F. T. 1995. Harmony or Friction between Formal and Informal Institutions.
Leiden, the Netherlands: Leiden Universiteit.
de Rougemont, Denis. 1968. “Marcel Duchamp mine de rien.” Preuves 18.204: 43–47.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. “Fourmis.” In Lectures de la différence sexuelle. Paris: Des
femmes.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1999. Notes. Paris: Flammarion.
Dumézil, Georges. 1979. “Concerning the Ergative.” Translated by Scott Walker.
Diogenes, no. 105: 4–7.
Germani, Gino. 1962. Política y sociedad en una época de transición: De la sociedad
tradicional a la sociedad de masas. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
. 1971. Estudios sobre sociología y psicología social. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
. 1978. Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
. 1981. The Sociology of Modernization: Studies on Its Historical and Theoretical
Aspects, with Special Regard to the Latin American Case. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
Guillén, Claudio. 1998. “La escritura feliz: Literatura y epistolaridad.” In Múltiples
moradas: Ensayo de literatura comparada. Barcelona: Tusquets.
Lehman-Nitsche, Roberto. 1919. “Mitología sudamericana II: La cosmogonía según
los puelche de la Patagonia.” Revista del Museo de La Plata 24: 182–209.
Lisse, Michel. 2000. “On peut toujours rêver.” In Jacques Derrida et l’esthétique, edited
by Nathalie Roelens. Preface by Eric Clémens. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Malabou, Catherine. 1999. “L’écartement des voies: Dérive, arrivée, catastrophe.” In
Jacques Derrida: La contre-allée, by Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida.
Paris: La quinzaine littéraire–Louis Vuitton.
Métraux, Alfred. 1928. La religion des Tupinambá et ses rapports avec celle des autres
tribus tupi-guaraní. Paris: E. Leroux.
. 1946. Myths of the Toba and Pilagá Indians of the Gran Chaco. Philadelphia:
American Folklore Society.
Milési, Laurent. 1999. “Zo(o)graphies: Evolutions darwiniennes de quelques fictions
animales.” In L’animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida, edited
by Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée.
Plissart, Marie-Françoise, Benoît Peeters, and Jacques Derrida. 1985. Droit de regards.
Paris: Minuit.
Pülhorn, Wolfgang, ed. 1992. Focus Behaim Globus. Nuremberg, Germany:
Germanisches Nationalmuseum.
Rancière, Jacques. 2000. Le partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique. Paris: Fabrique.
 450
Nepantla

Ricoeur, Paul. 1999. “Le paradigme de la traduction.” Esprit, no. 253: 8–19.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2000a. Règles pour le parc humain: Une lettre en réponse à la “Lettre sur
l’humanisme” de Heidegger. Translated by Olivier Mannoni. Paris: Mille et
une nuits.
. 2000b. Nicht gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger. Frankfurt, a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Stern, Grete. 1995. Sueños. Valencia, Spain: Centre Julio González.