Gareth Williams-The Mexican Exception - Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy - Palgrave Macmillan (2011) PDF

The Mexican Exception
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The Mexican Exception
Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy
Gareth Williams
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the mexican exception
Copyright © Gareth Williams, 2011.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United

States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this
is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered
in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the
United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-0-230-11024-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Gareth, 1963-

The Mexican exception : sovereignty, police, and democracy / by Gareth
Williams.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-230-11024-3 (hardback)
1. Democracy—Mexico. 2. Mexico—Politics and government. I. Title.
JL1281.W55 2011
320.972—dc22 2010045303
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: May 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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For Cris
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And let no one suppose that in seeking for something beyond them we are anxious
to make a sophistical display at any cost; we only undertake this inquiry because
all the constitutions with which we are acquainted are faulty.
—Aristotle
It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is,
the whole question of sovereignty.
—Carl Schmitt
Even though we know so little about what “democracy” should mean, it is still
necessary, through a kind of precomprehension, to know something about it.
We must move toward the horizon that limits the meaning of the word, in order
to come to know better what democracy will have been able to signify, what it
ought, in truth, to have meant.
—Jacques Derrida
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Exceptionality, Autoimmunity, and the Question of Democracy:
Summer 2005 17
2 Politics, Equality, and Freedom in Revolution: December 1914 41
3 The Manufactured Subject: Melodramatic Consciousness and the
Immunization of the Political, July–August 1937 65
4 Humanism Begets Good Order: Alfonso Reyes and Police Thought,
September–December 1939 87
5 “Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!”: Chance, Passive Decision,
Democracy, July–November 1968 117
6 Absolute Hostility and Ubiquitous Enmity: “The Party of the Poor”
and the Militarization of the Political, 1967–95 153
Notes 193
Bibliography 207
Index 217
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Introduction
I
began to write this book in the summer of 2005. On July 22, 2005, a
Brazilian citizen, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot seven times in the head
by officers of the London Metropolitan Police in the Stockwell Tube Sta-
tion. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of July 7, the Metropolitan Police had
implemented their secret shoot-to-kill policy—named “Operation Kratos”—
which had been designed and developed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington, DC. In its direct reference to the second
compound in words such as democracy or aristocracy, Operation Kratos alluded
to the force that underlies the partitions of the political community. It referred
to sovereignty as a standing reserve of force at the heart of society’s distribution
of powers and privileges. With Menezes’s death, the state’s claim to legitimate
violence had been tragically undermined, and the subsequent investigations and
inquest did little to guarantee justice.
Clearly there is nothing new in the relation between law, force, and the
democratic social order. But after almost half a century of political philosophy
announcing the advent of new paradigms of power based on the regulariza-
tion of populations and economies, it appeared that Menezes’s death, when
taken in conjunction with many of the policies of the Bush administration
after 9/11, indicated that the traditional rights of the sovereign to kill or sus-
pend guarantees while remaining free from legal obligation were witnessing
a powerful resurgence. In the context of the international “War on Terror,”
the liberal democracies of the West seemed to be embracing force as a funda-
mental procedure internal to the defense of good order, over and above the
management and administration of the population by the liberal optimization
of collective well being and prosperity. While purporting to guarantee secu-
rity measures defending, or immunizing, society against the random elements
inherent in a population of living beings, sovereign power itself appeared to be
the random element and Menezes’s death highlighted the difficulty in measur-
ing interactions between, on one hand, the vast anatomy of social powers that
regularize everyday life and, on the other hand, the state’s sovereign decision to
define the political arena by imposing and acting on a distinction between the
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2 ● The Mexican Exception
characteristics of a friend and those of an enemy. The indistinctness in the rela-

tion between the sovereign decision to kill and the administrative regulation of
good order seems to call for a reconsideration of sovereignty itself, not only in
a discussion of which individual or group of individuals should be hegemonic,
but also in a conceptual and practical reconsideration of the mere fact of sover-
eignty. But clearly this entails a parallel conceptual and practical reconsideration
of the mere fact of democracy in its relation to sovereign power and the faulty
immunization of society against disorder, violence, and lawlessness.
As the Menezes case hit the headlines, events in Mexico also seemed to lend
enormous historical and political weight to Jacques Derrida’s observation in
Rogues that the idea of sovereignty is being put to a critical test at the current
time. As he observed, the contemporary world bears witness “more and bet-
ter 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, deni-
als that are but the manifestations of its convulsive death throes” (2005, 154).
What can be understood by this reference to the principle of ruins that lies at
the heart of sovereign power, that “works it over,” and thereby forces it to con-
front and propagate violence in the name of democratic peace and sovereign
order? For Derrida, our ability to understand this principle entails accounting
for reason’s relation to sovereign exceptionality, and to the state’s partial, incom-
plete, and always ongoing attempts to immunize or inoculate society, and itself,
from the threat and experience of violence, disorder, or lawlessness. Since the
end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) domination in the 2000
presidential elections, Mexico has become a particularly significant arena for
reconsideration of the mere fact of sovereignty. By the end of summer 2005,
it was clear that Mexico was bracing itself for another chapter in its barbed
relation to sovereign legitimacy and democratic rule. As the 2006 presidential
elections loomed on the horizon, the outgoing government of National Action
Party (PAN) President Vicente Fox was trying (and, more significantly, fail-
ing) to hold former PRI President Luis Echeverría accountable for criminal acts
sanctioned and committed against sectors of the population in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The underlying question in this entangled legal process was
whether a former president could in fact be brought to justice or whether he
would always be an exception to the rule of law. Simultaneously, the neoliberal
political and economic elites were gearing up to discredit, by almost any means
possible, the populist challenge of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD)
candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In June 2005 the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation (EZLN) announced its intentions to withdraw from
the presidential elections in the name of a different approach to the political
(their “Other Campaign”), while in the process accusing López Obrador of

Introduction ● 3
being nothing more than business as usual rather than a legitimate alternative
to the ruling PAN or PRI, which had dominated the political and institutional
course of the twentieth century. In the months running up to the elections, the
country saw the civil unrest and brutal police response that made San Salvador
Atenco a household name. The country also witnessed the military deployment
and remarkable violence unleashed by the thousands of police who were sent by
the governor of Oaxaca to break up the teachers’ strike that would later form the
nucleus of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca.
In what would prove to be the most contentious presidential elections since
the 1988 election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the 2006 presidential elections
were accompanied by vociferous claims of fraud. In the end Mexico’s Federal
Electoral Institute resolved the electoral stand off by recounting approximately
9 percent of the vote and declared the conservative PAN candidate Felipe
Calderón the winner on September 5, 2006. Within days of coming to power
in these hotly contested elections, President Calderón defined the future of his
presidency by declaring war on the drug cartels. Since then, over forty thou-
sand soldiers have been deployed in Mexican territory, and it is calculated that
the conflict has claimed the lives of over thirty-five thousand people. Fighting
the drug cartels has cost a fortune in military expenditures, and this struggle
has had a hugely negative impact on Mexico’s image abroad, even leading to
speculation in some official circles in the United States that Mexico might be
a failed state.
In Mexico the war on the cartels has sparked a debate on the nature of sover-
eign power and its relation to democracy. Carlos Fazio was perhaps the first to call
attention to the increasing militarization of public security in Calderón’s Mexico,
noting that current conditions are like the suspension of citizens’ guarantees that
accompanied militarizing the state of Chiapas after the EZLN uprising of 1994.
Published in La Jornada in December 2006, Fazio’s “Hacia un estado de excep-
ción?” (“Toward a State of Exception?”) observes in no uncertain terms that the
state’s ability to mediate social conflict has given way to the open use of force,
inaugurating what he calls the discretional ground of the new law: that is, Presi-
dent Calderón’s state of exception. Fazio is by no means the only appraisal of the
Mexican “state of exception” in recent years. In its 2008 annual report, “Human
Rights Under Siege: Public Security and Criminal Justice in Mexico,” the Centro
de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez (Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez
Human Rights Center) in Mexico City called for the need to further regulate
the use of force in interactions between police and civilians. In his opinion piece
published in La Jornada on March 24, 2009, Luis Hernández Navarro observed
that the militarization of the northern territories undermines the constitution
and is thereby carrying Mexico down the path to martial law. On March 31,
2009, Dan La Botz of Mexican Labor News and Analysis posted an appraisal of

the current situation titled “Mexico: A State of Exception? Or a State of Disinte-

gration? A Panorama of Criticism of the State in Mexico.” On the same day the
freelance journalist Kristin Bricker posted her report titled “Regime of Exception:
Mexico’s Two-Track Justice System” in which she evaluates the potentially preju-
dicial implications of the legal reforms currently being sponsored and funded by
the US Congress under the auspices of “Plan Mexico.”
While these appraisals help us understand the complexity of the current situ-
ation in terms of rights violations and the use of force, they all share the idea
that the state of exception—sovereign power’s ability to decide on its excep-
tional status in relation to the law—is a historical and institutional aberration
in a democratic society because democracy can reign only when the state of
exception is rendered obsolete.
In this book I take a different, less idealistic, tack. Contrary to the essentially
ahistorical notion that the state of exception is indeed an exception—in Fazio’s
terms, the new law of the state of exception—I consider sovereign exceptional-
ity to be absolutely integral to our understanding of modern and contemporary
cultural history. The social pact and the application of the law do not give us
insight into the historical interactions and structures of Mexican society. Rather,
it is conflict and the state of exception that reveal how society functions. This is,
in my mind, the case in any modern society. The question, then, is not how to
render the state of exception obsolete in the name of democracy but how to think
the exception through in conjunction with sovereign power’s relation to the mod-
ern rationalization and regularization of democratic life. From the outset, then,
I should shed some light on the key concepts that underlie my approach to the
modern cultural history of sovereignty, police, and democracy in the specific
context of the Mexican exception.
Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Police

In the course of the last half century, much has been said of life as a political
concept, and of biopolitics and biopower as nomenclatures for the regulariza-
tion and optimization of life on a collective scale. As Roberto Esposito notes in
Bios, biopolitics has opened up a completely new phase in contemporary reflec-
tion on sovereign power: “From the moment that Michel Foucault reproposed
and redefined the concept (when not coining it), the entire frame of political
philosophy emerged as profoundly modified. It wasn’t that classical categories
such as those of ‘law’ [diritto], ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘democracy’ suddenly left the
scene—they continue to organize current political discourse—but that their
effective meaning always appears weaker and lacking any interpretive capacity”
(2008, 13). Clearly, in order to grasp the historical shifts in the status of the
political concept of sovereignty, and therefore in order to approach the question

Introduction ● 5
of the Mexican exception, we should turn to the notion of “the biopolitical” as

taken up by Michel Foucault in the mid-1970s. However, this does not mean
we have to remain exclusively within the framework provided by that term or
its genealogy. In other words, it is not clear to me if “the biopolitical” is a com-
pletely accurate term for the analysis of the historical and cultural specificities
of sovereign power and democracy in modern and contemporary Mexico. “The
biopolitical” is certainly useful and to a large extent descriptive, but my sense
is that it is only partially so and should be used only sparingly, rather than as a
blanket term to describe the processes of Mexican modernity tout court. I am
interested therefore in exercising utmost care in using the term in the specific
context of Mexican state and culture formation in the twentieth century.
In order to approach biopolitics, we should consider the classic definition
of sovereignty. In Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which is perhaps the epitome of
the classical definition of the term, the passion that inclines men to peace is fear
of death (1985, 188). It is fear of, and desire for protection from, death inflicted
either by foreign invasion or by fellow subjects that institutes and sustains the
covenant and authority of a social order unified under the will and command
of a transcendent common (i.e., shared) power. Hobbes is very clear. The only
way to erect a common power capable of defending men from foreign invasion
and “the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort . . .
is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one assem-
bly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one
Will . . . This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake
more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall
God, our peace and defence . . . and he that carryeth this Person, is called
SOVERAIGNE, and said to have Soveraigne Power; and every one besides, his
SUBJECT” (227–28). The sovereign, who can come to power by pure force,
“as when a man maketh his children, to submit themselves, and their children
to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by Warre sub-
dueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition” (228),
or by the consent of the multitude, as “when men agree amongst themselves,
to submit to some Man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be
protected by him against all others” (228), is a mortal god with the right to
decide over the life and death of his subjects. This sovereign decision over the
right to take life or to let live is the absolute basis of all political titles and social
distinctions. The sovereign decision precedes the emergence of the political and
legal order, which is to say that, in miraculous fashion, the sovereign cannot be
held accountable according to the terms of the legal order to which he gives rise.
This is because, in Hobbes’s formulation, whatever the sovereign “doth, it can
be no injury to any of his Subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused
of Injustice” (232). In other words, the sovereign decision institutes the law

and suspends the law at will and with utmost impunity; that is, the essence of
sovereign power is located in the miraculous ability of the sovereign to legally
suspend the laws that his subjects are legally banned from suspending or even
transgressing. In the twentieth century Carl Schmitt took a similar position,
as he identified the core of power as being the sovereign’s ability to proclaim
regimes of exception and suspend constitutional order: “Sovereign is he who
decides on the exception . . . The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the
miracle in theology” (2005, 5, 36). Ultimately what we encounter is a paradox:
the exceptional obligation to obedience is both a cause and effect of the state’s
existence since it simultaneously precedes and follows the formation of supreme
power (Virno 1996, 198). As Foucault puts it, “The theory of sovereignty pre-
supposes the subject; its goal is to establish the essential unity of power, and it is
always deployed within the preexisting element of the law . . . Subject, unitary
power, and law; the theory of sovereignty comes into play, I think, among these
elements, and it both takes them as given and tries to found them” (2003, 44).
The essential unity of power summarized in the theory of sovereignty is a police
discourse that “tends to affirm and increase the power of the state, to make
good use of its forces, to procure the happiness of its subjects and chiefly the
maintenance of order and discipline, the regulations that tend to make their life
convenient and provide them with the things they need to live” (2003, 366).1
In Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, however, there is an impor-
tant recognition of a distinctive yet supplementary relation between the classical
theory of sovereignty and what he comes to call modern biopolitics. In “Society
Must Be Defended” Foucault connects what he calls biopolitics to the emergence
of new regulatory mechanisms and technologies of power in eighteenth-century
Europe, which were designed to rationalize and calculate (i.e., to suture and
measure the exercise of instrumental reason in its relation to) human life in
order to immunize the collective against the random or heterogeneous elements
inherent in the social body. Biopolitics refers specifically to the following:
A set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction,
the fertility of a population, and so on . . . the form, nature, extension, duration,
and intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population . . . public hygiene . . .
insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures . . . Biopolitics deals
with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that
is at once specific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s prob-
lem . . . The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical
estimates, and overall measures . . . Security measures have to be installed around
the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a
state of life . . . it is, in a word, a matter of taking control of life and the biologi-
cal processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but
regularized. (2003, 243–47)

Introduction ● 7
Biopolitics is therefore the name for new mechanisms and calculations of

power that emerged with the transition from the classical territorial—or police—
state to the modern time of capital. If the police state is grounded in the unity of
political and economic domination, biopolitics is the diffusion of technoscientific
knowledge throughout the social sphere. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault
defines biopolitics as the treatment of the population “as a set of coexisting living
beings with particular biological and pathological features, and which as such falls
under specific forms of knowledge and technique” (2007, 367). Biopolitics there-
fore refers to forms of power that perhaps do the state’s work for it but that are
not necessarily the result of decisions taken at the heart of the state apparatus. It is
power in the name of the modern ratio, but not necessarily the power of the state
set in motion via the essential unification of sovereign subject, power, and law.
But we still need to be more specific. What Foucault traces in his work, from
The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish to the lectures that compose
“Society Must Be Defended”; Security, Territory, Population; and The Birth of Bio-
politics, is the far-reaching technoscientific shift in the role and function of the
Latin notion of civitas that emerged as a result of the fabrication of an increas-
ingly bourgeois order in Europe and beyond from the seventeenth century to
the present. At first glance, it would appear that Foucault’s formulation of bio-
politics as the regularization of life and of the technoscientific management of
man-as-species is wholly antithetical to the Hobbesian image of the sovereign
unity of power and law (“The Leviathan”) standing over society. But Foucault
observes that biopolitical power is not absolutely heterogeneous or antagonistic
to the traditional rights of the sovereign. First, he emphasizes the classical con-
cept of sovereignty in terms of its right to decide over life and death:
You know that in the classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death
was one of sovereignty’s basic attributes . . . What does the right of life and death
actually mean? Obviously not that the sovereign can grant life in the same way he
can grant death. The right of life and death is always exercised in an unbalanced
way: the balance is always tipped in favor of death. Sovereign power’s effect on life
is exercised only when the sovereign can kill. The very essence of the right of life
and death is actually the right to kill: it is at the moment when the sovereign can
kill that he exercises his right over life. It is essentially the right of the sword. So
there is no real symmetry in the right over life and death. It is not the right to put
to death or to grant them life. Nor is it the right to allow people to live or to leave
them to die. It is the right to take life or let live. And this obviously introduces a
startling dissymmetry. (2003, 240–41)
However, Foucault then suggests an important shift:

I think that one of the great transformations political right underwent in the
nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s

old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented
by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it,
permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power
to “make” live and “let” die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or
let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let
die. (2003, 241)
Foucault reiterates this complementary yet converse relation between classi-

cal sovereignty and the biopolitical optimization of modern life:
Beneath that great absolute power, beneath the dramatic and somber absolute
power that was the power of sovereignty, and which consisted in the power to
take life, we now have the emergence, with this technology of biopower, of this
technology of power over “the” population as such, over men insofar as they are
living beings. It is continuous, scientific, and it is the power to make live. Sov-
ereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I
would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live
and letting die. (2003, 247)
Sovereign power is still the traditional right to take life and let live. But
top-down sovereignty, the mortal god of the Leviathan presiding over society
in its miraculous exceptionality, is now supplemented by the infiltration and
proliferation throughout society of a multiplicity of immanent power and force
relations that amount to—indeed, are coextensive with—a whole productive
anatomy or technology of social power that, through the workings of regulariza-
tion, blurs the distinction between sovereign power and everyday life.
In this new arrangement the political is no longer defined exclusively by
the boundary that separates the exceptional rights of the sovereign from those
underlings who live in his shadow. Now the boundary between sovereign power
and life, between the normal and the abnormal, the proper and the improper,
or the friend and the enemy, is socially ubiquitous and has therefore become
as much a question of technocratic or technoscientific regulation and man-
agement as it is of force. In biopolitics sovereignty has become so profoundly
socialized that it orients everyday life, via the exercise of reason, toward the
bourgeois pursuit of good order, well being and prosperity.
As a result, “biopower” becomes a name for the endless redrawing of the
boundary between the political and the everyday in modern disciplinary and
postmodern control-oriented societies. In the move away from the territorial
state of the sovereign monarch, sovereignty has become increasingly dispersed
and decentered yet at the same time increasingly entrenched in everyday life.
As Foucault puts it, thanks to the advent and extension of biopolitics, “a battle-
front runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and
it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such

Introduction ● 9
thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary” (2003,

50–51). The political realm is no longer exclusively the result of the sovereign
decision and exception as it was in the Hobbesian model. Now the power of
sovereignty is coextensive with the social body in its entirety, and as the political
realm in the capitalist mode of production becomes increasingly saturated and
subsumed by the regularization of market forces, social battlefronts succumb to
increasing individualization.
Giorgio Agamben has taken up the question of the increasingly ubiquitous
nature of sovereign power and the ever-changing boundary between politics
and life in Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this work the origin of
the political in the Western tradition can be located in what Agamben considers
to be the separation between two terms that both referred to different forms
of what we now call “life”: “The Greeks had no single term to express what
we mean by the word ‘life.’ They used two terms that, although traceable to a
common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe,
which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals,
men, and gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to
an individual or a group” (1998, 1). Agamben proposes that in the classical
(Aristotelian) formulation, simple natural life was excluded from the polis in
the strict sense and remained confined—as merely reproductive life—to the
sphere of the oikos (home; 2). However, under modern and contemporary bio-
political regimes the classical separation between organized social life (bios) and
simple natural life (zoe) has shifted drastically:
The decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception every-
where becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the
margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political
realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and
fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life
from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually
constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire
political system rested. When its border began to be blurred, the bare life that
dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the con-
flicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power
and emancipation from it. (1998, 9)
According to Agamben, bare life was the constitutive outside of the sover-
eign realm, and as constitutive outside, not simply outside the political realm
but positioned by sovereign power as the outside on which the political con-
strued itself. Bare life is both the place for the organization of state power (still
the effect of its dialectical capture by the sovereign decision) and the place for
emancipation (a potential excess that undoes the sovereign realm from within).

But Jacques Derrida warns against an important oversimplification in Agam-

ben’s main formulations in Homo Sacer. Analyzing a passage from Aristotle’s
Politics, Derrida notes, “in this text, as in so many others of Plato and Aristotle,
the distinction between bios and zoe—or zen—is more than tricky and precari-
ous; in no way does it correspond to the strict opposition on which Agamben
bases the quasi totality of his argument about sovereignty and the biopoliti-
cal in Homo Sacer” (2005, 24). Agamben’s appropriation of, and distancing
from, Foucault tends to empty out the historical specificity of modern bio-
politics in favor of “a metaphysical reading of the originary and infinite state
of exception that has since its exception eroded the political foundations of
social life” (Campbell 2008, xxii). However, in contrast to Agamben’s meta-
physics of sovereign exceptionality, it is the historical specificity of Foucault’s
analysis of biopolitics that interests me more. It is also Foucault’s specificity that
ultimately leads me to look more toward the idea of police (understood as the
direct governmentality of the sovereign qua sovereign, or as what Foucault calls
the permanent coup d’etat [2007, 339]) than I do toward that of biopolitics in
my specific analysis of Mexican political culture. I do not mean that Mexican
modernity is not biopolitical. I do mean that we have to know how, when, and
for what reasons we use the term. In order to explain this further, I should first
address what the origin of biopolitics is in Foucault’s formulation.
The birth of biopolitics is the result of the modern advent of political econ-
omy in relation to the liberal art of governmental rationalization. Biopolitics, in
other words, is the name for the regime of truth that potentializes the capital-
ist mode of production via the principle of self-limitation of government. The
practice of the liberal self-limitation of governmental reason, carried out in the
name of governmental reason but, more important, in the name of the political
economy of capital allows for the extension of the modern biopolitical ratio.
Liberalism is “a rationalization which obeys the internal rule of maximum econ-
omy . . . Liberal thought does not start from the existence of the state, finding in
government the means for achieving that end that the state would be for itself;
it starts instead from society, which exists in a complex relation of exteriority
and interiority vis-à-vis the state” (2008, 318–19). This means that biopolitics
emerges as a new art of government via the liberal critique of sovereign power
understood as the unity of police reason (reason of state). It forms part of the
conceptual history of the police abolition of disorder, but it moves beyond the
expression of power of the sovereign body. Governmental rationality is no lon-
ger the rationality of the sovereign himself, of whomever it is who can say “me,
the state” (312). It is the existence of that sovereign rationality in conjunction
with the overlapping and interplay between the art of government according to
truth, the art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state,
the art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, the art

Introduction ● 11
of government according to the rationality of the governed themselves, and so

on (313). Biopolitics is the distribution and diffusion throughout society of the
liberal art of laissez faire political, social, institutional, and economic regulariza-
tion that administrates the acquiescence and consent of collectivities, the func-
tional distribution of social powers, the systematized allocation of places and
roles, and the institutional procedures for legitimizing those distributions from
beyond the specific political decisions taken by the state apparatus.
This is where Mexican cultural history disrupts, but does not completely
undermine, the legitimacy of the Foucaltian formulation of biopolitics. Mexi-
can modernity tends to turn European liberal modernity at least partially on
its head. Under colonial conditions the Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth
century helped forge a period of prosperity that was accompanied and sustained
by the penetration of Enlightenment thought, modern philosophy, science, and
increased regulation of private and public customs and styles (Viqueira Albán
1999, xvi–xviii). However, in Mexico modernity is not inaugurated via the
bourgeois self-limitation of governmental reason carried out in the name of
collective well being, prosperity, and happiness. Nineteenth-century Mexican
liberalism certainly utilized the discourse of governmental self-limitation to
challenge the power of the Catholic Church, and it embraced scientific positiv-
ism to forge the conditions of secular rationalism. But as any reading of Justo
Sierra shows us, Mexican modernity was inaugurated on the whole by the post-
colonial quest for a police state capable of creating the good order and sovereign
mastery that would allow for the implantation and extension of bourgeois rule.
The quest for the unity of economic and political domination is the lasting
inheritance of both the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Mexican Revolu-
tion of 1910–20. Social regularization might have been a partial by-product of
this implantation, but it was not its driving force. In other words, modernity
in Mexico has been predicated on the permanent application of state power in
the construction of social order, rather than on the self-limitation of state power
via a legal system guaranteeing individual rights and limiting public power. As
Arnaldo Córdova puts it, in Mexico “the law not only legitimates the state, it
breaks down all barriers that obstruct the state’s practice . . . In Mexico democ-
racy means conciliation of, and by no means disagreement with, power. It is not
a conquest that has to take away from the state, but something that only the
state can achieve . . . The essential thing is that the 1917 Constitution installed
a political regime that positioned itself automatically above all social groups,
forcing them either willingly or by force to live in common, and upon that
basis committed to guarantee their existence or not” (1973, 244–45). In the
official postrevolutionary discourse of Mexican modernity, then, popular will
was deposited in the Constitution and from there passed into the state, thereby
implying that the will of the state was and is the de facto will of the people

and vice versa (247). Roger Bartra’s insights are significant in this regard: “In
contrast to other countries, our revolutionary myths did not emerge from the
biographies of heroes and tyrants, but from the idea of the fusion of the masses
with the State, of the Mexican people with the revolutionary government . . .
National culture is identified with political power in such a way that whoever
wants to break the rules of authoritarianism will immediately be accused of
renouncing—or, worse, of betraying—national culture” (1996, 188–89).
Mexican modernity was predicated, not on the principle of self-limitation
of government, nor on the quest for the biopolitical regularization of society,
but on the consolidation of a police state understood as the direct governmen-
tality of the sovereign qua sovereign. Modernity in Mexico was orchestrated
by a total state that strived at all times to suppress the duality of state and
society. Circumstances became a central component of this order, and as Cór-
dova reminds us, a general principle that animated the modern police state
in Mexico was the broad freedom granted to the sovereign in order to act as
he thought fit: “The fact that on many occasions it has become a regime of
circumstance is something the juridical ordering of the country has foreseen
and wanted” (1996, 247). Mexican modernity, at least up until the economic
crisis of 1982 and the emergence of technocratic neoliberalism at the heart
of the PRI state apparatus, is predominantly (though not exclusively) a police
project, understood as a permanent coup d’etat: “It is the permanent coup
d’Etat that is exercised and functions in the name of and in terms of the prin-
ciples of its own rationality, without having to mold or model itself on the
otherwise given rules of justice” (Foucault 2007, 339). Foucault is signaling
here that the everyday workings of the “police” cannot be separated from the
sovereign state of exception. Indeed, he is signaling that sovereign exception-
ality is central to the exercise of police.
For this reason, in The Mexican Exception I avoid Agamben’s metaphysi-
cal reading of the originary and infinite state of exception eroding the politi-
cal foundations of social life since its inception. I do not reject his work on
sovereignty completely, but I find it considerably more productive to emulate
the historical and cultural specificity of Foucault, while at the same time rec-
ognizing the ways in which that specificity does not explain the intricacies of
the Mexican exception. For this reason, I refer to biopolitics in the Mexican
context only in the final sections of the last chapter, where the principle of the
self-limitation of government emerges in the context of the 1982 economic
crisis. For the remainder of the book, I prefer to use the term police in relation
to Mexican cultural history, while at the same time realizing that the genealogy
of the term itself is not unrelated to the genealogy and practice of biopolitics.
The question now, though, is how I conceptualize the police in relation to sov-
ereignty, democracy, and the political in the context of the Mexican exception.

Introduction ● 13
Sovereignty, Police, Democracy

Jacques Rancière makes an important distinction between police and the politi-
cal that is bound directly to the possibility of challenging the self-immuniza-
tion of the order of society: “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures
whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the orga-
nization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for
legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and
legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police” (1999, 28). For
Rancière police refers to the calculations of a power that lays claim continually
to the notion of the political as the management of abundance and consent. It
inscribes the suppression of politics (102): “From Athens in the fifth century
B.C. up until our own governments, the party of the rich has only ever said one
thing, which is most precisely the negation of politics: there is no part of those
who have no part” (14). Alongside Foucault, Rancière understands the police as
a mode of government tied up with the category of “man” and his “happiness.”
It is reason in the service of “the continuous act of creation of the republic”
(Foucault 2007, 259). As such, one kind of police might be infinitely preferable
to another. Rancière draws on Foucault’s legacy and explains the notion of the
police in the following terms: “I do not identify the police with what is termed
the ‘state apparatus.’ The notion of a state apparatus is in fact bound up with
the presupposition of an opposition between State and society in which the
state is portrayed as a machine, a ‘cold monster’ imposing its rigid order on the
life of society . . . The police is first an order of bodies that defines the allocation
of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bod-
ies are assigned by name to a particular place and task” (1999, 29). However,
taking into consideration the specific conditions of Mexican sovereign power
and democracy, my sense is that while the concept of the police might be het-
erogeneous to the idea of the state apparatus (and the sovereign decision), it can
never be wholly disassociated from it. After all, state violence is the product of
sovereign commands issued as a result of specific interests just as much as it is a
response to the police allocation and regularization of ways of doing, being, and
saying. The everyday workings of police cannot be separated from the sovereign
state of exception in Mexico. Indeed, as we will see in the course of these pages,
police is central to the exercise of sovereign exceptionality.
Rancière’s use of the term police, however, is curious. He distinguishes it from
the state apparatus, almost as if it were a synonym for Foucaultian biopolitics.
However, he is careful not to use it in terms of Foucault’s technoscientific regular-
ization of life via the rational administration of man-as-species. Rather, Rancière
refers to the police more than anything because he is interested in developing a
notion of the political that does not conform to the rules of the biopolitical. He

prefers the term police for two reasons: (1) Police (polis) is the common denomi-
nator in the relation between the classical inheritance of political Aristotelianism
and the modern reevaluation of the identification of the people with the figure
of the subject of sovereignty, in a post-Enlightenment epoch characterized by
new pronouncements and theories of popular sovereignty; (2) This allows for the
elucidation of a longstanding distinction between the police and the political,
thereby opening up the question of democracy as an egalitarian encounter with
the police order. Rancière can certainly draw on the legacy of Foucault, but he
cannot use the term biopolitics because this term conflates the police with politics.
For Rancière, there is no transformational politics available to us either in the
inner workings of the police or in biopolitics. This is an important proposition for
reevaluating the conditions of democracy in modern and contemporary Mexico.
The democratic notion of the political in Rancière is the opposite of police,
while remaining at all times bound up with it for, as he puts it, in order for
politics to occur “there must be a meeting point between police logic and egalitar-
ian logic” (1999, 34). For Rancière democracy—egalitarian logic—is the non-
determining disruptive appearance of a people, rather than the consolidation
of a particular collective life-form: “Democracy is more precisely the name of a
singular disruption of this order of distribution 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 interrupts the smooth working of this order through a sin-
gular mechanism of subjectification” (99). Democracy—the disruptive, ruinous
appearance or coming of the demos—is the unbinding of the relation between
administration (the functional relation between authority and calculation) and
the immanent life of society: “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”
(30). Jacques Derrida affirms that “there is no sovereignty without force, with-
out the force of the strongest, whose reason—the reason of the strongest—is to
win over everything” (2005, 101). The sovereign reason of the strongest (police)
characterizes those included under the banner of their own exclusion as mere
noise, as the murmurs of the incomprehensible, spontaneous, or irrational within
the ordered 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 (i.e., scripted) com-
munity. 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.

Introduction ● 15
The Mexican Exception is an attempt to pry open a space in Mexican cultural

history, and in its thorny relation to democracy, for those egalitarian languages
not set up in advance. In order to provide the ground for such an alternative
approach to the political, I structure each chapter around particular histori-
cal sequences and events that shed light on the ongoing question of political
democracy in postrevolutionary Mexican society. I therefore consider the devel-
opment of Mexican modernity through certain moments in which there are
indeed ordering forces present, but forces that perhaps have not yet summoned
their institutional rule into full view, or in which sovereignty is characterized
more by will and force than it is by law or consent. Each chapter therefore recu-
perates an interregnum or particular historical sequence that I consider to be
of fundamental importance for understanding the relation between culture and
state, or collective life and law, in modern Mexico. In particular, each moment
or historical sequence (which might refer to the events of a particular day, week,
number of months, or even decades) grasps the relation between culture and the
sovereign exception in its multiple manifestations.
Moreover, I consider each historical moment or sequence to be the staging
of a relation to language. As such, within each historical sequence I examine a
particular “speech scene” or encounter between heterogeneous (i.e., police and
egalitarian) languages. In these speech scenes there is a disagreement between
social actors (e.g., disputes between peasants and intellectuals over words such
as democracy, equality, freedom, proletariat, worker, revolution). In such scenes
we see that it is in the struggle between rich and poor that politics is installed at
the heart of society and that the assumptions of democracy are created, worked
through, and processed. Democracy in The Mexican Exception, then, is not just
a type of Constitution or a form of society that politics then has to process on
a day-to-day basis. It is the assumption and installation of egalitarian language
at the heart of society’s distributions of value, privilege, and prestige. Democ-
racy, in other words, is the momentary interruption or suspension of the police
order. By giving these interruptions specific historical sequences—their own
particular temporal dynamics and moments of disagreement—The Mexican
Exception uncovers the underlying stakes and subjugated democratic stories of
the political in modern Mexico. It is through the question of language and lan-
guage’s relation to the encounters between police logic and egalitarian logic that
The Mexican Exception stakes its primary claim for a countergenealogy of the
political that has never been fully immunized by the police order of twentieth-
and twenty-first-century Mexico.

CHAPTER 1
Exceptionality, Autoimmunity,
and the Question of Democracy
Summer 2005
Pure sovereignty does not exist; it is always in the process of positing itself by
refuting itself, by denying or disavowing itself; it is always in the process of
autoimmunizing itself, of betraying itself by betraying the democracy that
nevertheless can never do without it.
—Jacques Derrida
I will fold my arms and Comala will die of hunger.

And that is what he did.
—Juan Rulfo
T
his chapter analyzes the relation of the sovereign exception to the con-
temporary political scene. In the summer of 2005, it was clear that
something very serious was going to happen at the heart of the Mexican
political and legal order in 2006, and since then the crisis of sovereign legiti-
macy has only deepened, as evidenced in the extraordinary violence of Mexico’s
“War on Drugs.” How to conceptualize the malaise—the principle of ruin—
gnawing away at the heart of the contemporary democratic order? In order to
approach the inner workings of sovereignty, this chapter presents a detailed
analysis of the law’s relation to collective life in Juan Rulfo’s classic novel, Pedro
Páramo, in which the cacique is the embodiment of the law and the outside of
the law at the same time, in a socioeconomic order suspended between feudal
and bourgeois forms. I examine an encounter in the novel between two het-
erogeneous forces: (1) the spontaneous egalitarianism of the poor and (2) the
exercise of individual force that ultimately brings death not only to Comala
pal-williams-01.indd 17 3/23/11 11:10 AM

but also to sovereign power itself. I then use this reading of sovereign force and
weakness to interpret a series of events that emerged in the run-up to the 2006
elections: (1) the state’s performance of justice, while remaining incapable of
prosecuting the perpetrators of the student massacre of October 1968 and the
“dirty war” of the 1970s; (2) the economic elites’ maneuvers against the Demo-
cratic Revolutionary Party’s (PRD’s) populist candidate (Andrés Manuel López
Obrador) in the name of saving democracy against democracy’s supposedly
nondemocratic forces (“the people”); and (3) the declaration of the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation’s (EZLN’s) “Other Campaign,” which announced
the Zapatistas’ refusal to participate in the electoral process of 2006. The EZLN
proposed an idea of democracy that was not just antithetical to the language of
the institutional Left. It opened up the field of the political to the incalculable
and unconditional demand for freedom above all else.
Pedro Páramo: Immunity and Sovereign Ruin

As already noted in the introduction, the rational anchor for police order is ulti-
mately to be found in the relation of sovereign exceptionality (e.g., the state’s
right to kill while remaining free from legal obligation) to the sphere of collective
life. The initial question, then, is how to understand the working nature of this
social anchor? In the context of modern Mexico, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo offers
perhaps one of the most powerful portraits of reason’s link to sovereign force, law,
and exceptionality. In doing so, however, it also offers an insight into the principle
of ruin that simultaneously posits and disavows that link, thereby highlighting
once again the fragility and precariousness of sovereign reason, reckoning, and
calculation. Pedro Páramo is a particularly significant portrayal of the relation
of sovereign exceptionality to the sphere of collective life and law. This is the
case because it is a direct analysis of the social order that preceded the Mexican
Revolution, which was reproduced and extended as a result of the revolution and
became institutionalized in postrevolutionary Mexico thanks largely to the laws
inscribed in the 1917 Constitution. It is, in this sense, a novel that speaks directly
to the extraordinary powers concentrated in the essentially viceregal nature of
local, regional, and national sovereign power in modern Mexico.
Pedro Páramo provides us with a classic architecture of passage from one
epoch and social order to another. In its evocation of a social regime spanning
the period prior to and during the violence of the Mexican Revolution, the
novel is the story of a tragic abandonment of rural life to a sovereign power
emboldened by its ongoing and incomplete conversion from the universal prin-
ciples of Catholic feudalism to the secular principles of bourgeois accumula-
tion and individualism. Jean Franco’s words are particularly illuminating in this
regard:

Exceptionality, Autoimmunity, and the Question of Democracy ● 19
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 over-
lord 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 demolished 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. (“Journey,” 441–44)
The novel narrates the modern money economy and the conditions of a
feudal-colonial order that refuses to vanish. As the mysteries of the narrative
unfold, the figure of Pedro Páramo slowly rises, appropriating the land and
establishing himself as the sovereign power with the right to life and death. The
story of his life is the very means by which money and power become sanc-
tioned, organized, and socialized in Comala. In his reading of the novel, Patrick
Dove extends Jean Franco’s reading. 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”
(2004, 131). However, as in classical tragedy Pedro Páramo “is 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” (100). As such, the novel
inscribes modern history 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” (135).
The figure that lies at the heart of this portrayal of rural life is the sovereign
cacique Pedro Páramo himself. He is the forceful figuration of the stron-
gest whose reason—the reason of the strongest—has won over everything,
including the land (property), the bodies of the women and men of Comala
(labor), the Church (salvation, damnation), the revolution (history), and the
law (Right). He is the embodiment of a profoundly contradictory tendency
within the extension of the town’s relation to accumulation, for he represents
the extension of one of the principle values of bourgeois society but in real-
ity sustains feudal social bonds as the only telos for Comala’s individualized
accumulation of wealth.
Through the figure of Pedro Páramo, money saturates private and public
life. 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” (1969, 109). This is certainly true, but it is also a
little bit more complex, more precarious, and therefore more vital than this.
The novel begins and ends with the abandonment of the town to a form of
death that appears to be alive. Or, and this amounts to the same thing, it begins
and ends with the abandonment of the town to a form of life that is indistin-
guishable from the murmurs of the dead that inhabit and reveal the town’s past
and present. Comala, with Pedro Páramo as the lurid figure responsible for
the feudal socialization of capital in the town, lives a collective form of “death
without end” (Dove 2004, 160).1 This death without end, which amounts to its
very institutionalization (and therefore its paradoxical life-form), is the result of
a particular instance in the novel in which freedom asserts itself by challenging,
disrupting, and undermining momentarily both the power of accumulation of
the sovereign and the feudal institutions that his wealth has captured.
The assertion of an apparently spontaneous form of collective subjectifica-
tion—of a freedom and license exercised within an immanent world of equals—
creates a moment that reproduces neither the archaic figures and belief systems
of feudalism nor the presuppositions of debt and accumulation (profit and loss)
that have brought the cacique’s sovereign power into being. It creates a third
term that emerges toward the end of the novel, but that haunts the life and his-
tory of Comala in its entirety. The logic of the section I am referring to escapes
measurement. It is an incommensurable scene that brings the people and the
nonpeople (the poor and Pedro Páramo) together. However, their encounter
is based on physical and social separation since the sovereign views and reacts
inaudibly to the collective from afar. I am referring, perhaps unsurprisingly, to
the section of the novel immediately following the death of Susana San Juan.
The “madwoman” Susana has refused her predetermined place in the world by
systematically resisting her physical, psychological, and spiritual domination by
the unholy patrilineal trinity of her biological father, Bartolomé San Juan, her
spiritual father, Father Rentería, and her economic patriarch, Pedro Páramo,
respectively.2 She has struggled and has finally succeeded in exceeding the grasp
of their feudal-modern reason and calculation (which, of course, is far from say-
ing she is irrational or mad, as the people of Comala believe, and as the narrator
repeats). Everything that follows, then, every analysis of the inner workings of
sovereign power in Pedro Páramo, is constructed on and around the corpse of
the dead woman that the sovereign could never possess. Susana’s corpse, how-
ever, is not the sole origin for the question of sovereign power, because in the
same way everything is constructed in the wake of the corpse of the dead father,
don Lucas Páramo. In other words, sovereignty in the novel is constructed on
and around the figuration of, and question for, the limits of freedom in relation
to the limits of life and death inherited from previous generations.

Upon Susana’s quite contented demise without absolution, we encounter

a scene that brings to the forefront the very relation between the law and
collective life in Comala. This scene conjoins three elements: (1) the official
public mourning for the death of the sovereign’s loved one; (2) the Catholic
Feast of the Immaculate Conception, dated December 8 (thereby equating
sovereignty with political theology); and (3) the people’s festive embrace of
the 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 regarding the very relation
between law and life.
On December 8 the poor of Comala (an undifferentiated mass with no spe-
cific signs of wealth or virtue) 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 envelope them (Rulfo 1990, 186).
After three days of continual bell ringing everyone grows deaf to the sounds of
the sacred order of the sovereign (divine) covenant. At this point people begin
to arrive from all over. Comala is slowly taken over by a mourning fair in which
subjection to the law is reversed into collective license and self-determination:
People began arriving from other directions, attracted by the never-ending peals
of the bells. They arrived from Contla as if on a pilgrimage 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 bur-
ied 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)
There is an encounter here between heterogeneous worlds. This encounter

momentarily suspends the authority of the sovereign, for he realizes that in
the throng he is exposed to a potential horizon of ruin: the mere contingency
of the sacred order he seeks to embody and reproduce. That contingency is
the result of the exercise of a certain notion of liberty grounded in free will

and disrespect for, or unawareness of, rules and laws. The people fail to live
here according to either the laws of the Christian calendar or the secular
economic order of the cacique. Rather, they suddenly begin to exercise a sub-
versive disregard for such principles, norms, and good manners. There is, in
this sense, a momentary egalitarian democratization of sovereign power in
Comala.3 The exposure of the cacique’s fragility, through the distant appear-
ance and equality of the poor, is the ruin against which he ultimately reacts as
he swears to exercise, for once and forevermore, his supreme sovereign reign
(his free authority and jurisdiction) over life and death. He decides to plunge
the town into its convulsive death throes and, in the process, anticipates the
ruin of his own law, as a schism opens up suddenly between his true capacity
to rule and the violence of his human weakness.
The cacique’s folding of his arms and his quiet announcement of revenge
from the withdrawn space of his private quarters marks the actualization of
the paternal law (the original juris-diction) that will abandon the people of
Comala, and the lands on 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 abundant within the destitute
space of Comala.4 Indeed, abandonment lies at the very origin and heart not
just of Comala itself but also of Juan Preciado’s vengeful journey to the town as
his mother (Pedro’s wife, Dolores Preciado) tells her son to go to Comala after
her death in order to “demand what’s ours”: “Make him [Pedro Páramo] pay
dear for the oblivion he held us in, my son” (64), and she later insists: “Make
him pay dear for the abandonment he held us in, my son” (84; italics in original).
Pedro Páramo is the writing of collective experience that results from the
transformation of sovereign exceptionality into a life of ruin and never-ending
death. As Pedro crosses his arms and swears the death of the town, the people
become trapped unknowingly in the sovereign decision to kill without legal
obligation. The whole book narrates Pedro’s relentless capture and orienting of
the law. By the time we confront the people’s mourning fair in this sequence,
Pedro has already announced to his legal representative, Fulgor Sedano, “From
now on we are going to make the law” (107). While this affirmation certainly
marks the beginning of the downfall of Comala, the cacique says it in reference
to the specific appropriation of the town’s lands. There is a qualitative distinction
in the episode mourning the death of Susana San Juan, however, since here the
cacique declares, in the face of the people’s momentary self-determination, that
he is not just the embodiment of the laws governing relations of production.
He is the very threshold at which the law dictates the relation between life and
death. This episode therefore narrates the absolute applicability of the law as a
result of the suspension of all sovereign legal obligations to his underlings. It
thereby reveals the moment at which the invisibility in the distinction between

the law of sovereign authority and the reality of a collective life doomed to be
equal to death becomes operative in Comala.
Pedro Páramo folds his arms and announces a new inaudible law, applied
without any kind of mediation or measure other than that of the sovereign’s
absolute will to power. This law is suddenly in force everywhere but means
nothing for the town, even though it will saturate life and capture the collective
in such a way that life in the sovereign exception will become indistinct from
full abandonment to death without end.
The relation between the immanent egalitarian logic of the people and the
cacique’s individual ban (as seen in the folding of his arms and his swearing of
revenge)—a relation that installs a fundamental class distinction, limit, or separa-
tion at the heart of Comala’s social order and, indeed, at the heart of the novel
itself—stages the contradiction between the jurisdiction of authority and license
that produces the republican definition of community. The appearance of popular
freedom on the streets of Comala—an appearance that emerges from within the
shadow of both sacred and secular orders but that partakes of neither of them—
challenges sovereign power by suggesting the possible suspension and alteration of
social relations between the peasantry (the poor) and accumulation (the wealthy
cacique). The people’s brief moment of self-determination (the appearance of the
cracy of the demos) silently suspends (and therefore hails the potential death of)
the will and authority of the sovereign. And he recognizes that. The sovereign
ups the ante, however, and responds by deciding to abandon them to a law of
death without end and without reserve. This is the last (and perhaps most desper-
ate) guarantee of his exceptional status in relation to the law. As a result, Pedro
becomes the embodiment of a juridical ratio that is nomic and anomic (and there-
fore a betrayal or disavowal of the nomic) at the same time. He is the embodi-
ment of a law that becomes the norm for all, but of a law that precludes all legal
obligations between sovereign and citizenry. In this sense he is both the law and an
outside to the law in a relation that nevertheless grounds the legal and existential
horizon of Comala. This living relationality between nomos and anomie anchors
the novel in a sovereign exceptionality that assures the relation between the law
and the capture of abandoned life as death without end in Comala.
As a result of the distanced encounter between Pedro Páramo and the free-
dom of the people, Comala appears to be a field traversed by two conjoined and
opposite tensions. One tension passes from the feudal social norms imposed
by the domination of the cacique to the anomie of the people’s license and
self-determination and another goes from that experience of freedom—that
momentary unmeasurable and therefore incalculable democratization of sover-
eignty—back to the recapture of the nomos-anomie relation by the cacique, as
he announces a new law and at the same time steps out of his legal obligations
to the citizens of the town in order to pronounce their imminent death.

But there is more to be said here, for another thing that is striking about this
episode is that the people’s freedom and license does not consist of the accom-
plishment or representation of a determined subject within a permanently
ordered and ordering time. Rather, it renders freedom—democracy, the quest
for the appearance of an existence other than abandonment and capture—“the
proper character of the happening and exposure of existence . . . a ‘we’ happen-
ing as the togetherness of otherness” (Nancy, Experience, 157–58). This egalitar-
ian immanence does not survive. But neither does it become the police. Rather,
it remains a haunting principle of freedom lived and of imminence neutralized;
that is, it remains 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 license, the freedom to do what one pleases, is the
principle of ruin that announces, for the first time, the fragility and precarious-
ness of a sovereign power that is destined to crumble to the ground like a pile of
stones, because despite the mythic authority of his ban, in the end the sovereign
loses the vital reserve (the labor power) that grounds his capacity to rule.
Pedro’s 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,” 187),
because after the disruption of popular egalitarianism, it is an act that resutures
sovereign will to the law. Pedro’s display is mythical in its proportions because
it is a mere manifestation of presence.5 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 inevitably consume itself. As Walter Benjamin
puts it, “At the moment when the ruler indulges in the most violent display
of power, both history and the higher power, which checks its vicissitudes, are
recognized as manifest in him. And so there is this one thing to be said in
favor of the Caesar as he loses himself in the ecstasy of power: he falls victim
to the disproportion between the unlimited hierarchical dignity, with which he
is divinely invested and the humble estate of his humanity” (1990, 70). The
greatest expression of the sovereign’s power as absolute living law is also the
point at which he is most vulnerable, since it marks the beginning of the end
of the reserve that is necessary to sustain his rule. Ultimately Pedro Páramo
relinquishes his capacity to rule, for the announced death of Comala’s peasants
(and presumably of their labor) is equivalent to the dissolution of all relations
of production and, indeed, of the world. As a result Pedro Páramo seems to
support Marx’s inversion of Hobbes’s Leviathan in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s
“Philosophy of Right”: “If the sovereign is the actual sovereignty of the state then
the sovereign could necessarily 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 sovereignty of the people is not due to him
but on the contrary he is due to it” (1975, 28).
But what does all of this have to do with more recent events in Mexico,
such as the run-up to the hotly contested presidential elections of 2006?
Quite simply, the heterogeneous encounter in Pedro Páramo between collec-
tive license and the jurisdiction of sovereign power is a tale about the relation
between sovereign autoimmunity and the principle of ruin that consumes
and undermines it from within. The cacique’s folding of his arms in the face
of a mass with no specific signs of wealth or virtue is an autoimmune gesture
designed to protect the power of the sovereign by reestablishing the limits of
the “proper.” But Pedro Páramo employs his sovereign reason to betray the
reason of sovereign order, since he suspends the very relation to the socio-
economic and cultural world that the sovereign cannot do without. Autoim-
munity in Pedro Páramo highlights both the defense of sovereignty against
its heterogeneous elements and the suicide of sovereign power from within
the defense of sovereignty itself. The reason of sovereign autoimmunity, in
other words, works for the defense and regeneration of sovereign power and,
by doing so, works simultaneously for its death (as a result, at the end of the
novel Abundio can only kill Pedro Páramo when the cacique is, for all intents
and purposes, as a cacique, dead already).
Exceptionality and the Limits of Democratic Reason

The precariousness of the relation between sovereign exceptionality, immunity,
the law, and collective life in Pedro Páramo foreshadows the constellation of
forces that were at play in the months prior to the presidential elections of July
2006. What appeared to be at stake in the summer of 2005 was the very figu-
ration 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
incalculable on the political terrain; the nomic distribution and proportional-
ity of powers; and the hospitality of a potentially egalitarian anomie. For the
remainder of this chapter, I will account (at least in part) for the constellation
of forces at play during the run-up to the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico.
Toward the end of summer 2005, there appeared to be at least three major
ruinous figurations at play simultaneously in Mexico. However, the first two
figurations were actually a manifestation of the same law-preserving autoimmu-
nity in two distinct yet intimately related spheres. They were the result and per-
petuation of the norms and calculations of constituted power (i.e., of the police
order), and they represented historically determined attempts to continue to
bind reason to a democratic state form anchored in the violent workings of
exceptionality and the political neutralization of the populace. 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 working over sovereign order in the
run-up to the elections did not even indicate a force in its own right, even
though it was and is political. It proposed a defection from force, and it rep-
resented therefore a wager in the name of the incalculable, since it did not
attempt to install a specific means to any end in particular. Rather, it was merely
an attempt to forge an exteriority to a democratic order that depends for its
existence on the complete reduction of the field of the political to the func-
tional and institutional distinction between friend and enemy.6 In this third
principle of ruin, which we will come to shortly, there is nothing to suggest that
democracy is one constitutional form among others, managed and legislated by
the people who uphold and generate its laws. Rather, in this principle of ruin,
democracy is the work one carries out in order to forge an opening of indeter-
mination and incalculability in the very idea and working of social order. Before
analyzing these three forms of ruin, however, we should set the stage by examin-
ing briefly the historical relation between exceptionality and the figure of the
sovereign in modern and contemporary Mexico, for this relation is central to
the run-up to and outcome of the presidential elections of 2006.
As already noted, 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 what Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and others have referred to
as the “state of exception.” In particular, Article 29 of the Constitution defines
Mexican exceptionality 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 mea-
sures without such suspensions being limited to a specified individual.
As Brian Loveman observes, Article 29 of the 1917 Constitution is a direct

copy of Article 29 of Benito Juárez’s Constitution of 1857, which is the oli-
garchic article of law that has given structure to Mexican liberalism and all
party politics up to the present (1993, 67–90). In the wake of the Apatzingán
Constitution of 1814, the Federal Constitution of 1824, the conservative Con-
stitution of 1836, and the “Bases de Organización Política de la República de
México” of 1843, it is the Constitution of 1857 that adopted the definitive

language on Mexico’s constitutional regimes of exception, and its previsions

bequeathed a permanent language and authority that buttressed the constitu-
tional dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz from 1884 to 1910. With Article 29 of the
1857 document firmly entrenched at the heart of the Constitution of 1917,
but with Articles 89 and 49 also allowing for regimes of exception in relation to
the use of armed force for the internal and external security of the state, Presi-
dent Venustiano Carranza immediately requested extraordinary powers from
the legislature in 1917, and Congress obliged. From 1920 to 1938 exceptional-
ity became an ordinary instrument of government, as much of Mexico’s most
important legislation and the creation of government agencies resulted from
presidential decrees evoking extraordinary powers (1993, 67–90).7
In 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas supported a reform to limit violations
and increase the democratic role of legislative power. The reform stipulated that
extraordinary powers could be conferred on the president only in accord with
Article 29, that is, to confront invasion, grave perturbation of public peace, or
any “other event which may place society in great danger or conflict” (Loveman
1993, 89). However, the oligarchic law of exceptionality was for all intents and
purposes reinstated and extended in October 1941 (i.e., in the context of World
War II, the threat of espionage, and the possibility of “fifth columnism”) with
the ratification of Articles 145 and 145 bis of the penal code. These articles
curtailed the freedom of association and introduced the threat of “social dis-
solution” into the penal code as a punishable offense. Articles 145 and 145
bis became the effective instruments for the de facto suspension of constitu-
tional guarantees. Loveman tells us, “After 1940 the development of Mexico’s
unique dominant one-party system strengthened presidentialism. Amendments
to the penal code during World War II created the crime of ‘social dissolution’
and subjected those who ‘meet with a group of three or more individuals to
discuss ideas or programs that tend to disturb public order or affect Mexican
sovereignty’ with from two to twelve years in prison (Arts. 145, 145 bis)” (89).
The instrumental application of Articles 145 and 145 bis of the penal code
provided ample legal foundations in subsequent years for repressing worker
protests and peasant land occupations, for imprisoning political opponents,
or cajoling and censoring the media, for it applied to those who “in word,
writing, or by whatever other means propagate ideas, programs, or conduct
that tend to produce rebellion, sedition, riots, disorders, and the obstruction
of the functioning of legal institutions”(89). As a result Articles 145 and 145
bis of the penal code rendered sovereign exceptionality a de facto part of the
everyday workings of public life.
This coincides with an important historical shift in the social function of the
presidency. As Lorenzo Meyer informs us, after 1940 the president, and in par-
ticular the presidency as an office independent of its occupant, became a central

component in the determination of the political world. In the second half of

the twentieth century, traditional routines of power gave way to “authoritar-
ian normality.” The result was a Weberian shift to the bureaucratic rationaliza-
tion of the state, in which the charismatic nature of authority moved from the
leader—the caudillo-president of the immediate past—to the position; that is,
the authority moved to the office of the presidency as an impersonal institution
at the center of an enormous bureaucratic machinery designed to organize the
action of almost all relevant political actors in the modern single-party system
(Meyer 2000, 42). Thanks to the normalization of extraordinary powers as an
ordinary instrument of governmentality in the 1940s, the office of the presi-
dency became increasingly powerful. Traditional caciquismo, in other words,
became supplemented by bureaucratic authoritarianism and in just a few years
the presidency had become so powerful that it was practically synonymous with
the Mexican political system in its entirety.8
Almost a century after the outbreak of a revolution that claimed more than
a million victims, “provisions for the suspension of constitutional garantías and
concession of extraordinary powers to the president of Mexico [are] virtually
the same as those of 1857” (Loveman 1993, 90). However, it is not yet clear
how the exception is reasoned with (i.e., how it is measured, calculated, gauged,
assessed, quantified, and determined) in and through a political order that, now
more than ever, refers to itself as a democracy.
While at least partially liberal in both origin and intention, like most consti-
tutions the document of 1917 is a powerful exercise in nomic self-preservation.
It is a document of sovereign autoimmunity in action.9 Article 29 is not just
“the exception” but the very social anchor and horizon of the modern social
and legal ratio. As a result, the point is not so much that Mexico is now living
a state of exception that can or should be corrected or modified in order to
finally become a democracy. The point is that “the exception” is the ground,
the very heart and soul, of state reason. Exceptionality is the juridical prin-
ciple—the paradoxical cause—that allows reason to accomplish a necessary role
in the foundation of the law. If, as in Leibnitz’s formulation, nothing is without
reason, and there can be no effect without a cause, then there can be no mod-
ern state reason without provisions for the systematic suspension of that same
reason. The point, in other words, is the paradoxical place of reason and the
relation of reason to its own exceptionality and to the indeterminacies (e.g., the
alternating relations between authority and license) that underlie and extend
the history and concept of liberal institutionality. This is the dilemma of rea-
son’s relation to, and place within, sovereignty that Jacques Derrida points to in
the epigraph to this chapter. There can be no sovereignty without a calculated
(reasonable) appeal to the juridical determination of the exception, which is in
turn, the calculated suspension of the juridical order’s calculations (its reason).

There can be no sovereignty without a calculated appeal to the force, beyond

calculation, of the sovereign. So reason is found on both sides of the heteroge-
neous relation between sovereign legitimacy and exceptionality.
The question of sovereign reason in modern Mexico is connected directly
to the relation between nationalism, technological modernization, and the
image of the presidential persona. Claudio Lomnitz observed that the crisis of
nationalism in contemporary Mexico has to be understood against the back-
drop of Mexico’s regime of import substitution industrialization (ISI), which
lasted roughly from 1940 to 1982 (2001, 114), thereby coinciding with the
shift in the office of the presidency and the postwar regularization of authori-
tarian normality. During those four decades, the suturing of nationalism and
national identity to the grandiose accomplishments of technological modern-
ization became central to the state’s ability to create and extend the presidential
image of sovereign power:
The image of the state presiding over or introducing some major techno-
logical innovation or material benefit has been critical to the construction of
the persona of the president since Porifirio Díaz’s regime (1876–1910), whose
introduction of the railroad did much to lend verisimilitude to Díaz’s studied
resemblance of Kaiser Wilhelm. Recent examples of the nationalization of mod-
ernization include the construction of the Mexico City subway under President
Díaz Ordaz (1964–70), the construction of the National University’s modernist
campus and the development of Acapulco under Miguel Alemán (1946–52),
the development of Cuernavaca under Calles (1929–34), the construction of
the Pan American Highway and the nationalization of the oil industry under
Cárdenas (1934–40), and the electrification of the Mexican countryside under
Echeverría (1970–76). (Lomnitz 2001, 104)
However, thanks to the seemingly endless chain of social and institutional
crises that have plagued Mexico since the early 1980s, the suturing of the presi-
dential persona to the grandiose works of national technological modernization
has become definitively unstuck.10 In the postimport substitution era (1982 to
the present), the image of the presidential persona is linked more to the policies
and interests of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and to
the forging of transnational consumer networks or to the hemispheric “War on
Drugs” than it is to the link between the nation and technological modernity. So
what has happened to the image of the presidential persona in neoliberal times?
The historical and economic unbinding of the presidential persona from the
grandiose accomplishments and claims of national technological modernization
has produced a return to another, more antique, modality of legitimization: that
is, to the image of the sovereign whose mission is to save the law in the name of
the nation. This, as Lomnitz notes, recycles what has also been a powerful way
of claiming the presidency and of shaping the figure of the sovereign since the

times of Benito Juárez.11 This most recent turn in the image of the sovereign,
however, has been anything but smooth, since it places at the center of public
attention the historical and conceptual complicity between the law it strives to
save, naked force, and the history of sovereign impunity. To reiterate, then, after
71 years of single-party rule, the autoimmunity of Mexico’s postrevolutionary
authoritarianism—the modern forging of the image of the presidential persona
in relation to the suturing of nationalism, technological modernization, and
authoritarian normality—has been replaced by the image of the president who
saves the law in the name of the nation (i.e., who resutures the law to everyday
experience). However, as in the case of the cacique Pedro Páramo, this shift in
the rituals of sovereign power has exposed the limits of democratic reason and
opened up a historical, juridical, and political can of worms for the political and
economic elites.
Figuration I: Autoimmunity Trouble

In November 2001, after the defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) in the 2000 presidential elections, President Vicente Fox, in an autoim-
mune gesture undoubtedly designed to present himself and the new government
as a true democratic alternative to the authoritarian normality and sovereign
impunity of the PRI, announced the creation of the “Special Prosecutor for
Social and Political Movements of the Past” (Fiscal Especial para Movimientos
Sociales y Políticos del Pasado or Femospp).12 The idea behind the creation of
this governmental agency was, in official terms, to promote and defend human
rights, combat impunity in cases of state violence against social movements, and
investigate political crimes committed against Mexican citizens in the past (i.e.,
to resuture the law to the history of the modern nation).13 The creation of the
Femospp was clearly designed to represent the post-PRI state as an alternative to
its predecessor. In reality it became a democratic autoimmune gesture that did
little more than jeopardize the image of democratic autoimmunity.
The creation of the Femospp led to an extraordinary situation because sud-
denly the state seemed to become the spectacular object of its own scrutiny and
legal judgment. The state announced the official questioning, at least in appear-
ance, of the historical grounds of its own legality in relation to the student protests
and social mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s. In the process, the state prom-
ised to interrogate the legitimacy of a regime of exceptionality that has grounded
the reason of the strongest for decades. The creation of the Femospp called atten-
tion to the utter contingency of state authority since it revealed not just the extent
to which exceptionality is the very limit of the management, administration, and
distribution of power. Femospp also exposed 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, constitutional, and political justifications. But

in this turn it also shows us the way in which, in almost suicidal fashion, the state’s
quest for relegitimization after sixty years of authoritarian normality exposes sov-
ereign power to the figurations of its own ruin.
Despite the fact that during his presidential campaign of 1999 to 2000
Vicente Fox had met privately on numerous occasions with former PRI Presi-
dent Luis Echeverría (1970–76), and despite the fact that he even appointed
several longstanding Echeverría loyalists to key positions in the new National
Action Party (PAN) government, the Mexican juridical order during the Fox
presidency struggled with the possible consequences of the Femospp’s (and in
particular Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto’s) attempts to indict the
former PRI president for his responsibility in the deaths of dozens of students in
Mexico City on June 10, 1971, the infamous Corpus Christi massacre or “Hal-
conazo”.14 Echeverría was questioned in early July 2002 regarding his involve-
ment in the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi massacres of 1968 and 1971. On
June 30, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the thirty-year statute of limita-
tions did not apply to human rights violations that occurred during the so-
called dirty war. However, a month later Judge César Flores threw out the case
against Echeverría without releasing the reasons for his decision. On February
23, 2005, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled (in a 4-1 vote) in favor of apply-
ing the thirty-year statute of limitations on the Corpus Christi massacre (which
meant Echeverría could not be prosecuted). On June 15, 2005, however, the
Supreme Court ruled that the thirty-year statute of limitations on genocide
(which was the charge the Femospp was pursuing) had in fact not come to an
end. In the ruling, the court said the former president received immunity from
prosecution while he was in office and, as such, the thirty-year statute of limita-
tions could only apply from 1976. The court did not rule on the responsibil-
ity or innocence of the accused and passed that decision on to a lower court.
On July 23 the Femospp requested Echeverría’s arrest. A few days later Judge
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. She reasoned that it was not clear they belonged to a homogeneous
national group (Código Penal Federal de México, Article 149 bis,). In her rul-
ing she observed that on the day they were killed there were many different
banners on display in the street expressing an array of political affiliations and
interests. Therefore the students could be considered to be neither members of
a national or ethnic group nor, therefore, victims of genocide. They were vic-
tims of simple murder. However, the statute of limitations had run out on that
possible indictment on June 10, 1985 (Méndez Ortiz, “Carpetazo,”). As such,
and as in the Supreme Court decision, the responsibility or innocence of the
accused was never actually a factor in the case. On September 20, 2005, Special

Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto asked the courts once again to indict former
President Echeverría along with seven other members of the military and his
administration, this time for their involvement in the Tlatelolco massacre of
October 2, 1968, and the disappearance of student leader Héctor Jaramillo
(Méndez Ortiz, “Pide”). Again, the assigned criminal judge dismissed the filing,
holding first that the statute of limitations had expired and, second, that the
massacre did not constitute genocide.
The proceedings, however, were not without political expediency. Presum-
ably, as an attempt to present the PAN once again as a true democratic and
juridical alternative to its electoral competitors (the PRD and its leader Andrés
Manuel López Obrador), an arrest warrant for Echeverría was issued by a Mexi-
can court on June 30, 2006, just two days before the presidential elections.
However, Echeverría was found not guilty of charges just a week after the elec-
tion on July 8, 2006. Then, on November 29, 2006, he was charged again with
the massacres and ordered under house arrest. In July 2007, however, the trial
against Luis Echeverria was finally suspended. His case is officially sub judice,
that is, pending judicial resolution.
The legal order has systematically excluded exceptionality (guaranteed by
Article 29 and instituted at the time by Article 145 of the penal code) from the
sphere of juridical reason, thereby situating it as a purely political figuration that
marks the very limit of Mexican citizenship in general. In the meantime, the
state has been, at least in appearance, at odds with itself about the conditions
of its own powers because all of a sudden, thanks to the Femospp, sovereign
exceptionality is neither fully part of the legal order nor fully external to it.
Mexico, it could be said, has been living in the shadow of an anomic threshold
that has been opened up because the end of one-party rule (1929–2000) has
made explicit the fact that sovereign exceptionality (or authoritarian normality)
is as fundamental to PAN democracy as it was to PRI authoritarianism, despite
what the president would like people to think. PAN democracy might try to
project the image of a sovereign power now capable of suturing the law to the
history of the nation in the name of democratic modernization. But what it is
obviously incapable of doing is suturing justice to the history of the nation. 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),
just like on all anniversaries of the massacre, a group gathered in the Zócalo in
Mexico City to the exasperated cry of “Enough Judicial Power! Thirty Seven
Years of Complicity with Genocide” (Avilés, “Repudian al Poder Judicial”).
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 apparently does everything it is supposed to do.

However, by carrying out its charge to the full extent of the law it fails on all
counts, at least in part because exceptionality (Article 29) rules and limits the
relation between the law, the sovereign, and the life of society, while simultane-
ously threatening the autoimmunity of the state’s sovereign power from within.
It is not surprising, then, that with the end of the Fox presidency in 2006 the
functions of Femospp were suspended indefinitely and the embarrassing public
spectacle of failed autoimmunity curtailed. The office did provide an official
explanation of its functions. However, it did not utilize government letterhead
to do so. Femospp did not succeed in prosecuting a single person and accounted
for the human remains of only three people related in one way or another to
the state violence of the late 1960s and 1970s (see Román, “La investigación”).
Now the state can quietly reinstate its historical norms without juridical scru-
tiny or official judgment.
Figuration II: Consensus Trouble

The second major ruinous figuration in question—which was not wholly unre-
lated to the first because it also exposed the state’s fragile attempt to immunize
itself from its own truths—was a call for elite “consensus” on the terms of politi-
cal and economic interaction in the run-up to the 2006 presidential 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 at, or had even known of the existence of, a meeting in 2003 at the home
of former disgraced PRI President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in a private con-
cave designed to achieve consensus on the terms of fiscal reform (“Confirma
Salinas”). Salinas de Gortari—who came to power in 1988 after the electoral
process was suspended and public order saved by stealing democracy from the
clutches of the opposition PRD—was the only one who owned up to meeting
anyone at his home.15
Four days after the revelation of these clandestine fiscal policy meetings
between PAN and PRI officials, Carlos Slim Helú (2010’s wealthiest man in
the world) presented the “Pact of Chapultepec Castle” to the nation, this time
with the explicit knowledge, recognition, and full support of the Fox adminis-
tration. This pact—which was 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 power-
ful “probusiness” alliance of more than three hundred entrepreneurs, politicians,
intellectuals and media figures—was designed to urge the political and economic
elites to collaborate fully in the upcoming electoral process. The pact’s signatories
urged the nation to respect the outcome of the future elections 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 for-
ward 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 us see if, by working together, we can diminish all these
political vapors that sometimes impede us from taking decisions in the short run”
(Garduño and Cardoso, 1). Ideology, or what Slim calls “all these political vapors,”
is a thorn in the side of good government. In contrast, good government should
be ensured by forestalling or warding off ideological debate. In place of ideologi-
cal antagonism, Slim’s “National Accord” offers the pragmatics of consensus and
cooperation in the service of mainly economic goals that remain unquestioned.
What was at stake, of course, was the ability of the fiscal elites to keep neoliberal
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 and social administration.
What Slim and others proposed in September 2005 was obviously a response
to the fragility of sovereign order under neoliberal conditions. However, “con-
sensus” is always a problematic response to the precariousness of sovereign
command. The consensus-desire is a desire to shore up the administrative figu-
rations of constituted power once and for all in the name of a binding homoge-
neity, stability, and regulation. It is an attempt to cure the fragility of sovereign
power by substituting the field of the political with the expediency of economic
decision making. As Slim puts it, consensus displaces the political in the name
of administrative expediency and short-term decision making. However, Brett
Levinson observes in his discussion of Jacques Rancière that in, and thanks to,
consensus, “wrong survives.” But, he adds, “It draws no remark. It is unremark-
able. Without the inscription, suggestions, or ‘digestion’ of something ‘disagree-
able’ within the body politic, the consensus ‘goes without saying’. It slides down
well enough, with no ill . . . Consensus thrives; an increasing number of indi-
viduals 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” (66–76).
Consensus strives to cover up autoimmunity troubles with the language and
reason of full accord. But as Marx would say, it leaves the pillars of the build-
ing of domination standing. In consensus-regimes wrong is not recognized as
such (it cannot have a language of its own) because it disrupts and possibly
suspends 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 to guarantee accomplished alienation from the truth
of wrong. It is the extension of a principle of silence that does little more than
try to cover the fragility and precariousness of nation-state sovereignty with a

(not so) commonly agreed-upon language of complete unity lying at the heart
of national economic and political life. The quest for universal consensus—for
the image of nation-state sovereignty as indivisible singularity—together with
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.
Figuration III: Incalculability and Freedom

However, in the summer of 2005 there was also a third ruinous figuration that
emerged from the receiving end of domination’s rule. This principle of ruin
marked the possibility of a divergence away from everything previously men-
tioned. It was, quite simply, a principle of defection or of exodus from the
time-honored distributive arrangements that have characterized the internal
dynamics of Mexican political culture since 1917 (and that the so-called transi-
tion to democracy has done little to change).16
In June 2005 the EZLN published its “Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacan-
dona” (Sixth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle) in which the organization
announced “La Otra,” or, “The Other Campaign”: a shadow movement devoid
of intrinsic properties and battle lines that distanced the EZLN from the presi-
dential electoral process as a whole. The EZLN endorsed none of the institutional
political parties (including the PRD, led by the former mayor of Mexico City,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and withdrew from the 2006 electoral process.
Following are the terms of the EZLN’s dissenting hospitality in June 2005:
In Mexico we are 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 are going to search from La Realidad to Tijuana for whoever wants to
organize, struggle for, and construct what may be the last hope that this Nation,
which has been walking at least since an eagle perched on a nopal and devoured
a snake, not die.
We are after democracy, freedom and justice for those who are denied us.
We are 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.
(“Sexta Declaración,” 5–6; emphasis in original)

As the EZLN proposed, this was a campaign not for electoral victory (i.e.,
not for hegemony, counterhegemony, consensus, or homogeneity) but for a
life-giving communication in the wake of ruin.17 Indeed, it was a campaign for
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
say (5).18 It sounds simple, perhaps even naïve, but there is an important politi-
cal stake and promise raised by the EZLN’s proposed exodus from the current
democratic state form.
There is no specific architecture or proportioning of forces in the “Sixth
Declaration.” There is certainly calculation, though it is a calculation opened
up to the unconditional critique of the grounds of democratic sovereign power.
There are no defined ends and no expectations. The “Sixth Declaration” is a
preparation not for arms—it has no military function—but for the event to
come. As Derrida put it, “This call bears every hope, to be sure, although it
remains, in itself, without hope. Not hopeless, in despair, but foreign to the
teleology, the hopefulness, the salut of salvation . . . not foreign to justice, but
nonetheless heterogeneous and rebellious, irreducible, to law, to power, and to
the economy of redemption” (2005, xv).
It is important to understand that the EZLN’s hospitality—its opening up
to what or who comes and comes to affect it—is the offering of a partial guest
list. The mention of “our common people” who are the object of the invitation
does not necessarily reference “the People” or “Mexico.” The EZLN is indeed
very inclusive in its invitation, but there is no totality in its gesture. For exam-
ple, politicians, the police, the wealthy, whites, conservatives, lawyers, army
officers, the bourgeoisie, media moguls, bureaucrats, members of the Opus Dei,
yuppies, the People, and so on are neither invited nor defined as enemies. Of
course, many of the aforementioned might be able to fit into “La Otra” under
categories other than those suggested above, but they could do so only if they
were willing to assume the charge of “another way of doing politics.”
As such, “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 “our common people” of the “Other Campaign” a “part of those
who have no part that makes the whole different from itself” (Rancière 1999, 38).
In other words, the “Sixth Declaration” is an announcement of hospitality and of
inclusiveness that is designed to perform 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 have no part in it now and will continue to have no part in it in the
future if the current state form remains intact. In Disagreement Jacques Rancière
defines the proletariat in the following terms:

The proletariat are neither manual workers nor the labor classes. They are the
class of the uncounted that only exists in the very declaration 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 prin-
ciple, of which those individuals would be members. It is part of a process of
subjectification 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 inegalitar-
ian distribution of social bodies and the equality of speaking beings. (1999, 38)
“Our common people”—the invited guests of “La Otra”—are a mode of

proletarian subjectification whose very existence is “the mode of manifestation
of the wrong” (39). That wrong is the wrong of a sovereign power that includes
by abandoning the included to unmeasureable exclusion from the whole and its
parts. Therefore the interpellation of “our common people” by “La Otra” situ-
ates the proletariat as the political itself, for when “the people,” which plays the
part of those who have no part, situates itself into or appears within the totality
as if one part among others, “politics goes to work” (Levinson 2004, 61–62).
This is the work of an alternative politics (an alter) that dissents by with-
drawing from, and by suspending, established 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 1975,
254), this subjectless political community—without norm, law, telos, identity,
specific principles, prophesies, hegemonic or counterhegemonic designs, com-
mon horizons of expectation, or indeed, explicit common interests—cannot be
subject to substantive 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 might always be out of joint, thereby suggesting that they might never
be reassimilated into the whole under the banner of an all-inclusive consensus,
or as the self-perfecting autocritique of administrative power. They are just the
appearance of a possible mode of subjectification capable perhaps of dispelling
the illusion that the political state is the embodiment of the totality: the possi-
bility, that is, of a social sphere that can constitute itself in a relation of exterior-
ity to the imperium of the current state form.19
The EZLN’s proposed withdrawal from the current state form signals a
potentially expansive and constitutive process of political-theoretical redefini-
tion in which the word “democracy” is both the adversary and the uncondi-
tional promise of a new foundation for social life. Needless to say, it is still too
early to grasp even the vague contours of an alternative or alteration in the field
of the political. Moreover, the language of “La Otra”—that is, the “word” and

indignation it strives to assemble—might not even arrive. It can easily fall vic-
tim to indifference, incomprehension or the violence of sovereignty’s convulsive
death throes. However, we can conjecture as to the stakes of this still incalcu-
lable political and social wager for, or gesture toward, democracy.
In Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (the “Kreuznach manuscript”
of 1843), the political is “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” (Kouvelakis 2003, 303). The EZLN’s proposed
withdrawal from “democracy” is related directly to the displacement of the politi-
cal effected by Marx in this critique, which Kouvelakis takes up in Philosophy and
Revolution. The EZLN’s “Sixth Declaration” is designed to be a first step toward
the self-determination of the people despite the state’s continued (and continually
troubled) police administration of its juridical and economic powers, privilege,
and abundance. It is a call for the possibility of an expansive self-determination of
the collective grounded in (1) a constituent process resulting from the “permanent
self-criticism of a civil society which has become conscious of itself” (Kouvelakis
2003, 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 despite
the autoimmunity problems inherent to sovereign exceptionality and the state’s
disinterest in administering justly the relation between its parts (its social majori-
ties and minorities, interest groups, communities, the poor, etc.).
As in Marx’s notion of “true democracy,” the political in the “Sixth Declara-
tion” appears not with man as legal existence; that is, not with man as captured
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, programless subtrac-
tion from this top-down relation between sovereignty and its subjects. What
it appears to suggest is the possibility of a “constitution” of the political that is
immanent in social practice itself, and in which all current vestiges of state tran-
scendence are undermined and neutralized: a “constitution,” in other words,
that is the work of a constituent power that produces the social rather than a
work of constituted power. In his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” Marx
contrasts what he calls “true democracy” with the monarchical state form:
In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its modes of exis-
tence, 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 Testa-
ment. 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 “con-

stitution” of the political that is immanent in social practice itself, is, he says,
“the fundamental difference of democracy” (30). Stathis Kouvelakis expands on
this insight with the following observation on the relation between revolution
and immanence: “The law, the constitution, 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 demonstrated by the entire history, with its triumphs and
defeats, of the revolutionary experience” (2003, 305). With this in mind, what
“La Otra” invites us to consider is the possibility of an expansive act of political
abandonment in which what is abandoned is the current state form, that which
captures man as a legal manifestation within sovereign exceptionality. “La Otra”
inscribes a notion of the political grounded not in adding more police thought
to the already (flailing) state. It entails not making the state more inclusive or
more efficient because it recognizes and regulates the rights of more subjects,
identities, or social groups. Rather, it involves a politics of withdrawal that is
designed to subtract from the state the “illusion that it stands above civil society
even while claiming to dominate it” (Kouvelakis 2003, 309).20 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 con-
cept awaiting its systematic presentation” (Kouvelakis 2003, 314). “La Otra”
is a movement for “a word” capable of rendering the suspension of the current
police state (its law, its norms, its juridical, political and economic calculations,
that is, its reason and administrative, distributive functions).
It should be noted, however, that the EZLN does not do this in the name of
anarchy, but in the name, precisely, of “a new constitution” (Kouvelakis 2003,
6).21 As when Marx states, “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 police state 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-polit-
ical forms of their ‘determinateness’ [Bestimmtheit: abstract, passive determina-
tion] in order to restore their ‘self-determination’ [Selbstbestimmung], defined as
the self-determination of the people” (Kouvelakis 2003, 309–10). Withdrawal
and subtraction are the first political steps in the EZLN’s proposed challenge to
the reason of nation-state sovereignty. Withdrawal in this context is not just a

negative force fully dependent on, and circumscribed by, the characteristics and
maneuvers of its negated object. It is the advent-word for the possibility of an
infinitely preferable police to come; that is, for the possibility of an affirmative
suspension of the current state form in the name of freedom.
In the final pages of Rogues, Jacques Derrida observes, “It is no doubt neces-
sary, 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” (2005, 157). The EZLN’s announcement of “La Otra” in
June 2005 was designed to be a first step in defining the language of an exteri-
ority to the current state form. It is certainly the announcement of a potential
unbinding in the nexus between sovereign power and the political life of society.
And perhaps not even the compulsive will, the law-preserving violence, or the
vengeful reactions of the feudal Pedro Páramos of the world will be able to fully
capture either the quiet affirmation that breathes life into this principle of ruin
or the Sixth Declaration’s powerfully pragmatic yet incalculable political wager
that the order of the police—the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and
ways of saying throughout society—can indeed become other. This wager does
not imply that political wrong will disappear altogether if “La Otra” were in any
way successful. But it does suggest that social wrong can be processed, in the
name of an incalculable and unconditional freedom, through a fundamental
shift in the field of the political that could be infinitely preferable to the current
order of sovereign exceptionality and its autoimmunity woes, betrayals, and
rogue-like frauds.

CHAPTER 2
Politics, Equality, and

Freedom in Revolution
December 1914
It was perhaps Zapatismo that exercised the greatest influence in the readjustment
of the historical optic. The mere presence of Zapatistas in Mexico City in 1914
was an immediate corrective to the Porfirian idea of Mexico as a Greek or
Egyptian necropolis.
—Enrique Krauze
W
alter Benjamin observes that “just as the entire mode of existence of
human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does
their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is
organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature
but by history” (“Work of Art,” 255). In twentieth-century Mexico the histori-
cal spectacle of the revolution—the convergence between the advent of tech-
nological reproducibility and the forcible entry of the masses into the domain
of sovereignty—moved the image out of the realm of aesthetic distinction into
that of social function and ushered in a fundamental shift in collective percep-
tion. The vast photographic and filmic production of the revolutionary decade
is an inventory of human action, an imagistic arrest of the concrete conditions
of life in its (often cruel) immediacy, and the exposure of a new political optic
that revolutionized the social function of art in Mexico and beyond.1
Within this vast inventory of technologically reproducible photographic and
filmic images, perhaps the most widely recognized, the most permanent and
historically durable, has been that of Francisco Villa en la silla presidencial (Fran-
cisco Villa on the presidential chair), an image that can be purchased to this
day in street markets throughout the country. In a recent essay Andrea Noble
asks why the images of Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata sitting together in

the national palace on December 6, 1914, with Villa occupying the presiden-
tial chair, have come to encapsulate the meaning of the Mexican Revolution
(1910–20) in its entirety:
If you had to select one photograph that signals and evokes the Mexican Revolu-
tion in contemporary cultural memory, it might well be Francisco Villa en la silla
presidencial. Arguably the photo opportunity of the revolution . . . [t]he pervasive
presence of this photograph in the Mexican cultural landscape, obsessively repro-
duced and reinvented across a range of cultural texts, cannot be overestimated.
Like the heroic statues of revolutionary leaders that sprang up in the aftermath of
the conflict, Villa en la silla has become something of a (photographic) national
monument in its own right. (2005, 195)2
Why has this image come to stand in for the whole ten years of revolutionary
uprising and civil war? Noble situates her response within the historical frame-
work of the Mexican state’s postrevolutionary cultural policies. In particular, she
considers the iconicity of these images in relation to the state’s postrevolution-
ary desire to orient memories of the agrarian civil war toward a peace, stabil-
ity, and unity grounded in institutionalization and the state-led mystification
of the revolution’s actors and most significant deeds.3 Noble observes that the
photographs captured the postrevolutionary cultural imagination because they
coincided fully with the Obregonist, Callist, and Cardenist police projects of
the 1920s and 1930s; that is, with the drive to select, organize, and give mean-
ingful form to the images of the past in such a way as to found the state’s new
hegemonic project on the overriding principle of identitarian (i.e., geographic,
ethnic, and racial) unity:
There is nothing ordered or regimented about this sea of faces and sombreros:
this is the revolution as popular struggle. The impromptu scene further bespeaks
the mythical meeting of north and south and hence performatively enacts a form
of unification that chimes with post-revolutionary discourses of cohesive nation-
hood. But more than this, the sea of faces with its range of somatic tonalities
and associations with the revolution as popular struggle—from the dark-skinned
indigenous faces, to the lighter mestizos and pale criollos—becomes the face of
modern mestizo Mexico, where discourses of mestizaje played a key cementing
role in the process of making the Mexican mosaic cohere. (2005, 207)
In other words, for Noble the photographs are visually analogous to “a post-
revolutionary hegemonic rhetoric of national identity” (2005, 210) that strived
to subsume all social parts to a whole portrayed as an abstract totalization,
as in José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race) or in the accom-
plishments of the postrevolutionary muralist movement that originated in, and
was channeled through, Vasconcelos’s Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría

Politics, Equality, and Freedom in Revolution ● 43
de Educación Pública).4 According to Noble, Villa en la silla gives the emer-

gent postrevolutionary Mexican state exactly what it needs for its role as social
mediator. It does this on two separate counts. First, “these photographic images
represent the repressed of the revolution: popular power” (2005, 212), thereby
allowing the state to demonstrate its integrative function in relation to the poor
and still potentially insurrectional masses in the 1920s and 1930s. “That such
‘radical’ images were allowed to circulate,” observes Noble, “testifies to the sta-
tus of post-revolutionary cultural politics and power as subject to the processes
of negotiation and accommodation between state and society” (212). Second,
they also give the postrevolutionary bourgeoisie what it needs in order to defend
itself against the threat of popular upheaval, because images such as these, docu-
menting the cataclysmic disarticulation of a bourgeois-feudal police order, “are
uneasy reminders of a past, on one level at least, best forgotten” (211).
In their relation to the postrevolutionary state’s mobilization of historical
national consciousness and “identity,” these iconic images give both bourgeois
and subaltern classes exactly what they want or need. They are an all-inclusive
memory and foundational myth of origin for both bourgeois and subaltern
views on legitimate authority. Furthermore, they reflect the idea that legiti-
mate authority has its origins in the revolutionary history of a homogenized
(national, rather than regional or local) peasant agency. As such, they can be
commemorated, celebrated, and vindicated in aeternum from both sides of the
hegemony-subalternity divide, for they are the pure articulation of the social
nature of a state whose power always originates in the peasantry for either posi-
tive or negative reasons and results.
Hegemony however is fragile, and there is an important weakness underly-
ing the incorporation of Villa and Zapata into the postrevolutionary pantheon
of heroes and collective memorization. As Ilene O’Malley observes,
Because Villa and Zapata were basically class heroes who represented still unre-
solved grievances against the propertied classes, their images carry within history
lessons that belie the myth of the Revolution. The incorporation of Villa and
Zapata has at its core a contradiction: it keeps alive the threat it is supposed to
subvert. The same propaganda that dazzles the public with their machismo per-
petuates the possibility that the examples of their struggles may undermine the
ideology of the present regime. (1986, 144)
Noble notes that, “read against the grain of the hegemonic discursive struc-
tures in which it circulated, Villa en la silla could be seen—paradoxically—as
a potentially radical and destabilizing image that speaks to the experiences and
concerns of the popular classes. Instead, however, the photographs sanctioned
meaning turns on a disavowal of historical knowledge (both Zapata and Villa
were vanquished by the conservative revolution embodied by Carranza and

Obregón) in favor of belief: in the radicalism of the new order” (2005, 210).
These images therefore embody an economy of violence that uncovers three
distinct moments all in a single camera flash: (1) the agrarian revolution as the
foundation of the postrevolutionary state; (2) the constitutive exclusions of this
state (again, the agrarian revolution); and (3) the specter of the potential return
of that which is excluded.
However, in Noble’s accurate account of the historical significance of these
iconic images there is a speculative understanding of history that is grounded
in the implicit establishment of a direct historical-political continuum between
the events of December 6, 1914, the general cultural policies of the post-
revolutionary Mexican state, and mnemonic processes of bourgeois-subaltern
identification. As a result of this implicit continuum, Noble is able to project
the postrevolutionary state’s cultural nationalism back in time, to the images
taken on December 6, 1914, in order to then project that bourgeois ideal back
into a future in which revolutionary historical experience has already been reter-
ritorialized, by the state and its class interests, into specific rationalizations and
productive grids of intelligibility for both the present and the future.
Within this continuum, Villa, Zapata, and the faces that surround them
become the human essence not so much of the revolution per se but of a post-
revolutionary managerial rationality designed to replace the contradictions of
insurrection with the bourgeoisie’s capacity to orient historical intelligibility
toward order, homogenization, and the establishment of a common language
that unites the state and the peasantry as the mutual origins of the national
postrevolutionary community. This managerial rationality might not always be
capable of fully suturing state hegemony to the histories of agrarian peasant
revolt, Noble indicates. But, she concludes, the cultural memory generated by
the technological reproducibility of Villa en la silla presidencial has indeed been
able to “shore up” (2005, 213) the relation between history, insurrection, and
the postrevolutionary state. It is this “‘shoring up’,” or hegemonic suturing, that
has designated the nation-state as the historic destiny of all those poor, landless
people who took up arms in the Mexican revolutionary wars.
However convincing this interpretation might be in retrospect, one underly-
ing problem does remain concerning the status of the political in this approach
to the agrarian event. Within Noble’s interpretation of the iconic value of these
photographs, December 6, 1914, cannot exist as an event in its own right since
the significance of its images are always already captured by a relation of unme-
diated reciprocity between the peasant occupation of the capital city and the his-
tory that followed it (including, presumably, the ratification of the Constitution
of February 1917 and the postrevolutionary agendas of the Obregón, Calles,
and Cárdenas regimes). Noble notes that the images “represent the repressed of
the revolution: popular power” (2005, 212). But this is still too vague because

“nothing is political in itself merely because power relationships are at work in

it. For a thing to be political, it must give rise to a meeting of police logic and
egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance” (Rancière 1999, 32). Reading
these images as expressions of popular power repressed in postrevolutionary
times characterizes this profoundly political spectacle as a subconscious proph-
ecy of the destiny and place of the peasantry in what would later become its
relation to postrevolutionary institutional history: a history that began with
Venustiano Carranza’s agrarian law of January 6, 1915, proceeded with General
Obregón’s Agua Prieta rebellion and assassination of Carranza in May 1920,
and then continued with the rise to power of the Obregonist and Callist fac-
tions of Sonora and the process of the revolution’s institutionalization through
the formation of the caudillo-led party state.5
Noble’s approach to Villa en la silla presidencial is grounded in what William
Spanos has called “the essential imperialism of metaphysical ontology” (2000,
10). In his reading of Heidegger—“Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over
beings that aims to recover them as such as a whole for our grasp” (Heidegger,
“Metaphysics,” 93)—Spanos characterizes metaphysics as an end-oriented mode
of inquiry intended to domesticate or pacify the indeterminate realm of the
uncanny in order to reduce it to a condition of management. Obviously, we
could also call this the ground of police thought:
Metaphysics . . . in its post-Greek, that is, Roman, form, is a way of thinking
that perceives “beings” or “things-as-they-are” from a privileged vantage point
“beyond” or “above” them, that is, from a distance—an “Archimedian point,”
to appropriate Hannah Arendt’s apt phrase—that enables the finite perceiver to
“overcome” the ontologically prescribed limits of immediate vision or, to put
it positively, to comprehend them in their totality. But incorporated implicitly
in Heidegger’s translation of the Greek prefix meta as “from above” is the idea
of “from the end.” For another meaning of the word meta is “after” . . . We
can say that the metaphysical interpretation of being involves the perception
of “beings” or “things-as-they-are” (physis) from the end, not only in the sense
of termination but also in the sense of the purpose or goal of a directional and
totalizing temporal process, a process in which this end is present from the
beginning . . . To think meta-physically is thus to think backward. This means
retro-spectively or circularly, for the purpose of accommodating difference to a
preconceived end or of reducing the differential force of time to a self-identical,
objectified, timeless presence, while preserving the appearance of the temporal-
ity of time. (Spanos 2000, 9)
The images themselves, however, did not occur in a relation of peasant sub-
jection to Carrancism, an emergent bourgeois state apparatus, a systematized
distribution of powers, a preconceived end, or a self-identical, objectified, time-
less presence. They occurred in the context of a political-historical interregnum,

characterized by an extremely rapid intensification and extension of multiple and

often contradictory expressions of injustice in the countryside, that produced an
institutional vacuum in which the agrarian leadership (other than Carranza and
then Obregón, that is) were quite happy not to assume national power.6 By refer-
ring to Villa en la silla presidencial as a memory of “the repressed of the revolution:
popular power” (2005, 212), we run the risk of establishing a relation of continu-
ity between the very existence of the photographs and postrevolutionary police
as the natural resolution of the contradictions that the agrarian revolution staged
and left unresolved. In other words, we empty these images of political content
by positioning the revolutionary context of 1914 as a retrospective abstraction
of the result (a maneuver that Louis Althusser referred to as the Hegelian in-itself
conceived on the basis of the end as the real origin [“Young Marx,” 62]).
In contrast, my purpose in this chapter is to return the political content of
1914 to the images of Villa on the presidential chair. In this return the assump-
tion of equality and the relation of this assumption to the uncovering of societal
wrongs are paramount. In Disagreement Jacques Rancière makes an important
distinction between politics and the police, a distinction that is central to our
ability to account for the status of these historical images as something other
than pure capture or subordination to the constraints of postrevolutionary
police distributions, or to a metaphysical ontology grounded in the trope of
the agrarian revolution as a memory of things to come. As Rancière indicates,
“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 distribution. I propose
to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose
to call it the police” (1999, 28). Politics, on the other hand, is antagonistic to
policing while remaining at all times bound up with it:
Spectacular or otherwise, political activity is always a mode of expression that
undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically
heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assump-
tion that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the
order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. Politics
occurs when there is a place and a way for heterogeneous processes to meet. The
first is the police process in the sense we have tried to define. The second is the
process of equality. (1999, 30)
Obviously, in Noble’s reading of Villa en la silla presidencial greater herme-

neutic emphasis is placed on the relation between the trope of “cultural mem-
ory” and the way the aggregation and consent of collectivities, the organization
of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the means of legitimizing
distribution are achieved in the years following the revolution than it is on the

political as the interruption, and therefore as the uncovering of the contingency,

of the police order of domination at any given time.
There is at stake in these images, however, a fundamental question of peri-
odization and of the relation between that periodization and the unbinding of
the nexus between sovereign power and the political life of society. The exami-
nation of this question points to the photographs not so much as imagistic
kernels that consolidate hegemonic cultural memory and the sovereign distri-
bution of powers in the years following the agrarian insurrections but as the
formulation of a political question over the existence of a common stage and the
status of those present on it on December 6, 1914, in Mexico City.
These remarkable images were taken the first time the peasantry captured
the social life of the whole nation. They bear witness to the political truth of
the irreducible, contingent nature of that agrarian moment and its relation to
sovereign power. Noble is quite right to point out that the events of December
6, 1914, were later absorbed by the commemorative postrevolutionary state.
However, if we are to restitute political significance to that moment we should
first extract it from all official (postrevolutionary) metaphysics and bourgeois
mnemonic or identitarian narratives of national (ethnogeographic) unification.
For truth in its relation to equality is at stake for politics in these images, at least
as much as memory in its relation to a postrevolutionary bourgeois police or its
metaphysics of reification and capture.
In his seminal work, The Mexican Revolution (published originally as La rev-
olución interrumpida in 1971), Adolfo Gilly uncovers the historical significance
of the events that transpired a month after the military forces of Venustiano
Carranza evacuated Mexico City in November 1914, when Pancho Villa’s Divi-
sion of the North and Emiliano Zapata’s Liberating Army of the Center and
South paraded into the capital and occupied it with their fifty-thousand-strong
peasant contingents:
The peasantry took four years to acquire sufficient strength for the capture of
Mexico City. This was the necessary time span in which their experience reached
maturity and the whole revolution climbed to its peak of radicalization. The sei-
zure of the capital therefore came as a necessary conclusion to all the prior battles
in the North and South.
It was a broad upsurge that shattered the very foundations of the old regime,
sweeping the whole country and pulling all into the struggle. This process con-
densed in the destruction of the repressive core of the old regime, the federal
army and its auxiliary forces: it was a blow from which the old oligarchy did not
recover, since it thereby lost the continuity of a caste army.
The peasant occupation of Mexico City also broke the institutional continuity
which Díaz and Madero had sought to preserve with the Ciudad Juárez Accords,
and completely thwarted Carranza’s original aim of restoring it, as he intended

to do through the Guadalupe Plan and his own entry into the capital in August
1914. This development marked off the peasant revolution in Mexico from all
previous peasant wars.
Instead of dispersing in a huge, frantic, centerless jacquerie, the peasant war
concentrated on the capture of Mexico City its own national role and the entire
transformation which had stamped the country during four years of revolution . . .
The taking of the National Palace by the armed peasants was a hammer blow,
a historical divide more important than all the laws, votes, and debates of all
the conventions and congresses of those times. After fours years of countrywide
battles, it consolidated the new self-confidence of the peasants, urban workers,
and Mexican poor, and gave them a degree of national consciousness that no
other single action was able to impart.
Just these two gains, impossible to measure in economic terms, were worth ten
years of armed struggle. (2005, 181–82)
Whereas the school of history steeped in state ideology continues to see the
ratification of the Constitution in February 1917 as the culminating moment
in the periodization of the revolution, it is in fact the events of December 1914
that hold the key to understanding the revolution’s social curve (Gilly 2005,
viii). Gilly approaches the question of periodization, and the ontological inten-
sity of the revolutionary social curve, in the following terms:
If we use the yardstick of mass intervention and mobilization, weighing up their
spatial and temporal extent and the changes in the life, habits, and mentality of
millions of men and women, then the Mexican Revolution was unquestionably
one of the most profound in Latin America and one of the greatest anywhere in
a century so rich in revolutions. This criterion allows us to plot what we may call
the social curve of the revolution. The peak will not be the ratification of the 1917
Constitution, as it is for the institutional, state-centered optic of official stories,
but the point when the strength and mobilization of the armed peasant masses
culminated in the occupation of Mexico City. It will be the victory of December
1914. (2005, 328)
As John Womack Jr. (1968, 221) and Friedrich Katz (1998, 435) attest,
however, when Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa finally did meet in the Zap-
atista town of Xochimilco on December 4, 1914, they were the most uncom-
fortable of bedfellows. Despite the obvious clumsiness and relative silence of
their first meeting, coupled with Zapata’s palpable discomfort at the idea of
being even close to Mexico City, “two days later the Division of the North and
the Liberating Army of the Center and South formally and festively paraded
into Mexico City to occupy it together. For posterity the photographers at the
National Palace framed an ebullient Villa chuckling on the presidential throne,
a dour Zapata on his left” (Womack 1968, 221). This photograph was soon

disseminated worldwide, and without doubt helped to fuel the impression that
General Villa was the real strongman and ruler of Mexico (Katz 1998, 437).
However, as John Womack observes, the mirage of revolutionary union that
was captured by the flash of the camera in the national palace that day soon
vanished (1968, 221).7
In her reading of Villa en la silla, Noble indicates that “there is nothing
ordered or regimented about this sea of faces and sombreros: this is the revolu-
tion as popular struggle” (2005, 3). But it is more complex than this. What the
images expose is the relation between the pure contingency of the staging of
the peasant revolution—the spectacular conjoining and emergence of the part
of those who have no part in all their multiplicity—with, at their center, the
presidential chair as synecdoche for the sovereign organization of powers, the
collective distribution of places and roles, and the legitimization of those distri-
butions. The images, in other words, are all about the sovereign order of a police
system of distributions that has been interrupted, momentarily usurped, as a
result of the intensity of agrarian revolt. However, the symbolic law of sovereign
order is still there, exercising its almost mystical ordering force on the proceed-
ings and its spectators. As such, even though Villistas and Zapatistas appear, in
spectacular fashion, to be undermining the symbolic legitimacy of the police
fetish—the presidential chair and the machinery of the state that accompanies
it—they are still congregated around it, in relation to it, existing there as a result
of its magical law, even though the actual terms of mediation between the fetish
and political power remain suspended, momentarily beyond measure.
Against the official state-centered optic that would emerge as a result of
the victory of the sonorenses (the Sonora factions) in the 1920s, Adolfo Gilly
situates the peak of the revolution’s social curve firmly within a moment and
a space devoid of law, in which all juridical-political determinations had been
deactivated and neutralized by the sustained revolutionary violence of the poor.
It is this murky zone of administrative anomie that underlines the ontological
ground of Villa en la silla presidencial, bringing to the fore the question of the
political in its relation to an order suspended by the forcible entry of the masses
into the realm of sovereign power.
In the interregnum of 1914, the administrative regulation of the law is
suspended as a result of agrarian revolution. However, and as we will see, the
law of sovereign command continues to envelope the imaginary of the revo-
lutionaries from within its very suspension. Everything appears to be at stake
and up for grabs within the temporal frame of the interregnum. But sovereign
power appears to be almost preordained in its ability to structure and define
the grounds of practical action. As such, the interregnum signals a retreat of
sovereignty that allows momentarily for the tracing anew of the very stakes of
the political in its relation to sovereign power.

In late November 1914 the newly elected yet essentially powerless conven-
tionist president, Eulalio Gutiérrez, entered a national palace occupied by Emil-
iano Zapata’s peasant forces. Martín Luis Guzmán recreates the episode over ten
years later in El águila y la serpiente (The Eagle and the Serpent). However, he does
so with a view to reactivating bourgeois police distributions and relegitimiz-
ing the law of sovereign command after the peasant’s occupation of the capital
city.8 Emiliano Zapata’s brother Eufemio leads Gutiérrez and Guzmán through
the palace toward the presidential chair. Standing before the seat of sovereign
power, the peasant general exclaims, “Here’s the chair! . . . I’ve come to take a
look at it every day since we arrived, just to get used to it. Because, get this, I
always thought the presidential chair was a riding saddle” (1998, 396–97). At
this point the incoming (though essentially powerless) president quips sarcasti-
cally, “Not in vain, my friend, are you an admirable horseman. Because you and
others like you can rest assured that you will become president the day they start
putting chairs like this on horseback” (397). Eufemio Zapata, Guzmán notes,
“as if spellbound, stopped laughing. He became reserved, gloomy. Eulalio’s per-
haps excessively cruel or opportunistic sharpness had touched his soul. Fine, he
said shortly, . . . let’s go back downstairs to the coach depot and stables” (397).
The ideological charge of this passage could not be more evident. Eufemio
represents the political interruption (by a part of society that has no part) of the
natural order of sovereign domination. His mere presence in the palace repre-
sents the immanent egalitarianism of violent revolution and lawlessness; that
is, he represents an equality that suspends sovereign privilege and the juridical
order itself. Guzmán’s account, however, calculatingly reterritorializes the agrar-
ian revolt around the return to a normal police administration and distribution
of sovereign powers, predicated once again on the silence and humbled subju-
gation of the peasantry, on the intelligent wit and rhetorical superiority of the
“lettered” classes, and on the reinsertion of the poor into the nomic, administra-
tive realm of the sovereign ban. Quite simply, an anomic peasant revolutionary
cannot be acknowledged as a speaking being that counts before the presidential
chair. As such, Eufemio needs to be reinserted at all costs into the territory of
sovereign command; that is, taken out of the extrajuridical emptiness of lawless-
ness and brought once again into the fullness of the sovereign realm.
The problem, however, is that within the interregnum of December 1914,
the peasants are the only ones who count. Eufemio leads Guzmán and the new
president down to a dilapidated palace courtyard filled with Zapatista foot sol-
diers. This place, says Guzmán, is “abominable” (1998, 398). Eufemio begins
to serve his guests tequila:
“Our friend here,” he announced to his people, “believes that Emiliano and me,
and others like us, will be president only when they start saddling horses with

presidential chairs like the one upstairs.” There was a profound silence broken
only by Eulalio’s chuckle. At that point the tenor of the voices changed, taking on
a new vague, disquieting and disquieted tone . . . Robles began staring at me and
then gestured subtly with his eyes. I understood, emptied my glass, and bade fare-
well to Eufemio. An hour later, returning to the Palace accompanied by Robles’
entire military escort, I saw Eulalio and his Minister calmly exiting through the
very door we had entered earlier that same afternoon. “Thank you,” said Eulalio
upon seeing me, “luckily the escort won’t be needed: they just wanted to get so
drunk they didn’t even have time to pick a fight with us.” (1998, 399)
In a novel of fine moments, this is surely one of the most noteworthy, since
what is at stake here is the very staging and value of the political in the revolu-
tionary interregnum of December 1914. The two sides do not not understand
each other. In other words, this is not an encounter between two absolutely
incommunicable languages or incommensurable forms of life, knowledge, or
“identity.” Rather, they understand each other’s speech, snide remarks, and
counterremarks perfectly well. Indeed, they understand it as a struggle over the
meaning of the political in its relation to sovereign power.
Eulalio Gutiérrez’s language is the language of a state violence in which
Zapata and people like him will never be of any account. In the palace’s Zap-
atista space, however, Eufemio sequesters Gutiérrez’s speech and turns it against
him, exposing to his comrades the longstanding wrong that the president is and
will continue to be. Zapata’s speech produces a quiet noise among his followers
that, potentially, is the murmur of revolt. In the novel this noise leads Guzmán
and Robles to scuttle off in search of military protection and a potentially vio-
lent resolution to the problem of a social leveling that for them is akin to the
ruin of sovereignty, the bourgeois administration and distribution of powers
and, indeed, the possibility of social order itself. Theirs is a law-preserving vio-
lence exercised in the name of state command and the pacification of the peas-
antry’s anomic revolutionary upheaval.
Guzmán’s ideological intention is surely that his readers choose between
the enlightened, rational wit and communication of the intellectuals and the
murkiness of irreducible difference that Zapatismo embodies in this section
of the novel. Guzmán’s ideological intention is without doubt that his readers
decide in favor of the natural superiority of bourgeois police logic over the
violent “irrational” egalitarianism of the peasantry. The passage, however, is
actually more complex than Guzmán would probably have wanted it to be.
The author would no doubt have us think that it is the animalistic murmurs
of the peasants that strike fear into the hearts of the educated, natural-born
leaders of the nation, thereby rendering violence natural and necessary in the
face of such uncivilized threats from below. However, I think the threat can
be located elsewhere.

The passage uncovers a process of peasant becoming and exteriorization in

relation to the realm of sovereign command. It begins with a sovereign lan-
guage designed to circumscribe the place of a captured and subjugated citizen
in a still inexistent yet potentially emergent state (the positioning of Eufemio
Zapata in Eulalio Gutiérrez’s initial snide remark). It then passes to the politi-
cal constitution of the peasantry, as Zapata’s exposure of wrong before his men
expresses the fragility of Gutiérrez’s power and legitimacy. From there the lan-
guage of the Zapatistas passes from the performative restating of the president’s
words—“Our friend here believes that Emiliano and me, and others like us, will
be president only when they start saddling horses with presidential chairs like
the one upstairs” (1998, 399)—to the threatening circulation of “a new vague,
disquieting and disquieted” peasant voice that the educated classes can only
restrain through their law-preserving violence.
What this section uncovers is not the natural superiority of the educated
intellectuals but the equality of speaking beings in, and as a relation to, the
inequality of social rank. The problem for Guzmán and his companions are not
the vague murmurs of the peasantry but the fact that Eufemio proves before his
compañeros that he takes part in the same community of speaking beings as the
president and his entourage, that he understands fully the violent implications
of the president’s words, and that he also understands that it is precisely because
there is a common telos of mutual understanding between social ranks that
he is considered to be the inferior who is there to follow commands. Eufemio
initially remains silent after being treated like an inferior speaking being by
the president. As far as Guzmán and Eulalio Gutiérrez are concerned, Zapata’s
silence indicates that he understands his place in the world and his relation
to sovereign command. However, in the “abominable” patio occupied by the
Zapatistas, Eufemio creates a speech scene in which he demonstrates that the
Zapatistas understand their situation completely, as he questions Gutiérrez’s
place in the world through the very representation of his sarcastic utterance, this
time in a context in which it no longer works. In this sense the passage func-
tions along the lines of the Aristotelian distinction between voice and speech, in
which Eufemio Zapata’s speech scene sets forth the distinction between the just
and the unjust, while the murmur of the foot soldiers remains nothing more
than the animalistic voicing of discontent. Guzmán would have us think the
Zapatistas are caught in voice. However, Eufemio demonstrates their Aristote-
lian use of speech for political purposes:
Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious ani-
mals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only
animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is
but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for

their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of
them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth
the expedient and the inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust.
And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just
and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense
makes a family and a state. (Aristotle 1941, 1129)
The problem for Guzmán and the new president is that Eufemio is indeed
a man, and therefore by nature a political animal capable of distinguishing the
just from the unjust. This is a problem for Guzmán and Gutiérrez because
“justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which
is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political soci-
ety” (Aristotle 1941, 1130). Eufemio represents a principle of intelligence in
political society as much as they do, and this is why they cannot recognize
him as a speaking being before the seat of sovereign power. There opens up an
encounter, and a gap in the relation, between the president and the people, a
gap that is based on the relation between two distinct notions of what it means
to understand the relationship between language and social rank. For the presi-
dent, understanding the subtlety of language implies assuming superior and
inferior ranks. It means understanding and accepting an order and assuming
one’s place in it. For Eufemio Zapata, understanding the subtlety of language
implies not only understanding the grounds of that order but also assuming and
actively utilizing the equality of language and rank. In other words, it means
understanding a problem (the equality of speaking beings) that lies at the heart
of that order but that is silenced by its “natural” proportioning and distribution
of powers, privileges and distinctions.9 From the perspective of the Zapatista
masses, then, there is no real choice to be made between enlightened rational
communication, nonreason, animalistic irrationality or irreducible identitarian
difference (which is what the novel’s author would like us to think exists). Such
distinctions merely serve to uphold the order of inequality and the unjust. The
only subaltern politics possible is that which brings to light the question of
intelligence and of what it means to understand language itself in its relation to
social rank and the definition of the social order. And the only way of doing this
is by sustaining the rationality of the logos.
From within this subaltern politics, it is the unhurried emergence of an exte-
riority to the language of sovereign power, from within the very symbolic heart
of the state (a language that is an exteriority to sovereign will because it unbinds
the nexus between language, understanding, and the reproduction of social
superiority), which quickly leads Guzmán and Robles to the conclusion that
violence is a sovereign necessity. They miscalculate, however, since the Zapatista
peasants simply could not care less about them. This complete disidentification

is, of course, the moment of constitution (the moment of subjectification) of

the peasantry’s relation of exteriority to the nation-state. It also sets the stage for
their exit from Mexico City on December 9, 1914, a retreat through which they
reveal the huge gap in their insurrection between their political subjectification
per se and any kind of identification with centralized power (sovereign will) and
its unequal distribution of parts and privileges.10
On December 6, standing before the presidential chair just moments after
having his photograph taken with Francisco Villa by his side, Emiliano Zapata
suggested burning the chair in order to put an end to all political ambitions. He
did not, however, and nobody else took him up on his suggestion:
The huge difference in attitude between the warrior and the guerrilla was caught
in the famous photo that shows a euphoric Villa sitting in the presidential Chair
next to a surly and suspicious Zapata, always wary of a bullet perhaps springing
out of the camera instead of the flash of a bulb. A Zapatista witness to the scene
remembers: “Villa sat in the chair as a joke, while Emiliano stood to one side, and
he said to Emiliano: ‘Now it’s your turn.’ Emiliano said, ‘I didn’t fight for that,
I fought to get the lands back, I don’t care about politics.’ And later he said, ‘We
should burn the Chair to end ambitions.” (Krauze, Biography, 295)
Villa en la silla presidencial is the spectacle of a momentary disorder forged

through the convergence of three heterogeneous worlds: Chihuahua, More-
los, and the sovereign fetish of the nation-state. The images uncover a politics
that lies not in the fact that all of a sudden Villistas and Zapatistas have come
together as a unified community or hegemon with shared interests and com-
mon arguments. Rather, they have come together as a nonantagonistic politi-
cal multiplicity in which the freedom of the people is an empty property, an
improper property through which those who are nothing purport that their
group is identical to the whole of the community (Rancière 1999, 123). But
the word “purport” is important here, because underlying the staging of equal-
ity there is a fundamental discord in the terms of their commonality and in
their understanding of what it means to be in Mexico City. Even though the
instance is mediated by euphoria and playfulness, it is obvious that Zapata
grasps the situation differently from Villa. Indeed, he appears to disagree with
Villa’s understanding of the interregnum, which is predicated on his (albeit
parodic) identification with the symbol of sovereign power. Zapata’s language,
on the other hand, is predicated on the explicit disidentification with (or retreat
from) that same symbol. This is the ongoing legend of freedom that is Zapata.
Despite this rift between identification and disidentification within the rev-
olutionary peasantry, the images capture the very existence of the previously
inexistent and unimaginable in relation to an incommensurability that lies at
the heart of the convergence and staging of heterogeneous worlds. Allow me to

explain. Those who have never had a right to be counted as speaking beings in
the emergent feudal-capitalist modernity of Porfirian Mexico (the poor, land-
less peasants, Indians, “social bandits,” etc.) forcibly make themselves count as
they occupy the palace and momentarily sequester, or merely behold, the seat
of sovereign power. Two absolutely contradictory worlds—police logic and the
egalitarian logic of a revolutionary peasantry that is itself divided into two (Vil-
listas and Zapatistas)—are brought together into one space and are forced to
exist on the relational principle of symbolic equality: the former social bandit
on the chair is now in the place of the sovereign, and therefore all hierarchies
are leveled. This is what I refer to as the previously inexistent and unimaginable.
But as Martín Luis Guzmán is more than happy to point out in his supremely
calculated and calculating account of the times, the leveling of powers—the
previously inexistent and unimaginable—is ultimately extremely ephemeral
because in Villa en la silla presidencial the scene’s ideological charge is to be
found as much in the concrete presence of the chair itself on center stage as it
is in the face, sombrero, mind, or backside of the individual who sits on it, or
of the spectator who views it. Of course, it can be said that Villa on the seat of
power forges a relation of equality between the state and the people who con-
gregate around him and Zapata with such eagerness and fascination. But it is
more complex than this populist affirmation of popular power. The photograph
exposes the contours of a contingent subjectification by the fact of placing in
common a seat that sustains and guarantees, indeed, is the embodiment of
social wrong on a national scale. After all, the presidential chair is the inanimate
expression of sovereign inequity. As Eufemio Zapata momentarily misrecog-
nizes in his conversation with Eulalio Gutiérrez and Martín Luis Guzmán, and
as the latter reminds him (and, of course, his readers) so succinctly in El águila y
la serpiente, the chair is the existence of an irreducible inequality in the relation
between sovereign power and the protagonists of the agrarian revolution. It is,
however, an inequality whose law is under question, in a state of momentary
limbo, thanks to the immanent contingency of the agrarian revolution itself.
Equality is certainly staged in the captured photographic moment. But it
exists in the relation of the people to the presidential chair, which, it could be
said, is also the vanishing point, the path to inexistence, of equality. It is equality
consumed or disappeared. The image of Villa en la silla presidencial therefore
brings into existence the common stage of equality and simultaneously enacts
the impossibility of the equality or common stage that it brings into existence.
In Villa en la silla presidencial it is this inequality that produces the image of
the equality of the people: equality, that is, in its common relation to the wrong
that sovereign inequality is. Yet, at the same time, this ephemeral weakness of
the equality of the people is in fact their revolutionary force. And this is what I
refer to as the incommensurable: it is the unmeasureable, performative aporia

that lies at the very heart of the convergence and staging of heterogeneous
worlds, in which maximal revolutionary force coincides fully with maximal
egalitarian weakness. The simultaneous equality and suspension of equality that
the image captures is the very aporia that lies at the heart of the constitution of
the revolutionary political community.
This aporia, in which it is impossible to distinguish the limits between revo-
lutionary force and weakness (even though “popular power” is always center
stage), is obviously enormously paradoxical. Nevertheless, the ethicopolitical
dimension of the image, and, indeed, of the revolution, is grounded in this
incalculable relation between the appearance of agrarian equality and the
absolute inequality of sovereign power, between the emergence of revolution-
ary force and transformational weakness. In particular (and since one cannot
remain forever within an aporia) the ethicopolitical dimension of the image
resides in the relation of the aporia to the decision to take sides. But even this
is more complicated than it might seem, for there is actually no choice here for
the viewing subject.
One can choose the horizon of domination and opt openly for the subjection
and subordination of equality to sovereign power. In this case, the image rep-
resents the necessary superiority and inequality of the sovereign, and therefore
the capture of a time and event that accommodates difference to a preconceived
end or reduces the differential force of time to a self-identical, objectified, time-
less presence. This is the decision for the nomic production of life exclusively
from within the horizons of sovereign will. It is also the essential imperialism
of metaphysical ontology already seen in Guzmán and Noble’s interpretations
of the encounter between the peasantry and the seat of sovereign power. In his
1920s account of his encounter with Eufemio Zapata in El águila y la serpiente,
Martín Luis Guzmán obviously chose a priori the suppression of revolutionary
time at all costs. His was the decision for the confining idea of the law, for sov-
ereign regulation and for the bourgeois distribution and management of powers
as the only possible definition of the political.
On the other hand, one can choose to side with the nonsubordination of
peasant equality to sovereign power or with the notion of the political as the
montage and processing of wrong. However, in this case we remain captured
once again by the specter of revolutionary equality as a common relation to
the wrong that sovereign inequality is. This is a politics grounded in the inter-
ruptive logic of those who have no right to speak but who have made them-
selves count, as Rancière puts it, “setting up a community by the fact of placing
in common a wrong that is nothing more than . . . the contradiction of two
worlds in a single world: the world where they are and the world where they are
not, the world where there is something ‘between’ them and those who do not
acknowledge them as speaking beings who count and the world where there is

nothing” (1999, 27). In this particular case that “something” between the peas-
ants and “those who do not acknowledge them as speaking beings who count”
is obviously the presidential chair itself. However, in this option we remain
caught in the essential irreducibility and contingency of the (weak) relation
between the inequality of sovereign power and the appearance of equality that
gathers itself up as a force of potential change. This contingency, though per-
haps distinct in quality from the historically constituted bourgeois distribution
and management of powers, nevertheless sustains the inegalitarian partition and
distribution of powers and remains, like Villa en la silla presidencial, the denial
of equality through equality’s affirmation, the denial of freedom from within
its victorious counterhegemonic affirmation. These are the only options politi-
cally available in historical terms. However, they are simply two sides of the
same decision for the authority of sovereign exceptionality. Therefore there is
no real decision to be made. Nevertheless, what we are left with is a profoundly
political montage of subjectification that brings out the depth and intricacy of
contradiction in the relation between inequality and equality.
When invited by General Villa to sit on the presidential chair, however,
Emiliano Zapata quipped, “We should burn the Chair to end ambitions.” This
phrase has been largely recounted, time and time again, in anecdotal terms.
However, there is something extraordinarily weighty in this statement, since
it speaks directly to the heterogeneous and essentially irreconcilable relation
between equality and freedom in the staging of the political. Equality in the
photograph, which is equality not according to number but equality according
to value or worth, introduces measure and calculation as its essential ground
and precondition. There is equality because all participants in the photograph
are measured as a fraternity existing in relation, and as an essentially Christian
relation, to the absent or disappeared body of the true sovereign or master; the
one, and therefore countable one, who has momentarily been replaced by a
member of the revolutionary peasantry (Pancho Villa), who is equally one and
therefore equally countable though not necessarily the real thing. They measure
themselves in a relation of fraternal inequality to that truly absent Father and
his surrogate minimonarch. They measure themselves, in other words, and this
measure is the condition of their fraternity. Within this nomic spacing equality
is conditioned by its relation to the inequality that founds it. That is why if one
chooses for equality, one is essentially opting for the ground and conditionality
of inequality. That—that equality is never equal or adequate to itself—is the
aporia that founds the photograph’s political staging, our relation to it, and the
lack of a real decision to be made through it.
In his almost visceral response to Villa’s desire that he too sit on the presi-
dential chair, Zapata calls for something other than a conditioning, calculable
inequality in the staging of the political. His statement, “We should burn the

chair to end ambitions,” (Krauze, Biography, 295) expresses the political as the
possibility and promise of an unconditional challenge to sovereignty that is
heterogeneous to equality’s sovereign calculations and measures. There would
be no possible question of calculation available if his phrase were acted upon. To
destroy the chair “to end ambitions” is to propose putting an end to the measure
of all superiority and inferiority in the field of the political. It affirms the pos-
sibility of an unconditional freedom from all conditions, calculations, determi-
nations, mastery, and properties. Rather than equality as the measure of a law
of sameness that exists only in the face, and as a result, of sovereign inequality,
Zapata proposes (“We should . . .”) an absolute, and therefore an uncondi-
tional, incalculable, and singular withdrawal from sovereignty and its shackled
fraternities. Nothing could be made of this renunciation because it would be
heterogeneous to measure. But perhaps it would signal the possibility of an
equality—an incalculable and incommensurable equality—that would also be
the unconditional condition of freedom for all. But that is just speculation.
No matter how momentary, such a gesture—the burning of the chair to
end ambitions—might have established the ground (real or symbolic) for the
reconfiguration of collective peasant experience. The promise (rather than the
regulative idea) of a future understood as a realm of politics definitively beyond
subjection to the sovereign ban might have been located in this gesture for the
freedom of all. But there is no longer any choice to be made for a freedom
from subjection to the nation-state because the possibility of that historical
path was immediately foreclosed on December 6, 1914, when in the euphoria
of the moment nobody (including Zapata) acted on the word. Freedom for all
remains a nonexistence: something that never took place but that haunts the his-
torical proceedings with its unconditional promise and possibility. What the act
might have demonstrated, of course, was the nonstatist character of the agrar-
ian politics of Zapatista emancipation in 1914. Or it might just as easily have
demonstrated the freedom of absolute contingency that lies at the heart of all
revolutionary experience.
Let us not forget also that the nonstatist character of the agrarian revolution,
which is distinct from the empty freedom of anarchy, was already tangible and
functional by this time. The political and cultural withdrawal (or retreat) from
sovereignty was already a basic characteristic of Zapatismo. However, this does
not mean that the Morelos peasantry had no notion of police functions and
distributions. Their insistence on the language of the 1911 Ayala Plan and the
redistribution of the land was their differential system of police distributions and
management. Perhaps by not burning the presidential chair the Zapatistas pre-
served for themselves the image not of the sovereign power of the nation-state
embodied once again in the body and inequality of the sovereign but of the pos-
sibility of a future state function other than the one that had been crystallized

by the history of the relation between primitive accumulation and the Caesarist
presidentialism that characterized the years of the Porfiriato and that had only
been nominally put into question by the brief rise to prominence of Francisco
Madero. But again this is mere speculation.
In El águila y la serpiente, Eulalio Gutiérrez (and Martín Luis Guzmán with
him) remained perplexed because, despite his having insulted the Zapatista
leadership in public, the peasant foot soldiers “just wanted to get so drunk
they didn’t even have time to pick a fight” (1998, 399). Three days later the
Zapatistas abandoned the palace and the city as a whole. By doing this they
refused to offer their services to the essential imperium of sovereign consolida-
tion. Withdrawal, then, is their act of political constitution: the staging of their
revolutionary destructive character in the face of “the general inequality of the
state’s general equality” (Levinson 2004, 65). It is an act grounded in a historical
sequence of sustained subjectification that is political, while at all times eschew-
ing the occupation of the state, an act that institutes the Zapatista community
as a community grounded in irreducible withdrawal and destruction.11
Over fifty years later, just two years after the student massacre at Tlatelolco,
Octavio Paz (like Martín Luis Guzmán and Eulalio Gutiérrez before him)
refused to acknowledge the peasantry as speaking political beings in modern
Mexico. Following are Paz’s insights into the unwillingness of the peasantry to
take charge of the institutional distribution of powers:
Between the exercise of power and the peasant class there is a kind of essential
and permanent contradiction: there has not been and there never will be a peas-
ant State. The peasants have never wanted and do not want to take power. And
when they do take it they do not know what to do with it. Ever since the times
of Sumatra and Egypt there has always been an organic relation between city and
State; the same relation exists, but as an oppositional and contradictory inversion,
between peasant society and the State. Our only link to the Neolithic age, that
happy time with scarcely a monarch or priest, is the peasantry. (1987, 88)
Paz then goes on to interpret in more specific terms the events of December 6,
1914:
In the revolutionary period, during the occupation of the capital city by Zapata
and Villa’s troops, the two popular leaders visited the National Palace; every-
body knows that Zapata eyed the presidential chair with horror and, unlike Villa,
refused to sit on it . . . In the inhuman context of history, and particularly in
its revolutionary stage, the attitude of Zapata is the same as Hidalgo’s gesture
before Mexico City: through a fatal process of reversion he who rejects power
is destroyed by it. The episode of Zapata’s visit to the National Palace illustrates
the character of the peasant movement and its destiny: its isolation in the south-
ern mountains, its enclosure and final liquidation by the Carranza faction. The

latter’s victory, and later that of Obregón and Calles, was due to the fact that
the three caudillos, in spite of representing conservative tendencies (Carranza in
particular), all expressed national aspirations and programs. Villa was dispersion;
Zapata isolation and segregation. Once the peasant armies were defeated the oth-
ers integrated the demands of the agrarian movement into a wider national pro-
gram. (1987, 89–90)
In Paz’s account it is as if the frustrations and disappointments of the

whole of the twentieth century were the fault of an agrarian revolution whose
failure, along with that of the nation as a whole, was predetermined by the
presence of a backward peasantry uninterested in the police organization and
distribution of power on a national scale. More than fifty years after the event,
then, Paz is still perplexed by the idea of Villa and Zapata in the national palace.
However, he miscalculates the withdrawal from sovereignty by the rural poor,
judging that anything other than the state’s distribution of its sovereign powers
is simply not political. It is merely the fragmented noise of dispersion and segre-
gation. It is the impossibility of the basis or origin of community and therefore
contains no productive political force. As such, it is inherently and eternally
disastrous because “through a fatal process of reversion he who rejects power
is destroyed by it.”
Paz’s ideas, of course, are predicated on the complete subsumption of the
relation between freedom and equality to the order of an emergent national
bourgeoisie. Paz overlooks the fact that after the photographs were taken the
peasants staged the unconditional withdrawal from the relation between state
and peasantry. Finitude is always an index of the terms and exposure of political
relationality. Therefore in their retreat from sovereignty, in their defection from
its conditions, measures, and calculations, the Zapatista peasants staged the very
question of relation and of nonrelation as the essence of the political. On this
stage the political relation between state and peasantry is enacted as the mani-
festation and perpetuation of wrong. The wrong that relation is, in the relation
between state and peasantry, is what they open up and enact, as well as their
retreat from that relation and wrong. It is true that the Mexican agrarian insur-
rections, like the Paris Commune before it, did not fully destroy the dominant
groups or the political class. However, they destroyed (no matter how momen-
tarily) something far more important: namely, the idea of the inevitable or natu-
ral subservience of the rural poor to (or their mimetic identification or relation
with) the institutional constraints of the nineteenth-century state form.12 And
it was through the politics of defection or withdrawal that they performed this
destructive disidentification with the essential grounds of sovereign command.
In contrast to Octavio Paz’s damning evaluation of the peasantry, Paolo Virno

takes a particularly pertinent stance on the politics of exodus for our appraisal
of Zapatista action:
Because the Exodus is a committed withdrawal, the recourse to force is no longer
gauged in terms of the conquest of State power in the land of the pharaohs, but
in relation to the safeguarding of the forms of life and communitarian relations
experienced en route. What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of
“friendship.” Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow,
but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were
mapped out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are
already there: the autonomous expressions of the “acting-in-concert” that arise
out of general intellect, organisms of nonrepresentative democracy, forms of
mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside of
and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here
is a violence that is conservational. (1996, 206)
The images of Villa en la silla presidencial bear witness to the appearance

of peasant subjectification, on a national scale, in the very symbolic heart of
the state machinery. Furthermore, it is this absolute peasant appearance that
exposes and gives body to the fact that the previously inexistent and unimagi-
nable—that is, the peasant occupation of the capital city together with the very
idea of the redistribution of the land as the ultimate horizon for the eman-
cipation of the majority—had already been brought into existence. As Alain
Badiou observes, “there is no stronger a transcendental consequence than that
of making something appear in a world which had not existed before” (2003,
147). Just for a few moments and camera flashes, Villa en la silla presidencial is
a singularity in time that, while it did not realize another world, certainly cre-
ated the image and chance of a potentially distinct distribution of the relation
between that which exists (unfreedom) and that which does not (freedom for
all), between those who speak and those who are forced to remain silent or to
murmur in the shadows of national social life. No matter how ambiguous the
relation between the figuration of peasant equality and the persistence of the
seat of sovereign power is in these images, the photographs embody the possi-
bility of a reconfiguration of, and a fundamental redistribution of forces in, the
field of collective perception and political experience.
In December 1914 the enormously ambiguous appearance of Villista-
Zapatista peasant-being endured for just three days. It was the absolute expo-
sure of an immanent peasant relation to sovereign power that at the time was
incalculable, as a political and historical sequence, both for the revolution under
way as well as for the future. Nevertheless (and as Andrea Noble attests), the
consequences of this incalculable historical singularity lasted for decades as “a
social symptom, a brute force of uprisings and a theoretical threat—in the space

of governmental and political capacity” (Badiou 2003, 142). As Adolfo Gilly

proposes, it was those three days that marked the point of greatest intensity in
the revolutionary social curve, the moment in which the figure of the sovereign
as the singular point of cohesion of a whole political and juridical order became
momentarily a power overturned by the forceful appearance of the peasant army
(the part of those who had no part) and the speech and intelligence of its leader-
ship. There are profound tensions within this appearance, of course, for their
presence in the palace—including Zapata’s refusal to sit on the chair—signals
the chance of a world grounded in the desuturing (or destruction) of sovereign
power and the emergence of an unconditional freedom in which there is no one
authority to hold onto or honor. But Villa sat on and parodied the ready-made
symbol of the state machinery, and everyone congregated around him, thereby
reestablishing the topological structure of sovereign authority. Villa occupied
and reproduced the legitimacy of sovereign inequality and at the same time
created the optic for a relation of immanence between the realm of peasant
sovereignty and the symbolic heart of the state. He performed subjection to the
inequality of sovereign power, and this is perhaps what made Zapata so uncom-
fortable. Villa’s was a decision for the continuity of the sovereign imperium.
Zapata’s was a gesture for the freedom of all.
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Walter Benjamin observes in “The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” that “just as the
entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical peri-
ods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human percep-
tion is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by
nature but by history” (2003, 255). What we encounter in Villa en la silla presi-
dencial is the appearance (the historical manifestation, as a result of an emergent
technological modernity) of a new optic of peasant subjectification grounded in
(1) the forcible entry of the masses into the realm of sovereignty over their own
destiny; (2) the appearance, assumption, and montage of inequality; and (3) the
peasant’s disidentification with, or retreat from, the realm of sovereignty into
which they forcibly entered as a result of the staging and processing of wrong.
This paradoxical relation between forcible entry into, and withdrawal from,
the realm of sovereign power—while at all times partaking of its mysterious
force—is the anomic rift that makes the unbinding of the nexus between sov-
ereign power and the political life of society conceivable. Furthermore, this
anomic rift is the heterogeneous and uneven interregnum at the heart of institu-
tional life that, throughout the twentieth century, has animated a social sphere
that labors in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. The rift that underlies the
relation between forcible entry and withdrawal sets in motion the wheels of
democracy and its times, the iterability of the cracy of the demos that always
turns and returns in a different way in relation to sovereignty. However, this rift

is also the zone from within which the force of law can reinstate and strengthen
its authority and violence over society. It is the absolutely critical zone of indis-
tinction in which the nexus between law and force (nomos), together with its
potential unbinding in the name of a social order beyond subjection to sover-
eign command (anomie), haunt and sustain each other without end.
In the interregnum of December 1914, there is no such thing as a pure,
anomic violence beyond subjection to the law because, as can be seen in Villa en
la silla presidencial, the law of sovereign command—the peasant’s congregation
around the presidential seat—is sustained by the peasantry despite, and indeed
through, the very suspension of sovereign law. The interregnum in this sense is
the manifestation and perpetuation of the force of law without law. This space of
mutual contamination and indeterminateness between sovereign law and peasant
insurrection in 1914 is the very ground of the emergent political subjectification
that lies at the heart of the Mexican Revolution’s social curve, and no populist
politics of identity can do anything to account for that incalculable ground.
The events of Mexico City on December 6, 1914, do not uncover or expose
the presence of a specific political subject or identity. Identity-oriented poli-
tics is grounded in an essential imperialism of metaphysical ontology that is
motivated considerably more by the management and domestication of his-
tory’s heterogeneities than it is in testing the limits of human thought, action,
and freedom. On the contrary, political subjectification in the revolutionary
interregnum uncovers the ability to produce networks of polemical and para-
doxical scenes that bring out the contradictions between police logic and egali-
tarian logic, between equality and freedom, indeed, between sovereignty and
the unconditional force or power of the masses. That is why Emiliano Zapata’s
suggestion to burn the presidential chair in order to “put an end to ambitions”
is the trace of a freedom for all that is still a nonexistence. The trace of freedom
suggests the possibility of a life other than that defined by the historical ter-
rain of sovereign command, pointing instead to the possibility of thinking the
political in a relation of withdrawal from the historically defined vicissitudes
and horizons of the law. Finally, Zapata’s suggestion calls to the possibility of
a relation between egalitarian logic and police logic that does not locate the
political entirely within, and as the shadow and imitation of, sovereign rule and
the violence of its inhospitable language.

CHAPTER 3
The Manufactured Subject

Melodramatic Consciousness
and the Immunization of the
Political, July–August 1937
Is the subject of jokes worth so much trouble? There can, I think, be no doubt of
it . . . A new joke acts almost like an event of universal interest; it is passed from
one person to another like the news of the latest victory.
—Sigmund Freud
Those who go to bed with the State, in the morning alongside Lombardo awake.
—Anonymous
I
n Rogues, Jacques Derrida highlights one of the principle paradoxes under-
lying the relation between sovereign power and the modern realm of the
political. Following are Derrida’s insights, which are of particular impor-
tance for grasping the relation between popular culture and the political in the
wake of Mexico’s revolutionary upheaval:
In its constitutive autoimmunity, in its vocation for hospitality . . . democracy
has always wanted by turns and at the same time two incompatible things: it has
wanted, on the one hand, to welcome only men, and on the condition they be
citizens, brothers, and compeers, excluding all the others, in particular bad citi-
zens, rogues, noncitizens, and all sorts of unlike and unrecognizable others, and,
on the other hand, at the same time or by turns, it has wanted to open itself up,
to offer hospitality, to all those excluded. (2005, 63)
Derrida plays with the count, for the two desires highlighted, that is, the
simultaneous desires for hospitality (inclusion, citizenship, friendship) and clo-
sure (exclusion, noncitizenship, enmity), are traversed by a third term. This

third term refers to a world of predominantly pedagogical practice and repre-

sentation in which social and ideological tendencies are oriented in such a way
as to constitute the state and the population’s relation to sovereignty simultane-
ously. What I am referring to is the state’s representation of hospitality to all
those excluded, in which the enemy (or noncitizen) can in fact be converted
into a friend (or good citizen).
In the Hobbesian theory of sovereignty, there was no such ambiguity. For
Hobbes the covenant that organizes the sovereign commonwealth is set up
against the condition of mere nature (“which is a condition of Warre of every
man against every man” [1985, 196]). In this configuration, any internal enemy
of the state—for example, anyone who renounces subjection to the covenant—
is condemned to live in the state of nature and condemns his future generations
to the same fate. Hospitality to the excluded, in other words, is not part of the
code of sovereign power in Hobbes. You either accept the conditions of com-
plete subjection or you fall victim to the sovereign justice of the sword:
In Subjects, who deliberately deny the Authority of the Commonwealth estab-
lished, the vengeance is lawfully extended, not onely to the Fathers, but also to
the third and fourth generation not yet in being, and consequently innocent of
the fact, for which they are afflicted: because the nature of this offence, consisteth
in the renouncing of subjection; which is a relapse into the condition of warre,
commonly called Rebellion; and they that so offend, suffer not as Subjects but as
Enemies. (1985, 360–61)
Obviously, the modern realm of the political upholds no artificial barrier

separating it from nature (from the condition of war of every man against every
man). The political order is certainly still the ground for the continued exercise
of politics in the name of life and death. But at the same time, it is the pedagogi-
cal ground for the potential conversion and salvation of those excluded or those
who renounce subjection. The dialectic of force between inside (peace) and out-
side (war), as exists in the Hobbesian model of sovereignty, is now fully internal
to the sovereign domain and is mediated by the relation between life, death, and
potential conversion. The division of the political into the distinction between
friend and enemy is of course still predicated on real or potential violence.
However, democratic autoimmunity is a name for the techniques that the social
body establishes in order to immunize itself (and therefore save itself ) from the
disorder and violence it itself installs and perpetuates, while at the same time
sustaining societal differentiations and separations that are deemed to be nec-
essary for the stratification and partition of wealth and privilege. As noted in
Chapter 1, constitutive autoimmunity is related directly to the law (the juridi-
cal order, the laws of capital, etc.) and is predicated on the need to annul the
violence that society itself extends throughout (indeed, as) the organization of

The Manufactured Subject ● 67
life. But autoimmunity procedures, which are designed to annul the conditions
of violence, or the forces of disorder, only do so partially at any given instance.
Democracy is just one name for the administration of the relation between
the singular demand for inclusion (friendship), the double demand for inclu-
sion and exclusion (friendship and enmity), and the triple demand for all the
previously mentioned plus open hospitality to the excluded (autoimmunity).
Democracy is therefore the installation of an essential police disjointedness as
the very ground and heart of collective life. As we saw in Chapter 1 in relation
to the Mexican state’s attempts to bring former president Luis Echeverría to
justice for his role in the student massacres and dirty war of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, society’s juridical procedures are directly related to the democratic
fate and failures of state autoimmunity. However, the essential disjointedness
between the included, the excluded, and hospitality to all those excluded is also
where the relation between culture and the political comes into play.
Culture, both humanist and mass, often becomes the compensatory ter-
rain upon which the gestures of sovereign hospitality to the excluded (the
state’s constitutive autoimmune procedures) are extended, represented,
administered, or contested. It is where the disjointedness, and the paradoxes
at the heart of the political, can be neutralized, whitewashed, or highlighted
for all to see, to accept, to react against, or to transform. Culture is one of the
principal mediations in the relation between the included and the excluded,
between friend and enemy, between citizens and noncitizens, between anar-
chy and order, or between the cracy of the demos and sovereign force. In other
words, it is one of the principle dispositions in a sovereign order in which
inclusion is the very modality of exclusion (or of exposure to the sovereign
ban) rather than its opposite term.
One of the many goals of democracy is to protect itself (to immunize itself )
against the turns and returns of its own original disjointedness (and against,
therefore, the paradoxes or mere imprecision of its claims to friendship, citizen-
ship, justice, or universal inclusion). Democracy has to do this by immunizing
itself against, for example, the heterogeneous egalitarian presuppositions of the
part of those who have no part, of those who can arrive at any time and lay
legitimate claim to the whole (and therefore to the end of the friend-enemy rela-
tion). As a result, the political field of democracy is at least partially predicated
on the neutralization of the political through the conversion of egalitarian pre-
suppositions into pure police power and administration (i.e., measurement and
state reason). However, the political field of democracy is also predicated on its
potentially revolutionary unbinding from the daily turns of the legislative steer-
ing wheel. Democracy is, in other words, always a question of being able to reason
democracy’s paradoxes and antinomies as close to inexistence as possible. It is

always a question of covering up (of immunizing itself against) the paradoxical

ground it can never fully legislate.
This leads us to a number of questions. For example, how is politics (under-
stood here as the materialization of an encounter between police logic and the
heterogeneous presuppositions of egalitarian logic) forced into retreat by means
other than naked force? How is the sheer contingency and incommensurabil-
ity of the turns of social inclusion and exclusion neutralized or disappeared,
and what is the relation of this to the emergence and hospitality of mass cul-
ture? Since it is all in the end a question of reason’s relation to the administra-
tion of public matters, that is, a question of reason’s relation to and place in
the res publica, perhaps the case of the Mexican comedian Mario Moreno—
“Cantinflas”—could be used to shed some light on such matters. Approach-
ing the question of the comedian, the clown Cantinflas is pertinent to these
questions because through him, and thanks to his figure, we can gain a picture
of an assemblage of forces (some explicit, others anonymous) that illustrate an
opening, that is, a historical change of tone in Mexican society’s relation to, and
representation of, the demos and the field of the political. This change of tone
signals the opening of a new public space and of a new publicity of democratic
public space that is the direct result of postrevolutionary print capitalism, the
emergent mass entertainment industries, together with the imperfect historical
and institutional transition from the military force of the revolutionary gen-
erals to the police order of the licenciados (graduates) in 1930s Mexico. The
democratic change of tone, the shift in the register and imagery of the cracy of
the demos, opens up (indeed, is the opening of ) the very question of demo-
cratic distributions and partitions (of inclusion, exclusion, and hospitality to
the excluded for example) in the wake of Mexico’s revolutionary upheaval.
I take up Cantinflas because through him we see a change in the mode of
production of representation (and in particular in the representation of the rela-
tion between social class and intellect) in postrevolutionary Mexico.1 Through
Cantinflas we come close to “a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a
res pública, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpub-
lic remains an indecidable limit” (Derrida 2005, 92). Clearly the demos is never
very far away when one speaks of Cantinflas or when one hears him speak.
Similarly, when one speaks of Cantinflas or hears him speak, the languages
of superiority and inferiority—of inclusion, exclusion, and hospitality to the
excluded—are never very far away either. Democracy, in other words, has never
been far from a comedian who began plying his trade in the improvised work-
ing class carpas (marquees) of the capital city, became a movie star and darling of
the social elites, and (even though by the 1980s he had fallen out of favor with
Mexico’s cultural elites) ended his days with the official recognition of President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari at his multitudinous funeral in 1993.2 As a result

Cantinflas can be considered a privileged illustration of a singular encounter

between a certain language of the demos and a certain inscription of the police
and its paradoxical laws of inclusion and exclusion through mass culture.
Perhaps the fact that democracy has never been far from Cantinflas explains
why he has been referred to on many occasions as the Mexican Charlie Chap-
lin. After all, for many years Chaplin was also of specific interest to the police
powers of the liberal democratic state: “From early in his career, critics com-
pared Mario Moreno to another great film comic, Charlie Chaplin. Cantinflas
and the Tramp both represented the human debris of industrialization, root-
less migrants to the big city who survived by their wits in a bewildering and
coldhearted environment. Both were masters of physical comedy and possessed
an innate geniality that elicited sympathy for their underdog status” (Pilcher
2001, xv). But the comparison is ultimately false. Indeed, the denomination
that Cantinflas was the Mexican Chaplin is imprecise, for Cantinflas was the
image and comic stylization of the urban pelado and of the Mexico City neigh-
borhood that gave birth to this figure: “While Chaplin had a knack for trans-
formation—turning bread rolls into dancing girls in The Gold Rush (1925) and
changing himself into a machine in Modern Times (1936)—Cantinflas was
always content with his place, and a carefully defined place at that. Unlike the
Tramp, who appeared as an anonymous denizen of an unnamed metropolis,
Cantinflas was identified with a particular neighborhood, Tepito, site of the
notorious thieves’ market of Mexico City during the 1930s” (Pilcher 2001, xvi).
Carlos Monsiváis asks, “Who is the pelado?” (“Cantinflas,” 98). The pelado
(loosely translated as the shorn, shaved, stripped clean, and penniless) is the
incarnation of the landless agricultural producer displaced and living in the city.
He is the urban peasant, and as such, the living materialization of the history
and social content of ongoing primitive accumulation in rural postrevolution-
ary Mexico. In Capital, Marx described primitive accumulation as “the histori-
cal process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (1990,
875). So-called primitive accumulation is the violent origin, the absent cause, of
the capital-labor power relation, and it presupposes and reproduces the separa-
tion of the producer from the means of production on a constantly extending
scale throughout history (874). Marx put it as follows: “In the history of primi-
tive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the
capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those
moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their
means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected
and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the
peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process” (1990, 876).
Carlos Monsiváis refers to the pelado—the free, unprotected, rightless, and
expropriated agricultural producer now displaced and living in the capital city

striving to sell his labor power—in the following terms: “A person totally dis-
possessed—the inheritor and companion of the leper—who has endured the
leprosy of poverty and a complete lack of social attention . . . Marginalized
from the social distribution of income, he receives a generic name subtracting
him from reality and burying him in abstraction. The pelado is the dangerous
shadow of poverty in the expanding city, the nameless and almost naked threat,
the figure of riot, robbery, assault: he is the inert shape on the pavements”
(“Cantinflas,” 98).
The pelado, then, is the nameless figure of the city street, in the street, liv-
ing on the receiving end of the public eye, its legal distributions, and its parti-
tions of wealth and poverty. He is, in this sense, a strictly nomic figuration.
Like the figure of the rogue, the pelado is always a second or a third person,
for no child, no matter what their class origin, is ever going to say they want
to be a pelado when they grow up. Indeed, in Monsiváis’s description as “the
dangerous shadow of poverty in the expanding city, the nameless and almost
naked threat, the figure of riot, robbery, assault: he is the inert shape on the
pavements,” the pelado is the figure and principle of disorder that occupies
the street, loitering there (“occupied with occupying the streets,” as Derrida
notes in reference to the rogue [2005, 65]). He is either doing nothing or
promising an undefined yet always potentially imminent threat of violence.
The pelado, in other words, is a latent, delinquent counterpower to police
order that makes ill use of that order’s primary domain: public space. In this
sense the pelado is the potential rogue, nonbrother, or perhaps even internal
enemy of the ordered (bourgeois) polis.3
However, through Cantinflas the nascent entertainment industry of the
1930s captures this threatening figure of social violence—this potentially delin-
quent nonbrother and therefore protoenemy—and converts him into the smil-
ing urban rascal: “Thanks to a comedian, he is rebaptized with the diminutive,
the peladito . . . It is not often that such a drastic transformation takes place
in so short a time: the ferocious pelado awakens to find himself an inoffensive
peladito” (Monsiváis, “Cantinflas,” 99). The potential excess of social violence
is displaced and substituted by an excess of language (which we will come to
momentarily). We should recognize, however, that both the threatening pelado
and the entertaining peladito represent, within this transformation, a basic ten-
dency of capital:
It is a law of capital to create surplus labor, disposable time; it can do this only by
setting necessary labor in motion—i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It
is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labor as possible; just as it is equally
its tendency to reduce necessary labor to a minimum. It is therefore equally a ten-
dency of capital to increase the laboring population, as well as constantly to posit

a part of it as surplus population—population which is useless until such time as

capital can utilize it. (Marx 1993, 399)
In the context of Mexico’s nascent capitalist regime of the 1930s, both the
pelado and the peladito are incarnations of ongoing primitive accumulation in
the countryside and, in the urban sphere, the simultaneous expansion of an
industrial surplus population expressing itself (as far as the bourgeoisie is con-
cerned at least) through a surplus of disposable language. The conversion of the
pelado into the peladito, then, is an archetypal populist gesture organized from
within the new industrialization of popular cultural forms and patterns. As
such, it is a conversion—a gesture of hospitality from within capital to all those
excluded by capital—that must be situated at the undecidable limit between
the democratic and the demagogic, and therefore between the democratic and
the melodramatic.
In La revolución desvirtuada (Vol. 5, 1937; The Spoiled Revolution), Alfonso
Taracena tells the story of how Mexico’s most acclaimed comedian of the twen-
tieth century—Cantinflas, the soon-to-be peladito—first caught the eye of the
Mexico City press and went from being a comedian to an active participant in
the most discordant political debates of the day. According to Taracena, who
was a daily chronicler of urban bourgeois political and cultural life, on August
9, 1937, reporters noted how Cantinflas became entangled in an exchange of
insults between two of Mexico’s most renowned labor leaders, Vicente Lom-
bardo Toledano, leader of the pro-Cárdenas Confederation of Mexican Labor
(CTM) and Luis Napoleón Morones, leader of the long-established Regional
Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM).4
There is, it must be said, considerable uncertainty regarding the autho-
rial origins of this almost mythical confrontation between Cantinflas and the
leaders of organized labor during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. This lack
of certainty about the polemic’s authorial origin is not without significance
because the so-called Polemic of the Century illustrates how scriptwriters
worked behind the scenes to create the public image of Cantinflas. As such, the
episode bears witness to the existence of an ideological nonpublic public within
the public, to a res publica, a republic in which the difference between the pub-
lic and the nonpublic remains beyond measure. It does not, in other words, bear
witness to a recognizable individual or transparent group signature.
Taracena presents Cantinflas’s inclusion in the initial polemic between
Morones and Lombardo in La revolución desvirtuada (as Carlos Monsiváis
would also do years later) without naming the Mexico City publication in
which the confrontation was made public. According to Jeffrey Pilcher (2001,
51), Salvador Novo initiated the polemic between the two labor leaders on July
10, 1937, in his unsigned column in the illustrated magazine Hoy.5 As a result

of this, Lombardo published in El Universal a rebuke to Morones in which

he evoked the name of Cantinflas. Cantinflas then intervened in the polemic
in the magazine Todo not on August 9 (as Taracena says) but on August 12.
Pilcher notes that Cantinflas’s entanglement in the argument, which has been
attributed to the writing of Carlos León, a scriptwriter for the Teatro “Follies
Bergère,’” may actually have been the work of Salvador Novo. “In any event,”
Pilcher notes, “Novo dedicated his next column in Hoy, on August 21, to a
comparison between Lombardo’s rhetoric . . . and Cantinflas’s nonsense speech”
(52). But in reality Cantinflas is only given marginal status in Salvador Novo’s
August 21 Hoy chronicle, which is a scathing attack on Lombardo’s intelligence,
ethic, and overall persona. Novo’s chronicle, though not in fact dedicated to
the comparison between Lombardo and Cantinflas, does end however with the
following passing comment on the relation between Cantinflas and Lombardo
Toledano: “Weeks have passed since Lombardo Toledano said that ‘the socialist
ideal is idealistic because it begins with material goods and ends with the imma-
terial,’ in other words, that idealism is idealistic; and last week comrade Cantin-
flas, assuming for himself the same stature as Lombardo Toledano in the weekly
Todo, declared that there are momentary moments when he said: ‘Comrades,
there are moments in life that are truly momentary’” (Novo 1964, 110–11).
One thing that is clear in the altercation is that, whether Lombardo and
Morones really said what they were reported to say and whether the episode
was authored by Salvador Novo or Carlos León or Cantinflas or by any com-
bination of the three, it was never disowned or contradicted by either Mario
Moreno or Cantinflas. As a result the language of the polemic, which we will
come to shortly, is a signifier that at the very least highlights the complexities of
the new interactions between the emergent age of technological reproducibility,
the establishment of urban print capitalism, as well as the growing influence
of the organized urban proletariat. The episode draws attention to this new
assemblage of forces in such a way that the new age of bourgeois print capital-
ism itself could probably lay claim to authorship of the polemic, as much as any
individual or group of individuals could. The apparent difficulty in attributing
individual authorship or authenticity to this confrontation between the comic
and the leaders of organized labor actually renders it public in ways an indi-
vidual signature could not. In other words, the polemic of the century emerges
at the heart, and as an essential instance within the unfolding, of the bourgeois
postrevolutionary publicity of the democratic public and its relation to rep-
resentation (e.g., its connection to the state-labor relation, or to the pelado-
people relation). We can read the episode, then, speculatively, as the language
of an ideological skirmish that lies at the heart of police reason and its changing
relation to mass society. It is a language that emerges as a collective signature

of the times and as an instance that is revelatory of language’s relation to the

shifting tides of sovereign power (inclusion-exclusion, friendship-enmity).
As we will see, the perpetuation of caciquismo within the postrevolutionary
labor movement allowed its leaders to function as semimonarchs, and there-
fore as the actualization of the final subjectivity of decision, within their spe-
cific spheres of influence. By “semimonarch” I refer to the emergence, in the
1920s and 1930s, of modern, rational, legal, and bureaucratic (i.e., postmili-
tary) forms of patronage at the heart of the state. The traditional rural or mili-
tary caudillo had become increasingly integrated into society’s distribution of
privileges as the intermediary between the poor and the political system, rather
than being himself the distributor and guarantor of privilege and prestige. The
transition from traditional to modern forms of political patronage is the result
of a disciplinary extension of the logic of sovereignty that is accompanied by
fundamental shifts in the subjectification of the status of the worker in the post-
revolutionary political realm and economy. Within this context the figure of the
peladito speaks to, and exists as a direct result of, an emerging nexus between
politics and the mass culture industries that in the Cárdenas era is beginning to
articulate new political and economic relations between the population and the
realm of sovereign power.
Mary Kay Vaughan has pointed out that under the first presidencies of the for-
mer “Carrancistas,” Alvaro Obregón (1920–24) and Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–
28), increasingly effective state bureaucracies had emerged in labor, commerce
and industry, education, health, agriculture, and social welfare, as well as in the
traditional areas of finance and public works: “The labor bureaucracy, allied with
the government-favored workers’ confederation, the Confederación Regional de
Obreros Mexicanos (CROM), implemented protective legislation, subjected dis-
putes to arbitration, and organized workers under the aegis of the government
while attempting to eliminate independent trade unionism. Class conciliation
was basic to Obregón’s program” (1982, 128). As the state strived to establish
harmonious relations between capital and labor after the violent agrarian revolts
of the revolutionary decade, the CROM came to enjoy a privileged position in
the Secretaría de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo, with CROM chief Morones as
minister under the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles (131).6
By the time Cantinflas el peladito came on the scene in the summer of 1937,
the political lives of Lombardo and Morones had been intertwined for years.
Lombardo had worked for Morones in the 1920s as his principal lieutenant in
the CROM. However, Lombardo abandoned the organization in September
1932. Lyle C. Brown informs us of the subsequent developments:
On March 11, 1933, a group of dissident CROM elements met in Mexico City,
announced the expulsion of Morones and seven other high-ranking CROM

officials, and resolved to reorganize the labor confederation under the title
“Purified CROM.” Also, a resolution was passed expressing confidence in Lom-
bardo and inviting him to attend the meeting. In response to this invitation,
Lombardo appeared before the anti-Morones group on March 12 and delivered
an address in which he charged that under Morones’s leadership the CROM
had departed from its original program. According to Lombardo, that program
was the same as the one outlined in The Communist Manifesto of Marx and
Engels. As for himself, Lombardo admitted his bourgeois birth, but declared
that he was proletarian in ideology. Subsequently, Lombardo was elected Secre-
tary-General of the Purified CROM. (1991, 312)7
Over the course of the next three years, Lombardo would play a pivotal role
in the unification and centralization of the Mexican labor movement, which
was finally consolidated during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas with the
founding of the anti-Calles CTM in early 1936.8 The founding of the CTM
was the direct result of what had become a confrontation of historical pro-
portions between President Cárdenas and Plutarco Elías Calles. Although at
first Cárdenas had appeared to be simply the fourth in a line of puppets con-
trolled by the “Jefe Máximo,” his inauguration in 1934 brought about signifi-
cant political change. The showdown between Calles and Cárdenas began in
1935: “Calles precipitated the struggle on June 11, 1935, by condemning a
wave of strikes that had been condoned by the president. A number of promi-
nent unions mobilized in support of the administration, forming the basis for a
national Cardenista labor organization, the Confederation of Mexican Workers
(Confederación de Trabajadores de México, CTM), founded in February 1936
and headed by Vicente Lombardo Toledano” (Pilcher 2001, 50). After a brief
period of interunion strife in Orizaba and the dynamiting of a Mexico City
train as it crossed a bridge near the town, CTM leaders (who were, after all,
declared enemies of Calles and Morones) denounced the unrest and violence as
the subversive work of the CROM and its political cronies. On April 9 Cárde-
nas ordered the arrest and deportation of Morones and Calles, and the next day
they were put aboard a plane in Mexico City and flown to Brownsville, Texas
(Brown 1991, 320).
However, Morones returned to Mexico City on April 28, 1937, thanks to an
amnesty law signed by Cárdenas on behalf of all exiles desiring to return to their
homeland (Taracena 1968, 105). On his arrival in the capital, Morones imme-
diately began to berate Lombardo for his former betrayals and current politi-
cal ambitions, by saying that Lombardo owed everything to the CROM even
though he was trying to destroy it. Meanwhile, Lombardo was pushing for the
founding of a Mexican Popular Front whose sole unifying cry was to be “Long
Live the CTM.” Lombardo—the “doyen of Marxism in Mexico” (Carr 1992,
64)—had instigated a markedly conservative shift in the post-CROM labor

movement as he allied himself to an anticommunist clique led by union bosses

Fernando Amilpa, Fidel Velásquez, and Blas Chumacero. Lombardo strived to
centralize authority in the CTM at the expense of formerly autonomous local
unions and federations, cultivate close personal ties to leading politicians in
President Cárdenas’s government, and emphasize iron discipline and unlim-
ited respect for the cardenista state’s project of creating mass organizations tied
exclusively to government economic and political goals.9 The scene for the final
confrontation within the Mexican labor movement had been set for the Fourth
Council of the CTM, at which a large number of state federations and national
industrial workers had actually walked out in protest at the arbitrary, regressive,
and antidemocratic leanings of the new organization’s leadership. Morones’s
return to Mexico City was timed to perfection, and he was clearly striving to
take advantage of the divisions within the CTM in order to exploit for his
own purposes the general disquiet surrounding the figure and leadership of
Lombardo and, in the process, regain legitimacy for himself and his disheveled
organization in light of an ascendant pro-Cárdenas CTM.
Morones used the CROM’s May Day celebrations in the Teatro Hidalgo to
attack Lombardo and the leaders of the CTM for usurping worker representa-
tion in Mexico (Taracena 1968, 109). On July 30, he brought the XIII Conven-
tion of the CROM to a close with a public tirade against Lombardo in which
he referred to him, among other things, as “The Boy Fidencio of Teziutlán.”10
Finally, Morones challenged Lombardo to what was essentially a duel: “How
I yearn to come face to face with him one day in a place of his choice, and in
the presence of his people, to discuss the social issues that he himself chooses.
Unfortunately, however, he will never dare do such a thing. He is not one for
such shows of strength. He is a wimp; a meager figure” (177).
The following day the figure of “Cantinflas” was, according to Taracena,
introduced for the first time “into the temple of fame,” and it is said, Lom-
bardo provided the press with his official retort to the leader of the CROM. As
previously noted, Taracena does not mention in which publication Lombardo
provided his rebuttal. Pilcher says it was in El Universal. Following, however, are
Lombardo’s words as they appear in La revolución desvirtuada: “If it is an oratory
stand-off he wants, I think a man’s best discourse is his life and Morones’ life
is easily judged. If Morones wants to show off his dialectics he should go and
argue with ‘Cantinflas’” (178). Taracena notes that this immediately “sparked
interest in who ‘Cantinflas’ was. A parliamentary correspondent thought Lom-
bardo had said ‘Candingas’ and that it was a reference to the devil. But the truth
is he is a comedian at the Teatro ‘Follies Bergère’ who mimics the poor of the
Garibaldi district” (178).
It is said when he was asked his opinion on such matters, Cantinflas did
not clarify a thing. His brief sally into this “leaderist” expression of mutual

contempt—an insolence that was situated nevertheless at the heart of the

administrative calculation and legislation of powers and therefore at the nexus
between state reason, print capitalism, and the daily life of the working classes—
was characteristically hilarious, as the soon-to-be peladito reproduced, parodied,
and undermined the demagogic protocols and rituals of the postrevolutionary
labor movement.
Following are Cantinflas’s insights as they appear in Taracena, in response to
Lombardo’s rebuttal to Morones published in El Universal. Cantinflas, accord-
ing to Taracena, was asked to address “the problem” raised initially by Morones
and then taken up by Lombardo:
The first thing I did was think about going to see Lombardo to ask him what was
the point . . . But then I thought: Well, no! Because thinking about it, the truth is,
he couldn’t have picked a better person than me to solve the solution to the prob-
lem. Because, like I said, naturally, since he can’t solve anything while saying a lot,
the same happens to me and we’d never come to an agreement. Ah! But let me
tell you that I do have moments of lucidity and speak very clearly. And now I’m
going to be clear! Comrades! There are moments in life that are truly momentary.
And it’s not that you say, but rather that you have to see! What do we see? That’s
what we’ll have to see. Because, what a coincidence, comrades, putting yourself in
the position—let’s not say which one; but we do have to reflect and understand
the psychology of life to analyze the synthesis of humanity. Right? That’s the very
point! That’s why I think, comrades, what you agree on, if this goes that far . . .
because it might and it’s rude just to send it back . . . you have to show yourself
like the saying says! (I wish I could remember what the saying says). So, just like I
agree with something that I can’t remember what it is, we should all be unified for
the unification of the emancipated ideology that struggles. Why does it struggle,
comrades? Well, you just have to take a look! You remember September 15 . . .
which to an extent has nothing to do with any of this . . . but we have to be pre-
pared because life is like that and so am I. And how am I, comrades? A worker! A
proletarian in the cause of the work involved in getting this cause off the ground.
And now, we have to look at the cause for us being like that. Why has the cost of
living gone up? Because every living being has to live, so the gravitational point
is the gravest thing. And I don’t want to go down that path because I’m already
there . . . and that’s that, right? And now comrades, I beg you to explain to me
what I just said. (187–88)11
Monsiváis notes that Cantinflas speaks without saying anything while “the
whole of Mexico celebrates his falling into the abyss of meaninglessness, his
climbing the hills of no purpose” (“Cantinflas,” 95). In Cantinflas—the paro-
died embodiment of the urban pelado—the word is freed from its logical bonds
in a verbiage grounded in the experience of poverty and lack of access to the
institutional calculations that forge and perpetuate the social division of labor

and its distribution of powers: “The sounds slip from onomatopoeia to ono-
matopoeia, the phrases holding together the internal cohesion of the nonsense.
In the verbal rough-and-tumble of the neighborhood, nonsense carries a force-
ful meaning; you say nothing so as to communicate something, you confuse
words so as to untangle movements, confound gestures with the intention of
expressing virtues” (“Cantinflas,” 97).
In Cantinflas there is a surplus of words enunciated by a person who speaks
incorrectly, out of place and outside the truth—a person who is incapable of
guaranteeing the reference of what is spoken but nevertheless gives expression
to his relation to the reason and logic of state power and hegemonic subjection:
“And how am I, comrades? A worker! A proletarian” (Taracena 1968, 188).
In Cantinflas we do indeed confront meaninglessness, nonsense, impropriety,
imprecision, purposelessness, and irrationality. However we do so as a modality
of knowledge pertaining to the social ranks that, within the allocation, distribu-
tion, and administration of state force and privilege—that is, from within the
extension of the bourgeois mode of production—have no business thinking
and expressing their thoughts, because when they do it can give shape to the
unbearable and politically unsustainable equality of speaking beings: “Thinking
about it, the truth is, [Lombardo] couldn’t have picked a better person than me
to solve the solution to the problem. Because, like I said, naturally, since he can’t
solve anything without saying a lot, the same happens to me and we’d never
come to an agreement” (187).
Cantinflas’s language is funny precisely because it exposes the calculative
rhetoric, demagogic deployments, and economic rationalizations of the Mexi-
can postrevolutionary police order to a vacillating boundary of incertitude and
potential collapse. His language is that of the actualization of an uncertain rela-
tion between the reason of the state and the outskirts of the social sphere, a
possible abyss in meaning that threatens the relation between the calculations
of privilege and the uneducated, unrefined social ranks that begin to fill the
arrabales (outskirts) of the ever-expanding metropolis of the 1930s.
The comedian’s excess is certainly a restating of the pompous police language
of bourgeois distributions, but it is a restating that is out of context, anachro-
nistic, and inappropriate. It is the theatrical displacement of the language of
managerial precision and calculation and, at the same time, the exposure and
dissemination of impropriety. Here, the political life of the state confronts a ver-
tigo of speech in which the baroque oratory and verbiage of the vain semimon-
archs of the social order is cut down to size: rendered about as anachronistic as
the largely incomprehensible language of the lowly pelado.
However, the pelado offers no alternative rationale to the demagoguery of
the postrevolutionary state’s intentionally vacuous wordplay and endless stream
of broken promises.12 Cantinflas reproduces that vacuity in displaced form in

order to undermine and negate its seduction, while at the same time reinstating
it as an expression of simultaneous power and senselessness. Needless to say, if
Cantinflas were to offer an alternative rationale to the postrevolutionary state’s
language and system of privileges, it would no longer be funny. It would be
the ground for the political revolution of the part of those who have no part.
In the meantime, for the lowest social ranks his humor lies in the simple fact
that his language exposes postrevolutionary political demagoguery for what it
is—empty posturing and word games—while, at the same time, for the privi-
leged managers of the emerging social order it is humorous because it does all
the aforementioned and yet falls short of proposing something more serious,
such as the rationality and intelligence of actual substantive and potentially
transformational disagreement. His language is therefore always too much and
too little: excessive yet obviously not excessive enough (it is not by chance that
Cantinflas became the darling of the elites too). As Monsiváis puts it, “The poor
applaud in him what is close and familiar to them and, whether they realize it
or not, become enthusiastic about a not-so-very-strange fact: the festive and
vindictive representation of poverty. The rich are grateful for the opportunity
to laugh at demagogues and the poor, and at the last gasp of small-town rural
comedy. In the mid 1930s, the elites celebrate Cantinflas: he represents the per-
fect ‘childishness’ of the Underdog. And he reciprocates” (“Cantinflas,” 100).
In this particular intervention, authentic or not, there is a game that remains
constitutive of the grounds of the political, since his language here is ultimately
a comment on the way in which people (institutional labor leaders) speak to
each other and for others in the context of a police order that is structured to
a large extent around the mere fact of speaking and interpreting. Cantinflas is
scripted to approach the political as a question and dispute over the very place
of language in public life. By telling Luis N. Morones to go and practice his dia-
lectics with Cantinflas over at the Follies Bergères, Lombardo interpellated the
labor leader and the pelado as equally frivolous, shallow-brained, and socially
inferior beings akin to the characterization of Fidencio, the peasant messiah, in
Morones’s opening salvo. As such, there is a real parceling out of powers and
privileges, together with an essential denial of equality, in both Morones’s and
Lombardo’s printed words. By suggesting the possibility of a potential con-
versation between Morones and Cantinflas, however, Lombardo creates the
conditions for a communication on what it means to speak in public. What
Cantinflas does is give Lombardo what he seems to be looking for. However,
he does so by redistributing Lombardo’s parceling out of powers and privileges.
For Lombardo it appears there is no problem freely and publicly equating
Luis N. Morones and Cantinflas. As already noted it is understood that he
is declaring the inferior intellectual and social status of both of them in the
new police distribution of powers. Lombardo correctly assumes that this can

be understood by everyone. Cantinflas certainly understands it well. In the lat-

ter’s response, however, things are taken one step further because understanding
itself becomes the object in dispute (“And now comrades, I beg you to explain
to me what I just said.”). Cantinflas provides a response to a situation that
expresses public inequality and, at the same time, makes his improper language
a metaphor for the inequity that creates and allows for the situation to which he
is asked to respond. He stages the object of Lombardo’s words (frivolity, impre-
cision, inferior understanding, inequality)—for example, “And now I’m going
to be clear! Comrades! There are moments in life that are truly momentary” or
“We should all be unified for the unification of the emancipated ideology that
struggles”. However, he presents class difference (“And how am I, comrades?
A worker!”) as the overall context in which that object (inequity, inferiority,
superiority) is made part and parcel of public life, part and parcel, that is, of
Lombardo’s assuredness that Luis N. Morones should go and practice his dia-
lectics with a speaking being (the pelado) who, as far as Lombardo is concerned,
should obviously not be recognized as such within the upper echelons of soci-
etal power distribution.
The comedian’s oration (which clearly implies from the outset the pres-
ence of a first and second person) challenges the parceling out of powers
and privileges (the hierarchies established by both labor leaders) by insist-
ing from the outset that a common world of equality does exist. He does
this by immediately installing a third person. That third person is Vicente
Lombardo Toledano himself (“The first thing I did was think about going
to see Lombardo to ask him what was the point”). However, it could also
be said that Lombardo stands in here for all the semimonarchs of rank and
privilege in the police order. The pelado’s indirect interpellation of the labor
leader, and the relation of equality he establishes with him from the outset
calls attention to the status and situation of the speakers as equal speaking
beings in the social arena (“He couldn’t have picked a better person than
me to solve the solution to the problem. Because, like I said, naturally, since
he can’t solve anything while saying a lot, the same happens to me and we’d
never come to an agreement”). This thereby suggests that Lombardo is just
about as loquacious and as incomprehensible as Cantinflas. Cantinflas, “com-
rade” and “proletarian,” does this in order to underscore the fact that there
is indeed a common status to the workers and their representatives in the
police order of distributions. Language itself consists of their belonging to the
same sphere of community even if the semimonarchs would never want to
recognize so much. Within the context of this overall sphere of commonality,
Lombardo’s incomprehensible rhetoric (the loquaciousness that Cantinflas
parodies and that nevertheless makes him and Lombardo equal) produces,
sustains, and legitimizes social rank in the state’s distribution of privileges,

while Cantinflas’s incomprehensibility—which he knows is not unequal to

Lombardo’s—produces and sustains his lowly position in the ranks of society.
By doing this Cantinflas places at Lombardo’s feet the inequality in social
rank that lies at the heart of the equality of speaking beings in the state’s unjust
allocation and portioning of powers and privilege. As such, he recurs to the
expression of a logos that manifests what is just and what is unjust precisely by
calling attention to the fact that it is the relation between language and social
rank (in particular, social class) that, on one hand, sets up a common telos of
mutual understanding (thanks to which everybody understands that Lombardo
and Cantinflas are equally incomprehensible and uncomfortably equal) and, on
the other, installs the denial of equality through a system of exploitation that
“subjects” the worker in the social order: “And how am I, comrades? A worker!”
But Cantinflas is not just any worker here. He presents himself as a proletar-
ian caught in an affirmation of political subjectivity that is nothing more than a
variation of bourgeois ideological capture. He is “A worker! A proletarian in the
cause of the work involved in getting this cause off the ground.” In Grundrisse
Marx (1993, 409) observes that the immanent relation between capital and
labor (the essential social bond of bourgeois society) constitutes the civilizing
influence of capital over both nature and humanity by confiscating the real,
self-determining labor of men (living labor) and converting it into objectified
labor (commodification as capital and capital as mastery or command over liv-
ing labor). Marx notes that the productive laborer is he who directly augments
capital. In this process the creative power of labor is the power of capital that
confronts the laborer as an alien power. Capital, on the other hand, realizes itself
through the appropriation of alien labor and the consequent subsumption of
that alien power to the production process of capital. The appropriation of alien
labor—the conversion of labor power into alienated labor—is the very ground
of capital’s “civilizing” influence. As a result, Marx says,
All the progress of civilization, or in other words every increase in the powers of
social production, if you like, in the productive powers of labor itself . . . enriches
not the worker but rather capital; hence it only magnifies again the power domi-
nating labor; increases only the productive power of capital. Since capital is the
antithesis of the worker, this merely increases the objective power standing over
labor. The transformation of labor (as living purposive activity) into capital is, in
itself, the result of the exchange between capital and labor, in so far as it gives the
capitalist the title of ownership to the product of labor (and command over the
same). This transformation is posited only in the production process itself. Thus, the
question whether capital is productive or not is absurd. Labor itself is productive
only if absorbed into capital, where capital forms the basis of production, and
where the capitalist is therefore in command of production . . . Labor, such as it

exists for itself in the worker in opposition to capital, that is, labor in its immedi-
ate being, separated from capital, is not productive. (1993, 308; italics in original)
Cantinflas—as a fully scripted “proletarian in the cause of the work involved

in getting this cause off the ground”—announces himself as the social negation
of living labor. He is living labor captured by the civilizing influence and form
of fully appropriated labor. He is arrested by capital—by surplus value and the
accumulation of alien wealth—as the sole “cause” (origin and goal) of his class
and of his own subjective affirmation. Within the context of this affirmation,
Lombardo, as leader of the ascendant CTM is the semimonarch of a civiliz-
ing cause that is that of worker subjection to the political horizons of capital
rather than that of the cause of labor emancipation, while Cantinflas “the pro-
letarian” is the incarnation of the language and social form of labor appropria-
tion (the subsumption of labor to capital) in postrevolutionary Mexico. He is
the embodiment of the living sacrifice of “the human end-in-itself,” which is
human labor-power, “to an entirely external end” (488), that is, capitalist accu-
mulation. He is the living expression of the sacrifice of life to capital and of the
bourgeois ideological capture necessary for its civilizing orientation.
In this way Mario Moreno Reyes constitutes Cantinflas el pelado in 1937 as
what would become, 25 years later, José Revueltas’s definition of the “headless
proletariat”: “In Mexico what appears to be proletarian ideology constitutes
nothing more than a deformation of worker’s consciousness, a sui generis variety
of the dominant bourgeois-democratic ideology . . . The government of the
bourgeoisie looks in the end like a worker’s government that defends the ‘work-
ing masses.’ As a result, over the course of the last fifty years the Mexican work-
ing class has portrayed itself as a headless proletariat, or at least as a proletariat
that has a head on its shoulders that is not its own” (1962, 75).13
By doing this, however, the comedian sets up the ground for the installation
of his own first person (I/we) as representative of a social rank that belongs at the
heart of the allocations and distributions of the Mexican capitalist order of the
1930s. But thanks to the vertiginous staging of a speech that can have no place
in the logical and calculated administration of society, he installs a first person
(I/we) that belongs to that order without belonging. By doing this he gives lan-
guage to the fact that the semimonarchs of the police order—in this case, labor
leaders—are themselves the very denial of the possibility of a common world
of reason and argument between workers and their supposedly representative
institutions in the postrevolutionary police context. It is their language, and not
that of the dispossessed who parody, that imposes an inequality that contradicts
the equality of speaking beings. As such, there is no truly political representa-
tion, figuration, or symbolization available here because Lombardo, the semi-
monarch, simply is the actuality of the power of the sovereign ban. The pelado,

meanwhile, is (like the inhabitants of Comala in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo) the
language of a being in abandonment.
Cantinflas is the garbled expression of the relation of sovereign exception
as a relation of social ban in which he who is banned is not simply expelled
from the law of capital forever but is held in a relation of abandonment to its
law as a threshold in which surplus labor and the essentiality of labor become
indistinguishable. Cantinflas is the bewildered and disorienting idiom of the
social rule of the exceptio, in which what matters most in his performance is the
specific form of disorientation that his language installs and perpetuates. His is
the language of a social law of inclusion and exclusion that is in force but does
not signify and cannot be calculated or countered. It is merely the exposure of
the pelado’s being as the zero point of all reason and democratic social content.
The irony is that, oblivious of abandonment’s grip, the object of the social
ban—in this case, the peladito—affirms in populist fashion his relation of
excluded inclusion as the very ground of political and national subjectivity (I/
we as the affirmation of a social identity).14 Within this context Cantinflas’s
language becomes that of an imprecise, contentless link between the poverty of
the surplus population resulting from primitive accumulation and its capture
by the nation-state’s distributions of power in the postrevolutionary era. As the
embodiment of a language of separation from the mechanisms and calculations
of power (a separation that he embodies as a result of the ongoing history of
primitive accumulation but which also becomes the ground of his subjective
affirmation as a “worker, a proletarian”), the peladito is the oblivious, improper,
imprecise (i.e., prepolitical) foundation on which the whole economic order, all
its police rationalizations and industrialized inclusions, exists. He is captured as
that threshold and affirms his inclusion as perpetual exclusion from the advan-
tages, privileges, and rationalizations of the social order. He presents himself as
having no part—as having no position or distinction—even though he exists
and belongs within the exclusion (the sovereign abandonment) that he affirms
and reproduces in his circumlocutions. But it is a consciously oblivious staging
of the nonplace of worker’s speech in the social sphere. As a result it is a speech
that founds the sovereign order of capital that laughs at his social interlocutions,
for there is absolutely no questioning or disagreement (no heterogeneous argu-
ment or rational processing of egalitarian logic) available here. Furthermore,
this lack of disagreement is precisely the ground of his modality of knowledge
and the origin of its essentially bourgeois ideological interpellation.15
Roger Bartra calls attention to the relation between Cantinflas and the fab-
rication of the postrevolutionary police order: “The Cantinflesque stereotype
is an excellent metaphor to describe the peculiar structure of mediation that
legitimizes the single-party dictatorship and its governmental despotism. This
structure is a labyrinth of contradictions, risks and feints that allows the most

radical popular demands to be admitted. Inevitably they will be lost in the maze
of corridors, waiting rooms and offices, and their original meaning squandered”
(1996, 148). For Bartra, Cantinflas represents a form of popular conformism
that proposes flight over struggle, cunning over confrontation (147). In the
peladito he sees a symbiosis between the people and their oppressors as they
come together in the sharing of senselessness:
The myth of the pelado in its cantinflesque version is particularly interest-
ing because it reveals with clarity the relation that political culture establishes
between the government and the people. Cantinflas is not only the stereotype
of the poor urban Mexican: he is a painful simulacrum of the profound struc-
tural link that exists between the despotism of the state and the corruption of
the people. Cantinflas’ message is transparent: misery is a permanent state of
stupid primitivism that it is necessary to defend with hilarity. This is expressed
mainly through the corruption that is typical of his speech, along with the abso-
lute implosion of meaning. It is a delirium of metamorphosis in which everything
changes without the slightest apparent meaning. It is understood that there is a
relation of reciprocity between the corruption of the people and the corruption
of the government. The people have the government they deserve. Or the other
way around: the corrupt, authoritarian government has the people that accom-
modate it, and that cantinflesque nationalism offers up as its subject of domina-
tion. (1996, 150)
Cantinflas became an extremely popular star of stage and screen, as well as

an extraordinarily wealthy entrepreneur, precisely by giving a language of ideo-
logical imprecision and disorientation to that zone of indistinction between the
sovereign exclusions of capital and the surplus lives of the arrabales (outskirts) of
Mexico’s nascent industrial modernity. In this sense it was quite fitting that he
be scripted as responding to the exchange of insults between the semimonarchs
of the Mexican labor movement in the summer of 1937.
However, while on one hand, Lombardo Toledano trivialized the internal
dynamic of dialectical thought by insinuating that Cantinflas represented it at
work, on the other, what Cantinflas gave the Mexico City press was an enuncia-
tion of melodramatic consciousness in which historical consciousness is over-
come by a consciousness of futility that is absolutely central to the hegemonic
mythmaking of bourgeois morality and hospitality. In The Melodramatic Imagi-
nation Peter Brooks maintains that “melodrama comes into being in a world
where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown
into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instaura-
tion as a way of life, is of immediate, daily concern” (1976, 88). Ideological
contradiction, in other words, is the very form and content of the melodramatic
imagination. Louis Althusser takes this idea one step further. In his comment

on Bertolazzi and Brecht, he observes that melodramatic consciousness, the

performance of an unsolvable ideological contradiction between bourgeois
consciousness and the plight of the proletariat, denotes “a stationery time in
which nothing resembling History can yet happen, an empty time, accepted
as empty . . . a non-dialectical time in which nothing happens, a time with no
internal necessity forcing it into action” (“Piccolo,” 136–37). As such, melo-
dramatic consciousness is nothing more than the bourgeois reproduction of
the ideological contradiction that is its very content. But it remains without a
politics, since in melodrama, melodrama itself cannot be “dialectized” beyond
itself. This implies that melodramatic consciousness is imposed “from without
on a determinate condition but without any dialectical relation to it. That is
why the melodramatic consciousness can only be dialectical if it ignores its real
conditions and barricades itself inside its myth . . . In it, the dialectic turns in
a void, since it is only the dialectic of the void, cut off from the real world for-
ever. This foreign consciousness, without contradicting its conditions, cannot
emerge from itself by itself, by its own ‘dialectic’” (“Piccolo,” 140).
Mario Moreno was so good at his job that he actually fell victim to his own
portrayal and implementation of melodramatic consciousness. This was evi-
denced “at a dinner party in 1945 given by Maximino Ávila Camacho shortly
before his death. When the conversation turned to the upcoming presidential
election, Moreno attempted to talk seriously about politics. Everybody at the
table laughed, taking his statements as simply a Cantinflas joke, except for Gon-
zalo Santos, the powerful boss of San Luis Potosí, who cut him off abruptly:
‘Shut up and stick to your own language, you know nothing of the people, all
you know is the public’” (Pilcher 2001, 127). Carlos Monsiváis tells of another
typical Cantinflas sketch that sheds further light on the work of melodramatic
consciousness in the 1930s:
Cantinflas, a union leader, at the head of a group of workers, negotiates with the
owner of a soap factory (played by Manuel Medel), and addresses the demands
of the workers to him in a flowery proletarian language immediately approved by
the boss, who is happy to find an opportunity to put up the price of soap. At the
end of the speech, the owner calculates how many hours a year his employees do
not work, if you take away Sundays, holidays, Labor Day, lunch times, birthdays,
saints’ days, union meetings, etc.; he adds up, manipulating the math, and comes
up with a total of four days a year of actual work. Cantinflas, visibly depressed,
asks the owner of the factory how much they owe him for the privilege of working
for his company. (“Cantinflas,” 100)
It is of course hilarious. But it is also urban society’s new postrevolution-

ary consciousness of capital in action. It is the performance of an immediate
material (the capital-labor relation) encountering its natural form in the image

of a labor leader who is obliged to live and breath exclusively from within capi-
tal’s almost magical victory over collective life, language, and intelligence. In
the end, resignation is the only valid reaction for the worker who lives under
the yoke of capital, for social demands can never be satisfied anyway, so why
bother? Against his will the worker is forced to recognize that capital “represents
an authoritarian concretion of general intellect, the point of fusion between
knowledge and command” (Virno 1996, 195). The skit represents the trans-
fer of intellect from worker to constituted power. Mass culture, meanwhile,
becomes a fetishized substitute for the political logic of sovereign command.
As such, in the summer of 1937 Cantinflas performs the point in history in
which the social bonds of capitalist police and bourgeois ideology were begin-
ning to define and extend their not-so-invisible hospitality to the excluded of
modern Mexico. The task of the political, of course, would have been to take a
different route: namely, to process and transform rather than merely perform,
celebrate, and thereby reproduce the inequality that grounds and perpetuates
the zone of indistinction between sovereign exclusion and alienated labor. The
task of the political would have been to open up the terms of human existence
to something other than the garbled affirmation, in the name of popular sub-
jectivity, of the social sphere’s capture by the bourgeois ideology of appropriated
labor and the laws of alien wealth. But that would never have been funny. And
Cantinflas’s melodramatic consciousness could never be hospitable to such a
route. Rather, through the comedian, melodramatic consciousness is performed
as one and the same as the regulative idea of capital in motion. Indeed, capital
is performed as the exclusive regulative idea of the democratic public realm.
Capital is so magical that it is beyond the realm of reason. It cannot be reasoned
with. It just is the only common sense in town.
In the final pages of Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, Jeffrey
M. Pilcher surrenders to melodramatic consciousness’s relation to the undecid-
able limit between the democratic and the demagogic:
The pelado had sprung from the realm of popular culture, and although the char-
acter was nurtured by a media industry that profited from his image, he neverthe-
less remained the communal property of the Mexican people. Attempts by the ruling
party and its unofficial spokesman, Mario Moreno, to trick the masses through
cantinfladas into unquestioning acceptance of an authoritarian government could
only succeed through the complicit reception of the people themselves, and the
maundering medium of Cantinflas’s speech invariably subverted this hegemonic
message. (2001, 211; italics mine).
Such intellectual assurances of the inevitability of popular participation in

the conditions of authoritarianism and exploitation (claims to hegemonic sub-
version notwithstanding) overlook the real dialectic of democratic modernity’s

essential unfreedoms. They barricade historical discourse within a myth of

popular subjectivity grounded in the compensatory affirmation of universal-
ism, in such a way as to suggest that, whether they know it or not, in capitalism
the people always get what they deserve and what they deserve is what they are
given. This is the dialectic of desire and need in a void, and in the dialectic of
the void, in which the bourgeois mode of production is not only the melodrama
of our times. It is time itself rendered melodrama.
In contrast to such populist deformations, the task of democratic thought
is to insist on a relation of practical and theoretical disagreement with (rather
than on one of acquiescence before) the idea that the history of modernity is
the history of the ideological extension and universalization of bourgeois melo-
dramatic consciousness as the communal and imagistic property of the people.
In other words, the task of democratic thought is to suggest the possibility of a
time for the people in which the political is not neutralized or immunized; in
which something other than populist autoimmunity can happen; a time con-
taining an internal necessity that signals a coming event, that forces action,
or that at least is hospitable to the unconditional critique of the social order’s
administration of peace and order.

CHAPTER 4
Humanism Begets Good Order

Alfonso Reyes and Police Thought,
September–December 1939
The invisible is defined by the visible as its invisible, its forbidden vision: the
invisible is not therefore simply what is outside the visible, the outer darkness
of exclusion—but the inner darkness of exclusion, inside the visible itself because
defined by its structure.
—Louis Althusser
To take sides is the worst thing we can do. It is far more legitimate to maintain
hope in Vasconcelos’ “cosmic race”; or faith in Waldo Frank’s “human culture.”
Let us adopt everything and strive to reconcile everything. That which cannot be
reconciled will be wrong, and from there we can dispense with both left and right.
—Alfonso Reyes
The world is a labyrinth from which it is impossible to escape because all roads,
even when they pretend to go North or South, really go to Rome.
—Jorge Luis Borges
R
ecent scholarship on Alfonso Reyes and the antipositivist generation
of scholars known as the “Ateneo de la Juventud” or, as Alfonso García
Morales calls it, the “Ateneo de México,” has emphasized the universal-
izing function of the state and its relation to the humanist approach to cul-
tural history in modern Mexico.1 Robert T. Conn has presented Alfonso Reyes’s
intellectual sources through the prism of his “Aesthetic” and “Pedagogic” states
as fundamental conceptual matrices for advancing the unifying function of
culture. Meanwhile, drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s response to Hegel and
Croce, Horacio Legrás has examined the relation between the formation of

the “Ateneo” in the final years of the Díaz regime and the forging of what he
calls the “ethical state” during the postrevolutionary period. Neither scholar,
however, considers the historical, philosophical, and political question of sov-
ereign power, or of sovereign will, in its relation to the universalizing function
of the postrevolutionary state and the humanist rendering of national culture.
As a result, a concept of the political in the relation between state function and
humanistic culture in Alfonso Reyes, for example, is still largely unavailable to
us. The purpose of this chapter is to explore that relation and its consequences
for our understanding of police logic and its relation to history in twentieth-
century Mexico.
Though for the most part conceptually amorphous and presenting only brief
and sporadic close readings of Reyes’s writings and ideas, Robert T. Conn in his
The Politics of Philology recuperates Reyes as a complex “Arielista” revivalist of
German eighteenth-century humanism: a modern peripheral devourer of the
post-Kantian models provided by the “Classical Weimar” of Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and
Friedrich Schiller (which as we know, was itself a revival of Greek civilization).2
Conn presents Reyes as a philological humanist who made classical, European
Enlightenment, and North American intellectual models his own through
adaptation, as he drew on an eclectic array of sources largely in order to con-
vert the cultural and historical periphery—Mexico, “Hispanic America”—into
the transcendence of all possible forms of sociohistorical contention or cultural
antagonism. In The Aesthetic State Josef Chytry describes Schiller’s notion of
Weimar Humanität in terms that allow us to understand Reyes’s project of lay-
ing claim to all aspects, origins and levels of collective life and cultural history
from classical to modern times. Like Schiller in Germany, Reyes strived to offer
his fellow Mexicans and Latin Americans “a harvest of all previous cultures
through reflection on, and empathy with, those cultures. His ideal of an aes-
thetic state, drawing on the model of the ancient Greeks, remained resolutely
compatible with the small state, and, fully consonant with Weimar ideas on
genuine organic culture, it eschewed explicit social and political radicalism in
its image of the steady nurturing of the aesthetic individual, for whom the
state embodied his or her own harmony writ large” (Chytry 1989, 102). By
sustaining the mutual dependency of freedom and beauty “only an individual
or a people brought up primarily on aesthetic sensibility will experience and
be capable of social, political, and moral freedom,” for “the aesthetic mode
of awareness constitutes a state of mind in which the internal bifurcations of
humans are overcome” (102).3
Conn’s The Politics of Philology uncovers the multiple genealogies of Reyes’s
intellectual world and occasionally sheds light on how he appropriated and
put them to work in his writing. It is a laudable attempt to restore specificity

Humanism Begets Good Order ● 89
to Reyes’s genealogical “harvest of all previous cultures.” However, despite the

care taken to recuperate Reyes’s multiple models and singular appropriations,
the book provides us more with a (consciously incomplete) catalogue raisonné
of influences, sources, and borrowed names than it does a significant reading
of the politics of philology. In the end Reyes remains an isolated monument
to be revered on account of the authority of his sources and their genealogies.
However, he is not necessarily to be touched by the action or accomplishment
of thought itself. In the book’s conclusion, the author assures us that he has
“endeavored not to characterize [Reyes] as he characterized himself—that is, as
the sensible and mature intellectual who heroically defended Culture, Reason,
Mexico, and the liberal State . . . By excavating from Reyes’s project the critical
tensions sublimated and, ultimately, negated therein, I have sought to subvert
that sense of certainty” (Conn 2002, 173). The book, however, does little to
challenge certainty. Rather, like its object of study the question for the politics
of philology is posed purely in the midst of philological domination. As a result
Conn posits a vision of Reyes that, rather than challenging his basic premises,
preserves them in their essence and maintains them firmly in their philologi-
cal element, even though sublimated tensions are voiced on occasion. Conn’s
philological approach to the politics of philology is a process of deliberation in
exclusive service to the doing and making of philology, rather than to its limit
or finitude. As a result philological method actually impedes any question for
the politics of philology, simply because the question can be neither recognized
nor understood when thought is always already surrendered to the philologi-
cal. Like Reyes himself then, The Politics of Philology upholds the ideological
disavowal of the notion of the political as it appeared in the ancients themselves:
The Ancients, much more than the Moderns, acknowledged that the whole basis
of politics is the struggle between the poor and the rich. But that’s just it: what
they acknowledged was a strictly political reality—even if it meant trying to over-
come it. The struggle between the rich and the poor is not social reality, which
politics then has to deal with. It is the actual institution of politics itself. There
is a politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the
poor. (Rancière 1999, 11)
Reyes’s politics are the politics of human perfectibility. This perfectibility is

to be achieved through the continual forging of a cultural consensus grounded
in the active neutralization of the political (the ancient struggle between the
poor and the rich). Therefore, the politics of his philology is essentially the
political idea of the police understood as the never-ending establishment of aes-
thetic procedures whereby consent is perfected and extended, the organization
of powers is naturalized, the distribution of places and roles is rendered beauti-
ful, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution are harmonized. Reyes’s

politics are the sustained and systematic management of the “sweetness and
light” of beauty and intelligence, thereby marking the idyllic end of the field of
the political in the name of an aesthetic of absolute subjection to the harmoni-
ous.4 Culture is considered “not merely as the endeavor to see and learn this,
but as the endeavor, also, to make it prevail” (Arnold 1960, 46). It is “the most
resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State
which culture teaches us to nourish” (204). Meanwhile, The Politics of Philology
reproduces Reyes’s cultural endeavors mostly without questioning their limits
or prevailing ideological or political implications.
The question of the political in its relation to the “Ateneo’s” aesthetic of
absolute subjection to the harmonious is taken up in Horacio Legrás’s evalua-
tion of the group. In his work, Legrás (“Ateneo”) examines the group’s relation
to the intellectual origins of the “ethical state” in modern Mexico. Following
up on Alan Knight’s observation that intellectuals “are creators and purveyors
of ideology” (1991, 141), the author examines the figure and function of
the intellectual in the wake of the mass upheaval of the revolutionary years,
noting that “The Ateneo embodied a cultural formation in solidarity with
a new state modality (modern and inclusive), which the post-revolutionary
state imposed definitively in later years” (“Ateneo,” 36). That cultural forma-
tion is the “ethical state” (“Ateneo,” 44). Legrás quotes Gramsci’s observation
that every state is ethical “in as much as one of its most important functions
is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral
level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces
for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes” (quoted in
Legrás, “Ateneo,” 44). Legrás evaluates the “Ateneo’s” revival of the classics
(alongside Schiller, Matthew Arnold, Rodó, and others) as the forging of an
ethical-aesthetic state that was designed to provide the intellectual, moral, and
spiritual conditions for establishing universal governmental and subjective
cultural matrices in postrevolutionary Mexico. Legrás evaluates the “ateneísta”
project in a positive light: “The Ateneo triumphed in advancing the formative
and integrative function of the intellectual . . . They discovered the inevita-
bly political and prejudiced destiny of cultural intervention and were even
capable of glimpsing, in a time dominated by bohemians and ivory towers,
the committed, constructive character of art” (58). Legrás is obviously saying
something very important here: before discarding the writings of the “Ateneo”
to the trash heap of history, read them and reassess the formative and integra-
tive function of the intellectual not just in relation to historical processes of
state formation but also in relation to the present: “I have strived to restitute
some of their contemporaneity with the conviction that, in contrast to the
Porfirio Díaz magistrally described by the ateneístas, for them there was no
thin pane of glass separating them from reality” (58).

However, in Legrás’s restitution of the “Ateneo” to the present there is a con-

ceptual question that still remains. For if the intellectuals of the “Ateneo,” and
in Legrás’s essay predominantly Henríquez Ureña, embody the formative and
integrative function of the intellectual in relation to the modern “ethical” state
(and therefore in relation to the extension of “civil society”), Gramsci himself
points to a fundamental limit in the relation between state function and the
ethics of the modern state. That limit is the very notion of social class and its
role in the fabrication of the ethical state. In order to appreciate this, we should
draw more extensively from the section on “State and Civil Society” in The
Prison Notebooks. Here Gramsci calls attention to the common confusion of
terms between “class-State” and “regulated society” (or civil society): “The con-
fusion of class-State and regulated society is peculiar to the middle classes and
petty intellectuals, who would be glad of any regularization that would prevent
sharp struggles and upheavals. It is a typically reactionary and regressive concep-
tion” (1985, 258). He then develops his argument with the section already cited
partially by Legrás: “In my opinion the most reasonable and concrete thing
that can be said about the ethical State, the cultural State, is this: every State is
ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great
mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type)
which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and
hence to the interests of the ruling classes” (258). Gramsci consequently assigns
the pedagogical function, alongside other private initiatives, as paramount to
establishing a social apparatus for the political and cultural hegemony—that
is, for the establishment of the “ethics”—of the ruling classes: “The school as a
positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educa-
tive function, are the most important State activities in this sense” (258).
Gramsci then proceeds with the following fundamental qualification:
Hegel’s conception belongs to a period in which the spreading development of
the bourgeoisie could seem limitless, so that its ethicity or universality could
be asserted: all mankind will be bourgeois. But, in reality, only the social group
that poses the end of the State and its own end as the target to be achieved can
create an ethical State—i.e. one which tends to put an end to the internal divi-
sions of the ruled, etc., and to create a technically and morally unitary social
organism. (259)
In other words, the ethical state—the modern state as secular educator and
regulator of the lives of “the People”—is a police state grounded in the quest for
“hegemony protected by the armor of coercion” (263). However, for Gramsci
only the proletarian revolution can inaugurate the true ethical state, because it
is only the social group that poses its own end that can destroy class distinction
and, along with it, the state itself. Anything else is just the social regulation of

the ruling class’s ethics, that is, the consolidation and extension of the grounds
of regulation (subjection) in the sustained interests of class privilege and
domination.
While it may be argued that the post-Ariel Republic of Letters proposed by
Alfonso Reyes and the members of the “Ateneo” sought to establish a techni-
cally and morally unitary social organism by transcending the internal divi-
sions of human culture, in order to think them through in Gramscian terms
one would have to locate a working definition in their writing of “social class”
or “proletariat,” or a notion of the “end to the internal divisions of the ruled”
that referred explicitly to the ancient struggle between the poor and the rich or
even to the destruction of the class structure of society. However, this is never
going to happen.
Legrás is right to point out that the members of the “Ateneo” discovered the
inevitably political and prejudiced destiny of cultural intervention, and it was this
discovery that mapped out the intellectual ground for the invention of the Mexi-
can “ethical” state in subsequent years. However, theirs was an ethic that belonged
considerably more to the police extension of the bourgeois mode of production
than it did to the possibility of challenging or undermining that order. This indi-
cates that before we strive to restitute Reyes and the “Ateneo” to the present on
the basis that they attempted to define the terms of historical, philosophical, and
cultural accord or consensus within the social sphere, we need to reflect further on
the question of the political in their language. After all, for the “Ateneo” thinkers
the overcoming of all disharmony, discord, disagreement, or dissonance in both
culture and history was grounded not in the transformation of the relations of
production in society (the precondition for the establishment of a “true” ethical
state, in Gramsci’s words) but in the consolidation of a metaphysical anthropol-
ogy of national being, that is, in an aesthetic subjectivism anchored in a fully
harmonious notion of national Mexican “Identity.”5
The question, of course, is how the political—understood here as the ancient
struggle between the poor and the rich—plays itself out in Reyes’s approach to
the relation between aesthetics, cultural history, and state formation. By this I
do not wish to imply that the political is a preexisting object beyond the textual
or a supplementary field of vision that needs to be inserted into Reyes’s language
in order to account for his ideological portrayals of cultural history. In other
words, I am not talking about the political as that which is lacking or absent in
Reyes’s writing. On the contrary, I am referring to the political in Reyes as that
which is not missing, as that which has always been there, but as the object of a
productive oversight in which the whole function of the field of knowledge is to
not see it. Indeed, the function of the field of knowledge is to forbid any sight-
ing of it. As such, I consider the disorder of the political in Reyes to be identical
to the disorder of police knowledge.

For this reason I consider it to be particularly important to examine the

historical, philosophical, and political complexities of two of Alfonso Reyes’s
essays dating from the final period of the Cárdenas presidency (1934–40). I
am referring here to “Pasado inmediato,” dated September 1939 (which has
been described by Carlos Monsiváis as “Reyes’s most severe text” [1989, 510]),
and “Justo Sierra y la historia patria,” dated December 1939. These two essays
(which I read as companion texts) coincide with the beginning of Reyes’s ten-
ure at the Casa de España as Spain’s Second Republic crumbled in the face of
Franco’s rebel forces. They were conceptualized in a period of four months and
were penned only shortly after Reyes’s return to Mexico from his diplomatic
duties in Buenos Aires. After years of absence then, Reyes returns to Mexico
and immediately writes about his experience of the final years of the Díaz dic-
tatorship as a means of confronting the foundational question of culture versus
anarchy in Mexico’s “immediate past” and, as a consequence, in its immediate
present. Before initiating our close reading of these texts, however, we should
first indulge in a brief conceptual digression that will nevertheless allow us to
come back to Reyes’s writings on modern Mexican cultural history and the
transition from dictatorship to the consolidation of the integrative police order
(or ethical state).
The first step in this digression is to note that Reyes’s notion of the political
is linked intimately to the Latin-Romanic notion of humanitas, and therefore to
the care for the fact that man (homo) is human (humanus) and not inhumane,
that is, outside his essence (Heidegger, “Letter,” 244). Roman humanitas is set
up against, and defined in relation to its opposite. As Martin Heidegger informs
us in his “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Latin-Romanic notions of education lie at
the heart of the distinction between the human and the inhumane:
Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in the age of
the Roman Republic. Homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus. Homo hum-
anus here means the Romans, who exalted and honored Roman virtus through
the “embodiment” of the education [paideia] taken over from the Greeks. These
were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture was acquired in the schools
of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio et institutio in bonas artes. Educa-
tion thus understood was translated as humanitas. We encounter the first human-
ism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman phenomenon,
which emerges from the encounter of Roman civilization with the culture of late
Greek civilization. (“Letter,” 244)
It is the sustained division of the world into humanitas and homo barbarus
(inhumane, barbarous man) that allows us to consider the origins of Alfonso
Reyes’s humanistic universalism in tandem with Carl Schmitt’s notion of the
political. Heidegger continues,

The so-called Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy is a

renascentia romanitatis. Because romanitas is what matters, it is concerned with
humanitas and therefore with Greek paideia. But Greek civilization is always seen
in its later form and this itself is seen from a Roman point of view. The homo
romanus of the Renaissance also stands in opposition to homo barbarus. But now
the in-humane is the supposed barbarism of Gothic Scholasticism in the Middle
Ages. Therefore a studium humanitatis, which in a certain way reaches back to the
ancients and thus also becomes a revival of Greek civilization, always adheres to
historically understood humanism. For Germans this is apparent in the human-
ism of the eighteenth century supported by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller.
(“Letter,” 244)6
With the conquest of the Indias Occidentales—a historical, philosophical,

and legal juncture at which Europe was forced to reinvent itself as the center of
the earth and the source of all standards—it was the Roman distinction between
humanitas and homo barbarus, together with their common relation to Aristo-
tle’s Politics, that fueled the discussion regarding just war and legal title for the
occupation and annexation of territory alongside the subjugation of the indig-
enous peoples (the origins of the jus publicum Europaeum, or European public
law).7 For example, it was the distinction between humanitas and homo barbarus
that allowed Juan Ginés Sepúlveda to argue in 1530 for native servitude, legal
land appropriation, and the sovereignty of the Spanish state over all conquered
territories.8 In later years Francisco de Vitoria upheld the distinction between
humanitas and homo barbarus but questioned the Aristotelian maxim that some
people are slaves by nature. He did this by following St. Augustine’s thesis that
people may be barbarous and human and, like Bartolomé de Las Casas before
him, opened up the legality of conquest to the question of Christian guidance
(education and spiritual conversion). Ultimately what mattered to Vitoria
was that “Indians, though they are not Christians and may be guilty of many
crimes, should not be treated as criminals, but as opponents in war” (Schmitt
2003, 111–12). This nondiscriminatory notion of war against barbarians—a
war that is always about the fundamental legality of apportioning space and
converting souls to Christianity—was animated not just by the notion of the
homo barbarus but also by the notion of hostis (meaning “public enemy,” as
opposed to inimicus, the “private enemy”).
The barbarian, then, became a public, legal enemy in a war between civiliza-
tionally unequal humans occupying the same space.9 In the nineteenth century
this was the essential role of the homo barbarus in the nomos of the emergent
Latin American nation-state. This can be seen most persuasively in Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo in which we encounter, in response to the figure
of the tyrant Rosas as the incarnation of the homo barbarus-become-sovereign
power, a fundamental thesis on the relation between peripheral liberal culture

and “the structure-determining convergence of order and orientation in the

cohabitation of peoples” (Schmitt 2003, 78). Homo barbarus as hostis and there-
fore as the public enemy of the nomos—as the public enemy, that is, of private
land appropriation that, for the liberal Sarmiento, was the essential telos for the
extension of the legal jurisdiction of the sovereign secular nation-state—is also
the underlying ground for Carl Schmitt’s 1932 definition of the political as the
distinction between friend and enemy:
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be
reduced is that between friend and enemy . . . Each participant is in a position
to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and
therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of exis-
tence . . . The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete
and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by
economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic
sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies . . . The
enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general . . .
The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense. (1976, 27–28)
It is important to highlight two things here in the relation between the nomos
and the subjective (and therefore ideological) power of assertion of the friend-
enemy distinction in Schmitt. The first is that it is the nomos that segregates
its enmity and not vice versa. As Alberto Moreiras observes, “Enmity does not
precede the nomos: it is in each case produced by the nomos. The friend/enemy
division is therefore a subordinate division to the primary nomic division, and
is produced from it. The friend/enemy division is therefore not supreme: it is
generated by a nomic antithesis, and as such remains beneath it” (2006, 33).
In other words, the conditions for the public friend-enemy division are tied
intimately to, and are mediated by, the ideological effects of “the initial mea-
sure and division of pastureland, i.e., the land-appropriation” (Schmitt 2003,
70). The enemy is the perceived existential (civilizational, cultural, ideological)
threat to, or negation of, the collective “way of life” that has arisen as a result
of land appropriation and its concomitant administration and legal rule. The
second thing to be highlighted is that Schmitt establishes a highly problematic
distinction here between the field of the political as the friend-enemy antithesis
and other social arenas such as the religious, cultural, economic, legal, and sci-
entific spheres. He affirms that “the inherently objective nature and autonomy
of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish,
and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses”
(1976, 27). This absolute separation between intimately related human spheres
is no doubt convenient but largely unconvincing. In his discussion of the rela-
tion between Schmitt and Hobbes, however, Moreiras carries the discussion

into a more plausible realm by pointing out that culture mediates the political:
“War between friends and enemies is a conflict that is already structurally medi-
ated by the cultural. If the cultural mediates the political, then despite Schmitt
the political is not the final instance in the construction of sovereignty” (2006,
55). This opens up our digression—this pathway back toward Alfonso Reyes
and the political—to the tension between various disparate elements, namely,
the nomos of the emergent nation-state in its relation to land appropriation; the
political understood as the subjectivist affirmation of a friend-enemy antithesis
that is conditioned by nomic land-appropriation and its cultural history; educa-
tion as the eruditio et institutio in bonas artes (scholarship and training in good
conduct, also known as humanitas); and the extension and legitimization of
sovereign will.
For the time being, however, I will leave these elements aside in order to take
them up again a little later in this chapter. First, however, I would like to posit
the question of amity for, in Schmitt’s definition of the political, enemies exist
only to the extent that there are, or could be, friends. Indeed, more than any
other conceptual framework it is the politics of friendship that allows us direct
access to the language of Alfonso Reyes and the question of the political in the
final days of the 1930s. Carlos Monsiváis was the first to highlight the rela-
tion between Reyes and the idea of friendship as a communal intellectual proj-
ect. However, he limits his insight to biographical detail and the early epistles
between Reyes and Henríquez Ureña (Monsiváis 1989, 506–8). Friendship as
a concept and as a structuring force in Reyes’s thought—a force that, as Margo
Glantz (1989) has pointed out, cannot be separated from the function of the
master—is for the most part overlooked by Monsiváis.10 “Pasado inmediato”
and “Justo Sierra y la historia patria,” however, are all about the affirmation
and restitution to the present of history’s intellectual amity lines and perceived
or desired master functions.11 Thirty years after the outbreak of what would
become a decade of revolutionary upheaval, “Pasado inmediato” restores the
jurisdiction of genealogical friendship to the revolution. Meanwhile, “Justo
Sierra y la historia patria,” which was penned in honor of the impending publica-
tion in 1940 of Sierra’s monumental historical writings (titled Evolución política
del pueblo mexicano), testifies to the legacy of the “Ateneo” generation’s intellectual
and institutional pater familias (whom Reyes refers to as a “white giant” in “Justo
Sierra” [142] and as “the best: almost a saint” in “Pasado inmediato” [25]).
The function of authorial desire in these texts is to restore and shore up the
lines between amity, historical knowledge, and the political. This allows us to
speculate that for Reyes these texts are a response to the perceived fracturing
of, or decline in, the effectiveness of those lines, thereby indicating a profound
crisis of authority in the decisive ethical (and therefore cultural) state form. If
this is the case, then they are a response to the decline of a certain social master

function, or ideal of subjection, within the nomos of postrevolutionary Mexi-

can society: a response to the challenges caused by a theoretical and political
decline in the relation between a certain notion of culture and its concomitant
truth regimes. Friendship, within such a context, would represent a chance to
restitute a truth to which humanistic historical knowledge could be devoted, in
a world placed increasingly at risk by a profound and increasingly generalized
shift in the ethical authority of the state.
Reyes is writing at an extraordinary moment: a moment of maximal nomic
danger both for the national context as well as for the stage of world affairs.
Between 1935 and 1936 President Lázaro Cárdenas had revitalized the agrar-
ian reforms first agreed upon in the Torreón Pact of 1914 and later guaranteed
under Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. This revitalization, together with
the expropriation of foreign-owned oil resources in March 1938, unleashed a
national and international debate on the terms and privileges of private prop-
erty as well as on the terms of sovereign control of the nation over its land and
subsoil. The symbolic unification of the national community with the soil and
subsoil as a result of the “socialization” of property was guaranteed by the 1917
Constitution and was inherited directly from the Jacobinist and communitar-
ian forces of the agrarian revolution. The agrarian reforms of 1935 to 1936, the
nationalization of the oil industry in March 1938, and the handing over of the
railroad system to the workers in May 1938 marked the culminating point in
the pact (a pact that had actually been written into law since 1917) between
the Mexican state and the people. As already suggested, this was perhaps the
moment of greatest intensity in the postrevolutionary debate over conflicting
notions of law, private property, and the relation between individual and society
in postrevolutionary Mexico, because Cárdenas was recuperating from the revo-
lution the more radical tenets of collectivized property while the initial victors
of the revolution and the subsequent postrevolutionary “establishment” upheld
the US liberal-capitalist notion of private property.12
Meanwhile, by 1938 the founding in Guanajuato of the Unión Nacional
Sinarquista had unleashed across the center of the country hundreds of thou-
sands of peasants mobilized by a religious utopia motivated by “Cristero” mil-
lenarianism and the Spanish falangist myths of blood, sacrifice, and death (Gilly
2001, 352). In September of the same year, Cárdenas wrote a letter to President
Roosevelt proposing a coordinated continental boycott of Germany as a result
of Nazi aggressions in Czechoslovakia (Gilly 2001, 342). However, his sug-
gestion was not taken seriously. Chamberlain, Dudalier, Mussolini, and Hitler
met in Munich and consolidated Nazi rule over Czechoslovakia. On September
22, 1938, Trotsky (who had been in Mexico since the previous year) wrote in
the press, “After the collapse of Czechoslovakia Stalin will seek an accord with
Hitler” (quoted in Gilly 2001, 343). He was right. Six months later, on April 1,

1939, Franco proclaimed the victory of his rebellious forces and the demise of
a Spanish republic that had received unconditional support from the Cárdenas
regime even since before the rebels’ initial assault three years earlier. By the time
Reyes began to put pen to paper with “Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra
y la historia patria,” the world was well on the way to the conflagration of
world war, and as Adolfo Gilly puts it, like the Zapatista commune of 1915, the
cardenista “utopia” was increasingly alone and isolated as the political climate
within Mexico turned to the Right (2001, 351).
It is at this moment of maximal nomic anxiety, of fundamental shifts in
regional, national, and imperial realities that Alfonso Reyes turns to the ques-
tion of national cultural history and the present’s relation to the revolution. As
we will see, the structure underlying the notion of the political in these essays
is that of the restitution and restoration of a previous time. The intelligibility
of restoration in both essays—the conceptual terrain of their essential problem-
atic—is posited in and as a relation to the determination of visibility and to
what Althusser calls “the organic link binding the invisible to the visible” (1999,
25). Within this organic link the visible is “the definite structured field of the
theoretical problematic of a given theoretical discipline,” and the invisible is “its
shadowy obverse” (25), that is, “the defined excluded, excluded from the field of
visibility and defined as excluded by the existence and peculiar structure of the
field of the problematic” (26).
Reyes is perfectly conscious of this ideological binding and problematic:
“Unless it is an inventory of inexpressive facts the historical essay, consciously
or unconsciously, brings to light the historian’s angle of vision and the mental
language of his time, vision and language containing a representation of the
world” (“Justo,” 161). In “Pasado inmediato” Reyes is more explicit. Regional
(Mexican) ontology, in its relation to the historical, depends on the consolida-
tion and definition of the grounds and limits of the visible: “Perspective is a
finalist interpretation . . . By adding several perspectives and systems of refer-
ence, reducing some to others and taking into consideration the relativity of
them all, as well as their interdependence on an omnipresent eye capable of
assimilating the picture from all sides simultaneously, we will come closer to
the miracle of comprehension. The immediate past is the most modest of verb
tenses . . . Hopefully, one day, between us all, we will present it successfully as a
‘defined past’” (3–4). The demarcation of the visible and the invisible, in other
words, is what will allow Mexico to wake up from the nightmare of historical
uncertainty and instability.
It is friendship that provides the specific and decisive orientation for
Reyes’s thematization of cultural history and the political. This does not
mean to say, however, that the essays in question present absolutely no shad-
owy obverse or inner darkness of exclusion or, indeed, uncovering of enmity,

within the certainty and truth of their conceptual imperium. On the con-
trary, both essays present enmity as the defined excluded, as excluded from
the field of visibility and defined as excluded by the existence and structure
of the field of amity. This inner darkness of exclusion in these essays pro-
duces the necessary fall from truth of amity’s opposite. Furthermore, this
relation between the certainty of the overseen and the exclusions that are
sustained and silenced by the overseer bears witness to the essential ground
of Reyes’s Latin-Romanic imperialism.
These wide-ranging essays represent for Reyes a moment of sustained reflec-
tion on the relation between culture and temporality in the months leading up
to the crucial presidential elections of 1940. Together they allow us to approach
the conceptual determination of the relation between culture, temporality, and
the political in late 1930s Mexico since they highlight, at a moment of maximal
national and international nomic anxiety, the ways in which relations of conti-
nuity can be and, indeed, are established between the production of historical
narrative and the consolidation of the modern bourgeois state form.13 They
highlight the relation between the speculative understanding of history and the
forging of grids of intelligibility designed to oversee the bourgeois management
and administration of life on a national scale.
For Reyes it is all a question of suturing history to truth and culture (which
Reyes refers to as “intelligence”) in a context of intergenerational instability
and ongoing debate on the significance for the present of the chaos of the past:
“The problem: the History that has just occurred is always the least appreci-
ated . . . The immediate past! Is there anything more unpopular? It is, to a
certain degree, the enemy” (“Pasado,” 3). How, given this problematic context,
can the cultural sphere give sense to the historical when it is grounded in the
instability (the cultural and institutional anarchy) of the revolution? As already
noted, for Reyes it is a question of “intelligence.” In particular, it is a question
of intelligence’s ability to establish a relation of absolute agreement and confor-
mity between knowledge (reason) and fact (Mexican history):
The Mexican Revolution sprang more from an impulse than an idea. It was not
planned. It did not correspond to the application of a framework of principles,
but, rather, was a natural growth. Previous programs were drowned in its torrents
and could never govern it. It was not prepared by encyclopedists or philosophers,
more or less conscious of the consequences of their doctrines, as was the French
Revolution. It was not organized by the dialecticians of social warfare, as was the
Russian Revolution. It had not even been outlined in light of our own Liberal
Reform. No: circumstance prevailed and ultimate goals could not be glimpsed. It
was born almost blind like a child and, like a child, only slowly began to open its
eyes. Intelligence accompanied the Revolution but did not produce it. Sometimes
it just suffered as it waited for the day of illumination. The dignity of History

consists in achieving the parallelism of ideas and facts, in which what should
function for peoples is the golden adage proposed by the Moral Epistle: “Make
thought equal to life.” (“Pasado,” 8–10)14
Obviously, what is at stake for Reyes in intelligence’s relation to Mexico’s rev-

olutionary historicity is the ability of the intellectual to grasp the indeterminate
realm of the uncanny and transform it into a condition that enables oversight
and management (which he refers to here as “a defined past,” a product of “the
miracle of comprehension”). The grasping, transformational force of the intel-
lectual in Reyes has its origin in the adequatio intellectus et rei (the agreement
and conformity of knowledge with fact and of fact with knowledge) that lies at
the heart of the Latin-Romanic notion of veritas.15 This is where education, the
Roman eruditio et institutio in bonas artes (humanitas) becomes fully bound to
the author’s forging of historical amity-master lines. Moreover, it is this act of
binding that enables the development of his metaphysical quest for a defined
(calculated, manageable) past.
Reyes uncovers what he considers to be the nexus between education and
amity by recounting the story of the founding of the Escuela Nacional Prepara-
toria under the guidance of the nineteenth-century liberal positivist intellectu-
als, Gabino Barreda and Justo Sierra. The Escuela is chosen by Reyes because
it was the “‘alma mater’ of so many generations, it gave a new physiognomy
to the country” (“Pasado,” 13) after years of turmoil, upheaval, resistance to
foreign occupation, civil war, and Liberal reform. However, his essay is not so
much about positivist state formation in the nineteenth century as it is about
the decadence of the state form and the transition to a more vital, humanistic
evaluation of the cultural sphere’s relation to modern state formation.
Reyes delves into the gradual decomposition of the Escuela’s essential edu-
cational mission that begins to lose its way, he suggests, as the Díaz regime
becomes increasingly institutionalized, homogeneous, lethargic, and self-satis-
fied in the aging of its paternalistic caste structure. Like the increasingly ossified
Porfirian state form, “Barreda’s legacy dried up in the mechanisms of method”
(“Pasado,” 15); “Scientific instrumentality became rusty” (16); “Physics and
Chemistry became chalkboard sciences, without sustained experimental cor-
roboration” (17); “Literature was in decline” (19); and “Whoever wanted to
attain something from the Humanities had to conquer them alone, without any
effective help from the Escuela” (20). The situation in the Escuela Nacional de
Jurisprudencia (25–30) is not much better, as the country’s education system
in general is said to have fallen into a “greenhouse atmosphere with the rarity
of a rubber bell,” because says Reyes, “we were lacking the tools to examine
ourselves . . . We had a static concept of the country and were ignorant of the
torments threatening us” (30–32).

However, Reyes’s generation (the so-called Centenary Generation) “began

to suspect that we had been educated—unconsciously—in an imposture . . .
Mexican positivism had become a pedagogical routine and in our eyes was los-
ing credit” (“Pasado,” 33). It is at this point, with the image of Porfirian com-
placency and ossification underlying Reyes’s portrayal of cultural and scientific
isolationism in the pedagogical institutions, that the author transforms his essay
into a compendium of the names of the historical, cultural (i.e., literary), and
philosophical friends and masters of the emergent Revolutionary age. The new
dawning of intelligence in the culture of the immediate past is to be found in
the names of Friedrich Nietzsche, José Enrique Rodó, Justo Sierra, Jesús Urueta,
Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Salvador Díaz Mirón, Manuel José Othón, Francisco
de Icaza, Luis Urbina, Amado Nervo, José Juan Tablada, Rubén Darío, and the
Spanish “Generation of ’98” (34–35); Alfonso Cravioto, Luis Castillo Ledón,
Jesús Acevedo, Ricardo Gómez Robelo (39–41); Rafael López, Manuel de la
Parra, Eduardo Colín, Roberto Argüelles Bringas, Enrique González Martínez,
and Julio Torri (43). Last, but by no means least, it is to be found in the names
of his fellow founders of the “Ateneo de la Juventud” in 1909: Antonio Caso,
José Vasconcelos, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña (44–48).16
It is at this point that Reyes begins to adopt (without irony) the Weimar
language of an emergent generation of volatile, youthful geniuses living in open
rebellion against the accepted standards of their academic and cultural envi-
ronment, the actions of whom, in the cultural sphere, are portrayed as fully
proportionate to the emergent political rebelliousness of their times. It is this
language that establishes the ground for the synthesis (the Latin-Romanic adae-
quatio intellectus et rei) of Mexico’s (predominantly agrarian, peasant-based)
revolutionary history and the intellectual intelligence of his urban, bourgeois
generation: “When the attack began these were the knights of the Mexican
‘Sturm-und-Drang” (“Pasado,” 47), he says. “The challenge was sincere and
we accepted it. In the streets we raised the flag of free art . . . For the first time
you could see the youth filing past, clamoring for the privileges of beauty and
ready to defend it with their fists . . . That is how our action extended through
the bourgeois neighborhoods. There was a little of everything: metaphysics and
education, painting and poetry. The success was evident” (49–50). In 1908
after a number of attacks against Gabino Barreda (founder of the Escuela Pre-
paratoria) in the conservative press of Mexico City, the positivists of the Escuela
organized a conference in honor of his memory. However, Reyes’s small aca-
demic vanguard surprised the proceedings with its noncompliance with the
institution’s positivist precepts. This “new political sentiment,” says Reyes in
exalted terms that actually have little to do with fact, “was the first patent signal
of a public consciousness emancipated from the regime. Within the theoretical
order, it is not imprecise to say that this was the dawn of the Revolution” (51).17

In Reyes’s mind this theoretical dawning of the Revolution coincides fully

with the practical origins of what would later become the Maderista uprising
that gripped the nation from 1910 to 1913. The question, of course, is how to
create this synthesis for the readership of 1939. Reyes does this by framing the
revolution as an evolutionary passage from the cultural and scientific isolation-
ism of the Porfirian era to Mexico’s dynamic integration into a cultural league of
nations—a natural transition toward cultural cosmopolitanism (universalism)
that emerged harmoniously in tandem with the initial expression of displeasure
that surfaced in 1910 against the stagnant protocols of the “ancien régime.”
In Reyes’s account, what allows for that natural evolution from isolationism
to universal culture is his own “literary passion”; a maneuver that highlights a
quite remarkable indistinction in Reyes’s thought between individual experi-
ence (in this case, personal preference or literary taste) and the political turmoil
of a whole national class structure:
The uprisings have begun, the scattered outbursts, the first steps of the Revolu-
tion. Meanwhile, the culture campaign begins to see results. We should insist
on summing up its conclusions once again. Literary passion tempered itself in
the cultivation of Greece, it rediscovered Spain—which never before had been
considered with such love or knowledge—; it discovered England, it looked out
toward Germany without ever distancing itself from the always kind and beloved
France. It wanted to return a little to the Classical languages and a lot to Span-
ish; it searched for the formative traditions that constructed our civilization and
our national being. In very different regions and other depths, soon the political
shake-up would be felt everywhere. (“Pasado,” 55–56)
This marks the end of what Reyes calls “the first campaign.” Maintaining his
unironic language of heroic rebelliousness, Reyes then goes on to describe the
“Ateneo’s” “second campaign” as comprising “four battles” in their “quest for the
people” (“Pasado,” 58–59). Reyes refers to the fact that he and his friends were
offered teaching positions at the recently inaugurated Universidad Nacional
during the Madero years as “the occupation of the university” (the first battle).
The second battle was the establishment of the (neopositivist) Universidad Pop-
ular in the final days of Madero’s life. The third battle, the establishment of the
Facultad de Humanidades in the Universidad Nacional, paves the way for more
genealogical affirmations of amity and, of course, more lists of names. Some
are repeated from the “first campaign.” The new ones, however, include Sotero
Prieto, Ezequiel Chávez, Valentín Gama, Jesús Díaz de León, Mariano Silva
(61); Antonio Castro Leal, Manuel Toussaint, Alberto Vásquez del Mercado,
Xavier Icaza, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and Manuel Gómez Morín (62).
The fourth battle, “the most violent period of our struggles,” as Reyes puts it,
refers not to the mass uprising against Victoriano Huerta of the peasant forces

of the North and South but to the cycle of conferences offered at the Universi-
dad Nacional by intellectuals such as Jesús T. Acevedo, Manuel Ponce, Federico
Gamboa, Luis Urbina, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Antonio Caso (62).
And this brings us to the end of the history and amity lines of what Reyes
considers to be the immediate past. The subsequent ten years of revolution-
ary upheaval and emergent state formation are summed up in the following
terms: “The Revolution returned with Carranza, to experience its convulsions
until 1920. The sacrificed generation still had enough strength to publish the
journal Nosotros . . . In the worst years, from 1914 to 1916, editorial produc-
tion in Mexico was overwhelming and superior to anything we had seen until
that point. Then came Vasconcelos’s formidable educational work, the excellent
organizational skills of Genaro Estrada. New names appeared” (“Pasado,” 63).
After providing his reader with a seemingly endless compendium of names dat-
ing almost exclusively from the transition from the Porifiriato dictatorship to
the brief era of Maderismo, Reyes talks of the contemporary moment in terms
of an overriding need to resuture the spirit and function of those friends and
masters—together with the time they inhabited—to the present:
The year of the Centenary is distant. It can only be remembered with difficulty.
Perhaps one might like to forget it. However, it will be impossible: with its cries
and unsteadiness it opened up the possibility of the future. It put thought into
gear, posing questions and initiating promises that, truncated by discord, should
be bound once again to the passage of time. In the hour of examining con-
sciences—that midnight of the spirit in which we would like to begin all over
again—the guiding light of our symbolic stage can still illuminate us. (64)
In other words, it is necessary to harmonize the time of Mexican modernity

by reactivating the tradition of Reyes’s postpositivist cultural nobility and res-
tituting it to the present. After all this nobility, it is suggested, can reestablish
the grounds of an uninterrupted genealogy between the years preceding the
assassination of Madero and Mexico’s post-1939 generations. As such, the years
of transition from the ancien régime of the Porfiriato to the first phase of the
Revolution (i.e., before the full blown agrarian assault of 1914) is portrayed by
Reyes as “the guiding light of our symbolic stage” that “can still illuminate us.”
Reminiscent of Henri de Boulainvilliers’s invitation to the French nobility in
the eighteenth century, “You will not regain power if you do not regain the sta-
tus of the knowledges of which you have been dispossessed . . . The fact is that
you have always fought without realizing that there comes a point when the real
battle, or at least the battle within society, is no longer fought with weapons,
but with knowledge” (quoted in Foucault 2003, 155), Reyes proposes a new
self-awareness and a rearticulation of the sources of knowledge and memory as
a means of forging a new historical subject grounded in bourgeois, humanist

precepts. In order to do this, Reyes insists on the relation between his masters
and the power of education, which he always takes in its Latin-Romanic sense:
as ex ducere, to lead something out of the darkness into the light of day in order
to be seized.18
But whose illuminating self-awareness, knowledge, memory, and historical
subjectivity—whose “guiding light,” in other words—is Reyes really referring
to here? When faced with the acute nomic anxiety of longstanding historical
discord and disharmony—an anxiety that is not only projected back to the
Díaz regime and the Maderista period but also must refer to the moment in
which the author puts pen to paper (if this were not the case, why would he
write with such care to detail thirty years after the fact?)—Reyes’s best friend
and most revered master is Justo Sierra: “the incomparable Justo Sierra, the
best and oldest of all” (“Pasado,” 17); “illustrious organizer of primary educa-
tion. Wherever he intervened, he did good” (23); “the noblest intelligence
and purest will” (24); “All Mexicans venerate and love the memory of Justo
Sierra” (“Justo,” 141); “He was all virtue without austere affectation, author-
ity without a frown, love to all men, understanding and forgiveness, sure
orientation and a confidence in goodness that achieved almost heroic pro-
portions” (142). When the first rumbles of longstanding popular discontent
emerged around the time of the Centenary (1910), Justo Sierra “held out,
between the old and new regimes, a continuity of spirit, in the midst of the
general state of collapse and the impending transformations, that it was neces-
sary to save at all costs” (147).
As already noted, Reyes wrote “Justo Sierra y la historia patria” on the eve of
the reediting in 1940 of Sierra’s monumental history of Mexico, now bound in
a single volume titled Evolución política del pueblo mexicano. For Reyes the texts
composing La Evolución política, which had been published at the turn of the
century and, as such, at the height of the Porfiriato, are the culminating point in
the evolution of Mexican intelligence: “By its side, all other works of its kind are
modest” (“Justo,” 156). Sierra’s historical work is “a justification of the Mexican
people. Whoever does not know it does not know us, and those who do know it
can deny us affection only with great difficulty” (157). But more than anything
else, for Reyes the value of this monumental writing of history—this grandiose
encyclopedia of the historical essence of Mexican subjectivity—is to be found
in the fact that “Justo Sierra provides us with the normal history of Mexico”:
“The revolutionary shake-up that would occur in later years exercises an irresist-
ible attraction on immediate problems. It invites propaganda and polemic, and
can perturb the trace of certain fundamental perspectives. Justo Sierra provides
us with the normal history of Mexico” (157). The force of Sierra’s arguments
are most notable, says Reyes, in reference to the modern epoch (the immediate
past) because, as a political educator, Sierra knows that “the destiny of the past is

to create a necessary future and the most immediate past is that which provides
us with the richest of lessons” (161).
However, for Reyes in 1939 Sierra’s “normal history of Mexico,” the weight
and authority of the immediate past, and its ontological relation to the essence
of what it means to be Mexican in the present, should not be considered in light
of, nor in relation to, the upheaval of the Revolution itself:
It might be suggested that this history, suspended at the threshold of the Revolu-
tion, should be revised in light of the Revolution itself. No: it simply needs to be
completed. In this history one can find all the premises for the explanation of the
future, the same when he judges the social status of the Indian, the mestizo, or the
Creole; and the very candor with which it was written is the finest guarantee that
it is not necessary to twist or falsify the facts in order to understand the present.
(“Justo,” 163–64)
The insights and perspective provided by the Revolution would merely twist
or falsify “the normal history of Mexico,” for it is this that provides the essential
premise for the explanation of the future. It is the “normal” (correct) history
rather than the “abnormal” (incorrect) history that should now be restituted
and successfully completed by the generation of 1939. The Revolution, in other
words, was a historical aberration that interrupted normality. Normality is tan-
tamount to historical truth. The Revolution is the fall from that truth.
However, Reyes, who is so concerned with the Latin-Romanic notion of
education (and therefore with leading something out of the darkness into the
light of day in order to be seized)—a form of guidance that is synonymous, of
course, with the grounds of Roman humanitas—prefers to keep us in the dark
regarding what can be understood by this word “normal” in 1939, even though
he assures us that “Justo Sierra’s Evolución política is still on the move, as is the
inspiration of his work. Don’t say it has died” (“Justo,” 164).
At the turn of the century, however, Justo Sierra himself was far clearer about
the meaning and context of this word and the history it is used to qualify. In the
final pages of “La era actual,” the last book of Evolución política, Sierra observes
in his examination of the Porfirian state form that in order to guarantee what
he calls “our complete evolution,”
we needed, and we will always repeat it, like all peoples in times of supreme crisis,
like the people of Cromwell and Napoleon, certainly, but also like those of Wash-
ington and Lincoln and Bismarck, Cavour and Juárez, a man, a consciousness, a
will that could unify the moral forces and transform them into a normal impulse;
this man was President Díaz. Without violating a single legal formula President
Díaz has been invested, by the will of his fellow citizens and by the applause
of foreigners, with a life-long magistracy. This investiture—the submission of
the people with all its official organs, and of society as a whole, to the will of

the president—can be baptized ‘social dictatorship’, ‘spontaneous Caesarism’ or

whatever. The truth is that it has singular characteristics that do not allow it to be
classified under the classical forms of despotism. It is a personal government that
extends, defends and strengthens legal government . . . [it is] the offspring of a
national will to leave anarchy behind forever. (Sierra 1948, 395–96; italics mine)
Forty years apart in their analyses of the immediate past, Sierra sustains and
Reyes restores the notion of the historically “normal.” Sierra obviously uses the
term to account for the institutional and police ground of Porfirian sovereign
power. However, Reyes establishes a genealogical relation of intellectual amity
with the masterful figure and language of Justo Sierra in order to do two things:
first, like Sierra, recuperate the image of Porfirian sovereign power and subjec-
tion (the complete and legal submission of the whole of society to the will of
the president Imperator); second, and this time unlike Sierra, distance Mexi-
can state formation from the events and interpretative prism of the Revolution
together with, consequently, the postrevolutionary period. In other words, in
1939 Reyes strives to make the Porfiriato and the final months of the Cárdenas
presidency closer to each other in time and spirit (1902 and 1939) than either
one of them is to the Revolution, even though it is the upheaval of the Revolu-
tion that joins and separates them.
The Porfiriato is the immediate past for Reyes, not the Revolution or the
period that followed it, and it is the immediate past, including its network of
amity relations, that “provides us with the richest of lessons” (“Justo,” 161). In
December 1939 Justo Sierra is recuperated by Reyes as an absolute friend and
master whose language can be articulated against the anarchic noise of history.
The social dictatorship of the Porfiriato is the abode, the intellectual dwelling,
from within which to mediate the passage away from the upheaval of both the
past and the present.
In the recuperation of the figure of the absolute master and friend, we con-
front the unconditioned affirmation of Reyes’s historical subjectivism and,
alongside it, the virtus of his humanitas. However, in this willful assertion of
subjectivity (a subjectivity that exists in the exclusive service of the master’s his-
torical function), we confront the ideological content of his metaphysical ontol-
ogy and the politics of his philology. We encounter a theory of sovereignty for
modern Mexico (an ethic) grounded in the sovereign will of Porfirio Díaz (the
submission of society to the will of the Imperator) that can then be redistributed
throughout time and reproduced in 1939 thanks to the intellectual relation
between old and young generations (in which, presumably, Reyes occupies for
1939 the place occupied by Sierra in 1902).
Through our close reading of “Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra y la his-
toria patria,” we can see the narrative, philosophical, and political technique of

Alfonso Reyes at work. This is a technique grounded in metaphysical subjec-

tivism and the active concealment and oblivion of historicity. These are essays
designed to give the illusion that one is entering thought when in fact histori-
cal thought—the act of thinking the conflictive essence of national historicity
(e.g., the classical struggle between the poor and the rich)—is always already
disavowed. This disavowal, which is a means of defending the present from all
images of disharmony, is anchored in the philological field of knowledge by
posing all problems and solutions exclusively on the terrain, and within the
horizon, of the restoration of amity. The relation between amity and historical
knowledge in these essays is, in other words, a relation of absolute reconcile-
ment and orthodoxy.
As I indicated earlier in this chapter, the intelligibility of restoration in both
essays—the conceptual terrain of their essential problematic—is posited in and
as a relation to the determination of visibility and to what Althusser calls “the
organic link binding the invisible to the visible” (1999, 25). The invisible is that
which is “excluded from the field of visibility and defined as excluded by the
existence and peculiar structure of the field of the problematic” (26). For that
reason the invisible is the “inner darkness” of the given field of knowledge, and
the whole function of this field is to obfuscate any sighting of it.
In “Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra y la historia patria,” we are faced
with two defined exclusions or zones of inner darkness that belong to the field
of Reyes’s philological knowledge. However, they belong in the texts by not
belonging to the history of amity (which is now the same as saying “History
= Amity”). The first defined exclusion or inner darkness within the frame of
these texts is to be found at the end of “Pasado inmediato.” The second can
be found in “Justo Sierra.” The word that defines them both as history’s inner
darkness is the word “normal” that Reyes recovers so quietly from Sierra.
Let us return briefly to the two moments in question. First, “the Revolution
returned with Carranza, to experience its convulsions until 1920. The sacri-
ficed generation still had enough strength to publish the journal Nosotros . . .
In the worst years, from 1914 to 1916, editorial production in Mexico was
overwhelming and superior to anything we had seen until that point. Then
came Vasconcelos’s formidable educational work, the excellent organizational
skills of Genaro Estrada. New names appeared” (“Pasado,” 63). Second, “it
might be suggested that this history [Evolución política], suspended at the
threshold of the Revolution, should be revised in light of the Revolution
itself. No: it simply needs to be completed . . . the very candor with which it
was written is the finest guarantee that the facts not be twisted or falsified to
understand the present” (“Justo,” 163–64).
In the first passage the Revolution is subjected to a process of natural (philo-
logical) selection. Carranza’s revolution is portrayed in this passage as the direct

political antecedent to Vasconcelos’s postrevolutionary cultural and pedagogi-

cal projects, and as such, is taken to be the only natural antecedent, within the
revolution, to the “normal” institutionalization of Latin-Romanic humanitas (i.e.,
the rediscovery of the virtus of a sustained program of eruditio et institutio in
bonas artes) that took place in the 1920s under the Sonoran presidents Obregón
and Calles. Reyes therefore extends his amity lines to include Carranza’s revolu-
tion because the origins of the postrevolutionary ethical state are to be located in
Carrancismo’s subsequent relation to that institutionalization (Carranza begets
Obregón, Obregón begets Vasconcelos, Vasconcelos begets La Secretaría de Edu-
cación Pública, Carranza begets humanitas).
However, the agrarian revolutions of the 1913–20 period (e.g., Zapatismo
and Villismo) are of no account for Reyes or, therefore, for the normal history
of Mexico. They and their demands cannot be interiorized by that history and
therefore cannot form part of the field of philological knowledge, even though
he does acknowledge the presence of “dark forces” all around: “The most vio-
lent period of our struggles was approaching. Literary activity began to be an act
of heroism. ‘It is consoling testimony’, Bergson would say to me in amazement,
‘to the possibility of the spirit in face of the dark forces of disorder.’ Literature
continued the best it could. In the worst years, from 1914 to 1916, editorial
production in Mexico was overwhelming and superior to anything we had seen
until that point” (“Pasado,” 62–63).
Reyes has decided on a state of exception in which Zapatismo and Villismo
can only be included through a process of “euphemization” designed to guar-
antee their exclusion from the language of the normal history of Mexico. They
are referred to not as named national realities but, more vaguely, as “the most
violent period of our struggles”; “the dark forces of disorder”; “the worst years,
from 1914 to 1916.” Amity’s opposite, the revolution of the homo barbarus, the
inner darkness or defined exclusion within Reyes’s field of knowledge, is the
nameless agrarian revolution that haunts and conditions fully his approach to,
and recuperation of, the immediate past.19
The agrarian revolutions of Zapata and Villa—uprisings that (despite Reyes’s
active disavowal of their origins, complexity, and fundamental importance for
the history of Mexican state formation) bore witness more than any other
movement to the forcible entry of the masses into the realm of sovereignty over
their own destiny—are not normal. It is this abnormal history of Mexico that
actually makes the law in, and establishes its rule over, the language and critical
maneuvers contained in these essays. This is an abnormal history that raised its
head again, let us not forget, in postrevolutionary Mexico largely as a result of
the radical agrarian reforms of the Cárdenas regime in 1935 and 1936; the con-
troversial and experimental nationalization of the oil industry in March, 1938;

and the handing over of the railroads to the workers on May 1, 1938 (to name
just a few of the governmental experiments of those years).
In the second passage, which is taken from “Justo Sierra,” the Revolution
in its entirety is situated as the necessary exclusion upon which “normal” his-
tory—the history of political, philosophical, and “spiritual” continuity between
epochs separated by over 35 years of history (1902 to 1939)—should be con-
strued: “It might be suggested that this history, suspended at the threshold of
the Revolution, should be revised in light of the Revolution itself. No” (163).
The relation of the Revolution to the political evolution of the Mexican peo-
ple should remain concealed, undisclosed, and unexplained. It should remain
therefore beyond our grasp and without truth for the present: captured,
that is, but captured as without value for normal history. Reyes relinquishes
its value therefore by preserving and maintaining it as valueless, worthless,
invalid. This is not the ground for thought, however. Rather, it is the ground
for an ideology based on willing (i.e., subjectivizing) the history of the peas-
ants and workers into silence.
In this sense Reyes’s essays reproduce the logic of expropriation, alienation,
and estrangement that lies at the heart of the primitive accumulation of capital,
since his writings stockpile the social and anecdotal raw material for process-
ing bourgeois friendship (humanitas) at all costs, over and against the violent
histories of the displaced, exploited, and expropriated in modern Mexico. Quite
literally, he would like to be able to narrate the poor out of cultural history in
the name of a humanistic friendship synonymous with the social function of
the master.
Therefore, we can say that it is the history of the forcible entry of the masses
into the realm of sovereignty that is the true secret of Reyes’s reality principle in
“Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra y la historia patria.” His is a reality prin-
ciple that on the surface is grounded in the forging of amity’s absolute historical
relation to education and the forging of Mexican humanitas. However, through
the exposure of the exclusions of (or the “inner darkness” of history in) Reyes’s
field of knowledge, we see that actually his reality principle—his humanitas—
is grounded in the inscription of a class enmity that portrays the nonnormal
(homo barbarus: the specter of the potential dictatorship of the part of those
who have no part) as the necessary beyond of amity.
Reyes would like the nonnormal to be a historical silence in relation to which
no “intelligent” word can be spoken. The irony is that he has to give language to
the need for that erasure. As a result, he establishes a dictatorship of the absolute
friend in opposition to the other potential dictatorship (that of the dark force of
an emergent proletariat linked to the history of radical agrarianism), in which
the latter must be declared nameless for the stability and continuity of nomic
order. The other potential dictatorship—that of the part of those who have no

part—can only be declared invalid by disavowal, “euphemization,” silence, and

the active restoration of amity lines originating in the imperium of Porfirio
Díaz. As such, these essays are predicated on the subsumption of enmity to the
cause of mastery and friendship.
Despite his pretensions, Reyes is far from being a Greek thinker, and this sim-
ple fact determines everything in advance. If, as Octavio Paz affirms, in Reyes we
see not only a critique but also a philosophy and ethic of language based in the
transparency of the word and the universality of its meaning (1985, 147), then
we need to consider the fact that this is the ethic—the “just notion, the clear
orientation” (Henríquez Ureña, “Reyes,” 390)—of a Latin-Romanic thinker of
the truth of imperium, in which truth is grounded in the opposition between
correctness and incorrectness, rather than in the essence of the Greek sense of
“unconcealedness.” Heidegger explains imperium’s relation to the Roman sense
of truth and falsity in terms that shed light on the essential imperialism of
Reyes’s metaphysical ontology:
Why is the falsum, the “bringing to a fall,” essential for the Romans? The realm
of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum is the one of the impe-
rium and of the “imperial.” Imperium means “command.” Originally “command”
meant the same as “to cover”: to “commit” (command) the dead to the earth or
to the fire, to entrust them to a cover. On its way through the French language,
“commend” became commandieren i.e., more precisely, the Latin imperare, im-
parare = to arrange, to take measures, i.e., prae-cipere, to occupy in advance, and
so to take possession of the occupied territory and to rule it. Imperium is the ter-
ritory founded in commandments, in which the others are obedient. Command,
as the essential ground of domination, includes being-superior, which is only pos-
sible as the constant surmounting of others, who are thereby the inferiors. In this
surmounting there resides again the constant ability to oversee. The surmounting
overseeing denotes the dominating “sight” expressed in the often quoted phrase
of Caeser: veni, vidi, vici—I came, I oversaw, and I conquered. The imperial actio
of the constant surmounting of others includes the sense that the others, should
they rise to the same or even to a neighboring level of command, will be brought
down—in Latin fallere (participle: falsum). The great and most inner core of
the essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not
kept down, not simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted,
within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continua-
tion of the domination. The bringing to a fall aims at keeping the overthrown
standing in a certain sense, though not standing high. Imperial bringing to a fall,
fallere, is therefore a going after and a going around that lets stand. (Parmenides,
40–45; italics in the original)
Both “Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra” are predicated on the production
of an essential darkness—an internal obfuscation—that allows for a standing

of enmity in a certain sense, though not for its standing high. As such, these
essays are predicated on the historical subsumption and synthesis of enmity to
the cause of friendship (which is the same here as the cause of the master): amity
allows the excluded, within the territory of the command, to offer their ser-
vices for the continuation of amity’s domination as long as the excluded remain
excluded. Reason in Reyes is therefore the result of a normative task grounded
in a metaphysic of free will that remains fully consonant with the workings of
state rationalism. It is perfectly apt, then, that Enrique Krauze should open La
presidencia imperial: Ascenso y caída del sistema político mexicano (1940–1996)
in reference to, of all things, Alfonso Reyes’s “Pasado inmediato.” However, he
treats Reyes’s essay as if it were a work of historical precision, rather than an
ideological wager for the humanist policing of modern cultural and institu-
tional history.
Reyes’s language restitutes for the present the notion of the educated mas-
ter-friend (humanitas) as a defense (or autoimmunity) anchored ultimately
in bourgeois fear of the uncultured masses (homo barbarus as the hostis of
Mexico’s “normal” history). This is a defense that is predicated on the res-
toration of history as a police project to seal off the past that gave body to
the subjectification of the part of those who had no part (e.g., 1913–20 and
1934–39 among others). It is an autoimmunity anchored in the capture and
displacement of those who made themselves into speaking beings through, as
a result and despite, the violent history of primitive accumulation from the
nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Reyes’s philological writings on the immediate past cannot be separated
from the underlying conditions of land appropriation and the social order that
perpetuates and institutionalizes that original act of expropriation. Carl Schmitt
explains the idea of nomos in the following terms: “Nomos is the immediate
form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially vis-
ible—the initial measure and division of pastureland, i.e., the land-appropri-
ation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it. In
Kant’s words, it is the ‘distributive law of mine and thine’” (2003, 70). It is my
contention that the truth of Reyes’s essays cannot be considered without refer-
ence to the notion of nomos in its relation to a sovereign will that is exercised
in conjunction and in agreement with the history and law of ongoing primitive
accumulation in modern Mexico.
In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger asks how the “hap-
pening of truth” makes itself visible in the work of art. In similar fashion, I have
traced in these pages the way in which the “happening of truth” sets itself up,
and extends itself, through “Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra y la historia
patria” in the final months of the Cárdenas sexenio. Reyes obviously wants to
guide his readers toward and have them gather themselves around—that is, to

commune in the sweetness and light of—a fully harmonious notion of human-
istic culture over and against any inferior, abnormal, “dark,” or potentially con-
flictive form of historical being. The affirmation and restoration of the function
of the master-friend is the primary conduit for giving history its visibility—its
definitive perspective—and for affording Mexico the opportunity to gain a spe-
cific (cultured, bourgeois) outlook on itself (thereby rendering the immediate
past a “defined past” anchored fully in humanitas, rather than in exploitation or
the misery and frustration of the poor).
Every word in these essays therefore “fights the battle and puts up for deci-
sion what is . . . lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave” (Heidegger
1975, 43). What is masterful and lofty is the ability of the lettered intellectual
to forge the agreement and conformity of knowledge with fact and of fact with
knowledge, in order to make subjectivity and thought equal to life, as Reyes
himself suggests. This requires, however, the continual surmounting of that
which is neither masterful nor lofty (incorrect, false, abnormal, peasant his-
tory) within the given field of knowledge. In this surmounting there resides the
constant need to oversee. This act of overseeing that produces the terrain and
regime of the visible is the imperial actio that conveys the sense that the others
(the part of those who have no part) “should they rise to the same or even to a
neighboring level of command, will be brought down—in Latin fallere (parti-
ciple: falsum)” (Heidegger, Parmenides, 45).
There can be little doubt that this bringing about of a downfall—which
is the necessary counteressence for the truth (verum, “being-above”; veritas,
rectitudo, “correctness”) of the Latin-Romanic imperium—sustains the ethical
ground of Alfonso Reyes’s bourgeois politics of philology in the final months
of the Cárdenas regime. We can certainly consider Reyes to be a thinker of
the postrevolutionary aesthetic and pedagogical (i.e., “ethical”) state in modern
Mexico. However, we can only consider him to be so in a political manner if
we read him as a creator and purveyor of the ideology and law of bourgeois
imperium and its sovereign will.
In Parmenides, Martin Heidegger makes the following observation: “That
the Occident still today, and today more decisively than ever, thinks the Greek
world in a Roman way, i.e., in a Latin, i.e., in a Christian, way, is an event
touching the most inner core of our historical experience. The political has
come to be understood in the Roman way. Since the time of the Imperium, the
Greek word ‘political’ has meant something Roman. What is Greek about it
now is only its sound” (1998, 45). The presidential elections of 2006 (perhaps,
along with those of 1988, the most crucial and contested elections Mexico has
seen since 1940) clearly demonstrated that the time of the imperium is, to this
day, the most inner core of the Mexican experience of the political. If the 1940
elections directed the revolution toward the more conservative path that has

been followed by every subsequent Mexican government until now, perhaps

it was the 2006 elections that came closest (at least from within the electoral
process itself ) to challenging the effects of the economic and institutional paths
taken by the state in the immediate past.
Suspicion of voter fraud, ballot stuffing, the switching of votes between par-
ties and other irregularities in the vote led many to question the legitimacy,
indeed the legality of the democratic process. Both sides—the “Coalition for
the Good of All” (led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and the conserva-
tive Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (former Minister for Energy and doyen of the
neoliberal economic elites) occupied the essential domain of imperium in their
postelectoral contest for subjective command over the principle of electoral cer-
tainty. In the name of a democratic truth that guarantees the command and
oversight of sovereign authority, both sides in the messy, and sometimes plain
silly, postelection fray came to exalt the terrain of the willful assertion and the
positing power of subjectivity. Within this context, the positing power of sub-
jectivity that lies at the core of formal liberal democracy (and that translates
socially as “Felipe Calderón Hinojosa vs. Andrés Manuel López Obrador”)
unleashed a struggle between the concepts of amity and enmity within the
context of an overall economy of institutional (i.e., nomic) deliverance and
sovereign continuity. Citizens gathered themselves up (largely along class and
regional lines) and lent their support to one or another of those assertions of
subjective command as a means of legitimizing the legality of the sovereign
will to power. Within this process it was the task of the “Tribunal Electoral del
Poder Judicial de la Federación” (the Federal Electoral Tribunal) to bind and
suture the legal and political spheres in the most expedient fashion, in order to
guarantee social continuity, order, and the sovereign right to attribute, make, or
suspend law in a sovereign fashion.
In the meantime, the event that is the essence of our historical experience—
the commanding, positing power of subjectivity that grounds the Latin-Romanic
imperium—remains largely untouched by the contemporary machinations of,
and reflection on, the political. The domain of subjective assertion, which lies at
the most inner core of the Mexican experience of the political, is safe and sound
despite the increasing loss of credibility and legitimacy of the political order it
sustains, perpetuates, and continually threatens to undermine.
However, in his reflections on the ethical state Antonio Gramsci observes
that “In reality, only the social group that poses the end of the State and its own
end as the target to be achieved can create an ethical State—i.e. one which tends
to put an end to the internal divisions of the ruled, etc., and to create a techni-
cally and morally unitary social organism” (1985, 259). This should surely lead
us to wonder whether a democratic politics would necessitate a challenge—by
the part of those who have no part—to the commanding, positing power of the

nexus between subjectivity and state reason, rather than its nomic reaffirmation
and calculated relegitimization through the certainty (truthful or fraudulent)
of the ballot box. By this I do not mean to criticize voters or minimize the
importance of popular democratic mobilizations either in recent times or in the
immediate past. I am merely calling attention to the imperial social foundation
that remains for the most part untouched by popular mobilization and by the
(legal or fraudulent) formalities of liberal democracy as a whole.
In order to question not only the limits of the existing political order (the
logics of inclusion and exclusion that lie at the core of neoliberal formal democ-
racy) but also the most inner core of our historical experience of the political
(the Latin-Romanic imperium), perhaps thought would require an uncondi-
tional renunciation of the metaphysical subjectivism that installs and extends
the ground of the political as a struggle between friendship and enmity. As is
evident in Alfonso Reyes’s “Pasado inmediato” and “Justo Sierra y la historia
patria,” in the cultural sphere the friend-enemy division has been crucial to
the invention of a bourgeois state grounded in a master ethic of friendship that
surmounts, captures, and oversees the “abnormal” grounds and contingencies
of perceived enmity. This maneuver regulates and naturalizes the history of the
nomos and captures historical difference (other ways of life) as the necessar-
ily included yet displaced and silenced other—or inner—darkness of bourgeois
humanitas. As such, in the name of universal humanism Reyes makes a sover-
eign decision regarding the point at which universal humanism, in the interest
of certainty (and therefore truth), can only continue to exist by suspending
its universal applicability. Therefore Reyes’s philological humanism represents
a method of thinking that is not only contradictory. It is absolutely crucial for
understanding the bourgeois struggle for the right to the (aesthetic, cultural,
and political) state of exception.
In contrast, however, the possibility of a true ethical state—“one which tends
to put an end to the internal divisions of the ruled,” as Gramsci puts it—resides
in the ability of the part of those who have no part to posit themselves as the end
of the state by unconditionally withdrawing from sovereignty and the imperial
metaphysical terrain of its subjective command. It resides in the ability to call
into question, in the name of freedom, the institutional, historical, and cultural
positing power of subjectivity and its sovereign capture by the bourgeoisie and
its intellectuals.
In the realm of culture, thinking in the service of the true ethical state would
entail, among many other things, not restituting to the present the ethics of
Alfonso Reyes or the bourgeois politics of his philology. Rather than preserving
his subjective master-function in its essence, or of maintaining it in its origi-
nal philological element, cultural-political thought in the service of the true
ethical state would entail a thinking that abandons forever not just subjective

command but anthropological subjectivism (i.e., identity) in its entirety.20

The renunciation of the location of the subject—of “the subject” as inherently
and incessantly “located” in culture or history (or as Alfonso Reyes puts it, as
“defined”)—is the first step toward the reign of a lack of position. Perhaps the
abandonment of all forms of anthropological subjectivism can begin to create
the conditions for a politics of exodus from the essential sovereign domain of
imperium. Only then would we be able to perceive a staging of the political
that is not indebted to the exercise of majesty, the curacy of divinity, the com-
mand of armies, and the management of interests (Rancière 1999, 17). Politics
only occurs when these imperial mechanisms are stopped in their tracks “by
the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which
none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of
anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency
of any order” (17). However, this is a vision of the political that Alfonso Reyes
and the intellectuals of his generation could never uphold or legitimize. To this
day, and as the 2006 presidential elections clearly demonstrated, the Mexican
political order of both “Left” (PRD-PRI) and “Right” (PAN-PRI) cannot allow
this unconditional vision of the political to prevail.

CHAPTER 5
“Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!”

Chance, Passive Decision,
Democracy, July–November 1968
Future there is, if there ever is, when chance is no longer barred. There would be
no future without chance.
—Jacques Derrida
A
s we saw in Chapter 4, there is no humanism without sovereign will
and no sovereign reason without the determination and policing of its
zones of exception. It is humanist reason that polices the friend-enemy
relation at the cultural level, while normalizing that level in such a way that
there can be no opening to the event, that is, no opening to that which has
not been set up in advance or has no forewarning. In contrast, in this chapter I
explore the possibility of exceeding the fully determined opposition of sovereign
decisionism by circumnavigating the reduction of the field of the political to
the relation between friend and enemy. In order to do this, I trace the relation
between contingency, chance, and what Jacques Derrida (1997) has called the
passive decision—basic hospitality or receptivity to the affirmation or “yes” that
comes down from the other—as a means of uncovering a notion of the political
that is not governed by the determined character of all sovereign decisionism.
What is at stake in this turn is our ability to account for the relation between
reason and the emergence of something that takes place yet that really, reason-
ably, has no place to take place. Within the advent of the impossible, the passive
decision is central to any unconditional thought of the democratic event.
The questions raised so far in relation to sovereign force and exceptionality
in twentieth-century Mexico bring us inevitably to the question of 1968. They
bring us to the problem of 1968 but the return of the date and its anniversaries
over the course of the last four decades also brings us to the repeated inquiry
pal-williams-05.indd 117 3/28/11 12:09 PM

into the unconditional critique of sovereignty in relation to the horizon and

potentiality of democracy. There really is no avoiding it any longer. After all,
this exploration of the democratic event has been with us, in the wake of the
original date, since my initial approximation in Chapter 1 to the complexity of
the months preceding the 2006 Mexican presidential elections. The legacy of
1968 has been with us since the very beginning or at least since the turns and
returns that that particular beginning in 2005, together with the historical and
conceptual contingencies it has enabled, were set in motion.
Before we begin our approach to the relation between contingency, chance,
and the passive decision, we should first clarify what the historical sequence
we call “1968” means in Mexico. This skeletal examination will then enable us
to account for the world it moved against, its intellectual and political legacy,
the conceptual and political limitations presented by its subjectivization a pos-
teriori, and the need to move toward an evaluation of the passive decision as
a key component of the affirmation and originality of 1968. In order to do
this, we will turn to Luis González de Alba’s Los días y los años (The Days and
Years), which is surely one of the most powerful and yet fragile literary figura-
tions of social activism ever penned. Though a product of incarceration, we
will be able to read this work from within a register of freedom that far exceeds
the constraints of sovereign decisionism. Within this reading we momentarily
encounter a free zone in Lecumberri Prison: a declaration of love, a call to the
friend, an address to the other in the night in a writing that does not resign itself
to containment or sovereign administration of the friend-enemy antagonism.
Rather, in Los días y los años we encounter the demise of the friend-enemy
antagonism thanks to the gradual emergence of the Parisian slogan, “Under the
Paving Stones, the Beach!”1
“Chance Must Be Systematically Explored”: A Skeletal Sequence

By Friday July 26, 1968, the political science students at the National University
(UNAM) had been on strike for weeks, protesting the ongoing incarceration of
Demetrio Vallejo and Valentín Campa, the leaders of the rail workers’ strike
of 1958–59.2 In particular they were protesting Articles 145 and 145bis of the
penal code. These were the articles of “social dissolution” that subjected people
who met with a group of 3 or more individuals to discuss ideas or programs that
might affect sovereign rule with 2 to 12 years in prison. These articles were the
juridical justification for the rail union leader’s decade-long imprisonment. The
articles of social dissolution were remarkable pieces of legislation because they
allowed the authorities to imprison virtually anyone for virtually anything and
were used as such by the state. What they did was provide sovereign force with
a veneer of legal legitimacy. In pure exceptionality force without law gives rise to

“Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!” ● 119
the law of force. Law beyond the law becomes the only law, and the exception
becomes the norm. Through Articles 145 and 145bis, the sovereign remained
the law behind the law, that is, the only law, while at the same time hiding his
de facto exceptionality behind the socialized mask of jurisprudence. As such the
force of sovereign exceptionality was embodied in and through the articles of
social dissolution.3
Completely unrelated to this, for four days a couple of youth gangs from
local schools had been at odds with each other after tensions arising from a
soccer match that took place on July 22, 1968. On July 25 a few hundred stu-
dents from Polytechnic Vocational Schools 2 and 5 had marched on the Isaac
Ochoterena Preparatory School, itching for a fight. After the ensuing battle
between students, the riot police (granaderos), on edge in the run up to the
October Olympic Games, intervened with batons and tear gas and pursued
the students back into their schools beating anyone (including faculty) they
happened to encounter in their path. The National Federation of Technical
Students (FNET, a Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI]-oriented student
organization) immediately tried to co-opt and dilute student outrage by leading
a demonstration of Polytechnic students scheduled for July 26 to protest the
unwarranted violence of the granaderos. By chance, the protest march coincided
with the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953,
and like every other year since 1959 the Mexican Communist Party (PCM),
together with its student wing (the CNED) and the Communist Youth, had
organized a march to celebrate the first action of the Cuban Revolution.
As luck would have it, but perhaps as a result of police incompetence, the
two unrelated marches coincided on Avenida Juárez. FNET leaders could not
impede Polytechnic students and others from the pro-Cuba march from join-
ing forces to try to make it to the Plaza de la Constitución (Zócalo): the almost
sacred center of sovereign power. The riot police waded in again before the
students reached their desired destination. A street battle ensued on Avenida
Madero that quickly involved students from both marches. In a single after-
noon the riot police beat down, arrested, and pursued the Polytechnic students
who were protesting the excessive but localized aggression of the riot police,
the preparatory students who had gone to offer their support, plus the numer-
ous leftist groups who were there to commemorate the anniversary of Castro’s
attack on the Moncada Barracks. On a single Friday afternoon, the granaderos
achieved the impossible: they managed to forge an alliance between the Poly-
technic, the university, and the increasingly sectarian and divided political Left
(González de Alba 1999, 27).
Events sped up immediately. Barricades were constructed using burned-
out buses to block routes to the schools. The Polytechnic students organized
an ad hoc assembly to call for the immediate dismissal of Generals Cueto and

Mendiolea (the chiefs of the riot police and the Mexico City police, respec-
tively) who were clearly responsible for the excessive force used against the
students. The police spent the weekend rounding up members of the PCM
just for good measure. On Saturday, July 27, 1968 the students promised to
pull down the barricades if the prisoners arrested on July 26 were released.
They returned half the buses but kept the other half as insurance. The prison-
ers were not released. As a result, Sunday saw the renewal of the pitched battle
between students and riot police. Barricades were reconstructed on Monday,
July 29. By Monday afternoon the National Polytechnic (IPN) was on strike,
with a series of specific demands in response to the previous few days: free-
dom for the prisoners of July 26; the dissolution of the riot police; the dis-
missal of Cueto, Mendiolea, and now Lt. Colonel Armando Frías. Already
however, there was talk of demanding the freedom of all political prisoners
including the leaders of the rail workers’ strike of 1958–59 (Vallejo, Campa,
and others).
To everyone’s astonishment, on Monday evening the riot police launched a
bazooka straight at the historic entrance to the Preparatoria de San Ildefonso
and occupied Preparatoria 2 and Vocational Schools 2 and 5: “Through the
military occupation of the San Ildefonso School, the government elevated the
situation from a local, primarily police matter to an issue of national security”
(Krauze, Biography, 695). The following morning the university rector, Javier
Barros Sierra, lowered the campus flag at University City (Ciudad Universitaria-
UNAM) to half-staff. The nascent student protest was now officially a univer-
sity movement in response to excessive state force and arbitrary violence. A
protest march led by the rector of the university was held on Thursday, August
1, 1968, and was attended by tens of thousands. This was the official beginning
of the 1968 student movement for democracy.
By August 4 the students had formalized a list of written demands, which
they would uphold throughout. The demands were as follows: (1) freeing the
political prisoners; (2) dismissing Generals Luis Cueto Ramírez and Raúl Men-
diolea and Lieutenant Colonel Armando Frías; (3) disbanding the granaderos
with no other similar body put in its place; (4) abolishing Articles 145 and
145bis of the federal penal code, juridical instruments of aggression; (5) pro-
tecting the families of the dead and injured, victims of aggression from July 26
onward; and (6) identifying those responsible for acts of repression and vandal-
ism carried out by authorities, the police, granaderos, and army (Ramírez, Vol.
1, 190).4 By August 5 there was a permanent student strike in the capital and
the beginnings of a national strike throughout Mexico’s regional universities.
August 1968 saw the spontaneous emergence of popular democracy in prog-
ress, in schools, on campuses, and in the streets. Almost overnight the movement
established and consolidated three basic constituent forms. The first was direct

democracy and free expression through the formation of (a) “Struggle Commit-
tees” (comités de lucha) representing the interests of the different schools (Political
Science, Philosophy and Letters, Psychology, etc.); (b) assemblies; and (c) the
National Strike Council (founded on August 2), which comprised more than
two hundred representatives and as such could not be co-opted or negotiated
into inexistence by the state. By the end of the first week the comités de lucha
had supplanted the authority of the pro-PRI FNET, organized teachers and
students through the formation of teachers’ coalitions, and established direct
contact with the social sphere (workers, people in the streets, etc.) through the
work of political brigades.5
The three aforementioned constituent forms coordinated and unified for
the first time ever the actions of the Polytechnic, the UNAM, the “Escuela
Normal,” Chapingo, and the preparatory schools. They created new organ-
isms and modes of functioning that surpassed and delegitimized more anti-
quated (essentially PRI-sanctioned) forms of student representation such as
the National Federation of Technical Students and the Federation of Uni-
versity Students. They also surpassed and displaced the parties of opposi-
tion such as the Communist Party and the Popular Socialist Party (Revueltas
1998, 97–98). From the very beginning attempts were made to isolate the
movement. The press remained for the most part loyal to its sovereign master
(the exception being the national daily Excélsior, which would assume a cen-
tral role in late September). Leaders and representatives of all the major labor
unions condemned the students, as did the leaders of the official opposition
parties of both the Left and Right (Paz 1987, 34).
The August marches were festive and multitudinous. They represented a
broad-based and direct exercise of freedom in the face of police oppression,
while at the same time exposing the inability of the PRI to mediate, reorient,
or capture the critical language unleashed by the movement’s demands. The
only response the state could understand was via threats and violence. The first
time the movement occupied the Zócalo in its hundreds of thousands was on
August 13, when a small group of students considered the possibility of occu-
pying the national palace as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata had done in
1914 at the height of the revolutionary social curve. The movement’s demand
for public dialogue with President Díaz Ordaz was perhaps a reflection of its
overconfidence and political naïveté, not least because it entailed endless dis-
cussion of what this could possibly mean. (Would a telephone call constitute
public dialogue? After several hours of heated debate it was decided it would
not.) However, the demand for public dialogue, in public, bore witness to the
struggle against sovereign power’s privatization of force. It brought to light
the struggle against the distribution of the public and the private that sutures
the domination of the oligarchy throughout the state and society. And it did

this by insisting on an open discussion of the just and unjust proportioning

between inequality and equality, in a context in which Article 145 of the penal
code legalized the absolutization of sovereign power.
The moment of greatest intensity in the social curve of the movement, the
moment at which the state seemed to be incapable of providing a response to
the movement’s demands, was during the five days between August 22 and
August 27 (González de Alba 1999, 90). However, by the end of August the
government was no longer going to allow the students to enter the Zócalo en
masse and at will. When a march of hundreds of thousands from the Museum
of Anthropology to the Zócalo took place on August 27, in a move unau-
thorized by the Central Strike Council it was decided that a contingent of
students would occupy the Zócalo until the president agreed to a public dia-
logue. The police, granaderos, and military moved in with a vengeance. This
military action would come to mark the essential beginning of the end of the
movement. The next day the government forced its bureaucrats out into the
Zócalo to show their support for the state. However, the bureaucrats rebelled
and the situation ended in chaos, as the police and granaderos used tear gas,
batons, and armored vehicles against the government workers who expressed
their solidarity with the students.
At the beginning of September, in his fourth state of the nation address, the
president warned he would implement the full force of the legal order against
the agents of social upheaval. Repression and confrontation became increasingly
brutal. The remarkable “silent demonstration” (La Silenciosa) of September 13
brought out some four hundred thousand people. National independence was
celebrated on the evening of September 15 on the campus of UNAM, as well as
at Zacatenco, the Casco de Santo Tomás, and Vocational School 7. At UNAM
there was even a surrogate president available, as the civil engineer and univer-
sity faculty member Heberto Castillo gave the famous cry (“¡Viva México!”).6
Three days later approximately ten thousand soldiers accompanied by
light tanks and parachute regiments invaded the university and carried out
hundreds of arrests. Five days later the granaderos occupied the Casco de
Santo Tomás, which was defended fearlessly by the students of the Polytech-
nic (Ramírez, Vol. 1, 318–62). By September 24 Mexico City was living a de
facto state of exception as police and granaderos commandeered ambulances
(“mobile nests” for police and military machine guns [González de Alba 1999,
147]) to defend against “social dissolution” (which included beatings, arrests,
or even taking potshots at buildings or anyone on the streets they considered
to be worthy of suspicion).
The public outcry as a result of these invasions intensified considerably in the
final days of September, and at the end of the month the military was ordered to
abandon University City. This action was the result of public pressure centered

on the critique of sovereign exceptionality. On September 20, 308 intellectuals

published an open letter to the president protesting the army’s violation of uni-
versity autonomy, which had first been granted in 1929 as the postrevolution-
ary state attempted to establish a modern secular education system. In light of
the “shameful, anti-constitutional invasion and military invasion of University
City,” they denounced “(a) The anti-constitutional use of the army to carry out
equally anti-constitutional acts (Articles 29 and 129) (b) The de facto suspen-
sion of individual guarantees (Articles 1, 9 and 129) (c) The cessation of uni-
versity autonomy (d) The exercise of repressive measures in place of democratic
dialogue (Article 8) (e) The illegal, arbitrary, and completely anti-constitutional
detention of bureaucrats, researchers, professors, intellectuals, employees, stu-
dents, and parents whose only crime was to be on campus when the university
was occupied by the military (Articles 1, 29).” “We demand from you,” they
continued, “as President of Mexico and Commander in Chief, full compliance
with the Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico” (Ramírez, Vol. 1,
328; Vol. 2, 299–303).
On September 21 the Revolutionary Teachers’ Movement published a
document condemning the de facto suspension of constitutional rights found
in Articles 29 and 129 (Ramírez, Vol. 2, 321–22). On September 22 the
UNAM Teachers’ Union published a bulletin in El Día condemning the mili-
tary invasion of the university as illegal, since it violated Articles 16, 26, 21,
and 129 of the constitution (Ramírez, Vol. 1, 343). The following day “The
Workers of the University of Nuevo León” condemned the invasion of the
university in the national daily Excélsior and called for the immediate repeal
of Articles 145/145bis of the federal penal code (Ramírez, Vol. 2, 340–41).
On September 25 Heberto Castillo (“El presidentito”) published an essay
titled “In Defense of Citizen’s Freedoms” in ¿Por qué? in which he examined
in detail the constitutional violations of previous days (in particular reference
to Articles 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 29, and 129) (Ramírez, Vol. 2, 365). The same day
the faculty of UNAM published its official condemnation of events in El Día
(Ramírez, Vol. 2, 361–70). On September 26 a group calling itself “Parents of
Students of the National School of Biological Sciences and Vocational School
6” published an open letter to the president and Congress in Excélsior asking,
“if we are to understand in fact—rather than in law—that individual guaran-
tees have been repealed, thereby ostensibly violating the contents of Article
29 of the Magna Carta? The facts certainly indicate this” (Ramírez, Vol. 2,
327–29). The following day the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, then presi-
dent of the Academy of Arts and himself incarcerated previously for “crimes
of opinion” via Article 145 of the penal code, published in Excélsior a detailed
denunciation of the juridical exceptionality of sovereign power in Mexico
(Ramírez, Vol. 2, 382–92).

On September 30, the day the military abandoned University City, the stu-
dents of the Sorbonne held a demonstration in support of the Mexican student
movement. Forty-eight hours later, as new negotiations between the National
Strike Council (CNH) and representatives of the state were beginning, police
and military forces opened fire on the peaceful gathering of students and work-
ers at Tlatelolco Square, who had congregated to celebrate the military’s aban-
donment of the university campus. Hundreds died in the cross fire between
the uniformed military and the nonuniformed members of a paramilitary
group called the “Batallón Olimpia,” who were identifiable only by the one
white glove or handkerchief they wore on their left hand. The Olympic
“Games of Peace” went ahead as scheduled on October 12. Despite mass
incarcerations the movement managed to stay alive until December 8, 1968,
at which point it was finally decided in a move that was backed fully by “the
fish” of the Mexican Communist Party that students should abandon the
strike and return to classes.7
“Run, Comrade, the Old World Is Behind You!”

By the late 1950s it was clear that the PRI was not really a political party at all.
It portrayed itself as a universal state and, as such, as the police horizon for the
essential suppression of the political. The PRI had become the electoral column
of a sovereign power that was bolstered by the deference and obedience of the
three major corporative entities (workers, peasants, and popular sectors). The
party coordinated elections, counted votes, provided electoral observers, and
always won. Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s opposing Socialist Popular Party
(PPS) clearly supported the PRI while the equally oppositional National Action
Party (PAN) was quite happy to live off the crumbs it received from its master.8
Thanks to the administrative efficiency of the single-party state, “democracy” in
Mexico prior to 1968 had ceased to be a litigious word. Organizational or ideo-
logical independence and criticism were defused through negotiation, arrest, or
openly violent repression (as was the case in the state’s response to the railroad
workers’ strike of 1958, the doctors’ strike of 1965, and the student occupation
of the University of Michoacán in 1966).9
The justification for repression was always simple, transparent, and unflinch-
ing: the PRI could not be challenged through rational disagreement because
(they said) it was the only organization that provided effective safe haven for
the true guardians of the Mexican Revolution, the Liberal Reform, and national
independence. Whoever thought otherwise either was an enemy of the state,
and therefore worthy of incarceration or elimination, or was being manipulated
childishly by obscure threatening forces external to the PRI’s inherently supe-
rior reason and national consciousness. During the presidency of Gustavo Díaz

Ordaz (1964–70), political subservience to sovereign theocracy had become

virtually complete:
Since the days of Porfirio, there had never been so complete a climate of sub-
ordination in the country. There was almost no suggestion of independence in
that first circle of the system’s true dependents—neither in the army, nor in the
thousands of official unions, nor in the peasant organizations. The 32 governors,
the slightly more than 2,300 municipal presidents, the deputies (minus a handful
of non-PRI people), the senators and the judges all snapped to attention before El
Señor Presidente . . . In his Informe of 1966, delivered a little more than a month
before the army occupation of the University of Michoacán, Díaz Ordaz had
indicated (and foreshadowed) his reaction to the threat against the principle of
authority that—as in so many other countries during those years—unrest among
the young represented for the guardians of vested power and custom: “Neither
claims of social and intellectual rank, nor economic position, nor age, nor profes-
sion nor occupation grant anyone immunity. I must repeat: No one has rights
against Mexico!” (Krauze, Biography, 686–90)
Such increasing subservience to the sovereign subject coincided in the late

1950s and early 1960s with the increasingly efficient administration of an
economic order already dubbed the “Mexican miracle.” In social and cultural
terms, conservative mores anchored the state’s relation to Mexico’s emerging
urban middle classes. Radio and television, together with national and interna-
tional cinema, were systematically censored. The press was almost completely
servile. Social conservatives considered recent cultural manifestations such as
rock music to be diabolical or communist, while for the orthodox “Left” it
was a glaring symptom of Yankee imperialism.10 Abortion, prostitution, and
homosexuality were not appropriate topics of conversation for well-mannered
people. Jeans were frowned upon unless you were from the North, huaraches
(sandals) were unthinkable unless you were a peasant, and long hair was a seri-
ous affront to public order (González de Alba 2008). Dissident middle-class
university students in the early to mid-1960s could certainly read Marx and
Lenin if they really wanted to (Marxism was in fashion, but unlike the 1930s its
locus was the academy, not unions or even political parties [Krauze, Biography,
691]). But staunch Cold War anticommunism was the official language of the
state in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the growing conflict in Vietnam,
and the growing interest on university campuses for Latin American protest
music. For the Mexican state, 1968 marked a special time in which the much-
awaited arrival of October and the successful inauguration of the “Olympics of
Peace,” an event that was to be symbolized by Picasso’s white dove, would be
the first irrefutable and certain proof that the Mexico of the PRI had finally
entered the mature league of modern capitalist nations (even though in reality,

basic services such as a telephone connection could mean entering a labyrinth

of bribes and bureaucratic negotiations that could last for years). Nobody was
going to spoil the PRI’s official entrance onto the world stage, with its carefully
choreographed spectacle of order and tranquility in times of geopolitical and
sociocultural upheaval on a global scale.
At the same time, however, Mexico was witnessing the beginnings of another
world on the verge of realization. There was a kind of youth alchemy taking
place, quickly infiltrating the urban cultural sphere and pointing to new ways of
challenging and perhaps even breaking the cultural straight jacket and political
subservience of everyday social life:
Part of the student generation that created the ’68 Movement—a small part, no
more than seven or eight thousand out of half a million high-school and col-
lege students—had come of age in a politico-cultural stew that had the virtue of
universality. The madness that stalked us at life’s every turn was a global mad-
ness . . . We did not come from the national past. We didn’t know why, but for
us the past was an international realm that produced novels and revolutions, not
a local realm belonging to the people . . . We felt absolutely no connection to
Morelos, Zapata, Villa, to Vicente Guerrero, Hidalgo, Leandro Valle, to Guill-
ermo Prieto, or to Mina. They were characters from a foreign history that bored
preparatory teachers, little more than bureaucrats, strove to mis-teach us; or, at
best, more street names. Foreigners in our own country; foreigners in our own
history. (Taibo 2004, 16–22)11
The country was going through a demographic explosion. Education

had been opened up for the urban masses and middle sectors of society. The
mass commercialization of the contraceptive pill was transforming relations
between women and men forever by taking women’s sexuality out of the realm
of reproduction alone.12 The populace’s consumption of repression, boredom,
and the quietist moral values of the bourgeoisie was slowly crumbling under
images, symbols, and sounds of a suspension of historical values appropriated
from the popular youth culture of the modern international market. It was
this that provided middle-class urban youth with a sound track and loose
political grammar of license and self-mastery that they could mobilize more
or less freely, more or less arbitrarily, against the moral and cultural manacles
that official society—the historically fixed codes and antiquated mores of the
so-called Revolution-made-government—placed on their bodies and minds
daily. Through them an entire order of patriarchal hierarchy could be, if not
swept aside, deemed outdated or openly held in contempt.13 As Eric Zolov
puts it, “On the eve of the student movement of 1968 a grammar of youth
rebellion that incorporated discourses of a Latin American folk revival, rock
music, and revolutionary struggle was widely disseminated. Though class and

ideological differences still characterized youth in general, such a grammar

had nonetheless laid the foundation for the transcendence of such differences
in the name of a common movement” (1999, 118–1–9).
But the experience of 1968 is also more complex than this, and the forging
of a common youth grammar or cultural identification cannot account for the
fact that “nothing of what happened after the final days of July [1968] should
have happened. Neither the president, nor the political class, the students, their
parents, or the intellectuals themselves could have imagined it, or avoided it”
(Volpi 1998, 19). The brief catalogue of cultural change I have presented here—
this thematization of a nascent youth subjectivity, identification, or cultural
identity—cannot provide a definitive measure for a political experience based
on the decision to move suddenly toward the horizon of democracy. It is very
easy to explain the events of 1968 by recurring, in a superficially anthropologi-
cal or anecdotal fashion, to the formation of a new youth subjectivity and ideol-
ogy of affirmation, creativity, and novelty, embracing its “patricidal vocation”
(Krauze, Biography, 693) against the inherited imperium of sovereign anomie.
But 1968 cannot be explained by subjectivity alone. Listening to the Beatles,
reading Carlos Fuentes, and throwing stones or Molotov cocktails at the police
in the name of democracy are very different things. One is not the immediate
precondition of the other. The Beatles, a nascent pop culture, or middle-class
youths’ readings of translations into Spanish of Franz Fanon or Herbert Mar-
cuse cannot by themselves hold the key to our understanding of what has been
the most significant challenge to sovereignty in the last sixty years.
Without doubt “1968” is the name for the moment in which the admin-
istration of the PRI’s police order entered into crisis, just like the ossified
Porfirian institutions had prior to the 1910 revolution. It is the moment at
which privileged and less privileged youth came together powerfully and
momentarily to give expression to what they intuited as being the freedoms of
cultural and political demystification. However, as Gramsci would have put
it, the crisis of the 1960s consisted in the fact that even though the old could
be called outmoded, obsolete, arbitrary, and unjust, the new could not really
be born. As a result, within this interregnum a great variety of morbid and
violent symptoms appeared. “1968,” then, is the name of the symptoms of a
political and cultural interregnum that emerged as the result of a mass youth
reaction against stifling regularization and systemic subservience to sovereign
theocratic exceptionality.
The question is how this interregnum came about. At the time, everybody
knew the PRI—and above all, President Díaz Ordaz—was a repressive force.
Many felt they had more in common with the televised youth of Paris, Prague,
Berlin, or Berkeley than they did with their parents. The sacred words for some
were socialism, revolution, freedom, or democracy. But they were words without

specific content or palpable weight (Krauze, Biography, 692–94). How, then,

to think “1968” in terms other than its vague thematization as the glorious yet
forever lost cultural history and subjectivity of the youth of yesteryear?
It is certainly true that the decision to move in the name of freedom implies
an enactment by a subject. But a theory of the subject is incapable of account-
ing for the slightest decision.14 Rather than the nascent cultural subjectivity of
the subject, my assertion is that it is the relation between chance and the deci-
sion that determines the ground of the political event. The relation between
contingency, chance, and the decision is certainly enacted by a subject, but it is
not the subjectivity of the subject that determines the action. Subjectivity can-
not provide 1968 with its definitive name, place, or measurement in the history
of the relation between state and culture.
Having said this, in order to begin our approach to the event of 1968,
it is important that we first consider its legacy (meaning the way it has been
subjectivized, or named, a posteriori). This is the case because it is the legacy
that determines our ability or inability to return there now, or to calculate
the conditions that would enable a return to 1968, while at all times remain-
ing in its wake. 1968 always contained, indeed always was, a question not
only about 1968, that is, about the experience but also about the meaning
of political experience itself.15 As Jorge Volpi’s comment suggests, there was
something in the unfolding of the event that was heterogeneous to calculation
despite the sovereign decisionism that immediately divided the field of the
political into the clash and sustained struggle between friends and enemies.16
As is well known, the state carried decisionism to its most perfect and most
brutal consequences on the evening of October 2, 1968, when hundreds of
students and workers were caught in the cross fire between police, army, and
paramilitary forces in Tlatelolco Square. Despite the immediacy and violence
of sovereign decisionism, the student movement forced an encounter between
heterogeneous worlds. This encounter momentarily challenged the legality of
the sovereign and exposed the president’s theocracy for what it was: a ruinous
social and political order grounded in violent anomie. That order was threat-
ened by the students’ refusal of the anomic rules and laws that had dominated
the historically constituted political and institutional game for decades. The
students suddenly refused to live according to the laws and moral order of
the reigning sovereign. Almost overnight, then, they began to exercise, on a
truly massive scale, a complete disregard for the exceptionality of Mexico’s
modern political order. But they did so in the name of legitimate sovereignty.
So though the massacre essentially put an end to the movement, the student
movement’s true legacy lies not in its relation to the massacre but in relation
to the movement for democratization that preceded it. But does this democ-
ratization have a concept?

“Revolution Ceases to Be the Moment

It Becomes Necessary to Be Sacrificed for It”:
Dismal Thought and the Melancholic Itinerary of 1968
The year 1968 has been subjected to considerable conceptual and experien-
tial regulation (i.e., to the application of police narrativization) a posteriori. As
such, before continuing we would do well to contend with the name it has been
given, in order to then trace that name’s relation to the historical and conceptual
extension of 1968’s fundamental democratic improprieties. As we will see in the
pages that follow, 1968’s legacy has been subjected to an order of knowledge in
which the movement is normalized by a Christian model of political sacrifice
and martyrdom. Within this process of retroactive subjectivization, the histori-
cal interregnum that 1968 opened up—for more than one hundred days of the
movement—has been reclosed by applying sovereign decisionism to the internal
complexity of the movement. Within this process, the legacy of 1968 annuls
1968 as a political experience.
To account for what is at stake in the legacy of 1968, we can turn to a num-
ber of questions that were first raised in the aftermath of the Paris uprisings. In
the wake of May 1968, Michel de Certeau observed that something had hap-
pened to the human geography that could be neither contained in nor regulated
by the hundreds of histories and chronicles that were being penned and pub-
lished a posteriori. Something excessive happened at the heart of French society,
he observed, that had momentarily invalidated “the mental hardware built for
stability” (1997, 4). As a result, the sheer amount of writing produced in the
wake of the student barricades and general strike, in the aftermath of the accu-
mulation and intensification of collective intelligence and uncertainty, could
not account fully for the impropriety of the words and actions that had been
unleashed on the streets, campuses, and factory floors during those intense days
of confrontation. “In exiting the library of this immense literature,” Certeau
wrote, “the reader is overwhelmed, without having been able to find its secret.
But the key is at the bottom of the country, as if at the bottom of a well” (76).17
For Certeau the question that endured despite so much language was how
can one uncover the secret of (if not a revolution then most certainly) an “exem-
plary action” of truly massive proportions? How to still breathe life into a politi-
cal experience that had apparently succumbed so quickly to reaccommodation,
regulation, and closure? It seemed to Certeau that the more written about May
1968, the greater the inability of its protagonists to give practical and theoreti-
cal force to the sheer singularity of the experience itself. For him, 1968 and its
aftermath raised the question of language’s ability or inability to bear witness
to a seismic shift, or to what he called a “fundamental disquiet” (1997, 80) in

a symbolic order opened up by a breach in the social fabric of the De Gaullist

police order.
Suddenly, almost overnight and as if by chance, the unleashing of collective lan-
guage appeared to have unveiled an experience of freedom and self-determination
that before then had not been allowed to accede to the public domain, at least not
in such numbers and with such vociferousness and licentiousness. For Certeau,
the events of May 1968 not only presented a sociological lesson in the relation
between institutional structures and the possibilities of critique or militancy but
also presented a fundamental disquiet—a profound gap, tear, or unbinding—in
the very relation between reason, history, the place and function of the state, and
political subjectivity. May 1968 in Paris was, according to Certeau, the uncover-
ing of a momentary calamity in the order of knowledge that, in its aftermath, was
being resutured to the world of order and historical rationalization.
The impropriety of the people’s speech unleashed in the streets, campuses,
and factories—that hitherto unthinkable excess of thought, word, and affect
that had been momentarily freed against all forms of historical, institutional,
cultural, and sexual determination—was slowly yet surely being deprived of its
mystery in the wake of the events themselves. It was being reasoned into inexis-
tence. Within this context the question raised by Certeau was how to name an
event in such a way as to not have it succumb experientially and conceptually
to the resuturing and regulation of the police order and the reinstallation of its
mental hardware? How to keep the mad truth of an anachronistic experience
alive in the present not only as a trace or mark of what had come before but also
as an opening toward the future?
History teaches us that Michel de Certeau’s concerns in the immediate
aftermath of 1968 were fully justified, because the events of May were indeed
reinterpreted by historians, sociologists, and bestselling novelists who began to
regulate the events through the framework of a facile, and undoubtedly doctri-
nal, trope. Jacques Rancière describes the official version of events:
The movement of ’68 was only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation
and new ways of living. And as neither youth nor the desire for liberty by defini-
tion know what they want or what they are doing, these youth ended up bringing
about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but the truth of what they
sought: both a rejuvenation of capitalism and the destruction of all the familial,
educational and other structures that stood in the way of the unlimited reign of
the market that was penetrating ever deeper into the hearts and minds of indi-
viduals. (Rancière 2006, 88–89)
In the reinterpretation of events that ensued, the calculated knowledge and

sound wisdom of the sages—sages who denounced the impropriety and anach-
ronistic nature of the events by assuring the world that May 1968 was indeed a

central episode in the unfolding of mass consumption and capitalist youth cul-
ture on an international scale—won out over the directionless cries and protes-
tations of the fools in the street who supposedly knew not what they wanted nor
what they were doing. Whereas May marked the eruption of improper words to
which no predetermined idea could be attached, in its aftermath there was pre-
cious little breathing space left for friendship toward the chance experience, the
mad truth, and the raucous unseemliness of the so-called philosopher-rebels.
In a recent commentary Bruno Bosteels (2008) traces what he considers to
be an important distinction between the events and aftermath of May 1968 in
France and the problematic legacy of the Mexican student movement of the
following months. Unlike its French counterpart the Mexican movement was
organized around specific written demands that challenged the sovereign order.
It managed to sustain a state of mass mobilization and internal transforma-
tion for over three months of intense collective debate, street confrontation,
and mass marches. After being subjected from the outset to the brutality of a
state violence that culminated in the notorious Tlatelolco massacre of October
2 and that was accompanied by the persecution and imprisonment of all the
movement’s leadership, the movement endured for another two months before
finally returning to classes in early December 1968. As in Paris the Mexican
rebels were the sons and daughters of the middle class that had risen to urban
prominence in the previous two decades. They embodied “the clash between an
immobile and monolithic political and social sensibility—which hung onto the
empty models of national unity and a provincial veneration of national sym-
bols—and the fresh and unbending witnesses to a denationalized and depen-
dent reality, suffering from a rapid process of neocolonial transculturation, who
were extraordinarily sensitive to the causes and symbols that were their con-
temporaries” (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 1993, 202). Following are Bosteels’s
insights into the relation between the French and Mexican legacies:
Because of the deaths and detentions that followed, the history of the afterlives
of 1968 in Mexico is unlike that of France. Whereas May ’68 in Paris almost
immediately received a (now-canonical) series of interpretations from academic
disciplines both old and new, in Mexico it seems as if the experience of 1968 had,
by force, to pass through more experimental means, including dozens of poems,
novels, testimonies and memoirs. Only recently, with the release of new docu-
ments, have the facts at long last begun to dissipate the rumors and uncertainties
that for decades continued to surround the watershed year of 1968 in Mexico.
We might even argue that, despite Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent attacks against May
’68 in France, attacks that perhaps do little more than flatter the nostalgics, it is
in Mexico that the legacy of ’68 is still open. (2008, 5–6)

The brutal transparency of state violence—the deaths and detentions

that accompanied and followed the movement—lies at the heart of an open
wound that still characterizes the aftermath of 1968 in contemporary Mexico.
Clearly what Bosteels is indicating is that while the transformational efferves-
cence, violent repression, and gradual disarticulation of the Mexican student
movement still raises the question of its historical duration, place, and signifi-
cance—that is, the question of its specter and afterlife four decades after the
fact—the French experience was fully sutured, silenced, and reabsorbed decades
ago. How then, continues Bosteels in relation to Mexico 1968, “—aside from
the facts—are the events of that year lived at the subjective level? And to
what extent is the current disarray of the Left in large parts of the world pre-
inscribed in the way events such as 2 October were subjectivized forty years
ago?” (2008, 6). How, in other words, were the events of 1968 determined
after the fact? What consequences does that determination have for us today?
And how can we think around, or despite, those determinations in order to
approach once again the question of freedom and democracy that the move-
ment unleashed and struggled so hard to sustain?
On one level, Bosteels’s comments draw attention to what has become the
critical consensus on the events and aftermath of 1968 in Mexico. This consen-
sus, formulated virtually always in reference to the use of state force (i.e., to “the
deaths and detentions that followed”) indicates that the student movement and
the Tlatelolco killings cannot be separated from each other and that the his-
torical sequence generally called “’68” cannot be considered without Tlatelolco
and the consequent inability or unwillingness of the Mexican juridical order to
bring its perpetrators to justice. There is certainly a good deal of truth in this,
and Eric Zolov is right to note that “Tanks and guns could not easily erase the
memory of what had transpired or contain the spirit of free speech and demo-
cratic values the student movement had embodied. The regime might recapture
the places where its institutions and public figures had been mocked and chal-
lenged, but it could not as easily contain the continued symbolic resistance to
its authority” (1999, 131). However, the idea that Tlatelolco is ’68 and ’68 is
Tlatelolco can also be enormously limiting since it reduces, intentionally or
unintentionally, more than three months of exceptional intelligence, activism,
generosity, discussion, disagreement, friendship, vitality, political maneuvering,
and mistakes to a singular trope of sacrifice and martyrdom imposed on the
public sphere by sovereign force. In other words, thanks to “the deaths and
detentions that followed” Tlatelolco can too easily become ’68.
In her recent work on the Latin American 1960s, Diana Sorensen repeats the
conceptual underpinnings of the consensus with utmost clarity and simplicity:
“A whole generation considers the massacre to be the central event in its intel-
lectual formation, ‘a brand, a scar that has never healed,’ as Elena Poniatowska

declared in 1988” (2007, 55). Its traumatic memory, Sorensen continues, “is
central to Mexico’s national identity. Carlos Monsiváis declared it in lapidary
fashion in 2002: ‘34 years after the Student Movement of 1968, a consensus
has been reached: that ’68 is the most significant event of the second half of
the twentieth century in Mexico’” (55).18 Hence, concludes Sorensen, “1968
in Mexico has gone down as a scar, a deeply disruptive break in the landscape
of Mexican political life” (56). Tlatelolco and 1968 are united as an unhealed
scar and this scar is, for the author, what keeps the memory of 1968 alive:
“Hundreds commemorate the massacre every October 2 at Tlatelolco Square,
and books continue to be written about it” (56). For Sorensen and many oth-
ers it is clear that the massacre is the central event and trauma that has defined
and determined a whole generation as well as a half-century quest for Mexican
“national identity.”
However, we would do well to recognize that there are noteworthy alterna-
tives to this essentially Christian narrative of 1968 as inescapable martyrdom,
sacrifice, and social trauma. For example, Marcelino Perelló, one of the most
prominent leaders and members of the Student Movement’s National Strike
Council (CNH), questions the ethical and political underpinnings of what
Sorensen and others accept as the consensus of 1968. In an online exchange
with fellow movement leader and CNH member Luis González de Alba, Perelló
observes that this consensus offers little more than a languid, dismal recupera-
tion of a 1968 in which movement and massacre are conflated without further
thought or consideration:
Of all the different versions and points of view surrounding the ’68 Movement,
the one that stands out is the one you call languid, and that I prefer to call dismal.
It is a version that puts the accent on repression and forgets, omits, conceals those
who were repressed. The repressed. It sterilizes the Movement and reduces it to a
footnote. If you ask youngsters today what ’68 was all about, nine out of ten will
tell you it was a massacre. Very few would be able to tell you what we were saying
or how we were saying it. It’s as if we had never been there. As if we just happened
to be passing by. (2003, 2; italics in original)19
For Perelló and González de Alba in 2003, the consensual version of 1968
in what they call its most dismal, languid figuration (a figuration that is repro-
duced verbatim in Sorensen’s work) not only installs oblivion as its underlying
impulse but also installs conceptual, political, and ethical complacency at the
heart of the present’s relation to the past and, indeed, at the heart of the past’s
relation to the political. It is the preemptive barring of 1968’s internal intensi-
ties. In this sense, it is sovereign thought in action.
As Bosteels observes in his original commentary, what is truly at stake is our
ability to account for the way the events of 1968 were first subjectivized forty

years ago, in order to then consider the extent to which “the current disarray of
the Left” is preinscribed in the way those events were evaluated. In other words,
what he proposes is a critique of the way 1968 has been represented and thema-
tized historically in Mexico.
Both Bosteels and Sorensen indicate that the figure of Octavio Paz is central
to the evaluation and subjectivization of the legacy of 1968 in Mexico. However,
their approaches differ considerably. Sorensen provides us with an uncritical hom-
age to what she calls the “heights of philosophical and historical speculation”
(2007, 77) to which Paz rises in Posdata. Bosteels’s approach to Paz, on the other
hand, implies reading Paz against Paz in order to traverse and move beyond him.
The question of melancholy, and of a melancholic legacy, lies at the heart of both
approaches, though in different ways and for different reasons.
Bosteels’s close reading of Octavio Paz’s poetic reflections on 1968 (titled
“Interruptions from the West”) delves directly into the realm of melancholy. In
his analysis of “Interruptions from the West (3)” and “Interruptions from the
West (4),” Bosteels traces the way in which the Mexican poet draws on Marx’s
1843 letter to Arnold Ruge in order to make use of the notion of shame. Marx
writes, “Shame is a sort of anger that turns on itself, and if a whole nation were
really ashamed, it would be the lion that recoils in order to leap” (1971, 510).
In Paz, this becomes the following: “Shame is anger / Turned against itself: /
If an entire nation is ashamed / it is a lion crouching ready to spring. / The
municipal employees wash the blood / from the Plaza of the Sacrificed.) / Look
now, / stained / before anything worth it was said: / Lucidity” (Bosteels 2008,
6–7). The poet assimilates shame not as an affirmation but as “an ambiguous
act of introspection regarding the possible shame inherent in any revolution”
(6). Even in a poem that has been “often quoted as the poet’s last claim to fame
on the side of the Left” (6), Paz’s language can be read as if to say that it was the
student movement itself that did not have a chance to say anything worthwhile.
This ambiguity in the relation of shame to revolution (i.e., the ambiguity in
Paz’s approach to the Marxian legacy) is then accentuated in Paz’s fourth poem,
which was dedicated to May 1968 in France and was actually written origi-
nally in French, “Interruptions from the West (4).” Here it becomes increas-
ingly difficult to grasp the exact sense of Paz’s position on 1968: “(Paris: The
Lucid Blind) / In one of the suburbs of the absolute, / the words had lost their
shadows. / They traded in reflections, as far / as the eye could see, / and were
drowned / in an interjection . . . / The good, we wanted the good: / to set the
world right. / We didn’t lack integrity: / we lacked humility” (2008, 9). As
Bosteels concludes, this is little more than a veiled critique of 1968: “The stu-
dents lacked modesty or shame; they had been sinfully disingenuous, as though
the excess of innocence constituted proof of heightened guilt” (2008, 9). As
such, for Bosteels it is through Paz’s early readings of 1968 that we can trace the

beginnings in Mexico of “the melancholic itinerary of so much radical political

thinking today” (9).
Sorensen, however, refers to Paz’s Posdata, which was first penned at the
end of 1969 in the aftermath of the student movement’s demise, as the most
radical attempt to “deconstruct” (Sorensen’s word) the state’s claim to author-
ity after the Tlatelolco massacre (2007, 56). In reality, however, the book is far
from being a deconstruction of state authority. Paz indicates in this explicit
addendum to El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) that instead
of exerting its naked force on the student movement at Tlatelolco on October
2, 1968, the state should have listened to its demands and thereby returned to
what he calls (unironically) “the tradition of the Mexican Revolution”: “To rees-
tablish communication with the people would have meant regaining author-
ity and freedom to dialogue with the Right, the Left—and the United States”
(1985, 36–37). But the state, says Paz, did not do this. Therefore, he continues,
how can we understand the reasons for the violent actions and impulses of the
ruling party and, in particular, its use of naked force against the students and
their supporters on that fateful night? How, in other words, to assign Tlatelolco
its full historical, cultural, and institutional significance in the history of the
modern nation?
Paz is very clear on this point. The Tlatelolco massacre is the result of
the archaic specters of the Aztec world that still haunt the modern Mexican
state form. José Revueltas was the first to make this parallel between 1968,
the pre-Hispanic world, and the modern sovereignty of the PRI. In a schema
included in México 68: Juventud y revolución (Mexico 68: Youth and Revolution),
Revueltas wrote that in order for the state to accept the movement’s political
and social constituent power, it would first have to abolish its most oppressive
and antidemocratic structure; that is, “the presidentialist system upon which
the personal dictatorship of the tlacatecuhtli, whatever his name might be, is
founded. This is the totalitarian and corporative system of vertically organized
political and social institutions that constitutes a straight-jacket, impeding the
most insignificant expressions of autonomy, and political, unionist, and profes-
sional independence” (Revueltas 1998, 100). Clearly, Revueltas uses the parallel
to draw attention to the unmodern nature of modern sovereignty in the late
1960s. In Octavio Paz’s hands, however, the parallel becomes an all-encom-
passing allegory of the Mexican psyche and its atemporal cultural unconscious.
In Ulises criollo (1936) José Vasconcelos had stated that transforming Mexico’s
“underlying Aztecism” was “an indispensable condition for Mexico to occupy a
place among the civilized nations” (1936, 503–4). In 1969 our poet and essay-
ist seems to have taken Vasconcelos’s essential racism as the gospel truth; for
Paz, Tlatelolco “was an instinctive repetition that assumed the form of a ritual
of expiation. Its correspondences with the Mexican past, particularly with the

Aztec world, are fascinating, frightening and repugnant. The Tlatelolco mas-
sacre reveals that a past we thought was buried is alive and that it erupts among
us . . . It is a past that we have not known how, or have not been able, to recognize,
name, or unmask” (1987, 40). Quite simply, then, Tlatelolco is the return of the
Mexican repressed. And that repressed is Aztec in origin. Underdeveloped Mexico
is an otherness that designates poverty and misery, but it signifies much more. It
houses “that gaseous reality formed by beliefs, fragments of beliefs, images and
concepts that history deposits in the subsoil of the social psyche” (109). Otherness
is what “constitutes us” as psychosocial subjects (113).
Within this formulation all Mexicans, presumably even those who coordi-
nate the repression of citizens from within the corridors of sovereign power
and impunity, are in essence semiconscious victims and propagators of their
archaic Aztec otherness. This origin is the only partially absent cause of the pres-
ent’s existential, ontological ground, and its morbid symptoms can be witnessed
most clearly in the ritualistic repetitions and instinctive returns that emerge
to ruin the enlightened peace and modernity of the “tradition of the Mexican
Revolution”: “What happened on October 2nd, 1968 was, simultaneously, the
denial of what we have wanted to be since the Revolution and the affirmation
of what we have been since the conquest and even before” (Paz 1987, 113). As
such, rather than a radical deconstruction of the state’s claim of authority, as
Sorensen asserts, Paz recasts the violence of Tlatelolco as a mythico-ontological
act fully determined by Mexico’s history of racial and cultural identity: “The
double reality of the 2nd of October 1968: it was both a historical fact and a
symbolic representation of our invisible and subterranean history. But more
than a representation, what was unleashed before our eyes was a ritual act: a
sacrifice” (Paz 1987, 114). If this is the case, then who could assume full respon-
sibility for such acts of violence and brutality—for such injustice—when they
are nothing more than the “instinctive” rituals of the lost origins and uncon-
scious determinations to which Mexicans in the present are subjected as a result
of their Aztec specters? Under such circumstances, the sovereign decision to kill
cannot be considered to be a free or fully conscious decision, for the sovereign is
merely trapped in the acting out of an ontology that is determined historically
by the archaism of original violence, that is, the Aztec specters of Tenochtitlán
that walk among us, inhabit us, take us over, and lead us to carry out instinctive
acts that we ourselves cannot foresee and scarcely comprehend.
Sorensen considers that Paz’s “closed logic of explanation” is “part of Postda-
ta’s compelling force” (2007, 65). But the melancholy of Paz’s reading of 1968,
and indeed of Mexican history in its entirety, is stifling, all encompassing, and
utterly devoid of freedom. It is clear that Paz’s melancholy functions as a result
of a constitutive confusion between lack and loss. Within this confusion the
object lacking—the Aztec world Tenochtitlán, the origin—is presented not as

a lack but as once possessed and then lost (presumably as a result of the arrival
and colonial expansion of the Spanish). However, it is a loss that is not entirely
lost, for it occasionally returns as loss (as a specter of the Aztec world—a return
of the lost world—incarnated through ritualized state violence such as that of
Tlatelolco, for example). In the face of this eternal and inescapable return of
loss, Paz is left to mourn a situation in which all Mexicans are forced to recog-
nize through ritualistic and sacrificial state violence that they are in fact mourn-
ing the lost object that they have not yet truly lost and indeed cannot renounce
(i.e., the archaic origin of their modern identity).
It is for this reason that we can consider Paz’s language to be that of a text-
book melancholic. He actually possesses the object, but only when it returns
in its loss, and even then he does not desire it. So he and other Mexicans (pre-
sumably the sovereign and the dead students alike) are compelled to a social
life in which everything—freedom, democracy, equality—is always already
determined by the logic of archaic martyrdom that cannot be renounced or
killed. Slavoj Žižek establishes a significant distinction between mourning and
melancholy: “The mourner mourns the lost object and ‘kills it a second time’
through symbolizing its loss; while the melancholic is not simply the one who
is unable to renounce the object: rather, he kills the object a second time (treats
it as lost) before the object is actually lost” (2001, 147). Paz cannot lose his lost
object by fully symbolizing it. He cannot release it like a mourner and free
himself of Mexico’s archeological past forever. If he did, he would be rejecting
Mexico’s mestizo identity.
So the question is what does this do for Paz? What does it mobilize for
him? Does it create the conditions for a deconstruction of state legitimacy, as
Sorensen clearly asserts? The answer on the last point is obviously no. How-
ever, it does allow him to do three things: first, erase the details of the student
movement’s challenge to sovereign power; second, present a reading of the
political in which state violence is the return of Aztec archaism rather than
the essential enactment of modernity; and third, propose a time of progress
characterized in Hegelian terms as the ever incomplete capture and annul-
ment of the archaic in the modern. The problem is that it is impossible for
such a form of ideological consciousness to contain in itself, through its own
internal dialectic, an escape from itself (hence the essential unfreedom of Paz’s
transhistorical melancholy). If he acted like a mourner and acceded to the
true symbolization of loss (i.e., of lack), rather than treating it as lost before
the object was actually lost, then his metaphysic of Mexican identity, liberal-
ism, and modernity in Posdata, as well as in his previous work El laberinto de
la soledad, would be essentially meaningless. As a result, in Posdata Paz has
to subordinate 1968 to the Tlatelolco massacre in order to rewrite and rele-
gitimize the morbid symptoms of Mexican modernity he had already devised

in El laberinto de la soledad. Paz’s melancholy is therefore what reduces the

differential force of time to a self-identical, objectified, timeless dialectic. It
is melancholy that mediates the metaphysical narrativization of the relation
between the social, the political, the philosophical, and the historical in El
laberinto de la soledad and its post-Tlatelolco afterword, Posdata.
As already stated, the problem is that in the process he not only elides the stu-
dent movement in its entirety. He essentially condemns its historical sequence
to the dustbin of history, replacing it with the metaphysic of sacrifice and mar-
tyrdom he sees in and through Tlatelolco alone. Meanwhile, what Sorensen
refers to as the heights of Paz’s “philosophical and historical speculation, tracing
the thread that connects Mexico’s present with its archeological roots” (2007,
77) are actually a quagmire of morbid symptoms in which a melancholic onto-
logical vision overdetermines the political through the racialization of sovereign
force. In this process the historical is camouflaged as an inescapable metaphysic
of unmourned and unmournable loss that cannot be “dialecticized” into inexis-
tence. For this reason we can consider Paz’s poetic and essayistic responses to the
student movement of 1968 to be prime examples of dismal thought in its purest
(i.e., in its most determining, reductive, and regulative) form. It is through Paz’s
sad passions that Tlatelolco has become institutionalized intellectually as the
essence and tragic soul of 1968 and its anniversaries.
“It Is Forbidden to Forbid”:

Melancholy and the Question for the Decision
Octavio Paz’s influential figuration of the movement does not mean that the
melancholic itinerary of 1968’s afterlife has been marked exclusively by martyr-
dom and sacrifice. Fortunately, there is no such thing as a context that is abso-
lutely determinable, and the melancholic legacy has also produced instances of
extraordinary (though clearly aggrieved, indignant) lucidity. One such moment
is the aforementioned online exchange between Luis González de Alba and
Marcelino Perelló in 2003. Between the two, they begin to address the question
of how and why something took place during those days that really (i.e., reason-
ably) had no grounds to take place.
At the heart of this passionate exchange is the question of the relation
between contingency, chance, and the decision. This raises the question of
the relation between subjectivity and the experience of the political event. For
González de Alba and Perelló, the experience of the political is not simply the
deployment of subjectivity or of a more or less common cultural identification;
that is, for them the police regulation of power and privilege is not challenged
by the affirmation of a youthful egological immanence alone. Rather, it is the
advent of a collective subjectivization that emerges in the interregnum between

contingency and the decision. This clearly brings up the question of the relation
between reason and democracy.
It is in his almost aggrieved approach to the question of collective motiva-
tions that Luis González de Alba begins to formulate some fundamental ques-
tions not just about 1968 but also about democracy itself. In the following
section of his exchange with Perelló, González de Alba wholeheartedly rejects
the idea of 1968 as the product of a tangible, calculable, or measured relation
between reason and the political:
You say we took to the streets for the freedom of Campa, Vallejo, Rico Galán
“and so many other revolutionaries.” Ok: you and I did, and maybe a few
others from the Sciences, Philosophy, Economics, Political Sciences and the
Polytechnic. But I don’t think we could have summoned up more than a thou-
sand people to go out onto the streets. Year after year the marches organized
by the Left, or carried out under the banner of Leftist demands, were squalid,
lamentable affairs. How was it that, in August and September 1968, we sud-
denly found ourselves at the helm of a mass movement? In short, why did they
take to the streets to march with us? Those very same guys who used to kick us
out of their Schools whenever we went to lecture them about the glad tidings
of anti-imperialism? I’ve been saying for years that on July 30, 1968, only one
of every thousand people could have said who Vallejo and Campa were . . .
But on August 27th if you had shouted from the center of the Zócalo: “Let’s
get Mxyzptlk out of prison!” (Remember that character from Superman?), the
people would have followed you . . . The question is not why you, I, Escudero,
Raúl Alvarez, Gilberto Guevara etc took to the streets, but why everyone else
from the Schools of Medicine, Chemistry, Engineering, the Polytechnic, and
then even the Iberoamericana and universities from all over the country, joined
us? People who wouldn’t have followed us in our revolutionary project, who
used to shut us up with cries of “Get to the point!” when we were on slippery
terrain, but who held on to a sordid anger, an indefinable malaise or unease that
was closer to Wilhelm Reich than it was to Lenin . . . I’ll end this electronic
conversation with you, Marcelino, saying that, with thirty five years of hind-
sight, I’m still convinced of what did NOT move people: Campa, Vallejo or
the Article of Social Dissolution. In the very beginning they were moved by the
state’s vile aggression against the Polytechnic and the Preparatoria in July, then
by the speech given by the University Rector, Barros Sierra; by such indignation
in the face of barbarism. But that was just the beginning, the engine driving the
first protests. It is not the final explanation. Because then came an unknown
territory, a zone never imagined before, a freedom never experienced before. It
was from there, from that hard nucleus (but not from Campa or Vallejo) that
the passion that characterized the following month of August was born . . . That
explanation, that of the motivations that united the youth above and beyond
ideology, is an explanation we still owe the country. (2003, 2–3)

These concerns regarding the gap between the leadership’s political forma-
tion—their political consciousness—and the student’s decision to decide are
important. By demanding a more convincing explanation of the relationship
between theory and the singularity of the experience itself, González de Alba
seems to be challenging the idea that 1968 was an episode fully consistent
with the advance and expansion of the Left’s traditional ideological (i.e., “sci-
entific”) program.20
In particular, González de Alba’s concerns call for a reflection on the relation
between chance and the decision—between absolute contingency and the act
of the act—as a means of approaching the potential expression of an unmeasur-
able, incalculable relation to the horizon of the political. Paco Ignacio Taibo
comments on the tension between theory and practice in the first days of the
uprising: “It was mind-blowing. Bazookas or no bazookas we learned from the
information brigades that the clashes were continuing in the city center. The
prime movers were the younger students of the vocational and preparatory
schools: the ‘others,’ the ones who a week ago had never read a page of Lenin,
and who now, swept into the whirlwind, would not need to. Others—but just
like us . . . For those of us who had got our politics out of books, political reality
was a completely new school” (2004, 35).
Such questions have haunted González de Alba for decades. They first sur-
faced in his 1971 testimonial novel, Los días y los años, when in the confines of
Lecumberri Prison, the narrator-prisoner recollects José Visitación’s admonition
to him during the days of the movement: “Sometimes, he [Visitación] said,
it’s not clear to me if you’re admirable or an idiot. The thing is that no one
understands very well what we’re going through. I don’t even think you guys,
who are supposed to be the leaders, understand. Do you really think so many
people would rise up to kick out a chief of police? That’s of no importance to
me” (1999, 103). In 1993 González de Alba offered an argument for which he
would later receive the abrasive condemnation of Carlos Monsiváis:
Why did we take such risks? Why did hundreds of thousands march despite
warnings from police, relatives and parents? Why did the people who had been
kicking us out of their schools when we tried to explain the execrable Vietnam
War, the assassination of Jaramillo and his family, or the everyday injustices of
Mexico, suddenly abandon their classes? For twenty five years we’ve been giving
an almost religious explanation: because the Holy Spirit of social consciousness
suddenly descended upon the students in a Pentecostal revival that allowed
them to make society’s demands their own. That’s a lie . . . It wasn’t Christianity
or Socialism that produced the mobilizations of ’68. It was a party; a carnival
against the Mexican Lent that had been forced on us for fifty years, against the
mural that represented a static society while the whole world was changing
around us. (1993, 3)

But neither does festiveness provide us with a convincing explanation or

alternative conceptualization for the decision of hundreds of thousands to sud-
denly move toward the horizon of democracy. Elsewhere in his 2003 exchange
with Perelló, González de Alba says, “The explanation we’ve created, that you’ve
all created in the last thirty five years, is ridiculous, and it goes something like this:
once upon a time many, many years ago, all of a sudden young people every-
where embraced the political consciousness of the Left and put their lives on
the line in order to guarantee the freedom of a couple of communists who had
been imprisoned ten years before. Really? Don’t be ridiculous” (2003, 3). Strik-
ingly, however, even José Revueltas, who was also one of the main proponents
of the scientific rationale that González de Alba has challenged for years, raised
doubts about the relation between chance and the decision in reference to the
student movement of 1968. Again, from within the confines of Lecumberri
Prison, Revueltas speculated about the conditions of the here and now—about
chance and the decision—in relation to the Marxist conceptualization of the
movement: “The petit-bourgeois masses accept socialist ideology (in slogans,
symbols) because it is the only instrument possible with which they can criti-
cize the regime and its political superstructures. In different conditions—pres-
ently transcended in all or almost all countries—this student mass would have
accepted a movement of fascist characteristics. What does this mean?” (1998,
146). Revueltas provides no answer to his important question. It is as if he were
facing yet remained incapable of reasoning with, or of measuring the limits of,
an irreducible zone lying somewhere between the scientific reason of Marxism-
Leninism and the libertarian singularity of the chance event. Revueltas’s lack of
an answer is absolutely fundamental because it attests to the fact that a fully cal-
culable event (an event that falls under the generality of a law, norm, or deter-
minative judgment, and thus of a power-knowledge and a knowledge-power) is
not an event (Derrida 2005, 148). Revueltas’s lack of a response indicates that
1968 was indeed an event. It seems to be a silent admission that you can have all
the Marxist militancy—all the political consciousness and scientific reason—in
the world, but chances are you will never be able to fully compute the truth and
“experience of what or who comes, of what happens or who arrives—obviously as
other, as the absolute exception or singularity of an alterity that is not reappro-
priable by the ipseity of a sovereign power and a calculable knowledge” (Derrida
2005, 148).21
Certainly for Visitación, González de Alba, and Revueltas it is the decision
that makes the event. But what can we understand by the relation between
chance, the decision, and the act? The decision is the act of the act; that is,
it is an act that produces the act. But it remains beyond full calculability and
measurement when considered at the level of the act alone. As a result, the act
of the act raises a number of questions regarding the relation between reason,

calculation, and the field of political praxis. For example, and paraphrasing
Jacques Derrida in Politics of Friendship, how does one account theoretically and
practically for the disproportionate and nonsymmetrical decision of hundreds
of thousands of heterogeneous yet coaffirmed allies in any one given situation?
How does one orient a name to what can take place only once, here and now,
for the first and last time? In his exchange with González de Alba, Perelló refers
to this problem of incalculability not only in reference to the narrativization of
the past in the present but also in relation to the velocity and intensity of the
political experience itself as it unfolded in the summer of 1968:
Beyond the merely anecdotal, how can we transmit today or just evoke that vibra-
tion, that tension, that intensity? That ingenuity and dogmatism . . . Individual
and collective life is written in spurts. Suddenly, in a question of days or weeks,
events speed up and things happen that haven’t happened in centuries. Con-
sciousness speeds up and you can learn and understand in a question of hours
what you haven’t learned or understood in years. And you can suddenly adhere
passionately and enthusiastically to something that before was foreign or indiffer-
ent to you. That’s how you fall in love with people and causes: abruptly. (2003, 2)
A nonmelancholic reflection on the date and its anniversary, that is, on its
return and returns in the present, requires an evaluation of the process and
meaning of the political experience called ’68. It requires an examination of the
relation between chance and the decision—between chance and the act of the
act (the act of the act, the decision to decide) that remains beyond the measure
and reason of the act itself. It requires an examination of the receptivity or
hospitality to unconditional incalculability that allows one to “suddenly adhere
passionately and enthusiastically to something that before was foreign or indif-
ferent to you” or that allows you to fall in love with people and causes abruptly,
and in such a way that the world, as you have known it up until that moment,
changes forever. This is where chance, the passive decision, and the singularity
of the democratic event come into play at the heart of 1968.
“Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!”:

Chance, Passive Decision, Democracy
González de Alba makes the point that if 1968 had been about political con-
sciousness or militancy alone, then there would have been maybe a few thou-
sand people protesting in the streets, rather than hundreds of thousands. If
it had been just a question of political consciousness or cultural subjectivity,
then the decision would not have been a decision at all, because it would have
been merely an extension of what was already “mine” and of what “I” already
was. It would have been the rational instantiation of a classic free, moral, and

responsible subjective agency. If this had been the case, 1968 would not have
been a transformational experience because it would have been just the measur-
able effect of the calculable deployment of “my” political subjectivity, which
would have been the repetition of “their” political subjectivity and vice versa,
across the social sphere. In other words, it would not have been an event, because
deep down nothing would have stirred at the heart of the relation between the
subject and the decision.
The problem, however, arises precisely because 1968 was the product of
a stirring at the heart of the relation between the subject and the decision.
As such, it is the product of a decision in the true sense. But the decision as
such has escaped full measure and calculability. This raises the question of the
“eventness” of the event and gives rise to the almost pained intensity of Perelló
and González de Alba’s important online exchange 35 years after the fact. Need-
less to say, those who ascribe to the melancholic legacy of 1968 do not have
such problems. But neither can they face up to the relation between 1968 and
the singularity of the event, or to the relation between thought and freedom,
because they have already laid down all ideas obediently at the feet of sovereign
decisionism and Christian sacrifice.
In contrast, Luis González de Alba’s Los días y los años is a fundamental text
for thinking through, for traversing, the complexity of the responsible decision
in relation to 1968. In this book, decision and responsibility are not the effect
of a classic, free, and willful (i.e., a sovereign decisionist) subject. Rather, in his
approach to 1968 decision and responsibility are of the other; that is, they come
back or come down to the other, from the other, even if it is the other “in me.”
In González de Alba, then, the responsible decision reveals itself as an affirma-
tive receptivity or hospitality—a yes—to and from alterity. It is uncovered as a
passive decision, indicating “in me” the other who decides and rends. Derrida
defines the passive decision in the following terms:
The passive decision, condition of the event, is always in me, structurally, another
event, a rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolute other in
me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me. Undoubtedly rebellious
against the decisionist conception of sovereignty or of the exception (Schmitt)
the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge. Knowledge is necessary if
one is to assume responsibility, but the decisive or deciding moment of respon-
sibility supposes a leap by which an act takes off, ceasing in that instant to
follow the consequence of what is . . . and thereby frees itself (this is what is
called freedom). In sum, a decision is unconscious—insane as that may seem,
it involves the unconscious and nevertheless remains responsible. And we are
hereby unfolding the classic concept of decision. It is this act of the act that we
are attempting here to think: ‘passive,’ delivered over to the other, suspended
over the other’s heartbeat . . . receiving my very life from the heartbeat of the

other. We say not only heart but heartbeat: that which, from one instant to the
other this heart receives. (Derrida 1997, 68–69; italics in the original)
I would like to examine a single sequence (chapters 9 through 12) in Los días
y los años. At the heart of this sequence is the encounter between two heteroge-
neous regimes. On one hand we are located in the regime of sovereign decision-
ism converted now, in the wake of the student movement, into the geometrical
architecture of Lecumberri Prison’s infamous Panopticon.22 We are located in
an omniscient architecture that extends and perpetuates sovereign reason and
force by reducing life to the fully calculable and determined distinction between
subject and object; state and prisoner; normal and abnormal; friend and enemy.
On the other hand, and in contrast to the decisionist geometry of the
prison, we witness the figurative language of a strange constellation of images
and relations that exceed the Panopticon’s specific rationalization and crude
determination of the enemy. It is in the encounter between these two hetero-
geneous regimes that the slogan of May 1968—“Under the Paving Stones, the
Beach!”—emerges to take center stage on the streets of Mexico City and the
student cellblock of Lecumberri Prison.
Contingency, chance, and the decision lie at the heart of a sequence that
twists and turns between love and friendship, that is, between philia and eros,
without ever settling on either side of the imperfect suture. In this sequence
it becomes impossible to make the distinction between love and friendship,
between passive (you fall in love) and active (you make a friend). It allows for no
closure in the relation. It therefore disrupts the Schmittian axiom of sovereign
(subjectivist) decisionism. It turns away from sovereign subjectivization in order
to allow, just for a moment (in the passage from one instant to another) that the
other come as other, as other to the other, as other other, or as another other, in
the unveiling of the historical sequence of 1968 as an intricate choreographing
of the ethicopolitical relation.
By the time we arrive at the sequence in question, the narrator of Los días y
los años has recounted, from within the confines of Lecumberri Prison in 1969,
the experience of the student movement up to the final days of August 1968. As
the sequence begins, the narrator is out on the cellblock as the sun goes down,
unable to make it to the end of The Meaning of Meaning (by C. K. Ogden and
I. A. Richards). The cellblock is compared to an internal (fake) street, but it is
empty, lifeless. The narrator feels observed from afar (González de Alba 1999,
104). He begins to write about the real street outside and recounts the sequence
of events from August 27, 1968, to the unconstitutional military occupation of
the university campus on September 18 (105–42). Chapter 10 ends with the
occupation of the UNAM.

In the wake of this undeclared state of exception, the narrative shifts at the
beginning of chapter 11, and we suddenly encounter a poetic sequence that
transports the story back to Guadalajara in the fall of 1967. At the heart of this
episode, we find the interaction established between an “I” and a “you” as they
listen to a young couple talking about the upcoming Olympics. This chance
encounter opens up the narrative to the specter of an anonymous and ungen-
dered third person that seems to possess no particular quality.
From the very beginning of this sequence, a sequence that interrupts that of
the events of 1968, the address from “I” to “you,” which uncovers the spectral
presence of “he” or “she,” is accompanied by paving stones, water, the notion of
differential accounts of the same experience, and the difficulty of accounting for
a past that is forever lost, that is, for the question of the presence of the departed
and absent in the time of the now:
The light of the October afternoon cast a violet shadow over the coffee table, and
the green of the trees against the orange sky made the atmosphere more transpar-
ent. The heat was dissipating a little, no longer as suffocating as it had been a few
hours before.
Like a white dress on the brick sidewalk the water from the fountain erupted
and covered the surface with its foam . . . The resplendence of the sidewalk daz-
zled a little, but it was about to disappear. (143)
With the imminent disappearance of a resplendence that had been created

by the sudden fusion of paving stones and water, the first person narrative
begins to address the experience of the past, its impossible recuperation in the
present, and the question of the specter of the third person:
I think the two of us, you and I, have made much of the brilliant atmosphere
that surrounds a time lived so intensely, and now so far away, each year more
buried and foreign to us. It escapes us like the weeks and months, and it makes its
protagonists strangers: We are no longer we; it is not possible, they are too young,
adolescents, too different from you and I. There are times when a smell, a light
touch, a face glimpsed in a café once again brings the exact color of his/her eyes,
the timbre of his/her voice and I think that maybe the same thing happens to
you. One day you told me you remembered his/her hands. But for you, as for
me, s/he is no longer more than a symbol: a known smile, hair caressed so many
times, the sound of his/her voice, hands: eyes of un-definable color, a sudden
shadow. It is all we have left. (143–44)23
On top of the sense of loss that permeates this section—on top, that is,
of the passage of time doing its unjust work—there is the added question of
the heterogeneous experience of a shared and common history: “Even what we
experienced together and shared has different emotions for each of us, united to

a smell for you that for me is a sound” (144). History is certainly the experience
of the sharing and the parceling out of difference and sameness. But the arrival
of the specter of the other problematizes the distinction between any principle
of difference and any principle of sameness. This is central to the narrator’s
sense of history and of the present, for he is consciously and unconsciously
delivered over to the other, beside himself with and in the other, receiving his
very life and movement from the phantom of an other that possesses no specific
qualities, and that may or may not exist:
Even recently I would wake up startled in the night, feeling his/her presence and
warmth next to me. And I would still feel it when I was en route to the Univer-
sity or in class, in the cafeteria, when I came home for lunch and again at night;
always next to me, almost feeling it, all the time, even when I woke up early in
the morning. Now I’ve spent whole nights waiting without respite. Once again a
street I walk down daily, step by step, until I memorize all the trees . . . These are
the days you remember later like a scar. (144–45)24
This story of love and friendship lost, but also a story of the continual
advent of the other within the corporeality of the present, takes a new twist.
The chapter suddenly recuperates the story of the movement after the inva-
sion of the university on September 18. The narrative transports us unexpect-
edly—abruptly—to the students’ defiant defense of the Casco de Santo Tomás
against the invasion of the granaderos and military on September 23. After the
army intervenes and mass arrests occur, the night is emptied and the paving
stones begin to take center stage in the city: “All night, sirens could be heard
on the city’s main avenues. The sidewalks were still empty in remote areas and
it was impossible to find a restaurant or cafeteria open. Large tracts of the city
were deserted. The following morning, men, women and children could be seen
observing in silence the blackened façade, the broken windows; streets littered
with stones, bottles, sticks and projectiles of every kind: fragments of stone and
plaster gouged out by bullets” (146–47).
This brief story of street combat and state destruction is interrupted. In a
new step of the dance, the narrative swiftly transports us back to Lecumberri
Prison where the narrator recounts a dream to his compañero, De La Vega.
The dream takes us back to Guadalajara. In the dream fear impedes the nar-
rator from following through on his desire, but his desire is then displaced
and given expression through an alternative symbolization of combat: “Sud-
denly it was a street close to my house in Guadalajara” (147). People are lined
up watching a police band pass by: “I was carrying a Mexican flag under my
arm. It was very big and I was thinking of unfurling it, but then I thought,
no, better not, these sons of bitches could haul me off to jail for unfurling
it. I also considered painting C-N-H in huge letters on each of the bands of

the tri-color. Then there was no more band and, in that same street, someone
was teaching me something like a judo hold. It consisted of me holding my
arm up high and then him trying to lower it. But he couldn’t and he couldn’t
understand why. He would try again and again but he couldn’t lower my
arm” (147–48).
The dream comes to an end with the narrator’s arm in the air, but without
wielding a flag. The flag has disappeared, is absent, from a dream character-
ized by repression and castration or lack. The narrative suddenly, abruptly,
takes us back to the state of exception, to “the decision of the Polytechnics
to defend their schools by any means possible” (148), and to the illegality of
sovereign power: “The city was being guarded without announcing previously
the state of exception with all the requirements, assignations and precautions
established by the Constitution. Now it was no longer possible to even main-
tain appearances” (151). The chapter closes at the end of September with the
military withdrawal from the UNAM and the hope for a “change in attitude
in the government” (155).
From the end of September 1968, we are transported forward, at the begin-
ning of chapter 12, to Lecumberri Prison in early November 1969 (in such a
way that there is life after October 2, 1968!). In an echo of the light dimming
at the end of the day in the Lecumberri cellblock at the beginning of chapter 9
(i.e., the moment in which the narrator first begins to transcribe the September
sequence of 1968 that then carries us back to Guadalajara in 1967), and in a
sequence in which it appears that what took place in the past could take place
another time today, the lights go out (156). In this new situation, which is an
echo of another time prior to the new present of 1969, the sovereign regime of
the Panopticon is supplanted by the distant illuminations of a double constel-
lation. The emergence of Orion and the Great Bear in the night sky transports
us back to October 1, 1968 (in such a way that there is life before October 2,
1968!) and to the reemergence of a specter (“you”). This memory of the day
before the massacre produces another memory of an other. First, the following
section relates the initial displacement of the sovereign regime of perception and
surveillance, together with the emergence of a phantom “you” in the wake of
the constellations of November 1969:
The nocturnal surveillance is above us. When the lights went out a few days ago
we could see the dark, cold sky. And in the night sky, which we had not seen for
many months, perfectly framed in the courtyard appeared Orion at one end and
at the other the Bear, rotating slowly as if the blackout had waited for them to
assume their correct positions. The Great Bear again! Do you remember? Some-
thing similar has happened to me before. You arrive anywhere: first slowly, and
then with an impetus that leaves me disconcerted, dazed. Just like today, it hap-
pened to me last year too, on October 1st. (156)

This new twist opens up a sequence grounded in the welcoming affirmation of

pure hospitality to the other. In this chance arrival of an other in November 1969,
the narrator remembers October 1, 1968. He recollects awaking in an apartment
on Paseo de la Reforma and, sitting before a French tapestry of unicorns (which
according to Marianna Mayer, is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to
have been conceived out of human fears), he considers the possibility of seeking
a solution to the conflict that has been raging for more than two months. Sud-
denly he hears (is receptive to) the address, convocation, and rhythm of the time
of the now as the continual passage from one instant to another: “From Reforma
the first peals of the bells arrived in the clear Fall morning like a clock bringing a
melody. Each peal fell lightly from afar in the thin, crystalline air. The sounds held
a warmth, a sweet timbre that slowly began to create the melody” (156–57). It is
the rhythmic pealing of the bells on October 1, 1968, remembered in November
1969, that exposes us to the memory of memory, to the beach and the experience
of living momentarily delivered up to the heartbeat of the other: “And then I saw
you on the sand after nightfall . . . From behind the black line of the horizon the
stars of the Great Bear had begun to emerge one by one . . . I’d never seen you
like that before . . . At nightfall, when there was nobody on the beach, you and I
remained in the sand” (157–58).
This chance arrival of a memory in November 1969, which recalls the chance
arrival of an other memory on October 1, 1968, and this prompted by the peal-
ing of the bells marking the passage from one instant to another, produces a
temporal constellation that leads back to the street combat of September and
to the narrator’s arrival at a melancholic decision, in which it appears that he
would like to be able to activate the emergency brake of history but cannot:
In the midst of these violent months of restless daily struggle; especially during
these difficult days when the army controls the streets and in each square and on
every corner unleashes its violent response to the invasion of the University and
the Polytechnic; when I was worried only by the most recent events, these slow
sweet bells have slid back in. And now, in this pleasant room, before the gold
framed mirror and the tapestry of unicorns there is no longer any conflict, the
university occupation does not exist, nor the urgency to initiate negotiations . . .
Suddenly I have decided I don’t care if prior conversations are re-initiated or not,
or if somebody opposes them with absurd arguments; or if they kick Cueto out or
release the prisoners: you are far away and you won’t even have heard what’s going
on here; and I could be with you, be like you, live my life dedicated to my profes-
sion . . . I feel the most important areas of my life in recent years are collapsing . . .
The last notes of the melody have ended . . . and I feel painfully separated from
you and what you meant. I arose shaken by the feeling that the world is collaps-
ing, my world, where you and that summer and that sun were; and everything is
irretrievable like our age at that time. (158)

From the paving stones of the state of exception in late September 1968, we
have come to a beach inhabited by the affirmation of pure hospitality to the
other. By chance, the lights go out in 1969; by chance the author remembers
a chance encounter with a tapestry of unicorns in an apartment that is not his
own on October 1, 1968, and in this passive movement he remembers remem-
bering being delivered over to the heartbeat of a nameless, genderless other. All
of a sudden, being delivered over to the heartbeat of the friend-lover becomes
the act of an act, the act behind the decision: the strike council member decides
he does not care what happens.
But at this point there is an interruption at the heart of the subject. His
melancholic decision quickly shifts from the expression of a sad passion to the
memory of being delivered over not to the heartbeat of a lover or friend but to
the throats of a sea other than that of the beach, that is, to the specter of the
movement in motion. Once again we are taken back onto the streets of Mex-
ico City: “Later that morning when I had calmed down I remembered other
things . . . I remembered the Zócalo transformed into a choppy sea, hundreds
of thousands of throats hurling their condemnation down Cinco de Mayo like
the clamor of a stadium, or even more. Many people were crying” (159). At
this point, as a chance result of this remembered delivery of the self over to the
throats of the movement, “you” is transformed from being the object of melan-
cholic passions into an object of indignation accompanied by an affirmation—a
yes—to yet another other: to yet another specter. The point of transformation
between melancholy and the abrupt expression of responsibility to a yes that
comes from the other is the recalled image—and the chance receptivity to the
image—of a young woman brandishing a raised flag in the streets of Paris dur-
ing the uprisings of May 1968 (as opposed to hiding a flag from the police or
raising an arm with nothing in it, as in the narrator’s initial dream of Guadala-
jara). This image interrupts the self, but it does so as the interruption of the self
as other, in a receptivity to a spectral friendship that brings the narrator back
to the affirmation of the time of the movement before the Tlatelolco massacre,
to the affirmation of freedom, as well as back to the dark night of Lecumberri
Prison in 1969.
The recalled image is the beginning of a leap toward an act:
Then I saw you far away in England in an aseptic industrial chemistry lab, wear-
ing your blue or possibly white lab coat with your calculations written down in
your resolute handwriting . . . and I felt sorry for you. But then, when I remem-
bered that marvelous photograph of the French girl holding her flag up high,
surrounded by her companions in dissatisfaction and rebellion; when I thought
of everything we cannot express clearly but that she knows just as we do too, I
grew angry. I grew angry with you and your absurd notes and your engraved pens
and laboratory experiments. (159)

It is in this mad (not shameful) rejection of scientific calculability and mea-

surement (and therefore in this rejection of the police rationalization of social
panopticism in general); in a turn that emerges in conjunction with a pas-
sive hospitality to the specter of May 1968, that is, to the other as that which
decides on the narrator in the narrator, that the decision to take to the street is
unveiled. At this moment the passive decision frees responsibility from knowl-
edge. Responsibility becomes an affective leap by which an act takes off (Der-
rida 1997, 69). The passive decision—responsibility delivered over to the “yes”
that comes down from the other—becomes the initiation of a realization of
freedom that transports us from the time of the movement back to the current
time of incarceration: “It was late but when I picked up my coat in preparation
for the first meeting to announce the departure of the troops that had occupied
the university two weeks before, it occurred to me that you were in a prison
far more impenetrable than this one, where tonight the lights went out and we
could see for the first time in many months Orion at one end and the Great
Bear at the other” (González de Alba 1999, 159).
In a regime dominated by the social architecture of sovereign decisionism
(Lecumberri), González de Alba’s nocturnal rendering of 1968 delivers us
over, in an unconditionality without sovereignty, to the Paris slogan “Under
the Paving Stones, the Beach!” and to the image of “La Marianne de Mai 68”
in their Mexican receptivity.25 This receptivity momentarily uncovers a free
zone, an erotic zone of love and friendship, a turn to anger, a call to the friend,
an address to the other in the night in a writing that does not resign itself to
containment or sovereign administration of the friend-enemy antagonism.
In the place of the calculations of sovereign power and reason we encounter
a passive hospitality to chance and responsibility before the unconditional
arrival of the other. This is the precondition for the affective leap into the void
and out into the world of action.
But nothing lasts forever. The architecture of sovereign reason reimposes its
imperium and in the end responsibility to the other wanes: “When the lights
came on the constellations disappeared. The hexagonal tower beamed its reflec-
tors down from up above and the look outs could be heard up on the walls. I
returned to my cell and went to bed . . . How old were we then? Twenty, I think,
though I can’t remember. And suddenly it saddened me that I had never known
you” (González de Alba 1999, 159). As the narrative turns back to the final
days of the movement in November 1968, “normality”—the law—is reinstated
through the return to a perfectly homogeneous routine and the calculated disci-
pline of everyday life: “Breakfast . . . coffee, beans and a bread roll . . . at midday
they let us out to eat . . . pasta . . . soup with pieces of meat and vegetables . . .
beans, and, to finish, we all receive a bread roll . . . In the evening, when the
lights go on, we are allowed out again and they give us the same as in the

morning: beans, coffee and a bread roll” (160–61). Prisoners sit around a table
and jostle for position, reduced to a childish competition not for a common
opening grounded in hospitality to the other, but for distance and separation
from a former friend who at any time can become an enemy:
“Shit! I’m sick to death of this fuckin’ Pablo!” I shouted. Zama looked at me,
enjoying my outburst. “You know it really gets on my nerves when you poke me
in the ribs! Move over! More!”
“I can’t move over any more. What a fuss.”
“That’s right, it’s the fifth time just in this meal and that’s not counting your
elbow.”
“What elbow?”
“Your elbow every time you talk to me . . .”
“What a commotion, all I did was this.”
“What the fuck? Again?”
“That’s enough.”
The four of us continued eating, each one on each side of the table . . . During
November and December ’68, living together became more difficult. (163)
But in Los días y los años, the return to the law of sovereign “normality” does
not bury forever what Alberto Moreiras refers to as “the formal messianic struc-
ture (without messianism) of the event” (2006, 272). Becoming subjected to
the architecture of sovereign decisionism does not lay to rest, for once and for-
ever more, the possible advent of reason’s unconditional opening to the exces-
siveness (the incalculability) of the event. It does not lay the language of the
passive decision to rest. For this reason the novel ends with the present, in the
passage from one instant to another, as marked by, as the mark or scar in, rea-
son’s unconditional opening to the other. The novel positions the advent of that
opening in the past, that is, in its having been a hospitable advent to the other:
And now in the shadow surrounded by walls, a silk rose cannot fall without
a sound into a mountain of petals because the rats run as if poisoned among
the papers blown around the patio by the wind, and there is only silence, your
house . . . the flag at half-staff on a July morning, the Zócalo replete with torches
and flags . . . the water in the fountains, the tapestry, the bells, the boat in the
bay, the color of your hair . . . the rumor of thousands and thousands of people’s
footsteps advancing in silence, darkened streets, the police, the army, the fear, the
regulations, and the only thing remaining is the brief glimmer of freedom we did
not know until we lived those days, the unreal return down unlit avenues, down
streets in which power, violence and gunmen who force you to keep your head
down did not exist, your distant image . . . the photograph of the young woman
with her flag held on high . . . the bells that always brought me back to you, to
the inside of your car that night, the color I never saw the same again, the smell

of salt, your hand on my shoulders, the street traversed at all hours; they are that
scar. (González de Alba 1999, 207)
The novel positions 1968 as the advent of that opening in the past, that is,
in its having been a hospitable advent to the other. However, surely it does so
in such a way as to indicate that it should, can, and will arrive once again as
a decisive or deciding moment of responsibility—of receptivity to the scar or
mark—by means of which a leap of unconditional love-friendship can once
again take off.
One thing should be clear, however, the sociological rationalization of 1968
cannot prepare the conditions for such a leap since it cannot account for the
exceptionality of the event in the first place. Neither can the recuperation of
the classic free, moral, and responsible subject do that work. Rather, the leap is
what remains to arrive and be thought in the democratic relation between the
unconditionality of the incalculable (chance), hospitality or receptivity to the
other, and the passive decision. According to Los días y los años, which is still
one of the most precise and evocative approaches to the event, 1968 was the
opening up of that incalculable affective and political terrain on a massive scale.
Through González de Alba we see that the truth of the political event in 1968
cannot be disconnected from the freedom unleashed in exceptional fashion by
the passive decision. In contrast, however, sovereign decisionism, which always
comes accompanied by its calculating sages, melancholy pawns, and scientific
militants, has never been able to provide a convincing account of the singular
experience of the democratic event called 1968. And chances are it never will.

CHAPTER 6
Absolute Hostility and

Ubiquitous Enmity
“The Party of the Poor” and the
Militarization of the Political, 1967–95
In the unjust act to have too little is to be unjustly treated; to have too much is
to act unjustly.
—Aristotle
The struggle between rich and poor is not social reality, which politics then has to
deal with. It is the actual institution of politics itself. There is politics when there
is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor.
—Jacques Rancière
M
uch has been made of President Felipe Calderón’s use of thousands
of military personnel to police the country’s northern territories in
order to eradicate the highly sophisticated and heavily armed drug
cartels. In a guerrilla war there is no controlled or bracketed conflict between
clearly defined enemies. Similarly, in the “War on Drugs” there is no fully sche-
matized or negotiable distinction in place between friend and enemy, war and
peace, aggressor and victim, law and civil war. There is a distinction between
military and civilian because the army is still uniformed and is said to be work-
ing on the side of the law. However, the cartels and the police are often partners
in crime, the military is supplemented by paramilitary defense groups, and the
civilian force is often better armed than the military one, so at the technological
and administrative levels the distinction between the uniformed and the ununi-
formed, or the sovereign and the countersovereign, is of little to no importance.
The functional and recognizable boundaries between such concepts have been

blurred, as market-based civil conflict essentially performs the collapse of any

clearly demarcated friend-enemy relation.
The War on Drugs is a conflict that is internal to capital, rather than being
a conflict between external sovereign domains or distinct ideas of social orga-
nization. As such, in this conflict there is no real conceptual repudiation of the
relations of force extending throughout the public domain, because the cartels
offer no substantive political or ideological disagreement with the existing order.
Rather, the cartels are the bourgeois principle of private property and individual
wealth monopolization manifested in its most naked form. The conflict arises
because the cartel is capital actively desutured from the law, and therefore con-
verted into a potentially parallel sovereign imperium within national territory.
There is, then, open enmity between the state and the cartels because these are
a direct challenge to the suture of territory, population, and market within the
juridical order. But there is no ideological conflict between sovereigns or real
enemies, for the explicit ideology of the enemy is the explicit ideology of the
friend and vice versa. It is in this sense a war in which the enemies are in fact
brothers in arms (brother-friend-enemies).
The War on Drugs in its current form, however, remains a bandit war
couched in the language of morality and iniquity, between a state whose actions
are unconstitutional and an army of outlaw capitalists. The war clearly high-
lights the exceptional exercise of the force of law without law. But there is no
politics in the War on Drugs because it is a conflict that remains conspicuously
disconnected from the public life and language of the part of those who have
no part. Other than the workings of the exception, there is no specific knowl-
edge about the political to be gleaned from the war against the drug cartels.
The only thing to tot up is the body count that private wealth and the force of
law require for their competing strategies of territorial and population control,
in which market management is predicated on the necessary suspension of the
administrative relation between public law and life.
The real key to understanding the progressive and dispersed installation of
a new system of domination in contemporary Mexican society lies not in the
War on Drugs but in the rural figure of the guerrillero and particularly in the
historical relation of this figure to Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. It is not
the drug cartels but the rural partisan—this shadowy index of the long history
of Mexican mal gobierno (poor, unjust governance)—who proves to be the key
to knowledge of contemporary political reality for, despite the fact that he or
she is the opposite of the crowd, the mass, the people, or the multitude, the
cover and camouflage of the guerrillero is always linked to the public life of the
part of those who have no part. This is the case because the rural guerrillero is
the existence, in the dimness of the shadows, of the part of those who have no

Absolute Hostility and Ubiquitous Enmity ● 155
part that repudiates (rather than extends or intensifies) the sole reign of the law
of oligarchic interest that extends throughout the public domain.
The partisan is the figure that embodies the true problem of the political in
contemporary Mexico. Immersed in a situation of absolute hostility, the cover
and camouflage of a guerrilla uncovers a zone of indistinction between war and
peace, antagonism and acquiescence, disagreement and consent, or the public
and the private. But unlike the arena of the War on Drugs, this occurs in a
context in which the guerrillero “must be distinguished from the ordinary thief
and violent criminal, whose motives are directed toward private enrichment”
(Schmitt 2007, 14). The guerrillero worries not about private enrichment but
about distributing common lots, evening out collective shares and entitlements
to those shares, and doing so in the name of equality.
It is true that the guerrillero can also become resutured to the law via negoti-
ation, mediation, or amnesty. But this means he must cease to exist as such, and
must thereby abandon his lawlessness and simultaneous clandestine link to the
public life of the part of those who have no part. More often than not, though,
the intensely political character of the guerrillero’s existence—its direct repudia-
tion of, and challenge to, the portioning of the public—means it has to end in
annihilation. It is not merely a question of territorial or collective security. It is a
question of repudiating the historical wrong that sovereign partitions, divisions,
and shares signify for the part of those who have no part.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the historical and conceptual rela-
tion between the figure of the rural guerrillero, the autoimmune problems at
the heart of state reason, and the question of knowledge of political reality in
contemporary Mexico. In order to do this, we should first explore the historical
and conceptual nexus between the land, the peasantry, and the postrevolution-
ary juridical order, for herein rests the dispute between the public and the pri-
vate that animates and conditions the political in contemporary Mexico.
Capital Times and Article 27

Far removed from the broad avenues, university campuses, and urban throngs
of the 1968 student movement, in rural Mexico one of the most prevalent
themes of the oral folk tradition is that of the long-standing conflict between
the struggle for communal land rights and village customs versus the violent
individualization of wealth and privilege that in modern times has its roots
in the legacy of the nineteenth-century Díaz dictatorship and the historical
impunity of the rural caciques. This struggle between land expropriation and
the peasant’s telluric defense of the soil against the incursions of mal gobierno
holds the key to one of the most endurable political paradoxes of twentieth-cen-
tury Mexico; that is, the constitutional grounds for modern capitalism—and

therefore for the juridical rise to power of a new bourgeoisie after the Revolu-
tion—were instituted as a direct result of the peasants’ armed protection of
village land, custom, and tradition. For this reason, John Womack opens his
classic Zapata and the Mexican Revolution with the following evocation of the
paradoxical underpinnings of the peasant revolt that took place in Morelos
and surrounding areas during the revolutionary decade: “This is a book about
country people who did not want to move and therefore got into a revolution.
They did not figure on so odd a fate. Come hell, high water, agitators from the
outside, or report of greener pastures elsewhere, they insisted only on staying in
the villages and little towns where they had grown up, and where before them
their ancestors for hundreds of years had lived and died—in the small state of
Morelos, in south-central Mexico.” (1968, ix).
Arturo Warman warns against misreading this statement, noting that
Womack’s ingenious comment “has been frequently misunderstood and mis-
used to demonstrate a conservative and retrograde aspect of Zapatismo” (1988,
324). Neither historian is insinuating that Zapatismo was just a relic from the
past or that the Mexican peasantry is little more than “the remnant of a previ-
ous evolutionary stage, with no historic destiny possible but that of extinction”
(Warman 1988, 321). On the contrary, Womack is calling attention to the
paradoxical logic of the history of Mexican modernity in which capital’s organi-
zation of social time installs the telluric as a reactive or conservative response to
the emergence of new technologies of power. For example, in the early months
of 1914, that is, at the height of the uprising in the state of Chihuahua against
the usurper Victoriano Huerta, Pancho Villa entrusted John Reed with the fol-
lowing motivations for waging war:
When the new Republic is established there will never be any more army in Mex-
ico. Armies are the greatest support of tyranny. There can be no dictator without
an army . . . My ambition is to live my life in one of those military colonies
among my compañeros whom I love, who have suffered so long and so deeply
with me. I think I would like the government to establish a leather factory there
where we could make good saddles and bridles, because I know how to do that;
and the rest of the time I would like to work on my little farm, raising cattle and
corn. It would be fine, I think, to help make Mexico a happy place. (1969, 146)
Villa, who maintained close ties to the men from the military colonies—
many of whom filled the ranks of the Constitutionalist Divisions of the
North—promised to return lands to villages that had been deprived of them
by the emerging forces of economic modernization and private accumulation.
As such, the military colony came to constitute Villa’s ideal of how an agrarian
society should be structured (Katz 1998, 251).1 However, Villa’s desire to stay at
home in an archaic military colony making saddles, raising cattle, and growing

corn helped unleash one of the most forceful and technologically sophisticated
autonomous military corporations ever seen in twentieth-century Latin Amer-
ica: the rayo y azote (lightening and whip) of Villismo, as Rafael F. Muñoz called
it.2 At face value, it appears that the most radical agrarian sectors of the Mexican
Revolution considered themselves to be the last defenders of the soil against the
nihilism of an increasingly technological and intrusive economic world. Unsur-
prisingly, it is more complex than that, for Villismo was a war machine driven
by technical, military, and industrial progress.
Zapatismo and Villismo were mass responses to a fundamental shift in the
lived chronometry and socioeconomic rationality of peasant life after the liberal
land reforms of the 1860s. Brought about by the uneven ravages of ongoing
primitive accumulation and the dislocation that characterizes intensified land
expropriation, the violent passage from subsistence to wage labor and from
simple revenue to surplus value, Emiliano Zapata’s and Pancho Villa’s desires to
redefine traditional ties to the land were a symptom of the incursions of capital-
ist accumulation as it transfigured into new and more complex forms toward
the end of the nineteenth century.
What appears to be at stake in Villa’s military-technological quest for the
return of the military colonies is, first, a certain annulment of time and, second,
the possibility of a life other than that of the temporal despotism of capital’s new
forms of rationalization. Villa’s evocation of the military colony as the promise
of a happier Mexico than that of the present, while certainly evoking romantic
nostalgia for a world forever lost, can also be read as a pragmatic response to the
accelerated political and economic temporality imposed in northern Mexico
by the advent of the money economy. In Villa’s words there is fidelity to the
echoes of previous forms of social organization that, if reinstituted, could in
his mind impede the full consolidation of the injustices of the capitalist axiom-
atic. Zapata and Villa waged their respective revolutions in order to activate the
emergency brake on the locomotive of modern history.3 But this is very differ-
ent from assigning them a historical role as remnants of the past, both of which
were merely destined to disappear.
Zapatismo and Villismo had very different ways of trying to suspend or
interrupt the temporal despotism of capital. By the time he had reached the
height of his power, Pancho Villa, the former bandit, had forged a military
apparatus combining local village kinship relations with the industrial-tech-
nical equipment of a modern regular army (including US-imported weapons,
ammunition, trains, medical facilities, airplanes, uniforms, etc.). Villismo was
capable of waging a military campaign based on velocity, mobility, and sur-
prise. It did so in the name of the traditions of agrarian social organization, but
Villa’s telluric defense of hearth and soil was by no means autonomous from the
war machine of capitalist deterritorialization against which his army mobilized.

Furthermore, the military nature of the insurrection had direct consequences

for agrarian reform in the north, for Chihuahua’s vast cattle ranches had to
provide the resources necessary for war. Under Villismo, agricultural produc-
tion in the north was not organized on specifically peasant foundations, and the
hacienda structure remained virtually intact.4
The Ayala revolution, on the other hand, was far removed from the speed
and technicity of modern regular warfare that characterized Villismo. Zap-
atismo constituted more a local militia force than it did a regular modern army.
In Zapata’s army “many combatants were peons by day, and soldiers by night
and on Sundays. After 1914, when the haciendas were definitively abandoned,
resources were even scarcer. The Army of the South was not only an army of
the poor, but it was also quite poor itself ” (Warman 1988, 330). It also consid-
ered itself to be essentially removed from the stage of national federal politics:
“The very name of [Zapata’s] fighting force revealed how he conceived of the
civil war: whereas the Constitutionalist Divisions of the North, Northeast, and
Northwest were subordinate parts of a pretended national army, Zapata’s liber-
ating army of the Center and South was the independent agency of his region”
(Womack 1968, 186). Zapatismo never developed the power of a protonational
regular military force such as that of Villa’s Division of the North. Rather, Zap-
atista forces would blend in with the villagers of Morelos, Puebla, and Guerrero,
attack at a specific strategic point, and quickly melt back into the countryside
and mountains. In essence, Zapatismo was closer to being an irregular guerrilla
force, or “armed league” as Womack identifies it, than a regular uniformed army
on the open stage of combat.
One of the most important differences between Villismo and Zapatismo,
then, is that once the mobility and velocity of Villa’s regular army was con-
quered, Villismo as an agrarian movement was severely curtailed, whereas Zap-
atismo waged an ideological war for the very land the Zapatista villages toiled
on for centuries. Villismo was always a question of technomilitary deterritori-
alization, whereas Zapatismo maintained active ideological and political ties to
the soil, to the autochthonous population, and to the geographical particularity
of the land in order to extend the tradition and customs of the regional vil-
lage network. In contrast to Villismo, Zapatismo had a specific ideological and
political content linked directly to the long-term reconstruction of society on a
national scale (Warman 1988, 334–35).
The telluric underpinnings of the agrarian revolution of the south were
directly responsible for the radical provisions for communal property inscribed
at the heart of Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution. Zapatista proclamations
on the expropriation of the land and on the political organization of the agrar-
ian community (many of which were rooted in the political legacy of Ricardo
Flores Magón’s radical liberalism) anticipated the 1917 Constitution. In the

design of this foundational document, the Jacobin and agrarian wings of the
Constitutionalist movement imposed their will and transformed Venustiano
Carranza’s proposed reform of the 1857 Constitution into a new text. As Adolfo
Gilly observes, “When it was finally approved on January 31, 1917, the Mexi-
can Constitution was undoubtedly the most advanced in the world. It was not
socialist. Yet it virtually declared the big landowners and latifundia to be uncon-
stitutional, thereby dismantling one of the former pillars of Mexican capitalism”
(2005, 233).
This is fundamentally important for understanding contemporary political
reality, because the very idea of public or general interest in postrevolutionary
Mexico originates in Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, a provision that turns
on and institutes the principle of equality in the relation between work (the
land), the community, and the state. Before its amendment in 1992—shortly
before the ratification of the Tratado de Libre Comercio, or North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Article 27 placed stringent restrictions on the
ownership of property by foreigners and the church. It characterized the land
and subsoil as an originary property fully integrated into the sovereignty of
the nation. It gave Mexican peasants the right to tenancy or possession of the
land, and the state the right to possession of the subsoil. As such, Article 27
granted the government broad powers to expropriate private property in the
public interest and to redistribute the soil to the peasants in the form of com-
munal lands (ejidos).5
Through Article 27 the telluric drive of the revolution instituted land and
wealth redistribution as a national policy and historical debt. Zapatismo was
militarily defeated, but the establishment of the pueblo as the basic unit of
society by means of which a new state could emerge, together with a new accu-
mulation model in which power was no longer located exclusively in the cen-
tralized apparatus of capitalism, was now officially part and parcel of the field
of the political in postrevolutionary society. The very idea of the political com-
munity—of a postrevolutionary social order grounded in the common division
and just redistribution of land—was intended to correct, for the first time in
history, the unjust division of common lots, communal shares, and entitlements
that had characterized the liberal projects of the nineteenth century and the
colonial history that preceded them.6 As a result, it was Article 27 perhaps more
than any other constitutional provision that instituted a language for popu-
lar sovereignty, envisioning the nation in utopian fashion as an ideal geometry
based on just distributions, shares, and common lots. Ultimately, Article 27 was
the juridical recognition that Zapatismo had been right in its struggle all along.
However, while it is true that postrevolutionary society was grounded in
Article 27’s explicit challenge to the wealthy monopolizers of property and pub-
lic wealth, it is also true that the provision set up a fundamental dilemma that

remained central to Mexican modernity for the best part of the twentieth cen-
tury. Article 27 instituted the acknowledgement that the peasants could, and
should, enjoy the same freedom and access to resources as those private citizens
who possess wealth and virtue (such as the surviving Porfirian and postrevolu-
tionary rural bourgeoisies). It therefore allowed the peasantry to attribute to
itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens (Rancière 1999, 8).
This constitutionally sanctioned equality composed one of the fundamen-
tal contentions of postrevolutionary Mexican society. Article 27 allowed the
peasantry to identify with the national political community in the name of
the wrong that had been done to them historically by those who condemned
them to having no part in anything. As such, it was in the name of the wrong
done them by other parties that the postrevolutionary peasantry came to be
equal to the whole of the community (i.e., the nation). Article 27 therefore
inscribed and guaranteed as the heart of national political and economic life
the existence of the part of those who have no part, whose fundamental dispute
the state consequently had to resolve. Suddenly, the peasantry was not just one
class among others. The peasantry was the nation too. It was the whole. But it
was a nation that had had no part and would continue to have no part unless
land wealth was justly redistributed. As such, the Constitution of 1917 caused
the peasantry to exist in the nation and as the nation for the first time. And it
did so by setting up the struggle between rich and poor as the very heart of all
national economic, legal, and political life, bringing the part of those who have
no part into juridical existence and thereby interrupting the possibility of a
natural order of domination.
Article 27 instituted at the center of the state the constitutive wrong that
caused the poor to exist as a legal entity. This existence was the scandal of the
constitution that the vested interests and family dynasties of the Porfirian and
postrevolutionary police order had to suppress, displace, or just ignore in order
to continue guaranteeing an economic and political order grounded in long-
standing impunity, land expropriation, class and racial difference, and bour-
geois accumulation.
Article 27 provided the constitutional legitimization and just cause for the
disputes of the part of those who have no part in relation to the land. Zapatismo
was militarily defeated, but thanks to Article 27 it was still very much alive in
institutional terms. The problem for the postrevolutionary state was that Article
27 recognized, and gave juridical language to, the fact that whoever has no part
in the police distribution of power and privilege cannot in fact have any part
other than all or nothing. As a result, the Zapatista legacy of Article 27 con-
stituted a space for the potential demise of the postrevolutionary police order
itself, since for the part of those who have no part there can be no part measures
in the social allocation of ways of being, living, and working. Or rather there

can, and there are, but they are innately unjust and therefore worthy of dispute
because what is truly at stake—the land—is never anything more than a matter
of life and death for the peasantry.
At any moment within its administration, Article 27 could turn against the
postrevolutionary bourgeoisie and bring about the implosion of an entire social
organism and economic ratio. Armando Bartra puts it in the following terms:
During the armed revolution a section of the peasantry fought for the land and
the new State could only consolidate itself by adopting—no matter how provi-
sionally—the Zapatista banner. But this institutionalization of agrarianism had
contradictory effects, for in order for the State to be recognized as the supreme
arbiter, it was obliged to recognize in juridical terms the peasant’s right to the
land, legalizing a form of rural class struggle that put into question nothing other
than the sacred principle of capitalist private property . . . In summary: agrarian-
ism was an institutionalized peasant movement that developed within the post-
revolutionary State and according to the rules of the game; but agrarianism also
contained the nucleus for the negation of the new order. In agrarianism it was
not a question of a negotiation between two complementary social agents, as in
syndicalism, in which the State operates as the arbiter. Carried through to its
ultimate consequences, agrarianism gave expression to the incompatibility of the
peasantry and the landowners. We are not before a barter system, in other words,
but before a struggle to the death. (1985, 27)
Article 27 instituted Zapatismo’s struggle to the death as a mechanism of

social integration and immunization. By doing this, the peasantry became a
fundamental social base for the postrevolutionary state. But it also installed
an inescapable principle of ruin at the heart of modern sovereignty. As a result
of the institutionalization of a class-based struggle to the death, in a context
in which the full legal application of the constitution would be a calamity for
the bourgeoisie, between 1917 and 1934 the expropriation of hacienda lands
was absolutely minimal: “In 1929, when the process of land distribution was
decreed complete for Morelos, only 1 per cent of the approximately two hun-
dred thousand hectares of distributed land had been restored to their original
campesino owners” (Padilla 2008, 41). After the passing of Lázaro Cárdenas’s
Agrarian Code in 1934, 18 million hectares were redistributed to over 800,000
peasants. But while this was done after years of neglect in order to promote
agrarianism as a central tenet of postrevolutionary constitutionality, it did little
to offer a definitive political resolution to the question of part measures for the
part (the landless and the poor) that is everything (the nation) simultaneously.
Article 27 was a conceptual and practical challenge, inscribed at the heart of
the law, to the very fact of sovereignty’s apportioning of power, privilege, and
influence. While any constitution is designed to suture force to the law both

preemptively and retroactively, doing so always in the name of the mechanisms

and calculations of continued social equilibrium and peace, Article 27 explicitly
sutured the law to an unmeasurable incommensurability at the center of the
state’s autoimmune procedures. It thereby uncovered the principle of ruin of a
constitutional reason that challenged the whole postrevolutionary order it was
supposed to regulate.
It was for this reason that it became so important for the postrevolution-
ary state to suppress political democracy in relation to land tenancy. The insti-
tutionalization of Zapatismo and the incorporation of the peasantry into the
postrevolutionary police order were designed to make the state, rather than
the peasantry or the landowners, the subject of agrarian reform and the only
entity capable of bestowing status on the political.7 Postrevolutionary agrarian-
ism therefore depended on the recognition of the state as the great provider. But
when the state failed to deliver, or exacerbated the historical injustice via cor-
ruption and violence, the legacy of Zapatismo also provided the language and
political imaginary to pass into more radical forms of struggle, to become inde-
pendent of the state, and even to break the rules of the political game entirely
by passing into insurrection.8 This was not a continuation of the agrarianism
of the Revolution. On the contrary, postrevolutionary agrarianism inaugurated
a new form of struggle that was for the most part integral to the measures,
mediations, and distributions of a so-called Revolution-made-government that
incorporated the peasantry but at the same time considered itself to be different
from and superior to peasant society and its needs.
In order to curtail the just cause of the part of those who have no part, and
in order to avoid open hostility in its name, state reason needed to neutralize the
polemical (i.e., political) organization of the social that the Revolution-made-
government set up via its constitution. If this polemic could not be immunized
effectively via institutionalization, negotiation, subornment, electoral fraud,
intimidation, or amnesty, the state and its local or regional representatives
would have to abandon the fake neutrality and part measures of the Revolution-
made-government and move with a big stick, or other more effective weapons,
against the absolute class enemy in order to reimpose peace and stability. The
state and its representatives would have to decide on moving from bracketed,
immunized, or mediated enmity to the zone of absolute hostility against a class
enemy who was inevitably engaged in a struggle to the death. For this reason
the threat of potential democratic openings in the countryside, and the state’s
often gangster-like response to them, cannot be disconnected from the political
legacy of the agrarian revolution and the principle of ruin underlying Article 27
of the 1917 Constitution.
In a century of juridical and distributive part measures and unjust com-
mon lots allocated from within the heart of a postrevolutionary state that was

designed to assuage the difference between friend and enemy, but to do so

always and only for the benefit of the wealthy and the influential, the state
of Guerrero is a fundamental space for considering the question of political
democracy in recent years. This is the case because it was perhaps in the state
of Guerrero that the question of the political in relation to sovereign force was
experienced in its most blatant form. It was on the Costa Grande that the ques-
tion of part counts and specific class roles or social functions for the part of
those who have no part reached a historical point of no return, finally being
thrown out in the name of open hostility between the state and the peasants.
Between 1967 and 1974 the modern figure of the rural guerrillero con-
sciously assumed, and sought to extend, the name and program of an inde-
pendent supernumerary party—El Partido de los Pobres (The Party of the Poor).
Like so many before them, Lucio Cabañas’s armed insurgency group decided
to repudiate the material conditions and juridical boundaries of political
democracy inherited since 1917. A long history of impoverishment, sickness,
exploitation, and political persecution caused by an equally long history of
political, economic, and juridical neglect or impunity had taught many on
Guerrero’s Costa Grande that voting in the orchestrated elections of the Insti-
tutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for PRI-orchestrated socioeconomic rela-
tions and legal norms was nothing more than a rip-off: “In the kingdom of
the ‘Revolution-made-government,’ voting pays no dividends. At the end of
1960 [the people of Guerrero] overthrew a despotic governor with their social
tumult; two years later they voted in civilized fashion for democracy and got a
blood bath. Inevitable conclusion: the electoral struggle in Mexico is counter-
productive” (A. Bartra 1996, 123).
Legality came to be viewed by many as a deceit. In the wake of the Cuban
Revolution, and in the context of systematic state brutality against Guerrero’s
civic mobilizations for land redistribution, political democracy, and justice,
armed struggle seemed to be the only alternative.9 Along with fellow teacher-
turned-rebel Genaro Vázquez Rojas, Lucio Cabañas launched an armed rebel-
lion in the mountains of Guerrero against a brutal and unresponsive regime
(Doyle 2005, 2).
Following is a transcription of Lucio Cabañas’s taped testimony of how he
opted to take up arms:
In terms of all the information about what the Party of the Poor has been, I’ll start
with May 18th, 1967. At that time we were trying to liberate the village schools
from money making Principals, and we put an end to them charging money in
the schools . . . That’s how the movement began, but we also told parents it was a
political orientation so they could see there were school teachers who could help
out not just in education, but in their struggle as parts of the people; parents,

parts of the people, against the regime, against the government, against the rich
class. So we got involved in the problems with the logging companies, against the
Municipal authorities, against the exploitations by the rich over in Atoyac, and
the movement got started. But the movement wasn’t just educational, because in
the meetings we’d orient the people revolutionarily as a poor class against the rich
class. And that’s when Mister Government got angry and sent us a bunch of Judi-
cial Police who carried out a massacre on us on May 18th. But don’t think that’s
where everything started. Before that there were expulsions, mine and another
comrades,’ and the people rebelled and demanded and we came back again. Every
time the government expelled us the people brought us back and when they sent
us to Durango the people took over the school for half a year until they brought
us back . . . Some say Lucio went off to the mountains and found the way to
make the people. But we’ve been making the people since the time of Caballero
Aburto . . . There are a lot of theoretical comrades here who are not separated
from the people; don’t think I’m an enemy of theory and have done with it, ‘cause
all the time the ones who’ve affirmed what I’m going to say have been theoreti-
cal, but not everyone who’s theoretical is bad. So those people have said that to
make a revolution you first need an exhaustive analysis of reality. When we saw
our comrades lying dead on the ground, it was only natural we didn’t need an
examination . . . You have to pick up arms and kill the police, ‘cause they’re the
ones who’ve done the killing; the army killed, so you have to take up arms and
respond. Conditions aren’t right, said some of my comrades who’ve studied. Con-
ditions aren’t right for revolution? What do I care if there aren’t conditions? I said,
we have to pull the trigger against the killers. (Suárez 1976, 51–55)10
The enemy is no abstraction here. He comes with surnames, family histories,

and concrete acts of impunity, force, abuse, and neglect. Cabañas transforms
the state of exception (the massacre of May 18, 1967) into a state of neces-
sity (“we have to pull the trigger against the killers”). The perception of, and
recourse to, necessity dictates the decision to take up arms against the enemy.
This entails a moral or political (or in any case, an extrajuridical) evaluation, by
which the legal order is judged and is held to be worthy of violation.
On the surface it looks like the classical Schmittian axiom of friend-enemy
conflict playing itself out to perfection, a conflict of mutual annihilation
between an order of domination and an order of revolt in which, despite obvi-
ous class, technological, telluric, and tactical differences, the enemy is an armed
parallel reflection or mirror image of the friend, and both strive for the same
goal: the destruction of the other. The problem is that if this is the case we have
to conclude that in the decision for, and in the sheer fact of, the armed struggle
there is no politics because there is no actual encounter between two heteroge-
neous languages, social processes, or juridical orders.
On the other hand, the dispute of the Party of the Poor should not be
reduced to the taking up of arms. This is the case because the degrees of sameness

inherent to combatants in a civil war—the internal resemblance between these

brothers-in-arms at odds with each other—cannot account for the heteroge-
neous assumption of equality and freedom that lies at the heart of their histori-
cal dispute. It is the voiced articulation of the political, rather than the mere fact
of an armed fraternity of insurgents versus counterinsurgents, that allows us to
access the singularity of this party in its relation to knowledge of contemporary
political reality in Mexico. El Partido de los Pobres was not a handful of men who
took up arms and moved in isolation and independence from place to place like
other guerrilla movements. On the contrary, it was a guerrilla movement that
the people of the region helped, sustained, and protected. It was an active net-
work of relations and reciprocity on a regional scale. It was a shared language. In
the pages that follow I explore the question of the political not by subordinating
its language to the mere fact of armed struggle between peasants and the state.
This would not only glorify the heroism and sacrifice of the guerrillero but also
reduce the political to a geometric of fraternal conflict between preordained and
to a large extent predictable subject positions and sovereign decisions. Rather, I
examine the Party of the Poor in relation to the active discussion of the hetero-
geneous assumptions of the part of those who have no part.
War in Paradise
Perhaps the most multilayered analysis of the Guerrero guerrilla conflict is Car-
los Montemayor’s historically documented fictionalization of the Partido de los
Pobres: Guerra en el paraíso (War in Paradise). This rigorously realist, almost
documentary, political novel narrates both the party’s prehistory and the period
of open conflict between the organization and the PRI between the end of 1971
and 1974.11
After five years of local and regional organization and political work in the
villages of the Costa Grande and beyond, in 1972 the Party of the Poor launched
a series of coordinated attacks on military convoys and installations that were
designed to draw the state into open conflict.12 The party’s downfall came after
the kidnapping of the PRI official Rubén Figueroa Figueroa in 1974, which led
to the intensification of low-intensity military tactics against the peasants of
the region. It also led to the active pursuit of Lucio Cabañas. The novel thereby
recounts the moment of highest intensity in the peasant’s confrontation with
the state. It chronicles the story of the end of the Party of the Poor. And the
story of the end is the story of the emergence of a new sovereign subject, that is,
the paramilitarized state of ubiquitous decisionism.
The heterogeneous assumptions of the Party of the Poor were complex
and numerous. They were expressed in relation to the reigning postrevolu-
tionary police order, and they revolved around the constitutive couple of

democracy, that is, equality and freedom. The assumptions of the Party of
the Poor touched upon the very idea of the political. But they touched on the
political to such an extent that they even brought the meaning of the Left into
question itself. In the following pages I highlight two encounters between the
Party of the Poor and the outside world. In both cases the party’s assumptions
about equality and freedom stage a dispute about politics through which poli-
tics itself occurs.
Equality
In Guerra en el paraíso, the political turns on the spectacle and principle of
equality in the context of rural-urban relations as the armed wing of the Party of
the Poor, the Peasant Justice Brigade, opens up a theoretical and practical breach
at the heart of the “revolutionary Left” itself. The novel recreates a historical epi-
sode in which the Party decided to eject members of the “23rd of September
Communist League” from the highlands of Guerrero. In this narrative sequence
the Party’s heterogeneous assumption of equality leads to a contentious dispute
about the staging of politics, through which the struggle between rich and poor
occurs at the very heart of Mexico’s revolutionary forces.
On March 15, 1973, the 23rd of September Communist League was
founded as a confederation of post-1968 armed revolutionary and urban
guerrilla groups waging war against the PRI.13 Within the confederation it
was thought that the Party of the Poor would benefit from the league’s knowl-
edge of Marxist theory. On the other hand, since the massacre of May 1967
and the initiation of the guerrilla movement Lucio Cabañas had been aware of
the need to establish contact with groups beyond the highlands of Guerrero.
Thus the Party of the Poor’s Peasant Justice Brigade accepted urban activists
into the heart of their organization, in order to be instructed in the science of
Marxist revolution.
According to Guerra en el paraíso, however, in the pedagogical relation
between the urban literates of the League and the illiterate guerrillas of the
Justice Brigade the word “proletarian” proved to be a major bone of contention.
This was the case because both sides understood very different things by it. At
the heart of this disagreement is the question of the relation between theory and
practice, raised by the young Marx: “Will theoretical needs be directly practi-
cal needs? It is not enough that thought strive to actualize itself; actuality must
itself strive toward thought” (1975, 138). In the novel the disagreement over
the meaning of the word “proletarian” provokes a discussion that ends poorly
for the lettered pedagogues of the Communist League in both practical and
theoretical terms, because they confront a disagreement they do not have the
critical tools to handle:

“Who’s been telling you those lies?”

A heavy silence fell over the group of men attending class in the mountain
encampment.
“Lucio, the teacher.”
The instructor stared at the peasant who had spoken. Then the peasant reacted:
“Why do you say they’re lies?”
The instructor replied immediately:
“Because we were talking about the bourgeoisie. Not ‘the rich.’”
“But who’s the bourgeoisie?” Agustín insisted. “Aren’t they the rich? Aren’t they
the ones who make us poor?”
“I don’t know why Lucio Cabañas has been telling you that . . . I don’t know
why he gives you such imprecise information.”
“You often tell us,” intervened Eusebio, who stood up in the center of the
group, “that the rural situation is just part of the struggle, and that we should
understand the revolution with the proletarians, right? And you all know that we
the poor, those of us who fight against the bourgeoisie, are the proletarian force.”
“No!” exclaimed the instructor. “The poor who fight against the bourgeoisie
are not just poor and that’s that. It has to be a social class that destroys the bour-
geois state. And the only social class that can do that is the proletariat. That’s why
we need a proletarian consciousness in all the cities, throughout the working class.
It’s an ideological, political, military, and unionist consciousness. Without prole-
tarian consciousness there can be no revolution. Socialism cannot be created. It’s
a lie to say socialist revolution is a struggle of the poor against the rich.”
“So what are you doing here?” replied Eusebio, confused. “You say we’re not
proletarians, that we’re peasants and poor, right? But why do you come here with
the Party of the Poor? Are you going to tell us now it’s wrong to be called that?”
“You can call yourself whatever you want, that’s got nothing to do with me,”
said the instructor impatiently. “The Partisan Organization just committed to
sending me to teach you Marxism. And that’s what I’m doing.”
“But you haven’t come to teach us,” intervened Chabelo. “All you do is argue
and mock us . . .”
“I’m not attacking Lucio,” the instructor replied firmly. “I’m clarifying that
the revolution can’t be reduced to a war of the poor against the rich. I’m talking
from a scientific point of view. I’m not judging Lucio and I’m not against him.”
(Montemayor 1991, 115–17)
The debate presents politics in practice, as the peasants assume a relation of

equality that the scene itself—for example, the pedagogical relation between
instructor and pupil or the relation between city and countryside—denies.
While the scene naturalizes inequality (the superiority of the instructor), the
peasants’ presupposition of equality opens up the scene to the power to inter-
vene of anyone at all. The instructor clearly thinks from within functional
hierarchies in relation to theory as well as in relation to the people, language,
and geography he faces. Unfortunately for him, however, the peasants seem

to assume that all speaking beings are equal. According to the instructor, “the
poor” cannot be a category of social transformation since the term contains no
specific class identity, activity, location, or consciousness (ideological, political,
military, or unionist). It is an exception to the properties of community—the
dissolution of the idea of community—because the words “the poor” cannot
be counted either as a specific social group or as a totality. It disposes of all real
counts, in other words.
On the other hand, for the instructor “the proletariat” is the heart of future
collective life to the extent that it refers to real, concrete parts of and activities
within society. The proletariat pertains to the urban zone that is occupied by
specifically conscious manual workers and other labor groups. Within this for-
mulation, it appears that the rural “poor” are separated from the true “people”
of socialism and should recognize their relation of inferiority to those real parts
of society. Indeed they should do so in order to participate in the partitions and
distributions of privilege inherent to the revolutionary consciousness of “social-
ism” inaugurated in the city. But as the peasants seem to recognize, there is no
emancipation for them in this relation of subjugation to a proletariat that is in
and of urban, industrial civil society, and that is therefore in and of the already
existing logics of distribution, wealth, and privilege. As such, for the peasants
Marxist theory understood in these terms—as a political revolution at the heart
of the counts and calculations of the industrial police order but a revolution
that guarantees their separation—signifies the continued subjugation of the
rural world to the urbanized, lettered city. After years of industrialization, what
the 23rd of September Communist League promises is more of the logics of
primitive accumulation.
Expressing their discontent with the ideas and attitudes of the outsiders, the
Peasant Justice Brigade calls for a summary trial and judgment of the League’s
role and place in Guerrero (Montemayor 1991, 131–42). At stake in the ensu-
ing discussion is the inequity inherent in the urban intellectual’s reading of
Marxist theory in its application to the rural struggle. In other words, what
is being staged in the encounter between the Party of the Poor and the 23rd
of September Communist League is the class struggle at the heart of the rev-
olutionary Left. Unsurprisingly, the urbanites are unapologetic in what they
consider to be their superior grasp of the scientific truth of revolution: “The
revolutionary struggle is not a question of particular ideas, but of a precise
ideology. And we have it . . . For us there is only one true scientific explanation
of society, of the life of all peoples, and that explanation is historical material-
ism. In a word, it is Marxism. We cannot deceive ourselves on this point,” says
the instructor in his defense (138). However, in the face of such imperious
certainty, in which Marxist theory guarantees the triumph of industrialism over
agriculture, the peasants discuss whether to execute or banish the members of

the Communist League. In the end they decide not to execute but to expel the
urban revolutionaries from Guerrero.
The underlying irony, of course, is that the peasants of the Justice Brigade
are closer to the spirit of Marx’s word “proletariat” than the lettered urbanites
would like to think, since the words “the poor” and “the proletariat” both go
beyond a mere political revolution internal to the calculations and real counts
of the bourgeois police order, to take on the name of the negative representative
of society as a whole. Like the name “proletarian” the poor’s staging of equality
names “a process of subjectification identical to the process of expounding a
wrong . . . 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 1999, 38). In
contrast to the Communist League’s calculated identification of the location
and subject of political consciousness, the Party of the Poor gives itself the name
of universal offense, as if the Party were the embodiment of the universal limits
of the social order in its entirety. It takes for itself the name of “the notori-
ous crime of the whole of society,” as Marx put it, pointing to a part—“the
poor”—“that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a uni-
versal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular
right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it; a
sphere that can claim no traditional title but only a human title; a sphere that
does not stand partially opposed to the consequences, but totally opposed to the
premises [of the political system]” (1970, 140–41). Whereas for the instructor
the proletariat signifies a particular position and a specific knowledge in the
distribution of social activity, for Marx and the guerrilla peasants of Guerrero
the proletariat and “the poor” both signify absolute entitlement to dispute. The
proletariat and the poor signify that which is beyond specific counts and loca-
tions. They signal in that sense the conceptual horizon of a common being that
is antithetical to the particularities and partitions of private property.
But the Party of the Poor did not have an easy time giving conceptual and
practical consistency to the idea of freedom from the particularity and parti-
tions of private property. As we see in the confrontation with the Communist
League, the Party of the Poor had difficulty making the idea of general interest
take hold even in the groups on the Left. Later in Guerra en el paraíso, Lucio
Cabañas gives an impromptu speech at a festive gathering in which he empha-
sizes the heterogeneous assumptions of the Party of the Poor (equality and free-
dom), insisting not on the word “socialism” but on a horizon of justice based on
restitution in the redistribution of public wealth:
Our Party is not called a socialist party, but a Party of the Poor. Our brigade
is not called a socialist brigade, but a Peasant Justice Brigade . . . Our socialist

revolution is not just to take something away from someone and have done with
it. No, it’s not that. Our revolution is to give back to the poor what they’re not
allowed to have, what they’re not allowed to enjoy. Let the rich live justly with
what they need. But let the poor live justly with what they deserve. Because it’s
not a question of being just with some and not with others, because that way we’d
never get out of this and there’d always be poor people. That’s part of our revolu-
tion, certainly. Because it’s not a question of killing the rich and that’s that, no,
we want everyone to live, everyone. We’ll only kill the rich who kill people . . .
It’s important to say that we’ve been left with nothing, just misery. They take
from us what’s ours; our coffee, animals, and corn. But we still have a lot; a lot
to give, we poor people, because we have to give the greatest wealth of all, which
is this struggle; this revolution for everybody, for the poor and rich too, because
they don’t know that they’ll be better off like that, in our revolution . . . Everyone
will benefit with us, in our revolution. Dogs too, deer, birds, all that, fish, rivers,
everything will benefit. Even the streams that are drying up . . . That’s why I say
that revolution isn’t as simple as war, as the war of the poor; it’s not just a question
of taking from the rich to give to the poor. (Montemayor 1991, 213–14)
His claims to general interest sound naïve, without doubt. But this is also the
language of a man who is living the political in all its inconsistencies. For Lucio
the struggle of the part of those who have no part should not reproduce the log-
ics and unjust distributions of the existing police order. That would reinscribe
the wrong—the inequality, impoverishment, misery, and injustice—that initi-
ated the armed struggle in the first place. The struggle of the part of those who
have no part should break down and recompose the unjust distributions of the
existing police order and should do so not just in the name of justice but also as
a truly just distribution of public wealth. However, to do so via reparation and
restitution of “what’s ours” is immediately to return to the measures and calcu-
lations of a police logic that provides and guarantees neither equality nor the
just distribution of public wealth. Equality might be the result of an assump-
tion that emerges immanently at the heart of a particular staging or process
of subjectification—as in the peasant’s rejection of their instructor’s dogmatic
take on the science of revolution—but it cannot be conceived independently of
the police order. This explains the difficult moment in which Lucio’s discourse
appears to hit the rocks: “It’s not a question of being just with some and not
with others, because that way we’d never get out of this and there’d always be
poor. That’s part of our revolution, certainly. Because it’s not a question of kill-
ing the rich and that’s that, no, we want everyone to live, everyone.” In order
to continue speaking, Lucio implements a discourse of absolute equality and
universal benefit. But this is the most openly utopian moment in his speech, as
he envisions his revolution as the absolute reconciliation of society to itself as
well as to nature: “This revolution [is] for everybody, for the poor and rich too,

because they don’t know that they’ll be better off like that, in our revolution . . .
Everyone will benefit with us, in our revolution. Dogs too, deer, birds, all that,
fish, rivers, everything will benefit.”
Lucio’s language bears witness to the antinomies of the political on many
levels. He is immersed in the clear logics of the Schmittian axiom: a war of anni-
hilation in which the friend is the adverse response to the enemy but in which
friend and enemy are part of a national fraternity. He is engaged in a conflict
whose telluric roots are laid down in the democratic tenets of Article 27 of the
Constitution of 1917. He is the leader of a collective experience in which frater-
nity and equality between speaking beings can emerge immanently at the heart
of the Justice Brigade or in the networking of the brigade with the surrounding
villages but cannot be conceptualized theoretically or put into practice through
the political calculations of the revolutionary Left on a national scale. And his
claims to general interest are unconvincingly utopian.
Ultimately, Lucio is living the impossible task of making sense of, or of
acquiring specific knowledge about, the relation between the constitutive cou-
ple of democracy: equality and freedom. It is little wonder, then, that he should
end his speech fully aware of the incommensurable dilemmas he is staging and
confronting through armed insurrection: “That’s why I say that revolution isn’t
as simple as war, as the war of the poor; it’s not just taking from the rich to give
to the poor.” If it were merely a question of friends, enemies, and calculated
restitutions or redistributions, revolution would be easy because there would be
nothing heterogeneous to its ends and measures. Its reason would be internal to
the architectonics of the police order, and it would require no deciding moment
of responsibility and no decisive leap by means of which an action might take
place. As such it would not be revolutionary, since it would make absolutely no
claim on the incommensurability of freedom.
Freedom
If we consider that it is the opening up of a breach, an interruption in politics’
relation to regulation, or a zone of immeasurability in the order of police calcu-
lation that allows for the experience and figuration of freedom, then we can see
that the Party of the Poor insisted absolutely on its claims to freedom. Indeed
it was a decisive leap, the audacious staging of an incommensurable claim to
freedom—and to freedom as the opening up of incalculability—that really hit
the nerve of sovereign power.
This came to the fore in late May 1974, with Lucio Cabañas’s interview
and subsequent kidnapping of the PRI candidate for state governorship, Rubén
Figueroa. In hindsight, this episode constituted the “political and military error
that cost [the Brigade] its complete annihilation” (A. Bartra 1996, 140), for the

kidnapping unleashed the most brutal period in the war between parties. It led
to the military saturation of the highlands, the complete isolation of the whole
region, together with the torture and disappearance of entire populations. But
the fate of Rubén Figueroa had little to do with this. Rather, it was the Party’s
staging of a demand for absolute freedom for the part of those who have no part
that produced this sovereign decision for absolute annihilation.
In the same way the Revolution-made-government had amnestied Rubén
Jaramillo repeatedly before finally getting rid of him in 1962, Rubén Figueroa
proposed negotiating with, and thereby co-opting, Lucio as a means of bring-
ing him back into the fold of the “revolutionary family.” In June 1974, and as
a reply to increased military repression in the region, Lucio Cabañas extended
a secret invitation to Rubén Figueroa to meet and talk with him in the Atoyac
highlands. But instead of entering into negotiations with the police order, the
Peasant Justice Brigade detained Figueroa and held him for ransom. However,
they did not ransom him just for money. They also ransomed him for the free-
dom of all. Guerra en el paraíso stages the encounter between the two men as a
lengthy disagreement over the meaning of the word “freedom”:
“You’ve spent seven years in the mountains,” said Rubén Figueroa with tiredness
in his voice. “But what can fighting against the army, the government and people
like me, who haven’t done anything against you, possibly bring you?”
“Well, the problem we’re discussing is freedom for all prisoners. All the other
problems can be solved on a state-by-state basis, as you say. But the question of
the prisoners is another problem, because it’s not just a state problem.”
“I told you I’ll try to free your brother,” insisted Rubén Figueroa. “I’ll ask the
president as a personal favor to me. Rest assured it’ll be taken care of by June
23rd. Within a week you’ll receive news I’ve talked to your brother.”
“But we don’t see any particular state or geographical problems. We see a
national problem.”
“I agree it’s national, but I can only respond for Guerrero,” replied Rubén
Figueroa.
“What do I get with my uncle and brother? We don’t have any agreement
about that. We’ve been working things over and we haven’t reached a resolution
yet. So we’re going to make another proposition. We’ve agreed that you’ll come
with us until the prisoners are free . . . We want you to accompany us while they
free the prisoners, but not like in a kidnap. You aren’t kidnapped here.”
“What?”
“It’s the Brigade’s military agreement on behalf of the prisoners. You’re not
kidnapped. You’re detained. We’re not threatening you with your life, like kid-
nappers do . . .”
“Didn’t I free your uncles Bertoldo and Luis? And I know your cousin Manuel
and another uncle are prisoners. I promise to try my best”
“And what’s the good of one or two freed prisoners?”

“They say a hen fills her beak grain by grain”

“And what about over yonder? All those people in Acapulco, all the people
in Chilpancingo, all those in Chiapas, in Aguascalientes, Sonora, Chihuahua,
Monterrey, Guadalajara, Mexico City, the Acatitla women, all them completely
innocent and we want them out. That’s what the Brigade wants. I told you this
problem didn’t fit in writing, and that we shouldn’t deal with it because we weren’t
going to solve it. But I brought it up to you a while ago anyway.”
“I will tell you clearly, the president does not have the authority to do this. And
since he doesn’t have the authority, you might as well have me shot.”
“We’ll see”
[...]
“Why do you people always say, when you send someone off to prison, that
they’re detained and not imprisoned. For your kind, someone who’s detained and
someone who’s a prisoner aren’t the same thing. Detained people are isolated,
hit, tortured, sometimes even killed because of so much torture. Their families
look for them and nobody says a thing. Prisoners are never sentenced; they spend
months and years without anyone telling them what their sentence is and they’re
treated worse than animals. That’s why you’re not here detained or imprisoned. If
we’d detained you like the police or the army do, well, we’d already be torturing
you and you wouldn’t be sitting here talking freely to me.”
“But I am not free!” How can you expect me to speak freely? . . . I’ve proved to
you that I have the best disposition, Lucio. I’ve proved to you that I fight for your
people to gain freedom, haven’t I? And I insist that you will gain more, and your
Brigade will gain more, with me on the outside than you will with me a prisoner
here for as long as you like, a year, ten or twenty years, for you can put me up
against a wall whenever you think fit.
[...]
“We want to free people”
“Fine, Lucio, fine,” conceded Figueroa in irritation.
“Then there’s another question, someone who’s been kidnapped has no right
to speak or vote, or communicate with everyone else, or to see other people’s
faces; and on top of that, they’re threatened with death. But you talk. We are
conversing. You are saying what you think and I’m not putting my hand over
your mouth and nobody’s hitting you so you’ll say what we want you to say, like
the government you belong to does. Kidnapped people can’t see their captors and
you can see us. You’re here on a visit, and in that way you’re going to help the
revolution in spite of yourself, so they hand over the prisoners. But let’s be clear,
I’m not treating you the way the government treats people when they’re detained
by the army or the judicial police.” (Montemayor 1991, 240–45)
This is not an encounter between two absolutely incommunicable languages

or incommensurable forms of life. Rather, the senator and the guerrilla leader
understand each other’s speech as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in
its relation to sovereign command and justice. Freedom for Rubén Figueroa

signifies the sole empire of the laws of private, oligarchic interest. It is gained
as a result of specific individual negotiations and personal favors in a regime of
power that is sanctioned by the authority of presidential jurisdiction reigning
over an empire of individual interests. It is also the space beyond the mountains
of Guerrero where those individual negotiations, personal favors, and unhur-
ried police measures (“They say a hen fills her beak grain by grain”) occur.
Freedom for Lucio Cabañas is the struggle against the privatization of gen-
eral interest. For the guerrilla leader Figueroa’s notion of freedom implies sys-
tematic and historical injustice: detention, imprisonment without trial, torture,
abuse, isolation, and enforced silence. Lucio says his idea of freedom does not
fit “in writing.” He recognizes it cannot be captured and therefore represented
by law or administrative calculations. For Lucio freedom is the expression of
general interest, which includes the right of all to be counted as a speaking
being (“But you talk. We are conversing. You are saying what you think and I’m
not putting my hand over your mouth and nobody’s hitting you so you’ll say
what we want you to say”). Freedom means to be free from harm and danger,
to be safeguarded from the violence of sovereign force. In this sense, for Lucio
freedom means to be at peace and to be allowed to remain in peace. It is the
expression of the right to language, license, liberty, self-determination, and free
will. And his gesture toward the liberation of countless prisoners—toward the
freedom of all—is a democratic gesture that exposes the incommensurable rela-
tion between the private play of the oligarchs and freedom. His demand for the
liberty of all prisoners stages the contradiction between the specific counts of
police logic and a political logic that works in the name of a whole that remains
beyond all counts, beyond all measure. This is the case because his gesture pro-
poses throwing out the difference in the count between who is in and who is
outside the community of the free, thereby assuming that those who do not
count—the peasantry of Guerrero—actually assume that their group is identi-
cal to the whole of the free community.
When the Party’s demands are made public, they cannot be tolerated by the
state because Lucio’s ransom stages the indeterminacy that grounds the relation
between authority and freedom. He presents the state with a gesture for the
freedom of all, the potential consequences of which remain beyond reasonable
measure and calculation.
Absolute Hostility and the New Sovereign

The state ridicules the Party of the Poor as ignorant, absurd, and unacceptable.
As Pedro Ojeda Paullada, the attorney general of Mexico, puts it, “Senator
Rubén Figueroa’s kidnappers presented the federal government and the state
government of Guerrero with a series of absurd and unacceptable demands,

including the liberation and transportation to the highlands of an indetermi-

nate number of federal prisoners—plus all common prisoners—together with
the handing over of arms and fifty million pesos” (Montemayor 1991, 260).
It is this gesture highlighting the incalculable relation between freedom for
all and legitimate authority that leads the state to embrace absolute hostility:
“The Mexican government will not strike a deal with Lucio Cabañas. It can-
not make any deals with somebody who is incapable of deals or of any form
of legality” (260).
The state responds to the heterogeneous assumptions of the part of those
who have no part by stepping outside the realm of legality. Central to the plight
of the Party of the Poor is the role of the de facto state of exception established
as a result of the military siege of territory and population. We already know
that in the state of exception all law is suspended. But in Guerra en el paraíso,
exceptionality sutures force to the sovereign empire of electoral democracy. The
exception becomes an integral part of a paradigm and technique of government
designed to reduce individual and collective peasant life to a biological state of
nature, beyond the realm of language (communication) and beyond the appli-
cation of all law other than that of naked force:
“They don’t speak Spanish, Sergeant.”

“Keep going until they speak.”
“But I’m sure they can’t.”
“Look how they know what I’m telling you. They’re playing the fool. They’re
all covering for Lucio. Hey, you, answer me! You help’em don’t you, you bastard?
Answer me, or I’ll beat the shit out of you!”
“He doesn’t understand a word, Sergeant. They don’t speak Spanish. They’re
not people like you and me.”
“But look at his eyes, look how he understands! You keep going. If they’re not
speaking Spanish by midnight, kill them . . .”
The Corporal looked at the Indians again. They were on the floor fallen into
a heap of objects, dry straw, mud. One had just urinated and the ground had
still not absorbed the foamy stain; the dirty rags he wore as pants were soaked.
Down there at the end of the soldiers’ boots, they were like trembling pieces of
something emitting quiet, grave moans through their swollen, bloodied mouths.
Two had broken arms that made them look more like swollen objects; bruised,
decomposed meat blackened like mud, like something other than a body now
defecating and urinating uncontrollably. (Montemayor 1991, 80–81)14
Pure force without law has given rise to the law of force, and the exception has
clearly taken over. What is extraordinary is that it is through the brutality of the
state of exception that these abject bodies are inserted into the institutionaliza-
tion and regularization of collective life. For the first time in postrevolutionary

Mexico, we see that the traditional right of sovereign power to decide over life
and death is supplemented by the installation of a new system of rule that not
only includes but also surpasses the traditional concept of sovereign force. The
war against the Party of the Poor is the active forging of a zone of lawlessness
that makes the effective regulation and preemptive modernization of the rural
world possible. Within this zone, killing and torture become coterminous with
the production and reproduction of life itself, as something as harmless as road
construction becomes predicated on the sovereign right to decide to kill or let
live. As General Solano Chagoya assures his military staff,
“Remember this, gentlemen,” he said looking at some enlarged areas of the map
that lay among other papers on the table, “the routes we’re opening up through-
out the zone are for our benefit, not for the guerrillas. The roads and communica-
tions we’ve opened up are for our security, not for theirs. We still cannot aspire
to the perfection of this infrastructure, for it has to be in our benefit. Later, when
we’ve finished with the last remnants of violence, all the communications will be
perfect and you’ll be able to vacation around here on your bicycle if you want. But
not right now.” (Montemayor 1991, 85)
Elsewhere in the novel a journalist asks the Governor of Guerrero, “Is there any
relation between the guerrilla and the construction work being carried out in
the Atoyac highlands? Can they be considered to be a government response?”
(Montemayor 1991, 119). In his reply, socioeconomic development and insti-
tution building are clearly a multilayered reaction to the political figure and
threat of the guerrillero:
“These actions in the highlands represent the union of various wills. First,” he
said leaning forward slightly over the table, “the will of the people in the high-
lands. Second, the decisive will of President Luis Echeverría Alvarez. Third, my
administration’s concern for the development and welfare of our state. The com-
ing together of these wills has led to the construction of roads, schools, medical
centers, ‘Conasupo’ food and supply stores, credit for coffee growers and coconut
harvesters, plus the telephone lines that will run from village to village through-
out the Atoyac region. Actions of such vast proportions requiring such enormous
federal, state and local investment cannot be carried out overnight. They cannot
be improvised as a result of the demands of clandestine, antisocial groups such as
Lucio Cabañas.’” (Montemayor 1991, 119)15
The agrarian struggle for justice is rendered backward and antisocial, as capi-
tal time is installed and the calculations of military annihilation made coexten-
sive with a whole productive anatomy of social power that blurs the distinction
between sovereign force and everyday life.16 In the meantime the state upholds
its monopoly on violence as an empire of modern democracy standing against

all deviations and forms of so-called abnormality or lawlessness. President Luis

Echeverría is perfectly clear about the positive function of the suspension of
the law:
“Generally emerging from the heart of broken homes and family irresponsibility;
victims of a lack of coordination between parents and teachers; children with
learning disabilities; adolescents demonstrating problems of adaptation with
a precocious tendency to use drugs along with a notable propensity for sexual
promiscuity including male and female homosexuality; victims of violence who
watch too much television sponsored not just by private business but by the
directors of public enterprise . . . these groups are easily manipulated by dark
national or foreign political interests because they find irresponsible instruments
for actions of provocation against our institutions. And putting it simply, some-
times they think they belong to the extreme Left. But when we see their lack of
ideological preparation and realize they are really trying to provoke repression, we
can immediately clarify their true nature: they are trying to detain the march of
our liberties at a time when the politics of economic nationalism is just beginning
in our country . . . We will not give in with government concessions before such
provocations. All of Mexico knows: in extreme cases there is a clear constitutional
procedure to impede any interruption in the institutional march of the Nation.
Let that be made clear.”
Once again, Congress broke out in applause. (Montemayor 1991, 309)
Congress applauds the suspension of the application of the law in the name
of guaranteeing the normal functioning of institutional order. It therefore
applauds the active implementation of the exceptional decision even though
such a decision effectively undermines Congress. Revolutionary democracy is
guaranteed by suspending its legal procedures, and this makes the democratic
institutions happy.
Through narrative sequences such as those outlined here, we see that it was
in Mexico’s Cold War mini-Vietnam—in the armed struggle between the PRI
and the Party of the Poor—that we encounter the juridical anomie and violence
that anchors the heterogeneous yet inseparable relation between the traditional
sovereign right to kill or let live and the modern right to forge a community
that exists as a specific, territorialized, and fully regulated population. In the
Guerrero of the 1970s, the absolute hostility of a war of annihilation between
parties cannot be distinguished from the state’s calculation and regularization of
collective welfare. Participants in a struggle to the death, citizens are provided
the services of the modern biopolitical ratio, such as the construction of schools,
health benefits, roads, social security, and medical facilities, as well as electricity,
water, and communication networks.17 Historical injustice is, thereby, couched
in a state language of technical efficiency and institution building.

In response to the open hostility of the Party of the Poor, the state forged a
low-intensity state of siege not of a city or a fortification but of a whole cultural
geography and population struggling against a legacy of poverty and injustice.
In this process the modern biopolitical right to stabilize, equilibrate, and man-
age the relationship between the state’s internal order and the development of
its full economic and political interests became indistinguishable from the de
facto suspension of the law. The Costa Grande became a zone of indistinction
between traditional sovereignty and modern forms of intelligence, social regu-
lation, interdiction, and instruction. It is as a result of this particularly intense
nexus between absolute hostility and protobiopolitical regularization that mili-
tarized decisionism became fully entrenched in the everyday life of rural society.
Naked sovereign power and the militarized immunization of the social sphere
became part and parcel of the same class war, as the Mexican reason of state split
into the workings of sovereign obliteration and the protection of the population
simultaneously. Killing and collective welfare became visibly indifferent to each
other for the first time, as they each became the alibi of the other in exactly the
same instant. Furthermore, all of this was mobilized in such a way as to resist
the return of the ghost, to repress or exorcise the returning specter of Emiliano
Zapata, but in a war that could no longer be like that of the ghost because now
it was part and parcel of Cold War low-intensity tactics.18
By the end of the novel, the new sovereign subject of history is the military,
and its enemy is a cultural geography that can still believe in the ghosts of the
agrarian past. The generals are very clear about their new position in the rela-
tion between the sovereign right to kill and the right to regularize entire ter-
ritories and populations. General Escárcega explains most clearly the sovereign
decisionism of his increasingly autonomous military corporation:
For the first time in modern Mexico there is a total military occupation of a
whole region. It is not easy for many to comprehend, not even for the army. It
is an experience of historical proportions . . . We can say we’re fighting against a
handful of young men or Indians or communists, but the truth is we’re control-
ling entire towns, municipalities, cities, mountains, communications, everything.
And that raises questions about whether we’re suffocating and fighting the people
themselves or, as the President of the Republic likes to say, merely combating
problems caused by the CIA in Mexico . . . The enemy is in all the villages and
not just in that group of guerrillas . . . That’s why it’s a question of confronting the
people themselves . . . That’s why we have total control of the region, gentlemen,
because it cannot be resolved any other way. And only a force such as the army
can take a decision such as that. The President and his civilian Cabinet cannot
take it because they’re terrified by the political image of the decision, while for
us it is an organic responsibility. Our essence is to reestablish peace, no more and
no less . . . We have military control of the zone because in fact the war is against

that zone . . . I’m thinking that throughout this century the whole zone has been
Zapatista. Zapatista guerrillas were strong not just in Morelos, in Cuautla, but in
Guerrero, in the very region belonging to Lucio. And let’s not forget that Zap-
atismo never developed a powerful regular army like Villismo did . . . Zapatismo
was always a kind of fiction in military terms. It hid in the towns; it blended in
then suddenly jumped out at some point and disappeared again. It was above
all a guerrilla force rather than a regular army . . . History repeats itself and lays
dangerous traps for the life of armies, don’t you think? . . . We should accept that
the people, or at least a sector of the people, are behind Lucio and support his
struggle. It doesn’t matter if they’re drug traffickers or cattle thieves. What we
need to be clear about is the fact that part of the people supports his struggle, and
that they are the people. And that is what some politicians refuse to accept. That’s
why they fear the measures taken by the military. (Montemayor 1991, 347–51)
For the newly independent and increasingly sovereign military, the war
against Lucio Cabañas and the Party of the Poor is a war against the return
of the ghost of Emiliano Zapata, and against the ghost’s relation to the part
of those who have no part. The enemy is history, geography, and the people
who inhabit it, that is, the legacy and territory of Zapata. Within this radical
militarization of the civilian state, “Zapatista” claims for the just distribu-
tion of public wealth as defined in Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution are,
by definition, declarations of absolute enmity. And in order to combat such
claims, sovereign decisionism becomes a ubiquitous tool in the arsenal of an
absolute military hostility capable of availing itself of the preemptive modern-
ization and regularization of the cultural geography, its institutions, and its
communication networks.
State enmity toward the ghost of Zapata is biopoliticized and militarized.
Enmity is situated at the heart of the relation between intelligence and security
and is applied to anyone in a given territory in a preemptive, low-intensity war
against the part of those who have no part. The enemy is no longer just those
who declare themselves to be enemies of the state by taking up arms in the name
of general interest. The notion of enemy “now includes a component of poten-
tiality based on previous intelligence: the enemy is now the probable enemy, no
longer merely the certain enemy” (Moreiras 2006, 53). The probable enemy, in
other words, is now the population of a rural area with an established, or just a
potential, relation to the ghost.
On June 28, 1995, a pickup truck carrying a few dozen peasants—several
of them members of the Organización Campesina de la Sierra del Sur (Peasant
Organization of the Southern Highlands)—was traveling to Atoyac de Álva-
rez in the Costa Grande of Guerrero. They were en route to the birthplace
of Lucio Cabañas to protest the disappearance of Gilberto Romero Vásquez,
an activist who had not been seen in the area for a month. At approximately

10:30 a.m., in a place called Paso Real, the pickup truck was brought to a halt
by hundreds of uniformed officers of the Guerrero State Motorized Police, the
Judicial Police, and ununiformed armed men who had been lying in wait for
the pickup truck for up to five hours. The security forces were armed with R-15
machine guns, AK 47s, shotguns, and pistols. The peasants were ordered down
from the pickup truck. When one of them resisted having his machete taken
away, shots rang out. The order was immediately given to round up and kill the
whole group. The official version is that 17 were killed and 20 injured. Other
versions talk of summary executions of the wounded and the presence of two
helicopters to transport and dispose of cadavers elsewhere, in order to reduce
the official numbers of the massacred.19 Weapons were placed in the hands of
the dead peasants and the security forces immediately claimed to have acted in
self-defense. However, state police shot a video of the massacre that was later
leaked to national television. Nobody—not even the Guerrero state governor,
Rubén Figueroa Alcócer, the son of Rubén Figueroa Figueroa—has been held
responsible for the massacre.
The peasants killed in the Aguas Blancas massacre of 1995 were not the real
enemy. They were the potential enemy, and the price they paid was the price
of probability. If they had arrived in Atoyac de Álvarez, they might have caused
trouble. But they did not. The use of prior intelligence and the de facto state of
exception in Guerrero took care of that before anything serious could happen.
Absolute Hostility and Ubiquitous Enmity: The Secret Reports

Contemporary sovereignty has become the regularization of collective life pred-
icated on the expansion of market forces in coordination with the preemptive
identification and possible eradication of the potential or probable enemy. In
certain regions of contemporary Mexico, friendship toward the ghost of Zapata
has become a question of universal probability, as military intelligence strives
to calculate the extent to which the hearts, minds, words, and actions of the
population are sutured truly to the values, distributions, and calculations of the
police order.
This world of calculation, probability, and potentiality is the telos of
Carlos Montemayor’s Los informes secretos (The Secret Reports), a novel that
presents itself as a relay of secret reports and bureaucratic memorandums for-
warded, at the height of the military offensive ordered by President Ernesto
Zedillo against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1995,
from an anonymous intelligence supervisor to his equally nameless immediate
superior in the Mexican secret services. Through these monotonous reports,
the novel uncovers an underworld of conjecture, speculation, incalculabil-
ity, coincidence, encounters, and clandestine contacts to be analyzed and

deciphered in a history and cultural geography that has been in a state of civil
conflict for decades.20
The conditions of the political have shifted dramatically between the histori-
cal sequence of 1967–74 and 1995. The PRI’s import substitution industrializa-
tion model collapsed in 1982, to be replaced by the technocratic neoliberalism
of Presidents Miguel de la Madrid, Carlos Salinas, and subsequent adminis-
trations. The postearthquake elections of 1988 that brought Salinas to power
were rigged and led to the popular mobilization and founding of the opposi-
tion PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party). The implementation of NAFTA
under the technocratic leadership of President Salinas came on January 1, 1994,
coinciding with the unexpected eruption onto the political scene of the EZLN.
In preparation for the 1994 inauguration of NAFTA, and in a general economic
strategy designed to subordinate public interest to private capital and foreign
investment, the new Agrarian Law of February 1992 erased all sections of Arti-
cle 27 of the 1917 Constitution that allowed for peasants to petition legally for
land redistribution, thereby erasing from the constitution all postrevolution-
ary references to “public use,” “public interest,” and “public wealth” in rela-
tion to land tenure, in the process bringing to an end the democratic legacy of
the agrarian revolution.21 The reforms to Article 27 were the detonator for the
Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994 (Harvey 1998, 258). In December 1994,
the first month of Ernesto Zedillo’s “sexenio,” the Mexican economy collapsed.
In February 1995, Zedillo ordered a military offensive against the EZLN to
capture the organization’s leadership. It provoked massive demonstrations in
Mexico City, the displacement of tens of thousands in Chiapas, and the organi-
zation of paramilitary groups supported by civil and military government agen-
cies (Harvey 1998, 207–23). However, the military offensive did not guarantee
the capture of the movement’s leadership. As a result, in April the government
opened up peace talks with the rebels although troops remained stationed close
to the communities suspected of supporting the EZLN. Ever since then, many
areas in Chiapas have been subject to a state of siege.
Los informes secretos covers the days between February 23 and August 17,
1995. In its treatment of the resurgence of Zapata, the novel functions on three
levels simultaneously. On the first level, the anonymous intelligence supervi-
sor has been charged with the surveillance of a professor of history who is a
researcher in the National Archive. The historian is a political activist who
appears to have established contact with the organizational networks of the
EZLN as well as with other potential guerrilla groups in Hidalgo, Oaxaca,
Puebla, Guerrero, Chiapas, and elsewhere. The novel begins in medias res,
thereby suggesting that if there is a specific origin or reason for the surveil-
lance its details remain beyond our grasp. Or maybe the surveillance is in place
simply because sovereign power fears for its autoimmune procedures because

of the return onto the political stage of Zapatismo. The novel begins with the
uncovering of a probability:
23rd of February
We have confirmed certain information. The connection you have ordered us to

investigate appears probable. The information could have come from one of the
four initial meeting places, which correspond to his routine areas. I also received
the report about the telephone lines. On one of them the intervention extends
for eleven kilometers to the Colonia del Valle exchange, and from there another
eleven kilometers to its collection base: we are talking about the offices on the
third floor of the ministry of national defense. There is no connection to El Faro,
so we cannot count on information in our areas. I suggest occupying the line
Military Intelligence has left open. (Montemayor 1999, 9)
Immediately, the world of national security emerges as a sovereign realm

of calculation, potentiality, speculation, and competition between groups and
organizations working at the heart of state intelligence. The supervisor sets up
his surveillance of “the objective” by infiltrating an anonymous “element,” a
former friend and leftist activist, into his everyday life: “26th of February Our
agent for infiltration work is ready: he was an activist in ‘Proletarian Line’
between 1972 and 1975 in the south of Coahuila and the north of Durango; he
had a close friendship with the objective particularly between 1983 and 1986,
and it hasn’t disappeared completely. They met up again two years ago and we
know he knows nothing about our agent’s current status” (Montemayor 1999,
10–11). The element’s reports are supplemented by those written by other
nameless agents who follow the objective’s every move around Mexico City and
certain rural areas of the republic.
The element’s job is specifically to forward the content of the objective’s
writing and research materials to the supervisor. The latter then forwards it to
his ghostlike superior who ordered the investigation for reasons unknown. It
is when the supervisor forwards the reports to his superior that the reader also
gains access to the story and begins to reproduce the chain of state intelligence
and surveillance as we strive to unravel the significance (if indeed there is any)
of what we are reading. This is the first level of the narrative, and it pertains
exclusively to the national security situation of the weeks of low-intensity con-
flict between the end of February and mid-August 1995. Through the objec-
tive’s movements and conversations, we gain possible information about his
potential ties to armed movements from the 1960s, to peasant guerrilla move-
ments in Hidalgo, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas during the 1980s, and to
their possible connections with current conditions in the Chiapas of the 1990s.
But nothing here can be confirmed.

It is the objective’s research—information supplied to the superior, and there-

fore to the reader, by the element who forwards it on through the supervisor—
that provides us with the novel’s second level. The element forwards transcriptions
of the objective’s research notes, microfilms, writings, and taped interviews with
former secret agents and political activists. Through these writings the surveil-
lance of the objective in 1995 is revealed to be a very minor episode in a long
history of surveillance and infiltration of the Left in twentieth-century Mexico.
Los informes secretos presents the objective’s historical documentation in min-
ute detail. This documentation includes an evaluation of the PCM’s (Mexican
Communist Party) connections in Guatemala prior to the CIA-backed over-
throw of President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 (Montemayor 1999, 27–29); the
infiltration of Chiapas-based communist groups by police forces, together with
the systematic pursuit and assassination of leftists in the mid-1950s (32–34);
the surveillance of Guatemalan and US leftists living in Mexico, the relation
of these groups to Moscow, the internal struggles of the Mexican Commu-
nist Party, and the evaluation of a potential communist-backed insurrection
in the Mexico of the 1950s (45–52); the relation between the Mexican “Left”
and the Caribbean prior to the Cuban Revolution (62–68); reports on levels
of police infiltration in the Mexican Communist Party and the Worker Peas-
ant Party (77–83); microfilms outlining the extent of infiltration in the union
movement from the late 1950s onward (94–100); transcriptions of interviews
talking of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ ties to the KGB together with the details of
the infamous 1952 May Day massacre (107–15); cassettes analyzing the vio-
lence of the 1952 presidential succession (123–37); the injustices internal to
the Communist Party network, Soviet manipulation of political interests, Lom-
bardo Toledano’s relation to the Party, and the famous case of José Revueltas
(148–63); transcribed interviews talking of the Communist Party’s treatment of
homosexuals, Revueltas’s scathing critique of the PCM, and the party’s relation
to the contemporary “Left” (169–83); the attempted assassination of Trotsky,
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet crisis in Cuba (197–217);
military documentation revealing the state’s strategic operations to destroy the
political and military structures of the EZLN in Chiapas (226–28); and, finally,
official description of low-intensity military tactics including the suspension
of individual guarantees (state of exception), the use of paramilitary groups,
psychological warfare tactics, and blanket censorship in the contemporary war
against Zapatismo (235–39). The latter documentation ends up being particu-
larly important. However, 1968 is conspicuously absent from this history of
political intrigue and infiltration, in which the difference between loyalty and
treachery, or between friends and enemies, is anything but clear.
This opaque history of political infiltration and repression, however, is sup-
plemented by the novel’s third level. This is an equally opaque tale of infiltration

that ends up dominating the investigation and producing the backbone of the
whole book. It is the story of the supervisor’s increasing frustration and sus-
picion regarding the task he has been assigned. Slowly he begins to question
the way the investigation is allowed to proceed, is intercepted, or is actively
hindered and why.
At the center of the supervisor’s investigation is the third of four meetings
attended by the objective. At the beginning of the novel, it appears that this
meeting might hold the key to the objective’s movements and actions, and
therefore to the resolution of the investigation itself. But it is also clear that the
investigation of the objective is already subject to certain troubling connections
with unknown Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación) advisors:
4 March
I received the notes on the initial meetings. We confirmed that all the contacts
from the Ambassador’s house are clean, at least in the first meeting. But not in
the following one. His ties to the Nuevo León entrepreneurs are the result of the
Mexican Federation of the Alliance Française, because they are all members of the
Board of Directors; his tie to the Colegio de México professor is an old relation
and is of a professional nature. But his connections to the Ministry of the Interior
advisor do not appear to be very clear. They have not known each other very long
and their ties could be the explanation we need to make the link. This hypothesis
is strengthened by another fact we have just discovered: somebody else from our
corporation attended that meeting. We do not know the name. (Montemayor
1999, 14)
This small mystery haunts the investigation throughout, even though it is

quickly set aside as new details pile up. It is really the objective himself who
creates the conditions for the supervisor’s questioning of his mission. The objec-
tive converses at length with the element about the downsizing and privatiza-
tion of national security, that is, about the application of the principle of the
self-limitation of government to state intelligence and security agencies, which
came about as a direct consequence of the economic collapse of 1982. For the
objective this date marks the beginning of a crisis of intelligence in the state’s
identification and neutralization of its internal enemies. As a result of what he
calls a “fracture of information” after the disarticulation of the specter of “Com-
munism” in the 1970s, intelligence’s relation to the everyday workings of the
public sphere and therefore to the political realm is disrupted. The administra-
tion of state intelligence is disbanded, decentralized, or passes over into crimi-
nality. The objective’s conversation about the effects of the neoliberalization
of the PRI state is, as always, passed from the element to the supervisor to the
superior, and therefore on to us:

4 of June
What is a fracture of information? Human archives, groups of experts that are disar-
ticulated, disappear or remain inactive, documents that get lost, records and follow-ups
that vanish. The administrative urge becomes mixed up with the interests of political
groups. Entire teams are disbanded. The fracture began in 1983 with the disappearance
of the old police forces such as the Federal Security Directorate. Those repressive entities
were apparently victorious after 1977 and it took a long time to dismantle them. Some
elements remained in service; others passed over into private security groups or the drug
cartels, or they fought against the drug cartels or just passed over into delinquency. In this
dismantling continuity was fractured. Information on subversive groups is now clandes-
tine; if you obtain it, it is distant. Thanks to the archives we can get an idea of the past
with a degree of lucidity. But the documents do not contain the silence or the murmur of
the present in motion . . . (Montemayor 1999, 118; italics in original)
The privatization of security and the corresponding fragmentation of knowl-

edge that results from the state’s self-limiting of government mean that the mys-
tery is not the past but the present. This leads the supervisor to reflect on the
need for preemptive intelligence, for the internal details of the investigation in
hand are hampering its successful resolution (i.e., the revelation of its truth). He
begins to question the governmental obstacles apparently impeding his work
and, in particular, the role possibly being played by his superior:
8 of June
Please find enclosed the documentation regarding the objective’s connections

with Ministry of the Interior advisors . . . We have not advanced for three weeks.
The documents and transcriptions we have forwarded to you are part of our inter-
est in the objective; they constitute secret documentation that has fallen inexpli-
cably into your hands; but they correspond to events from decades ago that might
be obstructing something else. The abundance of information impedes us from
seeing what there is behind, and now . . . We are detained and not because of
our inability. Rather, it is because of the delay in authorization and uncertainty
regarding what is happening in our offices . . . It appears that we ourselves are
putting the brakes on, trying to cover our eyes so as not to see, or rather, so as not
to foresee those spheres that concern us most. (Montemayor 1999, 121)
The surveillance supervisor seems to lament not being able to predict reality
with absolute certainty in the same way Alfonso Reyes fights to maintain his
faith in the metaphysics of certainty and absolute perspective. Both Alfonso
Reyes the humanist and our anonymous Ministry of the Interior intelligence
supervisor yearn to exist within the metaphysical empire of certainty. One does
so in order to suture reason to history and identity. The other does so in order
to suture reason to law and order.

However, the frustrating limitations placed on the supervisor’s desire for pre-
emptive (i.e., absolute) intelligence are compounded when he confirms his new
orders from above: “12 June In accord with your instructions, I reiterate that I
have suspended my agent’s surveillance of the connection we identified in the
third meeting point. It is clear to everybody he remains beyond our investiga-
tion” (Montemayor 1999, 140). But this imposed limitation, or possible cover-
up, is only part of the complexity of this third level of investigation, because the
military state and the civil state appear to be working at odds with each other,
or at least with different interests in mind and with different levels of suspicion
affecting the status of the investigation.
It appears that slowly but surely the intelligence of the civil state is being
threatened and overtaken by the military. Suddenly the supervisor begins to
fear for the safety of his agents as Military Intelligence draws in closer to his
communication networks, and his superior maintains his distance: “26 June
Your indications were opportune; the meeting with R2 has been confirmed
along with the interception of military elements in his subsequent surveil-
lance . . . Military elements are now coming closer to our routes . . . It is
not disrespect, but a concern among our elements who now feel vulnerable,
because there has obviously been a change toward us. I ask that you give us
the opportunity to show we are free from any questionable nexus. I would
like you to allow us to demonstrate that much” (Montemayor 1999, 166).
But nothing happens.
The Ministry of the Interior appears to be in a shambles. On the eve-
ning of the Aguas Blancas massacre on the road to Atoyac (June 28, 1995),
the Minister of the Interior is forced to submit his resignation (Montemayor
1999, 167). In addition, the supervisor seems to be aware that the objective
holds information about the Mexican military’s ties to the United States, but
its use for civil intelligence purposes seems to be inconclusive (168), perhaps
suggesting an increasing disconnect at the heart of the state between civil
and military intelligence agencies and interests. His frustration increases: “4
July . . . I repeat that we have followed your orders completely . . . I suggest
that other corporations or teams are interfering in our investigation . . . They
have now detected us . . . I repeat that not only is our agent in danger, but
also several other responsible parties. I insist on requesting your authorization
to reassume our task of tracing the lines of investigation that have been closed
off to us” (185–86).
Slowly the penny begins to drop. The clarity and certainty of preemptive
intelligence is an ideal of civil autoimmunity that is impossible to implement in
the shadowy world of private security and individual intelligence interests. It is
with this realization that the narrator not only shows his naïvety but also begins
to formulate specific questions for his superior:

14 July
I think we are the window through which this country should contemplate itself
in the most complete and clearest way possible . . . But the window through
which we view reality is not clean . . . Somebody is intentionally blocking our
operations and provoking a chaotic or partial (fragmentary) view of our respon-
sibility . . . Our function in national security should not be reduced to police
surveillance . . . We should move beyond that and foresee events before they set
fire to entire regions . . . Why doesn’t the documentation take us toward the social
and student movements of 1968? . . . Why haven’t we come across relevant infor-
mation on the army that could explain Military Intelligence’s interest in him? . . .
What is the true goal of the investigation that has been asked of us? What is the
true nature of the information we have not been allowed to obtain or even pre-
suppose? We have provided information on what we have been allowed to see.
It is what we see, but only from within the circumstances we have been able to
work within. That is why our vision is incomplete. (Montemayor 1999, 193–95)
The new function of civil intelligence is to steer clear of the military: “22
July . . . In accordance with your orders we have pulled our element out of
those areas we now know are the responsibility of Military Intelligence . . . We
believe the lines of investigation we are developing are delicate and require abso-
lute security. I ask for your support” (Montemayor 1999, 219–20). A week
later the supervisor forwards his superior his own didactic reflection on loy-
alty and treachery in relation to state intelligence. In this communication he
positions himself as the idealist, organic intellectual of civil intelligence’s rela-
tion to governmental transparency. What appears to be at stake for him in his
pedagogical treatise is the potential ruin of state autoimmunity in the face of
military encroachment, private motivations, individual fidelities, and contra-
dictory drives at the heart of the military-civil police order. Absolute certainty,
transparency, and honorable labor appear to be his ideals. Opacity appears to
be his reality. But in such a world of shadows, in which there are no friends and
anyone is a potential enemy, perhaps his idealistic motivations are not what they
appear to be either:
A clumsy loyalty is likely to change master, and our job requires above all else
intelligence; a loyalty anchored in intelligence. He who is loyal will always be
so with somebody, for that is his nature. Intelligence requires more, but it also
requires security. He who is loyal and docile but unintelligent does not need secu-
rity in order to continue being himself. We, on the other hand, need the certainty
that the ends we propose and reach arrive and are used correctly . . . For this
reason I try to explain why security is required. Each one of us should know that
he is situated on solid ground, or like a link in a chain moving in the right direc-
tion because we all expect it to advance that way. Our task does not just project
outwards: it wouldn’t be the first time an institution or government tried to hurt

itself. The value placed on our information is also the value placed on our work,
because we become what the information we possess is worth. We become what
we know . . . Today I have begun to understand what we are about to uncover. I
must insist that it is not a question of disagreement. I have followed your orders
completely but the contacts have emerged in spite of us. We know the same
information has reached your hands via other routes. The elements intercepting
us confirm we have investigated well. The path of all information appears to lead
to you. As a result I ask that you ratify me in my position. (223–24)
It is still not clear to the reader what this really means. Has the superior put
the investigation in motion to test the motivations and loyalty of the supervisor?
Has the objective been a pretext all along and the true objective the supervisor?
Did the superior put the investigation in motion to test his own security in the
face of military intelligence, thereby using both the objective and the supervi-
sor as equally duped partners in a game to analyze his own immunity? If so,
what are his interests? What is he covering up? Why would he be an object of
interest for a military intelligence network that clearly functions independently
of, rather than subordinated to, the civil state? Or is the supervisor warning his
superior he has valuable information that will ruin him? Is he now demanding
loyalty of his superior? Could it mean all the previously mentioned or just parts?
On August 5 and August 6, the supervisor notes that the objective has in
his possession secret documentation related to the 1995 military offensive in
Chiapas against the EZLN. He concludes that the leaking of such documents
could only have come from the Ministry of Defense, the private offices of the
president of the republic and, to a lesser extent, the offices of the secret services.
He comes to the conclusion that, given recent leaks in the press, the private
offices of the president of the republic are most likely the origin. If this is the
case, he says, in his mysterious third meeting the objective did not receive infor-
mation but passed it on (Montemayor 1999, 231–33). But this still appears to
be speculation for it is not completely clear what it refers to. What information
was exchanged? Through whose hands did it pass? And how does he know this?
The documentation in question is presented (Montemayor 1999, 235–39).
It describes in great detail the national security tactics and goals of the military
offensive against the EZLN, detailing the suspension of all guarantees (the state
of exception), censorship of the media, and the organization and deployment of
civil self-defense paramilitary organizations throughout Chiapas. The objective
appears to have passed on military intelligence documents to a representative of
the Ministry of the Interior, thereby suggesting that the military is an autono-
mous corporation working independently of the civil institutions of the repub-
lic, who now have to spy on it in order to find out what the armed forces are
up to. For the supervisor, Chiapas is the result of the “fracture of information”

initiated in the wake of the economic collapse of 1982: “Chiapas is, in social
costs, the example of an error in national security, not an example of good judg-
ment” (244). For him the fracture of information—the liberal principle and
application of the self-limitation of government (also known as the birth of bio-
politics)—is what impedes foreseeing and preempting guerrilla conflict (245).
But where do such speculation, conjecture, and inference lead? Ultimately,
Los informes secretos leads to an inversion of roles in the relation between supe-
rior and inferior. Concrete conditions in Chiapas become little more than a
pretext for the private power games at the heart of national intelligence and
security. Out of the blue the supervisor announces that for over a month he has
been conducting an investigation of his superior. At some point his superior
became his objective and did so without the new objective, or the reader for
that matter, realizing it. The original objective and the element are displaced
from the investigation because they are no longer of interest. Despite his claims
for the need for absolute transparency in the relation between intelligence and
security—the idea being that this would be for the good of the nation—the
supervisor has actually been taking advantage of the partial perspectives guaran-
teed by the fracture of intelligence in order to carry out his private investigation
into his superior’s personal interests, motives, and actions. His apparently naïve
claims to transparency for the good of all were little more than the cover that
allowed him to burrow into the private shadows and internal hierarchies of the
national security state.
At this point it becomes clear that the idea of “the public” is being pushed
aside by private interests, for the novel’s investigation is no longer about the
history of surveillance and infiltration of the Left. For a period of time that
remains unknown to us, the novel has been a game of cat-and-mouse between
two individuals looking out for their own private interests at the heart of state
intelligence:
16 August
First I identified the two elements in my team who provided you with additional
information. Not the ones you imposed in the course of recent months, but the
ones who were here before I took charge. Second, I identified the area in which
your agents were interested. Third, I began an investigation of you . . . We now
know you are not interested in knowing the objective’s possible nexus with clan-
destine groups, but his possible nexus with political groups. Also, that you pro-
posed using our group to erase some of your own tracks and thereby discover to
what extent intelligence teams from other political groups could detect you. We
have decided to protect several points in the investigation taking into consider-
ation a simple fact: that for the moment we depend on your office while you are
there. On July 13th the objective dialed two telephone numbers repeatedly; those

numbers were yours. The objective was calling to ask for help because he is your
friend. He does not know what your position is, but he has his intuitions . . . As
I told you, we become what the information we possess is worth. That’s the way
it is, and now we both know. (Montemayor 1999, 246–47)
The superior places his friend and his research at the heart of state surveil-
lance, in order to procure information about military operations while throw-
ing the scent off via the objective’s connections with the Left. The objective,
meanwhile, realizes he is being investigated and calls his former friend for help.
His friend does not help. Does the superior procure information about military
operations in order to undermine Military Intelligence in favor of the EZLN?
Or is he more interested in covering his own former connection to political
groups, gauging any potential suspicion Military Intelligence might have of
him, and thereby measuring his individual level of security in the face of the
military mobilization against the resurgent ghost of Zapata? Is his motivation
fear or politics? Is there a difference anymore between fear and politics at the
heart of the national security state?
The supervisor has recognized that the conspicuous absence of 1968 in the
objective’s research is the unsymbolized kernel of truth that explains the rela-
tion between the objective and his superior. It is this realization that allows the
supervisor to turn the tables on his superior. But he does not blow his superior’s
cover. He does not uncover the truth and declare him to be the enemy. This
is the case because he is more useful for the supervisor’s own private interests
while still in office and in debt than he is exposed and out in the open. Now
the supervisor becomes the leader of an investigation that is truly dedicated to
preemptive intelligence, personal advancement, and the further concentration
of individual interest:
17 August
I propose that you choose one of the following options. One, that I continue
reporting the advances in the investigation to you under two conditions: first,
that I be authorized to broaden all required routes; second, that all necessary
additional teams be coordinated under my command. The second option is that
you accept that my briefs be sent to an area beyond our sector. This second option
has three advantages for you: it safeguards the information you are interested in; it
eliminates the information you wanted to get rid of and means you are not pres-
sured by the surveillance of a friend of yours. You will remain clean and on the
margins while we will recuperate the routes that have been cancelled out. I want
to go into this case in depth and complete the fragmentary images we’ve been
stumbling over. In order to achieve this I need total freedom of movement and
decision. I know I can continue, or rather, reinitiate definitively, the investigation.
(Montemayor 1999, 247)

The supervisor proposes an open-ended investigation into the history of

past political groups and their potential ties to the EZLN and current security
conditions. He begins to do Military Intelligence’s work for it. But there is
an underlying question that remains unsolved: Is it the case that the superior
is an active infiltrator in the secret services working for political groups on
the Left? Is this not the case? In the end it appears to matter very little. What
really matters is that the superior remain clean and on the margins while the
supervisor takes over security and surveillance operations in the name of pre-
emptive intelligence. Loyalty and treachery—the distance between the friend
and the enemy—are indistinguishable in the end and have been in fact since
the very beginning.
The new individual power in the shadows, living in the wake of the downsiz-
ing and decentralization of national security after 1983, calls for total freedom
of individual movement and decision in the quest for a preemptive intelligence
mobilized militarily against the resurgent ghost of Zapata. In this process,
notions of general interest such as public use and public wealth are displaced
by a privatization of sovereign decisionism that works hand in hand with the
militarization of public security.
Finally, from the first page of Los informes secretos the reader has been located
in exactly the same position as the superior in the productive chain of intelli-
gence and surveillance. However, the reader’s knowledge has been limited in the
same way the supervisor’s knowledge was limited for a good part of the investi-
gation. But at one unidentifiable point in the book, the supervisor turned the
tables without us knowing. After having been befuddled voyeurs of an investi-
gation of almost six months (February–August 1995), by the end of the novel
we are hapless accomplices to the fact that the superior has illegally received
classified information regarding Military Intelligence’s counterinsurgency oper-
ations in Chiapas. Now we also know that he most likely had, and perhaps still
has, suspicious ties to political groups and that he is trying desperately to hide
this fact from Military Intelligence.22
By the end of the novel, the reader is an accessory to those facts. We know
with certainty that the superior received, via unauthorized channels, classi-
fied military information regarding the state of exception in Chiapas. It is
perfectly reasonable, then, that as far as Military Intelligence is concerned
each and every reader, wherever and whoever they might be, is a probable or
potential enemy who is worthy therefore of surveillance and investigation.
It is now perfectly natural that this be the case, because the newly emergent
apparatus of sovereign power is a low-intensity paramilitary order predicated
on the private interests of the oligarchies, whose absolute enemy is the part of
those who have no part that might still believe in the possibility of a language
of public use, public interest, and public wealth in the wake of the ghosts of

the agrarian past, and in the wake of Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917.
After all, the unjust portioning of the land and its relation to the spectral
figure, language, and legacy of the part of those who have no part is still the
relation that challenges us to strive to know better what the democratic imagi-
nary ought, in truth, to have meant for modern and contemporary Mexico.
Anything else is just conceptual and political acquiescence before the play of
the increasingly militarized oligarchies.

Notes
Introduction
1. For the history and development of the notion of police, see Neocleous 2000.
Chapter 1
1. In a section of the novel that connects two land stories (Rulfo 1990, 102–12), end-
ing with the anonymous voices of the displaced (110–12), Pedro decides to marry
Dolores Preciado in order to pay off his debts, while Toribio Aldrete challenges the
unlawful expropriation of his lands by unsuccessfully referring to the legitimacy of
traditional property rights. Pedro refuses the existence of preexisting property laws
(“What laws, Fulgor? From now on we make the law” [107]). This double tale of
expropriation, in which the land is violently individualized, is the point at which
Comala slowly begins to change into a land of shadows, ghosts, and echoes of previ-
ous life-forms: “The sky was still blue. There were a few clouds. The breeze was still
blowing up above, but down here it was becoming hotter” (107).
2. See Susana San Juan’s rejection of her biological father (Rulfo 1990, 153), spiritual
father (162; 185), and Pedro Páramo (165).
3. The episode hinges on the indeterminate relation between the two Greek words for
freedom: eleutheria (liberty, license) and exousia (authority, jurisdiction, liberty).
See Derrida (2005, 22).
4. See Nancy (“Abandoned,” 43–44) and Agamben (1998, 29).
5. For mythic violence, see Benjamin (1996, 248–49).
6. See Schmitt (1976, 26).
7. For more information, see Loveman (1993, 89).
8. For the extraordinary power concentrated in the office of the Mexican presidency,
see Meyer (2000, 51).
9. Adolfo Gilly establishes a direct link between the history of Mexican radical liberal-
ism (in particular, Ricardo Flores Magón’s turn to anarchism in the years preceding
the Mexican Revolution) and the language of the 1917 Constitution. See Gilly
(2005, 51, 115–18, 186–7). Also see MacLachan (1991). For the relation between
the Constitution and the colonial “Leyes de Indias,” see Krauze (Biography, 25).
10. Consider the effects of the economic meltdown of 1982 and the end of the regime
of import substitution; the emergence of technocratic neoliberalism at the heart
of the PRI state; the postearthquake elections of 1988, stolen by the PRI; the
pal-williams-07n.indd 193 3/23/11 11:32 AM

194 ● Notes
founding of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD); the signing

of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994; the unexpected eruption
onto the political scene of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional and the
assassination the same year of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio;
mass migration; the virtual collapse of the PRI government during the presidency
of Ernesto Zedillo; the electoral crisis of 2006 and the announcement of the war on
drugs in the months following.
11. Juárez, Madero, Carranza, Villa, and Zapata all presented themselves as saving the
law in the name of the nation. In its current guise, however, saving the law is carried
out not in the name of technological modernization but in the name of democracy
and the interests of international capital. See Salinas de Gortari (2002, 315–38).
12. Fox was actually implementing the policies first proposed by the neoliberal wing of
the PRI during the presidency of Salinas (1988–94).
13. The Femospp was created to investigate the crimes detailed in a report published
in November 2001 by the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH).
Its legal framework was provided by Articles 16, 20, 21, and 102 of the Constitu-
tion. These articles deal primarily with questions of due process: the existence and
administration of judicial procedures for arrest and detention; the regulation of
procedures designed to guarantee the right to a fair trial by jury; the right to the
prosecution of penalties exclusively by the judiciary, as opposed to other branches
of the executive; or the responsibility of the attorney general and his office to obey
the provisions of the law and to accept responsibility for every offense, omission, or
violation they may incur in the discharge of their duties.
14. Fox appointed staunch Echeverría loyalists Adolfo Aguilar (national security advi-
sor), Juan José Bremer (ambassador to Washington), and Alejandro Gertz Manero
(chief of federal police) to his government. Luis Echeverría was Interior Secretary
(Secretario de Gobernación) under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970)
and president of the republic from 1970 to 1976. He presided over the state’s first
phase of repression against leftist and student groups dating from 1966 to 1971
(including the events in Tlatelolco Square on October 2, 1968), was responsible
for the actions of the infamous Olimpia Batallion in October 1968, and orches-
trated the second phase of repression that included the deaths and disappearances
of Mexico’s “dirty war” against the student movement and the revolutionary Left in
the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre. After 1968 the government formed clandes-
tine student groups as ununiformed security forces designed to confront and divide
the student movement. This arrangement enjoyed some initial success, but the so-
called Halcones’s cover was blown on June 10, 1971, when open police cooperation
in a deadly attack erased any doubt that the government was linked to systematic
violence against students.
15. For accounts of the 1988 electoral fraud, see Gilly (1989, 54–56), Barberán (1988)
and González Graf (1989).
16. According to Virno, “What I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action,
capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics—in short, capable of con-
fronting the great themes articulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Lenin, and Schmitt (I
am thinking here of crucial couplings such as command/obedience, public/private,
friend/enemy, consensus/violence, and so forth) . . . Exodus is the foundation of

Notes ● 195
a Republic. The very idea of ‘republic’, however, requires a taking leave of State
judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The political action of the Exodus
consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal” (Virno 1996, 197).
17. As Subcomandante Marcos noted on September 16, 2005, “Constructing unity
with a longing for hegemony and homogeneity is bound to fail” (Marcos 2005).
18. The EZLN states that what they propose “is like a campaign, but it’s very other,
because it is not electoral” (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional 2010).
Beginning in January and ending in July 2006 (though the idea was that that end
mark a new beginning) the EZLN intended to send delegates to every Mexican
state, invited by whoever wanted them to go and financed on a purely ad hoc basis,
to “listen and organize the indignation” (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
2010). The EZLN presented its criticism not as an end in itself, but simply a means.
For the significant rift in the relation between the EZLN and the intellectual Left,
see Anzar (2005).
19. Throughout this book I refer to imperium in the terms described by Anthony Pag-
den (1995, 12–14).
20. “La Otra” withdraws from recognizing the basic historical framework and rules for
the exercise and reproduction of elite command and obedience—a framework that
has been forged and reproduced since the ratification of the Constitution of 1917
but that also has its roots in the power relations of the agrarian village tradition since
colonial times. As such, the announcement of “La Otra” bears witness to the exhaus-
tion of common frameworks for understanding and recognizing legitimate authority.
21. This is an important point with significant connotations for the historical develop-
ment of Zapatismo and, in particular, for the appreciation of the difference between
contemporary Zapatismo and its historical predecessors. Enrique Krauze refers to
Emiliano Zapata as a “born anarchist” (Biography, 274–304). Also see MacLachan
(1991, 55–56).
Chapter 2
1. For the influence of the Mexican revolutionary period on US cinematic and news-
reel production, see Orellana (1999). Also see Mraz (2009, 59–105).
2. Part of the Casasola archive, there are two photographs of Villa on the presidential
chair with Zapata by his side. One has Zapata looking to his right to exchange a few
words with Villa, and the other has Zapata looking sullenly in the general direction
of the camera while Villa chuckles and looks off to his right, with Tomás Urbina at
Villa’s right hand, Otilio Montaño to Zapata’s left, and the Villista General Rodolfo
Fierro standing at Montaño’s left. The rest of the frame is packed with the faces
of about thirty onlookers jostling for position. Mauricio Gómez Morin suggests
that the photographer that day was Agustín Víctor Casasola (Gómez Morin 2000).
However, as John Mraz contends, there is no evidence of this (2000, 3).
3. See O’Malley (1986, 113–32).
4. See Vaughan (1997, 25–46). Also see Monsiváis (2000, 985–93) and Legrás (2005).
5. For the most detailed account of the role and rise of the Sonoran factions, see Agui-
lar Camín (1985).

196 ● Notes
6. I follow Paul Bové’s definition of “interregnum” as “that place and time . . . when
there is as yet no rule, when there are ordering forces but they have not yet sum-
moned their institutional rule into full view” (1996, 385).
7. See Womack (1968, 222). Also see Guzmán (1998, 409), Katz (1998, 437) and
Knight (1986, 306–7).
8. For an excellent evaluation of Guzmán’s novel in relation to the political complexi-
ties of the 1920s, see Parra (2005, 78–80).
9. According to Rancière, “There is order in society because some people command
and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required:
you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it.
And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you.
It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order. Doubtless inferiors obey
99 percent of the time; it remains that the social order is reduced thereby to its
ultimate contingency. In the final analysis, inequality is only possible through
equality” (1999, 16–17).
10. Alberto Moreiras examines this same section of Guzmán’s novel in The Exhaus-
tion of Difference (2001, 123–26). In his analysis of subaltern negation, he makes
a fundamental point (with which I concur fully) regarding the relationship
between abandonment and the limits of hegemonic thinking: “The zapatistas’
failure to act in a sense that would have potentially enabled them to preserve
some kind of military control over the Mexican state is still a condition of the
political even though it presents itself contingently as a suspension or momentary
abandonment of the political. What if, for the zapatistas at the palace, the appar-
ent abandonment of the political had been nothing but an alternative under-
standing of the political, a radicalization of subaltern negation in a final ‘non
serviam’—‘I will not be as you say’—conducive to a secret triumphant redemp-
tion? Zapatista atopics: I will not be where you place me, in a context in which
hegemonic thinking can only at most place everything, place obsessively, and find
itself exhausted in a thinking of the place . . . If subaltern negation is a simple
refusal to submit to hegemonic interpellation, an exodus from hegemony, is that
not a new assumption of political freedom that remains barred to any and all
thinking of hegemony, to any and all thinking of location? What do the zapatistas
retreat from if not sovereignty?” (Moreiras 2001, 125–26).
11. See Benjamin’s notion of the destructive character (1999, 541–42).
12. Alain Badiou’s reading of the Paris Commune is important here (Badiou 2003, 148).
Chapter 3
The anonymous epigraph is quoted in Carr (1992, 303).
1. The change in the mode of production of representation in postrevolutionary
Mexico was profound, multifaceted, and wide ranging (see Mraz 2009, 107–51).
Literacy campaigns had begun to create a reading public for articles published by
important international intellectuals and Mexican thinkers. Modern illustrated
magazines replete with photo reportages began to circulate during the regime
of Lázaro Cárdenas (Mraz 2001, 117). The radio and the phonograph began to
bring regional musical forms into contact with one another for the first time. And

Notes ● 197
cinema, more than any other form, began to facilitate “a common urban cultural
patrimony whose symbols were absorbed in varied ways by unequal social sectors”
(Schmidt 2001, 45–46).
2. For a description of the Carpa theaters, see Pilcher (2001, xxii). Also see Pilcher’s
description of Moreno’s debt to Mexican plebeian culture, political theater and
satire, and popular street theater and its main comic characters prior to the 1930s
(2001, 1–20). Moreno began working regularly at the Carpa Sotelo in Azcapo-
tzalco in 1930. In 1933 he moved to Tacuba to join the Carpa Valentina and
returned to Mexico City in 1934, where he eventually rose to a legitimate stage in
1936 with the opening of the Follies Bergère. By 1940, after his move into film,
his fast-talking, convoluted humor had become the “voice of an era” (Pilcher
2001, 26–32).
3. In 1935, Samuel Ramos described the pelado as “the most elemental and clearly
defined expression of national character” (1962, 58), who belonged “to a most vile
category of social fauna: he is a form of human rubbish from the great city” (1962,
58–59). Octavio Paz later described Ramos’s work as “still the only point of depar-
ture we have for getting to know ourselves” (1985, 143).
4. The CROM had been the largest of the pro-Obregón and pro-Calles union federa-
tions of the 1920s. However, it began a protracted process of disintegration after
the assassination of president-elect Obregón in 1928. Morones “was the prototype
of those labor bureaucrats who, while enriching themselves and providing politi-
cal personnel for the bourgeoisie, eventually come to rely on armed gangsters to
crush any attempt at rank-and-file opposition” (Gilly 2005, 323). Lombardo, on
the other hand, was inspired in his youth by the ideas of classical Greek democracy
and the teachings of the “Ateneísta” philosopher Antonio Caso. Lombardo, a mem-
ber of the so-called Generation of 1915, emerged with the victory of Venustiano
Carranza in 1916 as one of a new cadre of revolutionary intellectuals who were
committed to orderly, unified civilian rule (see Krauze 1976, 86). As Alan Knight
notes, through the new generation of intellectuals, such as Lombardo, “the licen-
ciados were staking their claim, the military were politely being shown the door”
(1991, 167).
5. However, in Novo’s Hoy chronicles reproduced in 1964 as La vida en México en el
período presidencial de Lázaro Cárdenas, there is no mention of the confrontation or
of Cantinflas’s role in it (1964, 81–82).
6. For a general overview of the relations between the state and the administration
of the labor movement from 1920 to 1934, see Aguilar Camín and Meyer (1993,
112–41).
7. Lombardo considered himself to be a Marxist but not a Communist (see Liss 1991,
366–69). The Mexican Communist Party considered him to be a chauvinistic
nationalist in spite of his close working relations with Moscow; Trotsky labeled
him a bourgeois political dilettante; Víctor Alba (1954, 56–57) called Lombardo’s
Marxism unoriginal and devoid of political analysis; and José Revueltas considered
him to be a right-wing opportunist (1962, 108). In 1947, Roberto Cordova, Mexi-
can ambassador to the United States, characterized Lombardo Toledano in a report
to Washington as follows: “VLT is not a dangerous man for the government. He is
always ready to compromise with the government. Whenever he gets particularly

198 ● Notes
rambunctious, the president merely has to call him in and Lombardo agrees to
whatever the president wants” (quoted in Carr 1992, 153).
8. For more detailed accounts of the founding of the CTM and of interactions
between Lombardo, the labor movement, and the Cardenista state, see Brown
(1991, 313–19) and León (1991).
9. See Carr (1992, 53–54), and Brown (1991, 320–21).
10. Morones’s mention of “the Boy Fidencio” was a reference to José Fidencio de Jesús
Constantino Síntora (see Monsiváis 1997, 119–28). In the 1920s, “the Boy Fiden-
cio” had been a mystical faith healer and effeminate country messiah who fused
together Aztec gods and Christian saints, spiritualism and Marianism, the Saint
of Cabora and the legend of Saint Felipe de Jesús, and revolutionary messianism.
He had become a trickster and a frequenter of houses of ill repute and was gunned
down on June 20, 1937, by a Toluca police officer during a game of dominoes (see
Taracena 1968, 146).
11. For the original Spanish, see Taracena (187–88). I have made minor adjustments to
the translation of Cantinflas included in Monsiváis (1997, 95–96).
12. An example of the verbiage of the police system of distributions can be found in
the official statutes of Lombardo’s CTM: “The Mexican proletariat must know
that the stage of historical evolution in which we find ourselves has the character-
istic of an individualist, semi-colonial, semi-democratic regime that is agitated by
popular forces favoring national liberation and socialism, and by reactionary sec-
tors that push it toward a bourgeois dictatorship” (quoted in Brown 1991, 318).
John Rutherford mentions the “massive class barrier” (1971, 127) that haunted
the relations between the intellectuals and the revolutionary peasantry in the
decade of military insurrection. Obviously that lack of representation or iden-
tification was still prevalent, though in a different form, in the institutionalized
workers movement of the 1930s.
13. In the “Revolution made government” of postrevolutionary Mexico, “the organi-
zation of bourgeois consciousness is, in Mexican historical reality, nothing more
than the bourgeois organization of all consciousness, the leader in the process of
development and the mediating force of worker consciousness” (Revueltas 1962,
81–82).
14. I am using the term “populist” as the performance of an imprecise consciousness
in which all ambivalence is transcended and immediately simplified by subjective
(i.e., identitarian) affirmation as a veneer for, and in spite of, actual conditions.
15. It is not surprising that Cantinflas’s performances were, to a large extent, consonant
with the conservative press’s and the entertainment industry’s cultural organization
of bourgeois consciousness (see Pilcher 2001, 49–53).
Chapter 4
1. The “Ateneo” (1909–13) was the most influential generation of humanist scholars
in the history of modern Mexico. It was also one of the most influential intellectual
formations of twentieth century Latin America as a whole. Its founding members
(Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Antonio Caso, and José Vasconcelos),
established the Popular University and the National University in the early days of

Notes ● 199
the Revolution (1910–20), in addition to the faculty of humanities in the National

University as the revolution drew to a close. From 1920 until 1924 José Vasconce-
los presided over the Secretaría de Educación Pública,’ which was responsible for
the creation of the modern national school curriculum. Alfonso Reyes came from
a prominent Porfirista family (Camp 1985, 86). Reyes, who became a diplomat,
founded the Casa de España with Daniel Cosío Villegas in 1938 and directed the
prestigious Colegio de México from 1939 to 1957. He also brought a generation
of Spanish intellectuals to Mexico after the Spanish Civil War, and was himself one
of the most prolific humanist scholars in the Americas until his death in 1959. The
bibliography on the “Ateneo” is vast. For an initial though significant assortment,
see Conn (2002), García Morales (1992), Henríquez Ureña (“La influencia”),
Hernández Luna (1984), Legrás (“Ateneo”), Pineda Franco and Sánchez Prado
(2004), Reyes (“Nosotros”; “Pasado”), Vaughan (1982, 239–66), and Zea (1944).
2. For the “Arielista” tradition in Mexico, see Conn (2002, 56–80), Parra (2005,
83–89), Vaughan (1997, 239–66), and Zea (1944, 282–84). Claudio Lomnitz
characterizes “Arielismo” as an elitist attempt at cultural immunization against the
crass materialism of US society (2001, 103).
3. For the aesthetic state also see de Man (1984, 264–65).
4. See Matthew Arnold (1960, 53–54; 69; 147).
5. In a later essay, Legrás modifies his position on the “Ateneo”: “There was no ‘Ger-
man road’ to revolution for Mexico as successive waves of peasant armies com-
pletely destroyed the material bases for the reproduction of symbolic capital upon
which the whole ateneísta project rested. After 1913 the “Ateneo” disbanded and
although its members continued being active in Mexican politics, the “Ateneo”
became just a cultural myth” (2005, 9).
6. For discussion of some important limitations in Classical Weimar’s appropriations
of Greek civilization, see Bolgar (1981, 433–65).
7. For the relation of “just war” to Spanish ideas on conquest and settlement, see
Pagden (1995, 91–102.)
8. See Schmitt (2003, 102–3).
9. With the barbarian transformed into an unequal public enemy, Christianity forged
the law of a fallen humanity, the law of humanity as the law that pertains to the
Christian fall, the ultimate finality of which is to distinguish between dominions
and properties (Villacañas 2008, 151).
10. Monsiváis mentions that Reyes placed too much emphasis on the paternal figure
(1989, 512). However he does not take this comment any further. Margo Glantz
provides us with one of the most ambitious, and perhaps risqué, readings of Reyes.
11. Amity lines were legal spatial divisions designed to distribute and rationalize rela-
tions among European powers with a view to ordering the land and sea appro-
priation of the Indias Occidentales (Schmitt 2003, 92–99). My use of the term
is predominantly temporal and intellectual, rather than spatial and geopolitical.
However, as my reading of Reyes’s essays shows, his establishment of genealogical
friendship networks, or amity lines, is not unrelated to the history of the nomic
appropriation of the land. I am using the term “master function” as it appears in
Lacan, and as it is taken up in Moreiras’s reading of Donoso Cortés and the ori-
gins of modern Spanish reactionary thinking (2004, 123–30). Lacan notes that the

200 ● Notes
nineteenth century can be defined “in terms of a radical decline of the function of
the master,” since Hegel “turns him into the great dupe, the magnificent cuckold
of historical development, given that the virtue of progress passes by way of the
vanquished, which is to say, of the slave, and his work” (1992, 11). Hegelianism
is the fiction of the Aristotelian master in its negation (see Moreiras 2004, 125).
Alfonso Reyes’s essays are a response to the decline in the function of the master,
an attempt to turn the clock back on Hegel and his philosophical, historical, and
political legacies.
12. See Carr (1992, 47–48). Also see Revueltas (1985, 77–78).
13. For the significance of the 1940 elections, see Carr (1992, 59–62).
14. Reyes was not the first to suggest that the Revolution was lacking in rhyme and
reason. Also see Azuela and Tannenbaum (1933). Paz would later repeat the same
idea (1985, 130–31). For further discussion, see Parra (2005, 33–37) and Franco
(“Dominant,” 454–57).
15. In the Roman translation of the Greek aletheia, truth passed from meaning “always
already un-concealment” to adaequatio intellectus et rei, the correspondence of
mind and thing.
16. Henríquez Ureña also liked to give his readers endless lists of the names of his
friends and masters (see “La influencia,” 369). Such lists attest to the sustained
legacy of French Enlightenment Encyclopedism.
17. Carlos Monsiváis provides the following qualification: “The affirmation, which is
quite controversial, ignores for example the theoretical accumulation and rebel-
liousness of Ricardo Flores Magón’s anarcho-syndicalists. However, Reyes thinks he
is saying the truth. He does not believe in any revolution and neither is he inter-
ested in it. He is for civil harmony and the advance of his own work. He dedicates
himself to that and that is what he is good at. For him revolution is a word emptied
of all violent connotations; it is almost a synonym for institutionality” (1989, 510).
18. See Spanos (2000, 16).
19. Reyes is fully in tune here with the history and aesthetics of Mexican “Arielismo”
(see Parra 2005, 80–94).
20. Adela Pineda Franco and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado propose showing “the con-
temporaneity of Reyes, situating him within the debates of Latin Americanism
and recovering his role within the field of Latin American reflection” (2004, 10).
They are aware that such a project may seem “anachronistic” (2004, 5). However,
they say, “it cannot be denied that Latin Americanism, such as it has developed in
the twentieth century, encounters a foundational figure in Reyes” (2004, 5). They
reappropriate Reyes as a response to “the utilitarian paradigm of North Ameri-
can academia” (2004, 12), assuring the reader that “reconsidering Reyes’ human-
ism does not mean adopting a conservative cultural or political position” (2004,
12). But they reproduce the essential premises of conservative thought: that is, the
nostalgic reappropriation of Latin-Romanic humanism against vague notions of
northern utilitarianism. Also see Sánchez Prado’s reading of “Pasado inmediato” as
a model for contemporary intellectual life (2009). Rather than reinstating a model
of fidelity to Reyes’s humanism, this chapter privileges a model of critique as the
precondition for intellectual vitality.

Notes ● 201
Chapter 5
1. Sous les pavés, la plage! The title and subtitles of this chapter are slogans from the
Paris uprisings of May 1968. As paving stones were uprooted and hurled at riot
police, the philosopher-rebels demanded nothing less than the right to break free of
all forms of societal determination. This slogan suggests the existence of a world of
beauty and freedom beneath the grey uniformity of the modern world. The impro-
priety of language on the streets of Paris in May 1968 was unleashed by the feverish
creation and propagation of slogans. Though largely Situationist in origin, they
seemed to come out of nowhere and to be directed toward nobody in particular.
They were, however, influenced by anybody who wanted to give them some kind
of provisional content, meaning, or action. At a time when the international Left
was becoming disillusioned with the bureaucratization of the Communist Party
network, when European and Latin American youth were embracing Mao and the
Cuban Revolution’s overt celebration of youth, slogans represented a condensation
of revolutionary impropriety converted into political catch-phraseology, much akin
to the citations contained in “The Little Red Book,” Quotations from Chairman
Mao Tsetung.
2. For the complexity of the Mexican student movement, see Ramírez (1969). Also
see the bibliography included in Bosteels (1999, 765 n.18).
3. The following is an excerpt from Article 145:
A prison sentence of two to twelve years will be given to any foreigner or Mexican
national who in spoken or written form, or by any other means, carries out political
propaganda among foreigners or Mexican nationals with a view to spreading the
ideas, programs or plans of action of any foreign government that might perturb
public order or affect the sovereignty of the Mexican state. Public order is perturbed
when those acts determined in the previous paragraph tend to produce rebel-
lion, sedition, tumult or riot. National sovereignty is affected when those afore-
mentioned acts endanger the territorial integrity of the Republic, impede the
functioning of its legitimate institutions or propagate among Mexican nationals
disrespect for their civic duties. A prison sentence of between six and twelve years
will apply to any foreigner or Mexican national who in any way carries out acts
of any kind that prepare materially or morally for the invasion of national terri-
tory or for the submission of the country to any foreign government. The same
sentences will apply to the foreigner or Mexican national who by any means
induces or incites one or more individuals to carry out acts of sabotage, acts that
tend to weaken the general economy, illicitly paralyze public services or basic
industries, undermine the institutional life of the country, or carries out acts of
provocation in order to perturb order, public peace . . . (Monsiváis 1971, 230–31;
italics mine).
4. José Revueltas very quickly realized the potential of the new situation. He thought
it required calling for democratization by challenging the juridical status of Mexi-
can sovereignty. See Revueltas (1998, 41).
5. For description of the brigades, see Revueltas (1998, 96) and Monsiváis (1971,
245–46).

202 ● Notes
6. For the president’s private reaction, see Krauze (Biography, 713).

7. Members of the PCM were referred to as “fish” because they could only swim with,
rather than against, the administrative currents of the police order.
8. See Carr (1992, 254).
9. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz presided over the repression of all these movements, either as
Minister of the Interior under President López Mateos (1958–64) or as the presi-
dent himself (1964–70). See Krauze (1997, 681–82). For details of the doctor’s
strike, see Krauze (1997, 688–90).
10. See José Agustín, quoted in Volpi (1998, 109).
11. This questions Octavio Paz’s take on the movement, which he characterized as
essentially nationalist. See Paz (1987, 31).
12. See Estrada (2004, 103 and 243). Also see Taibo (2004, 42–44).
13. See Taibo (2004, 36).
14. “Undoubtedly the subjectivity of a subject, already, never decides anything; its iden-
tity in itself and its calculable permanence make every decision an accident that
leaves the subject unchanged and indifferent. A theory of the subject is incapable of
accounting for the slightest decision” (Derrida 1997, 68).
15. See González de Alba’s Los días y los años (1999, 36–41) for the encounter between
representatives of the Socialist German Student Union (Der Sozialistische Deutsche
Studentenbund) and members of the Mexican Strike Council.
16. For similar concerns, see Taibo (2004, 46–50).
17. For the “library of this immense literature,” see Certeau (1997, 68–76). Also see
Bosteels (1999, 765n17).
18. There is actually nothing new in this insight. In the 1970s, President José López
Portillo referred to 1968 as a “watershed in the modern history of Mexico,” calling
it “the expression of a crisis of conscience” (Estrada 2004, 234). Monsiváis has been
saying something similar since the publication of Días de guardar in 1970.
19. Also see Taibo (2004, 108).
20. For the scientific explanation of ’68, see Revueltas (1998, 21).
21. Roger Bartra observes that “José Revueltas was truly puzzled by the movement
of 1968: the final years of his life were illuminated by the originality of that
experience, to such a degree that his ferociously Marxist-Leninist conceptions
were eroded; in 1973 he wrote in a letter to his daughter Andrea that ‘in light
of the experiences of this half of the twentieth century the Leninist theory of
the party—together with the theory of the State and the proletarian dictator-
ship—should and can be overcome.’ Revueltas died in 1976 obsessed with the
idea of writing a new prologue for his Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza, in
which he would openly revise his former Leninist ideas about the Party” (2000,
66–67).
22. For the description of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, see Foucault (1979, 200–209).
23. Clearly my English translation cannot do justice to this indistinguishable subject,
hence the clumsy use of “s/he” or “his/her.”
24. “The possibility, the meaning and the phenomenon of friendship would never
appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called them up in advance,
had indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend, a wounding

Notes ● 203
question, a question of wound. No friend without the possible wound” (Derrida

1997, 153).
25. Suddenly ’68 in Mexico and ’68 in France are delivered over to each other as one
and the same in their difference. Their mutual spectrality does not end there, how-
ever, because the other that decides on the narrator in the narrator in Los días y
los años is “La Marianne de Mai 68,” a photograph taken by Jean-Pierre Rey on
May 13, 1968 (See Mai–68 2010). The photograph presents an image that is an
uncanny revenant of Eugène Delacroix’s painting, “La liberté guidant le peuple,”
which was painted in commemoration of the July Revolution of 1830 and the
overthrow of Charles X. “La Marianne de Mai 68” appeared in Life Magazine on
May 24. It depicts Caroline de Bendern, English aristocrat and model, brandishing
the flag of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. When her grandfather saw
the image he disinherited her.
Chapter 6
1. For the history of the military colonies, see Katz (1998, 17).
2. Quoted in Aguilar Mora (1990, 156).
3. See Benjamin (“Paralipomena,” 402).
4. See Bellingeri (2003, 72).
5. Article 27 presented land reform in the following terms: “Ownership of the lands
and waters within the boundaries of the national territory is vested originally in
the Nation, which has had, and has, the right to transmit title thereof to private
persons, thereby constituting private property. Private property shall not be expro-
priated except for reasons of public use and subject to payment of indemnity. The
Nation shall at all times have the right to impose on private property such limita-
tions as the public interest may demand, as well as the right to regulate the uti-
lization of natural resources which are susceptible of appropriation, in order to
conserve them and to ensure a more equitable distribution of public wealth. With
this end in view, necessary measures shall be taken to divide up large landed estates;
to develop small landed holdings in operation; to create new agricultural centers,
with necessary lands and waters; to encourage agriculture in general and to prevent
the destruction of natural resources, and to protect property from damage to the
detriment of society. Centers of population which at present either have no lands
or water or which do not possess them in sufficient quantities for the needs of their
inhabitants, shall be entitled to grants thereof, which shall be taken from adjacent
properties, the rights of small landed holdings in operation being respected at all
times . . . All contracts and concessions made by former Governments since the
year 1876, which have resulted in the monopolization of lands, waters, and natural
resources of the Nation, by a single person or company, are declared subject to revi-
sion, and the Executive of the Union is empowered to declare them void whenever
they involve serious prejudice to the public interest” (See Political Database of the
Americas, 2005).
6. I refer to Article 27 as a historical correction because it rearticulated King Carlos
III’s 1783 “Ordenanzas de Aranjuez,” which gave possession of the subsoil (e.g.,
the mines) to the Spanish Crown. After independence the Mexican nation became

204 ● Notes
the universal inheritor (see Gilly 2001, 141). At the beginning of the twentieth
century, however, fifty families owned 20 percent of Mexico’s national territory.
7. See A. Bartra (1985, 161–62). Also see Padilla (2008, 40).
8. The story of Rubén Jaramillo and the history of “Jaramillismo” in Morelos are
central to the transformation and returns of Zapatismo under postrevolutionary
conditions. See Bellingeri (2003) and Padilla (2008).
9. See A. Bartra (1996, 134–35).
10. For a detailed analysis of this moment in Cabañas’s political life, see A. Bartra
(1996, 135–46).
11. Guerra en el paraíso offers “an exceptional literary interpretation of the whole move-
ment, with broad documented sources” (Bellingeri 2003, 174). It is a political his-
torical novel with clear ties to the techniques of reportage, the testimonial tradition,
and even to the naturalist realism of the literature of the Mexican Revolution. The
novel reconstructs the chronology of events from the peasants’ first armed attacks
on the army to the death of Lucio Cabañas. The role of the narrator is to compile,
organize, transcribe, and order the voices and thoughts of the participants on both
sides of the conflict. However, the novel is not a stranger to the mythical evocation
of the telluric roots of collective life in the highlands of Guerrero.
12. For the history of agrarian violence in Guerrero, see A. Bartra (1996). By mid-
1972, after the Party of the Poor’s Peasant Justice Brigade killed 26 soldiers and
captured more than fifty weapons in two separate ambushes, the US embassy was
describing reports of mass detentions in Guerrero and the extensive use of torture
by security forces during interrogations (Doyle 2005). The party became the most
widely supported peasant-based movement in Mexico since the revolution.
13. “23rd of September Communist League” was an umbrella organization named
after the ill-fated Chihuahua guerrilla of 1965 (see Montemayor 2006). For the
“23rd of September Communist League,” see Bellingeri (2003, 164–65).
14. For similar sequences of torture (the sovereign reduction of life to purely biological
functions), see Guerra (Montemayor 1991, 316–24).
15. For a similar sequence dealing with the nexus between the biopolitical rationaliza-
tion of the social sphere and the sovereign right to kill without murdering, see
Guerra (Montemayor 1991, 196–201).
16. The logic of this nascent militarized biopolitics is that the modern ratio makes
anything other than itself immediately backward. Backwardness is both behind the
times and the enemy of the people; therefore being poor is the enemy of the devel-
oped people and the party that stands in the name of the poor is also the enemy of
the people (see Montemayor 1991, 260).
17. Two years after the Atoyac massacre of May 1967, two battalions of soldiers
arrived in the region to impede any commemoration of the violence by local pop-
ulations. They also brought five hundred military doctors who distributed aid,
medicines, and food to the people of Coyuca, San Jerónimo, Atoyac, and Tecpan.
In 1971 and 1972 a socioeconomic study was carried out with a view to future
development plans. In 1972 the Integral State Development Plan for Guerrero
was announced. Between 1971 and 1974 over two hundred kilometers of newly
paved highways were constructed (A. Bartra 1996, 145–47). In the context of

Notes ● 205
the peasant insurgency of that time, killing and torture became coterminous with
infrastructure building and the saving of lives via modern medical techniques.
18. See A. Bartra (1996, 137). Also see Montemayor (1991, 48; 154).
19. Álvaro Delgado, quoted in Zavaleta Betancourt (2006, 69).
20. For Montemayor’s description of the novel’s chance origin, see Long (2006, 1).
21. For Salinas’s policies, see Harvey (1998, 169–92) and La Botz (1995, 101).
22. According to Article 133 of the federal penal code, the superior could be facing
between 5 and 40 years in prison.

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Index
Agamben, Giorgio, 9–10, 12, 26, 195 Campa, Valentín, 118, 120
Aguilar Camín, Héctor, 131, 195, 197 Campbell, Timothy, 10
Aguilar Mora, Jorge, 203 Cantinflas, 65–86, 197
Agustín, José, 202 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 27, 29, 44, 74, 75, 93,
Alba, Víctor, 197 97, 106, 108, 161, 196
Alemán, Miguel, 29 Cardoso, Víctor, 34
Althusser, Louis, 46, 83–84, 98, 107 Carr, Barry, 74, 196, 198, 200, 202
Anzar, Nelda Judith, 195 Carranza, Venustiano, 27, 45, 46, 47,
Arielismo, 92, 199, 200 159, 197
Aristotle, 52–53, 94 Caso, Antonio, 197, 198
Arnold, Matthew, 90, 199 Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel
“Ateneo,” 87–115, 197, 198 Agustín Pro-Juárez (Miguel Agustín
Ávila Camacho, Maximino, 84 Pro-Juárez Human Rights Center), 3
Avilés, Karina, 32 Certeau, Michel de, 129–30, 202
Azuela, Mariano, 200 Chaplin, Charles, 69
Chytry, Josef, 88
Badiou, Alain, 61–62, 196 Conn, Robert T., 87–89, 199
Barberán, José, 194 Córdova, Arnaldo, 11–12
Barreda, Gabino, 101 Cordova, Roberto, 197–98
Bartra, Armando, 161, 163, 171, 204, 205 Cosío Villegas, Daniel, 199
Bartra, Roger, 12, 82–83, 202
Bellingeri, Marco, 203, 204 Delacroix, Eugène, 203
Benjamin, Walter, 24, 41, 62, 193, 196, Derrida, Jacques, 2, 10, 14, 28, 36, 40,
203 65–66, 68, 70, 117, 141–42, 143–
Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos, 19–20 44, 150, 193, 202–03
Bolgar, R. R., 199 Díaz, Porfirio, 11, 27, 90, 104, 106, 155
Bosteels, Bruno, 131–34, 201, 202 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 29, 121, 124–25,
Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 103 127, 194, 202
Bové, Paul, 196 Dove, Patrick, 19–20
Bricker, Kristin, 4 Doyle, Kate, 163, 204
Brooks, Peter, 83
Brown, Lyle C., 73–74, 198 Echeverría, Luis, 2, 29, 31–32, 67, 194
Esposito, Roberto, 4
Cabañas, Lucio, 163–80, 204 Estrada, Gerardo, 202
Calderón Hinojosa, Felipe, 3, 113, 153
Calles, Plutarco Elías, 29, 44, 73, 74, 108 Fazio, Carlos, 3
Camp, Roderic, 199 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 88
pal-williams-09in.indd 217 3/23/11 12:28 PM

218 ● Index
Flores Magón, Ricardo, 193, 200 La Otra (The Other Campaign), 2–3,
Foucault, Michel, 5–14, 103, 202 35–40, 195
Fox, Vicente, 2, 30–31, 194 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 94
Francisco Villa en la silla presidencial. See Legrás, Horacio, 87–88, 90–91, 195, 199
Villa en la silla presidencial León, Carlos, 72
Franco, Francisco, 93 León, Samuel, 198
Franco, Jean, 18–19, 200 Levinson, Brett, 34, 37, 59
Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 71–79,
García Morales, Alfonso, 87, 199 124, 183, 197
Garduño, Roberto, 34 Lomnitz, Claudio, 29–30, 199
Gilly, Adolfo, 47–48, 49, 62, 97–98, Long, Ryan, 205
159, 193, 194, 197, 204 López Mateos, Adolfo, 202
Glantz, Margo, 96, 199 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 2, 18,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 88 32, 35, 113
Gómez Morin, Mauricio, 195 López Portillo, José, 202
González de Alba, Luis, 118, 119, 122, Los informes secretos, 180–92. See also
125, 133, 138–52, 202 Montemayor, Carlos
González Graf, Jaime, 194 Loveman, Brian, 26–28, 193
Gramsci, Antonio, 87, 90, 91, 113, 127
Guerra en el paraíso, 165–80. See also MacLachan, Colin, 193, 195
Montemayor, Carlos Madero, Francisco, 102, 103, 104
Gutiérrez, Eulalio, 50–53, 55 Madrid, Miguel de la, 181
Guzmán, Martín Luis, 50–59, 196 Man, Paul de, 199
Marcos, Subcomandante, 195
Harvey, Neil, 181, 205 Marx, Karl, 24, 34, 37–39, 69, 70–71,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 87 80–81, 134, 166, 169
Heidegger, Martin, 93–94, 110, 111–12 Méndez Ortiz, Alfredo, 31–32
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 96, 110, 198, Menezes, Jean Charles de, 1–2
199, 200 Meyer, Lorenzo, 27–28, 131, 193, 197
Hernández Luna, José, 199 Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez Human Rights
Hernández Navarro, Luis, 3 Center. See Centro de Derechos
Hobbes, Thomas, 5–8, 24, 66, 95 Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez
Huerta, Victoriano, 102, 156 Monsiváis, Carlos, 69–70, 71, 76–77,
78, 84, 93, 96, 133, 140, 195, 198,
Jaramillo, Héctor, 32 199, 200, 201, 202
Jaramillo, Rubén, 204 Montemayor, Carlos, 165–92, 204, 205.
Juárez, Benito, 30 See also Guerra en el paraíso; Los
informes secretos
Katz, Friedrich, 48–49, 156, 196, 203 Moreiras, Alberto, 95, 151, 179, 196,
Knight, Alan, 90, 196, 197 199–200
Kouvelakis, Stathis, 38–39 Morones, Luis Napoleón, 71–79, 198
Krauze, Enrique, 54, 57–58, 111, 120, Mraz, John, 195, 196
125, 127, 128, 193, 195, 197, 202 Muñoz, Rafael F., 157
La Botz, Dan, 3, 205 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 24, 193

Lacan, Jacques, 199–200 Neocleous, Mark, 193

Index ● 219
Noble, Andrea, 41–44, 46–47, 49, 56, 61 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 94
North American Free Trade Agreement Sierra, Justo, 11, 93–115
(NAFTA), 159, 181, 194 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 183
Novo, Salvador, 71–72, 197 Slim Helú, Carlos, 33–34
Sorensen, Diana, 132–38
Obregón, Álvaro, 44, 45, 46, 73, 108 Spanos, William, 45, 200
O’Malley, Ilene, 43, 195 Suárez, Luis, 163–64
Orellana, Margarita de, 195
Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II, 126, 140, 202
Padilla, Tanalís, 161, 204 Tannenbaum, Frank, 200
Pagden, Anthony, 195, 199 Taracena, Alfonso, 71–72, 74–77, 198
Parra, Max, 196, 200 Tlatelolco, 117–52, 194
Party of the Poor, the (El Partido de los Trotsky, Leon, 97, 197
Pobres), 163–80, 204
Paz, Octavio, 59–60, 110, 121, 134–38, Vallejo, Demetrio, 118, 120
197, 202 Vasconcelos, José, 42–43, 108, 135, 198,
Pedro Páramo, 18–25. See also Rulfo, Juan 199
Perelló, Marcelino, 133, 138–39, 141, Vaughan, Mary Kay, 73, 195, 199
142, 143 Vázquez Rojas, Genaro, 163
Pilcher, Jeffrey, 69, 71, 74, 84, 85, 197, 198 Villa, Francisco, 41–63, 108, 156
Pineda Franco, Adela, 199, 200 Villacañas, José Luis, 199
Villa en la silla presidencial, 41–63
Ramírez, Ramón, 120, 122–23, 201 Villismo, 41–63, 108, 155–58
Ramos, Samuel, 197 Viqueira Albán, Juan Pedro, 11
Rancière, Jacques, 13–14, 36–37, 45– Virno, Paolo, 6, 60–61, 85, 194–95
46, 54, 56–57, 89, 115, 130, 160, Vitoria, Francisco de, 94
169, 196 Volpi, Jorge, 127, 128, 202
Reed, John, 156
Revueltas, José, 81, 121, 135, 141, 183, Warman, Arturo, 156, 158
197, 198, 200, 201, 202 War on Drugs, 17, 153–55
Rey, Jean-Pierre, 203 War on Terror, 1
Reyes, Alfonso, 87–115, 185, 198, 199, 200 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 88
Rodó, José Enrique, 90 Womack, John, 48–49, 156, 158, 196
Román, José Antonio, 34
Rulfo, Juan, 18, 82, 193. See also Pedro Zapata, Emiliano, 41–63, 108, 178–79,
Páramo 180–81, 195
Rutherford, John, 198 Zapata, Eufemio, 50–53, 55
Zapatismo, 41–63, 98, 108, 155–65, 195
Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 3, 33, 68, 181, Zapatista Army of National Liberation
194 (EZLN), 2, 3, 18, 35–40, 180–92,
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M., 199, 200 194, 195
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 94–95 Zavaleta Betancourt, José Alfredo, 205
Schiller, Friedrich, 88, 90 Zea, Leopoldo, 199
Schmidt, Arthur, 197 Zedillo, Ernesto, 181, 194
Schmitt, Carl, 6, 26, 93, 94–96, 111, Žižek, Slavoj, 137
144, 155, 164, 171, 193, 199 Zolov, Eric, 126–27, 132


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The Mexican Exception

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All rights reserved.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Gareth, 1963-

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First edition: May 2011

Printed in the United States of America.

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characteristics of a friend and those of an enemy. The indistinctness in the rela-

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pal-williams-00intro.indd 3 3/23/11 11:01 AM

the current situation titled “Mexico: A State of Exception? Or a State of Disinte-

Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Police

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of the Mexican exception, we should turn to the notion of “the biopolitical” as

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pal-williams-00intro.indd 6 3/23/11 11:01 AM

Biopolitics is therefore the name for new mechanisms and calculations of

However, Foucault then suggests an important shift:

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Foucault reiterates this complementary yet converse relation between classi-

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thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary” (2003,

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But Jacques Derrida warns against an important oversimplification in Agam-

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of government according to the rationality of the governed themselves, and so

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Sovereignty, Police, Democracy

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The Mexican Exception is an attempt to pry open a space in Mexican cultural

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I will fold my arms and Comala will die of hunger.

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Pedro Páramo: Immunity and Sovereign Ruin

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Upon Susana’s quite contented demise without absolution, we encounter

There is an encounter here between heterogeneous worlds. This encounter

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Exceptionality and the Limits of Democratic Reason

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As Brian Loveman observes, Article 29 of the 1917 Constitution is a direct

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language on Mexico’s constitutional regimes of exception, and its previsions

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component in the determination of the political world. In the second half of

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There can be no sovereignty without a calculated appeal to the force, beyond