Modernity as Exception and Miracle

220 Pages·2020·1.098 MB·English

by  Eduardo Sabrovsky

MODERNITY AS
EXCEPTION AND MIRACLE
SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
—————
Rodolphe Gasché, editor
MODERNITY AS
EXCEPTION AND MIRACLE
Eduardo Sabrovsky
Translated by
Javier Burdman
With an Introduction by
Peter Fenves
English translation of De Lo Extraordinario: Nominalismo Y Modernidad, 2nd rev. ed.
(Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2013).
Translation and indexing (provided by Tristan Bradshaw) were supported through
funds the Mellon-Foundation program, Critical Theory in the Global South at
Northwestern University.
Cover photo: Thomas Ledl, The Austrian Postal Savings Bank building (cropped).
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eduardo Sabrovsky | Javier Burdman, translator. Peter Fenves, Introduction.
Title: Modernity as Exception and Miracle / Eduardo Sabrovksy, translated by
Javier Burdman. With an Introduction by Peter Fenves.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series:
SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479156 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479170
(ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937135
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface to the English Edition vii
Preface to the Spanish Edition xi
Introduction: From the Transcendental, through the Extraordinary,
to “Perpetual Peace” 1
Peter Fenves
1 Musil’s Death 7
2 The Extraordinary, History 17
3 The Extraordinary, Myth 27
4 The Works of Science 37
5 Nietzsche: The Incombustible in Reason 49
6 The Truth Is That There Is No Truth 61
7 The Endless Sacrifice: Art and the Production of
the Extraordinary 67
8 Outline for an Ethics of Immortality 85
9 Politics of Space and of the Gaze 101
vi Contents
10 Notes on the Spectrality of Objects 117
11 Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion 127
Notes 147
Bibliography 187
Index 193
Preface to the English Edition
For the third time now, I am writing a preface to this book—a book that
was initially published in Spanish in Chile in 2001 under the title De lo
extraordinario: Nominalismo y modernidad. The Pinochet dictatorship was
already a decade back in time; nonetheless, the local publishing industry
was still undergoing its aftereffects. So was I, and so were many of my
fellow philosophers and friends. We were scholars without a fixed academic
address: while I wrote this book, I was still laboring as a part-time univer-
sity professor, hopping between universities in Santiago and Valparaíso, a
hundred kilometers away, just to make ends meet; relief, in the form of a
full-time academic position, would only come almost at the same time this
book was being published in its initial form.
The translation I am presenting now is based on the book’s second
revised and expanded edition, published in 2013 by Universidad Diego
Portales, the university in which, after those difficult and interesting years, I
have been teaching for almost two decades now. This second and definitive
edition includes an introduction that, as well as containing introductory
remarks regarding each of the book’s chapters, gives a global perspective on
it, organized around four keywords: decision, exception, miracle, and “lo
extraordinario,” the nominalized form of the Spanish adjective “extraordinario”
(“extraordinary”), a form that does not translate well into English and that
for that reason was dropped from this book’s title, with “exception” and
“miracle” taking its place.1
There is another word I would now add to that list of keywords:
“event.” Exceptions, miracles, fundamental historical discontinuities (“deci-
sions,” if we follow this word’s Latin etymology, “caedere,” hence “cut”) are
not part of a historical world’s normal states of affairs but are extraordinary
historical-metaphysical events that, in the way of a big bang, constitute the
vii
viii Preface to the English Edition
very origin of a world’s normalcy. Besides this complement, there is noth-
ing I would add to my introductory remarks of the 2013 Spanish edition.
Nonetheless, and anticipating certain quite plausible reactions, I deem it
necessary to explain why, in a book written by a Chilean intellectual and
philosopher, almost no mention is made of Chilean or Latin American real-
ities and issues; almost no attempt to engage in a critical and philosophical
reflection with those realities and issues as its visible subject.
In my defense, I might point out that, in fact, one chapter does
engage with the work of an important Chilean conceptual artist: Gonzalo
Díaz, who was awarded with the Chilean National Visual Arts Prize in
2003. This engagement is intertwined with a reflection on modern art as
such, and on the practice of sacrifice as a negative path to secular glory
(see chapter 7). I would also call to the reader’s attention chapter 8, which
dives deep into “The Immortal,” a fiction by the Argentinian writer Jorge
Luis Borges. However, in this fiction, Borges deals with ancient manuscripts,
with death and immortality and repetition in life and literature, and not at
all—alas!—with gauchos, tangos, or the disputable legacy of Juan Domingo
Perón. And so do I, distilling from it the notion of an avant-la-lettre post-
structuralist literary aesthetics.
These, however, are only feeble excuses. The actual contested issue,
the frequently and occasionally fiercely contested issue, is the one Borges
himself faced in the Argentina of the 1950s, under the fire of right-wing
and left-wing nationalism unified under the leadership and legacy of Juan
Domingo Perón. Was Borges, as his nationalist critics claimed, less of a
Latin American writer, essayist, intellectual, for his preference for so-called
European and cosmopolitan literary topics? And where does all this leave
me, and my fellow Europhylic Latin American philosophers?2
In an essay published at the beginning of the 1950s (“The Argentinian
Writer and Tradition”) Jorge Luis Borges offered a solid argument against
what he understood as a false dilemma. Analyzing the devotion of nation-
alist writers towards “gauchesca,” a literary gender allegedly deep-rooted in
firsthand experience of life in the Argentinian lowlands (“la pampa”) and
in the language of its inhabitants, gauchos, Borges wrote:
The nationalists tell us that Don Segundo Sombra is the model
of a national book; but if we compare it with the works of the
gauchesque tradition, the first thing we note are differences.
Don Segundo Sombra abounds in metaphors of a kind having
nothing to do with country speech but a great deal to do with
Preface to the English Edition ix
the metaphors of the then current literary circles of Montmartre.
As for the fable, the story, it is easy to find in it the influence
of Kipling’s Kim, whose action is set in India and which was, in
turn, written under the influence of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn, the epic of the Mississippi. When I make this observation,
I do not wish to lessen the value of Don Segundo Sombra; on
the contrary, I want to emphasize the fact that, in order that we
might have this book, it was necessary for Güiraldes to recall the
poetic technique of the French circles of his time and the work
of Kipling which he had read many years before; in other words,
Kipling and Mark Twain and the metaphors of French poets
were necessary for this Argentine book, for this book which, I
repeat, is no less Argentine for having accepted such influences.3
For Borges, each and every item in the library of the literary tradition
shares the fate of Güiraldes’: under close scrutiny, it is revealed to be a hybrid,
a biblical coat of many colors. And the condition of the Latin American
writer, neither settled in the pampas nor in Europe, but on the edge, as “a
writer on the edge,”4 is understood by him as the nutritious ground, the
privileged observation point from which such deconstructive conception
of literary and cultural productions may arise. In fact, he assimilates this
condition to the position of Irish writers towards British culture and of
Jews towards the whole Western culture. In relation to the latter, he writes:
What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this
question easily and that there is no problem here. I believe our
tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe we have a
right to this tradition, greater than that which the inhabitants of
one or another Western nation might have. I recall here an essay of
Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the pre-em-
inence of Jews in Western culture. He asks if this pre-eminence
allows us to conjecture about the innate superiority of the Jews,
and answers in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in
Western culture because they act within that culture and, at the
same time, do not feel tied to it by any special devotion.5
According to Borges’s sweeping argument, nationalism would be nothing but
a European artefact. Of course, that might be just a ruse for getting even—of
turning the indictment back to the indicter and deviously rejoicing in our