The (Mixed) Times of Revolution

This chapter examines the role of Christianity in the work of José Lezama Lima as it relates to his engagement with Revolutionary politics. The chapter shows the multiple temporalities that the State wields, and contrasts this thinking on temporality with the Christian apocalyptic vision held by Lezama. The chapter is concerned with highlighting the manner in which Lezama unworks Christianity from within. Yet its aim is not to prove yet again that there is a Christian matrix at the heart of modern revolutionary politics. Rather, it shows the way in which the mixed temporalities of the Revolution, already a deconstruction of the idea of the One, still poses a challenge for contemporary radical thought: how to think through the idea that political change is possible precisely because no politics is absolutely grounded. That Lezama illuminates the difficult question of the lack of political foundations from within the Christian matrix indicates that the problem at hand cannot be reduced to an ever more elusive and radical purge of the theological from the political.

Introduction

The introduction foregrounds the relation of the formless to the fields of thought treated in the book: Latin Americanism, the Cuban Revolution, the question of political representation in connection to philosophical developments concerning time, and the writings of Lezama Lima. The book explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments in giving form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of the People. It advances the notion of the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics. The introduction also begins to outline the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality (also understood in the book as the end of a single hegemonic Time and the end of multiple temporalities, or times) for the critique of metaphysics.

Toward the Absence of Time

This chapter focuses on the concept of time at the heart of political modernity, particularly as it is embodied in various phases of the Cuban Revolution. It sets out a way of understanding a perhaps unexpected continuity in the concept of politics underwriting the Revolutionary State across different moments in its history. The chapter shows to what extent the opposition of the one and the many, the one hegemonic time of Capitalist modernity and the multiple peripheral temporalities that confront and fracture it, only serves to occlude the metaphysical structure of modern political time as a whole. The chapter is concerned, on the one hand, with the retroactive changes that obtain in our image of politics once we take into account recent developments such as the period that follows the fall of the USSR and the contemporary moment of “normalizing” relations between the US and Cuba. On the other hand, the chapter is concerned with the various theoretical models available to think the political temporalities at issue.

Writing of the Formless

The second part of the book is not divided into chapters. Rather, it is composed of sections of varying length. Its central concern is to trace the treatment of the question of the void in the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima. This entails an examination of Lezama’s reading of the history of void throughout the Western philosophical, religious, political, and artistic traditions. The central tension of this section lies in tracing Lezama’s engagement and ultimate unworking of the structure of a transcendental dictation, which informs and splits the subject, and which is the structure central to modern political and aesthetic subjectivity. Taken together, these readings can be understood as the unfolding of Lezama’s own highly idiosyncratic and baroque take on the question of the ontological difference (which he ironically and famously dismissed in his comments on Heidegger). The central insight that ensues is that of a thought on time that is beyond the forming or framing dialectic of the One and the Many. It is in this idea of a time beyond Time(s) that we find Lezama’s most radical political insights.

Conclusion: Godard, Lezama, and the End of Time(s)

The conclusion brings together the consequences that can be drawn from the analyses in the book by way of a reading of Jean-Luc Godard’s use of Lezama Lima’s texts, particularly those drawn from the posthumous novel Oppiano Licario, in the 2004 film Notre Musique. The conclusion explores the consequences of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition. This formless temporality would be Lezama’s writing of the formless occupying a fractured now: the difference between linear and multiple temporalities, an-archically at odds with the theologico-political distribution of time into hell, purgatory, and paradise. This would be the time of the absence of time, of sameness without Form, in which the absence of time no longer means the eternity.

Nihilism: Politics as Highest Value

This chapter explores some of the consequences of placing politics in the site of the highest value, a fundamentally theological gesture. The chapter shows to what extent this is the fundamental gesture even in proposals that begin by affirming the contingent, such as the post-foundationalism often associated with Left-Heideggerian thought. The chapter puts forward the proposal that to think the void at the heart of all politics, a void that was the discovery and most important evidence made available by the Age of Revolutions, is far from being the task of reactionary subjects, but is in fact the only way forward when confronting our dire contemporary political situation globally. The chapter also traces the similarities between apparently disparate approaches to politics related to Cuba, all of which share the belief that there is a proper, real and true, politics, which then becomes the standard against which one can measure the deviation of the “nihilist” subject.

Sovereignties, Poetic and Otherwise

Chapter two traces the link between the Guerrilla or Foco in the early stages of the Cuban Revolution and the role of the dictation of the Muses in Romantic poetry. The chapter shows to what extent what is at issue is not simply a literary or aesthetic question, but the difficulty of confronting the void at the center of any politics. This void is not something that is offered as a motif by the arts, but the central evidence made available by the political upheavals in the Age of Revolution. Nevertheless, much of the intellectual, political, and artistic work that confronts that foundational abyss has no other aim than to cover it up. Thus, the central aim of the chapter is to bring into sharper focus the implications of a thought that is central to the history of modern aesthetics and politics, but which remains fundamentally occluded by that same archive.