Gareth Williams - The Mexican Exception And The 'Other Campaign'

Gareth Williams - The Mexican Exception and the 'Other Campaign'Gareth Williams The​Mexican​Exception​and​the​​ “ ​ Other​Campaign”

There can be no critical consideration of diver-

gence, difference, or dissidence without attending to the political realities and philosophical figurations of sovereign power. It is this, after all, that lies at the heart of the notion of the political as theorigin of all forms of social exclusion/ inclusion. Moreover, in the history of modern Latin America few cultural artifacts shed as much light on the inner figurations and fragility of sovereign power as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo does. In this essay I will approach this remarkable narrative from the perspective of sovereign power— from the terrain of a performative language of force and ruin—inorder to bring its insights to bear on contemporary Mexican cultural and political realities. I will then apply these realities to the interminable question of democracy: to the possibility of a question for a nondetermining yet unconditional vision of democracy ( for the cracy of the demos: the power of the people) in the period immediately preceding the Mexican presidential elections of July 2006.Events in Mexico during the summer of 2005 lend enormous philosophical and political weight to Jacques Derrida’s observation in Rogues that
South Atlantic Quarterly 106:1, Winter 2007 doi 10.1215/00382876-2006-018 © 2007 Duke University Press

10 Gareth Williams

the idea of nation-state sovereignty as indivisible singularity is currently being put to a critical test. As Derrida observes,the contemporary world bears witness “more and better 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, denials that are but the manifestations of its convulsive death throes.”1 But what can be understood by this referenceto the principle of ruins that lies at the very heart of, and that works over, sovereign power? For Derrida it is a Benjaminian principle of ruin (a mournful event) that haunts the very relation between reason, force, law, and their potential unbinding in the name of democracy. This can be considered in conjunction with Jacques Rancière’s important distinction between the police and the political:“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.”2 For Rancière police refers to the biopoliticalcalculations of a power that continually lays claim to the notion of the political as the management of abundance and consent. It inscribes the disappearance of politics (102). The democratic notion of the political, however, is the opposite of police, while remaining at all times bound up with it, for, as Rancière puts it, in order for politics to occur “there must be a meeting point between policelogic and egalitarian logic” (34). As such, democracy—egalitarian logic—is the nondetermining disruptive appearance of a people, rather than the consolidation of a particular biopolitical 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 thename of what comes and interrupts the smooth working of this order through a singular mechanism of subjectification” (99). Democracy—the disruptive, ruinous appearance or mournful arrival of the demos—is therefore that which lies in the wake of the unbinding of the relation between administration (calculation) and society’s immanent life: “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the...