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  • Fear and AbyssTwo Figures of Power
  • Pablo Oyarzun R. (bio)

A Brief Note of Presentation

The following text belongs to a long-term project that I began many years ago, and that still should have many years ahead, because of circumstances that are adverse for patient and sustained work. Therefore, it is doubtful if it will ever see the light of day. The project, which aims to become a book, has as its title "Figures of Power," and it is a research project that I would term as metaphysical-aesthetical-political, focusing precisely on power. An extensive and ambitious book that adds to a long critical introduction the analysis of some "figures" (interrupted in certain places by three excurses), each of them with a speculative presentation, readings of texts that I deem relevant for the respective figure, and a certain visual repertory. I have already gleaned and even published parts of the introduction, and maybe something more, in a fragmentary way. The figures are, according to their order, which I cannot [End Page 219] explain here, garment, name, prestige, seduction, abuse, abjection, fear, abyss, perspicacity, resistance, secrecy, and silence. They are 13, as someone who would keep track of the enumeration may have noted; the two figures that I will present now are the eighth and ninth, not complete, of course, with all their readings, discussions, clauses, and digressions: it will be only part of the speculative preambles.

What guides this research is the suspicion that ontological analysis is not pertinent when it comes to power. But this would not be because power exempts itself absolutely of what we call "being," but because power, in its most intimate fiber, remains indifferent to being, while at the same time inscribing itself in being as difference. In trying to think this out, I privilege, from the archive of ontological notions, the category of relation (of course, a relational concept of power is not a novelty at all), but on condition of conceiving the relation as possible only through separation. I assume, then, by way of hypothesis, that separation is structurally required for the establishment of any relation of power, so that it could be affirmed that separation makes relation possible. And this possibility entails at least two cardinal moments.

First: the separation of one and another as those who are in relation, meaning "are" not to enter the relation as if coming from a previously constituted state of entity and identity; it is relation itself that operates separation by itself and structurally as its own possibility.

Second: the separation of a quantum or a modus (quantum or modus doesn't matter, provided that it is a separation of power from its execution), and a subreption of this quantum or modus for the establishing and maintaining of relation. In the same way as this subreption, the subtraction of power establishes and maintains relation: without it there is no relation at all, as there is no power of the relation. As a result, it leaves in the one who suffers it a residue, a sediment, a valley of nonpower, which s/he feels as his/her being and which as his/her being affects him/her. Relation exists for the related ones as representation of power, and they exist for themselves as affection of being, and, to the same extent, as possibility of total impotence. [End Page 220]

Fear : Trembling and Knowing

The possibility of total impotence constitutes, as affection, the subject of power: any subject, no matter which position s/he occupies in the relation of power. The character of this affection is fear. I choose this term because of its ample semantic specter, which embraces all forms of dread, from the most benign to the most intense and paroxysmal.

Fear, no doubt, is a primary reference of the individual to him/herself, but this reference—which could be conceived merely as an instinct of self-preservation—does not make fear in its own right a condition of subjectivity. The constitution of subjectivity requires that the self-reference proper of fear, that this affection of the individual in view of its own being insofar as it...

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