Pasarse PolÍticamente: Interrupting Neoliberal Temporality

In this article, I examine Guillermo Rebollo-Gil's notion pasarse políticamente as an interruption of the violence of austerity in fiscally distressed Puerto Rico. I read Rebollo-Gil in light of Walter Benjamin's discussions of Schuld in "Capitalism as Religion" and Entsetzung in "Critique of Violence." Protests that cross the line, que se pasan, have the potential to interrupt the guilt-debt nexus that binds subjects to the fate of capital. These protests might fail, not appear at all, yet they are "hopeful." The subjects who protest index the violence induced by the intersection of law, state, and capital. In so doing, however, they index themselves as violent. These protests are hopeful, then, since they require the very transformation of sense to appear as acts of protest in the first place. Key here is the interruption of the time of neoliberal coloniality. Through a reading of Benjamin and a critical engagement with Werner Hamacher, such interruption is conceived as a subversion of mediation itself.