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«Seminario Loyola - Gracián»
practical terms to the demands of the situation, not for the sake of moralist advantage,
but rather for the sake of a better and more faithful fulfillment of the truth. Whatever the
case, relational autonomy constitutes, in my opinion, the core of Jesuit modernity, and
perhaps, in different forms, of every other modernity, including our own
archimodernity. One wonders what Machiavelli would have thought of it, provided, of
course, that it was not Machiavelli’s dominant thought.
This notion of relational autonomy sends us back to the problem raised by
Antonio Rivera: is the autonomy of the political an essential, or even the essential mark
of modernity? Fredric Jameson has noted of contemporary critical discourse on the
political that it ends up devolving “into ethical, theological, and civic republican motifs
(...) For the Left, the present conceivability of any strategic orientation to state power
has arguably imparted an abstract character to its various affirmations of ‘the political’
as an agenda in its own right.” If we are to engage today “the problematic status of the
semantics of decision, commitment, and denunciation,” and address “the question of
what constitutes the specifically political dimension . . . and whether this can be
distinguished from mere partisan ideology” (Jameson), we must come to terms, I
believe, with Jesuit relational autonomy. This is, incidentally, the question that Naoki
Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity leaves with me.
Could any possible primacy of politics over history (including economic history)
be considered absolute or relative? If relative, then politics would still be subordinate to
history in the last instance. If absolute, then politics would be the norm of action. But an
absolutely primary politics would have to rely on the total immanence of its own
conditions, and would in fact be normless. A politics without a norm that it, a politics
that would itself be the normative standard, without recourse to alterity or to a
heterogeneous grounding, can only be a politics of force. As such, it would have
become ontology (as in the Nietzschean case).
The alternative to an ontology of force (which would in itself create a paradox:
would politics then reach full autonomy to the very extent that politics becomes
ontology, and thus something other than itself?) is to think that a norm for politics can
Eikasia. Revista de Filosofía, año VI, 37 (marzo 2011). http://www.revistadefilosofia.com 23