Mariana Amato (Licenciada en Letras, UBA, 2002; PhD, NYU, 2009) is currently Guest Professor of Spanish at Sarah Lawrence College and will soon become Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. She specializes in Latin American literary and intellectual history from the 19th century onward, with focus on the Southern Cone, including Brazil, and critical theory, with particular emphasis on psychoanalysis and political philosophy. She is working on a manuscript that explores figures of the animal and the flesh in Latin American fiction of the 20th century. Her next project will examine the notion of exceptionality among Latin American writers and intellectuals of the 19th century. |
How to cite this article: Amato, Mariana. "Force Majeure: Leopoldo Lugones toward a Vitalist Fascism". Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. On line. Internet: 05/20/10 (http://www.dissidences/ 6LugonesAmato.html) |
| "According to the reflections that it elicited by the time of its invention, the phonograph made particularly apparent the kind of interactions between science and technology that were at stake in its design. This is the case, for example, of an essay by the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, which compares the anatomy of the human brain and the functioning of memory with the mechanism of the phonograph. Hence, Kittler points out, not only the development of media technology had required new scientific research on the nervous system, but also vice versa, neurophysiology after Broca and Wernicke’s theories modeled itself on the phonograph" |
| "During the period between 1912 and 1917, as he explains it repeatedly in his articles on World War I, Lugones’ main contention against the German position in the conflict was that Germany’s militarized intervention entailed a barbaric violation of the law through the imposition of its military force over international treatises. This is why he considered WWI a last and definitive confrontation between despotism and freedom. The triumph of the former would be catastrophic, Lugones argued, because it would entail the predominance of brute force over the law, a predominance that Lugones understands in this moment as the core of authoritarianism" |
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An excessive relation between knowledge and biological life is central to the narrations
compiled in Leopoldo Lugones’s Las fuerzas extrañas [Strange Forces, 1906]. This
anthology would prove one of the most interesting and influential works by an author who
occupied the center of the Argentinean literary scene during the turn of the twentieth
century, and simultaneously built a polemical reputation through his alliances with the State
administration, his aristocratic manners and his political metamorphoses. Las fuerzas
extrañas consists of twelve short stories and a final “Ensayo de una cosmogonía en diez
lecciones” [“Essay for a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons”]. About the latter, Borges (72)
speculated that it constituted Lugones’ shy attempt at formulating a cosmogony in its own
right, a hypothesis that is not too bold if one considers the bold ambitions—in quantity,
variety and intensity—of Lugones’ works, which include poetry, fiction, several biographies,
a commission on the history of the Jesuitic Missions in Argentina, essays on literature, a
series of studies on Ancient Greek culture, innumerable articles on national and
international politics, and in the last years of his life, several meticulous, megalomaniac
programmes for the national administration. In its ambiguous fictional status, the
“Cosmogony” of Las fuerzas extrañas enunciates the metaphysics that underlies most
of the narrations of the anthology, if not all of them.[1] Its main thesis is that all the
manifestations of life are forms of thought, and therefore, all the physical and biological
forces are intelligent beings:
Todas las manifestaciones de la vida son formas de pensamiento, puesto que lo son de la energía
absoluta en su eterno doble trabajo de integrarse y desintegrarse; pero entonces, también, las fuerzas
son seres inteligentes en proporción con su mayor vecindad a la energía de donde proceden. (207, My
emphasis) [2]
I underline here the word “forces”—which from the title of the collection illuminates a path
of reading for the short stories included in it—as an introduction to my major argument: that
the hypothesis that physical and biological forces are intelligent beings is a literary preamble
to Lugones’s late vitalist fascism.
In his late political essays, published during the 1920s and the early 1930s, Lugones will
argue that life is so unequivocally identical with “a state of force,” that every juridical
institution, every logical system, every political ideal that does not submit to those biological
imperatives constitutes a hindrance to life’s proper dynamics. My claim is that these
heterogeneous texts—the fantastic fictions compiled in 1906, on the one hand, and the philo-
fascist essays published three decades later, on the other—intersect at their respective
biopolitical imaginations. I argue that, through his borrowings from evolutionism, science
and occultism, Lugones elaborates first a fantastic literature, and later a political position,
both of which investigate the biopolitical characteristics and potentialities of the modern
nation-State. These two moments of Lugones’ writing simultaneously absorb some elements
from, and propose a reflection on, a peculiar stage of development of the modern liberal State
in which biological life as such becomes immediately political—it becomes, in fact, the very
task of politics. This is, at least, how Michel Foucault (1976, 2003), Giorgio Agamben (1998)
and Roberto Esposito (2005, 2008) have conceptualized the historical net that goes from the
social Darwininist theories of degeneration of the late 19th century to the Nazi concentration
camps of the mid 20th: as the result of a complete overlap between biological life and politics.
The authors differ in the way they trace the origins of such phenomenon: Esposito situates in
Hobbes’ political philosophy the first significant interrelation between the notion of life and
the definition of politics, whereas Foucault localizes in the 18th century a new awareness of
humanity as a species that creates the conditions for biological life to become the main
object of the political, and Agamben finds in the concept of homo sacer an articulation of the
relation between life and politics as a historical continuum from antiquity to late modernity.
Despite these and other differences that I cannot detail here, the three authors coincide in
defining the emergence of eugenics that eventually produces the Nazi extermination camps
as the culmination of a historical process of convergence between biological life and politics.
In the words of Agamben (1998, 148):
The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately
political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given. (…) The totalitarianism of our
century has its grounds in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains
incomprehensible.
Moreover, Agamben relates this politicization of life with the vertiginous passage from the
first liberal democracies to the totalitarian states of the 20th century:
[Only] because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to
understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary
democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states (…) [These] transformations were produced in a
context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only
real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring
the care, control and use of bare life. (1998, 122)
Thus, the expansion of political representation through universal suffrage, and later the first
collapses of liberal democracies under the advance of militarized or totalitarian governments,
are both at the heart of the biopolitical reconfiguration of the State. Lugones, for whom
politics was always a primal concern, was very involved with both of those moments of the
political history of Argentina. He was, early in his youth, a revolutionary socialist who
despised the emergent institutions of liberal democracy—the Congress, the European
Parliaments or universal suffrage—because of their inherently bourgeois character.[3] Soon
afterward, Lugones became very close to the élite that governed Argentina, precisely during
the decisive years in which this élite was losing some of its hegemonic power and debating
the possibility of a transition toward a democratic system of representation based on
universal suffrage. Miguel Dalmaroni has rightly argued that, during this period between the
early 1900s and 1920, literary modernization formed an alliance with State modernization in
Argentina. Dalmaroni analyzes the prominent role played by Lugones in this connection; he
claims that the State policies for the formation of citizenship gave Lugones a reason to see
his own figure as a poet, and his own literature, as State affairs:
Así, ciertas políticas educativas, laborales y electorales del Estado le han dado a Lugones motivos para
creerse él mismo, en tanto poeta, una razón de Estado, y sostener entonces, de un modo singular, que
la literatura lo era. [4]
Lugones’ identification with the nation-State, nevertheless, later effected in him a distancing
from poetry and an increasingly active involvement with politics. Around the 1920s, a
reactionary and philo-fascist Lugones became one of the most radical opponents of liberal
democracy. He actively participated in the first military coup d’état in Argentina, and had
the aspiration of performing the role of leading intellectual of the military government that
came to power after that takeover, aspiration to which he devoted several books with detailed
political reflections and programmes (Lugones 1930, 1930a, 1931, 1932). María Pía López (29-
35) rightly remarks that this tendency to write regulations and programmes characterized
Lugones as a State intellectual, and became particularly emphatic during his fascist period.
It is thus clear that, despite his political mutations, Lugones was always intensely engaged in
observing the development of the modern nation-State—with all its paradoxical, even
terrifying consequences and potentials. Because of this reason, some of his literary and
political pieces are rich voices of a dialogue that he sustained with his own historical time.
My claim is that the central topic of such conversation is the biopolitics of the modern nation-
State.
There is a group of short stories in Las fuerzas extrañas that more specifically deal with the
topic that, according to my hypothesis, connects the whole collection: the possibility of
immediacy between biological life, the cosmos and the mind. This group includes “La fuerza
Omega” [“The Omega Force”], “La metamúsica” [“Metamusic”], “Viola Acherontia,” “El
Psychon” [“The Psychon”] and “El origen del diluvio” [“The Origin of the Flood”]. José
María Naharro-Calderón has analyzed in three of these titles the same moment of absolute
immediacy, of fleeting erasure of the symbolic order, that interests me here. Based on
Rosemary Jackson’s study on the fantastic, Naharro-Calderón sees in that epiphanic kernel
a subversive punctum of these short stories:
Con la presencia de estos inventores, los textos atentan contra el concepto ideológicamente unitario del
personaje realista, contra la razón analítico-referencial y los modelos científico-literarios desarrollados
por el naturalismo y posibilitados por el positivismo, los cuales defendian lo óptimo de la observación y
la transparencia de los enunciados. (32) [5]
Although I find Naharro-Calderón’s analysis interesting and rigorous, the binary logic
through which he opposes realist representation to the fantastic seems to me poor to think
the complex relations between literary form and intellectual history. Moreover, I think that
an analysis that contrasts Lugones’ fantastic narrative with other contemporary discourses,
including Lugones’ political essays, may find less subversive and more reactionary potentials
of that aspiration to immediacy between human thought and cosmos.
As its title suggests, “La fuerza Omega” entails a whole theory about the notion of force,
hence offering a particularly rich ground to explore the relations between Lugones’ fantastic
fictions and his late political essays. Indeed, “force” is the signifier that links and synthesizes
Lugones’ trajectory from the fantastic short stories reunited in 1906 to the fascist political
essays of the late 1920s and early 1930s. First, Lugones’ fictions speculate on a notion of life
as a perpetual struggle of forces that become matter and vice versa; this hypothesis
supposes that biological life is continuous with, if not identical to, thought and intelligence.
Later, Lugones’ political essays will assert that the notion of force determines the continuity,
if not the identity, of biological life with politics. For this vitalist Lugones, the legitimacy of the
law depends exclusively on a state of force, which is in his viewpoint continuous with the
struggles of biological life. Conversely, the political ideals that attempt to interrupt those
allegedly biological tendencies are for the fascist Lugones a mystical fallacy. The notion of
force is thus central to Lugones’ late political thought, since it provides a biological
foundation to his rejection of liberal institutions. In 1925, for example, he asserts:
La armonía y la moral de la vida consisten en su propia función normal que es (…) un estado de fuerza.
(…) En un estado de fuerza, la guerra es un episodio natural impuesto por el fatalismo de la vida: un
desenlace entre tantos. Negar la fuerza es un desvarío místico que arrastra a la degradación y a la
imbecilidad, porque es negar la vida en una de sus más elevadas manifestaciones. (1925, 12) [6]
In “La fuerza Omega,” the narrator tells us about his friend, an obscure and poor scientist,
not related with any academic environment and devoted to manufacture “little industrial
inventions” (97) that he sells for little money and despises as what he does “[just] to earn a
living.” (98) The narrator explains that their friendship originated in the discovery of a
common fascination for the occult sciences. In the context of such a friendship, the scientist
habitually comments his intuition that there is “a tremendous force” soon to be discovered, a
force that he describes as belonging to the “inter-ethereal forces.” The scientist expects that
this event will “modify the most solid concepts of science,” since the aforementioned forces,
he affirms, “in accordance with the assertions of occult knowledge, more and more depend
on the human intellect.” (98) A certain force is thus expected to revolutionize the knowledge
established by positive science and to justify a basic assumption of occultism that, in the
narration, the scientist describes as “the identity of the mind with the directional forces of the
Cosmos;” or “the identity between the laws that rule human thought and the universe.” (98)
The assumption of such an identity, the scientist explains, implies the expectation that one
day every kind of mediation between the mind and “the original forces” will be eliminated;
machines and matter should hence, he points out, tend to be suppressed.
Over the course of the plot, the scientist in effect detects a force that he describes as “the
mechanical power of sound” [“la potencia mecánica del sonido,” 100], and whose discovery
is the consequence of his hypothesis that sound is matter. Interestingly enough, the
character asserts that his find was stimulated by the ideas that involuntarily came to his
mind while “modifying phonographic discs.” (101) In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
Friedrich Kittler argues that the age inaugurated around 1880 is marked by the
technological differentiation of optics, acoustics and writing, thus exploding what until then
was “Gutenberg’s writing monopoly.” (16) According to Kittler, these new machines “take
over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of
muscles.” (16) Technological differentiation is hence correlative—and sometimes
consecutive—to the scientific research on the physiology of eyes, ears and brain inaugurated
towards the end of the nineteenth century as well; and it entails, according to Kittler, “a clear
division between matter and information” that is necessarily accompanied by a split up of
the human being into physiology and information technology (16). My claim is that, in spite
of the mystical halo that surrounds the theories of the scientist in “La fuerza Omega,” at
stake in the experiments described in Lugones’ short story is precisely the division between
matter and information described by Kittler. The scientist’s attempt to prove the identity
between the mind and “the original forces” that rule the movement of the universe, as well
as his endeavor to grasp one of such original forces, are both an effect of and a response to
the divisions—the reduction of bodies and individuals to formulas—that, according to Kittler,
occur as part of the process of technological differentiation initiated around 1880.
Thus Kittler claims that, by the end of the nineteenth century, science and technology are at
the center of a radical transformation of long Western traditions: whereas technology
operates a segmentation of optics, acoustics and writing, science reformulates the notion of
“soul” into the physiology of the nervous system. The media technology emergent by the fin-
de-siècle consisted precisely in an implementation of the functions of the nervous system: “A
telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear—the stage was set for the
phonograph,” (28) Kittler remarks. According to the reflections that it elicited by the time of
its invention, the phonograph made particularly apparent the kind of interactions between
science and technology that were at stake in its design. This is the case, for example, of an
essay by the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, which compares the anatomy of the human
brain and the functioning of memory with the mechanism of the phonograph. Hence, Kittler
points out, not only the development of media technology had required new scientific
research on the nervous system, but also vice versa, neurophysiology after Broca and
Wernicke’s theories modeled itself on the phonograph: “Records turn and turn until
phonographic inscriptions inscribe themselves into brain physiology,” (80) Kittler asserts.
But this is not all. A second hypothesis of Kittler’s study considers the close interactions
between the development of media and war technologies, particularly during World Wars I
and II. Although Lugones’s Las fuerzas extrañas was published some years earlier than the
main developments in war technology that Kittler deals with, that second aspect of the latter’
s essay is nevertheless relevant with regard to Lugones’ short story—and particularly
pertinent to my analysis of it as a preamble to this author’s late reflections on war and (or
rather, as) politics.
In effect, in “La fuerza Omega” the scientist’s work on phonographic discs “involuntarily”
brings to his mind the idea that sound may be or become a mechanical force. From this
hypothesis he draws the conclusion that, if addressed to the center of a body, such a
mechanical force may be able to perforate it and even destroy it. With these ideas in mind,
he manufactures a device whose small size disappoints the narrator, because of its contrast
with the powerful forces suggested by his friend. But the scientist describes the small
machine by analogy with several implements of war, thus implying its destructive power:
Los vacíos entre diapasón y diapasón, tanto como el espacio necesario para el juego de la cuerda que
los roza, imponían al aparato este tamaño mínimo. Cuando ellos suenan, la cuádruple onda
transformada en una, sale por la bocina microfónica como un verdadero proyectil etéreo. La descarga se
repite cuantas veces aprieto el botón, pudiendo salir las ondas sin solución de continuidad apreciable,
es decir mucho más próximas que las balas de una ametralladora, y formar un verdadero chorro de éter
dinámico cuya potencia es incalculable. (107. Italics are my emphasis) [7]
As soon as he described his invention, the scientist proceeds to a demonstration in which he
destroys a massive object within his laboratory. The narrator and a third friend are
astonished. But the most surprising detail of the little destructive device manufactured by
the scientist is the fact that nobody but himself can make it work. This is, the scientist
asserts, the mystery of “his” force, whose mechanism he does not fully understand: the
machine depends on the scientist to work, because it partially is him, it is part of him. Some
faculty “passes through him,” allowing the scientist to see, without materially perceiving it,
the center of the body that he aims to disintegrate; this is how his “ether” is projected
against the object in question. The device is therefore potentially a dangerous weapon, albeit
one that is also attached to and dependent upon the scientist’s mind—or perhaps we should
rather say to his brain, in spite of the scientist’s mystical desire to eliminate matter. The
power to destroy belongs both to the machine and to the mental abilities of its inventor.
Hence the force discovered by the scientist not only provides him with an enlarged capacity
for destruction, but it also seems to emphasize his charisma. This possibility, nevertheless, is
complicated by the conclusion of the story, in which the narrator relates how one day he and
another friend encounter the scientist sitting dead on his chair. On the wall close to his head,
they find a strange substance that—the necropsy confirms—turns out to be the scientist’s
brain. The narrator explains:
Efectivamente, la cabeza de nuestro amigo estaba vacía, sin un átomo de sesos. El proyectil etéreo,
quién sabe por qué rareza de dirección o por qué descuido, habíale desintegrado el cerebro,
proyectándolo en explosión atómica a través de los poros de su cráneo. (109) [8]
Attached to the scientist’s nervous system (eyes, ears, brain), the device—derived from the
reflections on the destructive power of sound, elicited by the mechanism of a phonograph—
threatens to become a weapon of mass destruction, but ends up destroying the mind in
which it originated and exposing the brain to which its mechanism was attached. A self-
destructive turn of the mind’s power on itself: this is the paradoxical result of the
identification between the intellect and the forces of the Universe. The mind disappears,
leaving in its stead a flattened brain, and a destructive device that nobody knows how to use.
The secret to control it has died with the occultist-scientist, who attempting to gain control of
the forces of the universe was instead dominated by a new agreement between technology
and his own nervous system. In the scientist’s attempt to eliminate all mediation between his
intellect and “the original forces of the Cosmos,” his own intellect becomes the undesired
mediation between the nervous system and war technology, and is hence annihilated. Since
mediation is precisely the dimension of humanity and of politics that modern biopolitics
erodes: while biological life becomes immediately political, the nervous system becomes
immediately attached to war technology. The scientist is hence exterminated by the life that
his own theories and practices expose to both the exercise and the intervention of violence.
In spite (or rather, because) of its high degree of abstraction and its mystical character, “La
fuerza Omega” announces many of the biopolitical aspects of Lugones’ late political
writings. Both the notion of a revolutionary “force” that is expected to annihilate all
established knowledge, and the notion that the forces of the universe are so identical with the
human intellect that all mediation between them should be eliminated, may be considered a
fictional preamble to Lugones’s late political claims. These assert that, after World War I, the
enlightened notions of law and politics have become obsolete. Instead, Lugones comes to
argue that the forces displayed historically as violence—which are exemplarily condensed in
the notion of war, and which are, according to him, continuous with the forces of biological
life—rule the political. Curiously enough, in his political essays Lugones formulated his
transition from socialism to fascism through a transformation in his conception of the limits
between the human and the animal, a topic that his fictions had previously explored
extensively.
Four of the short stories of Las fuerzas extrañas visibly investigate the relations between
humans and animals—“Yzur,” “Un fenómeno inexplicable” [“An Inexplicable
Phenomenon”], “Los caballos de Abdera” [“The Horses of Abdera”] and “El escuerzo”
[“The Bloat-Toad”]. Through a reflection on the figure of the animal, these stories
simultaneously rethink the boundaries of the political and the boundaries of humanity with
regard to the rest of organic life. Indeed, one could say that any reflection on the limits that
separate and unite humans and animals entails a consideration on the boundaries of the
political space and life. Since the figure of the animal (not animals themselves) traditionally
demarcates the limit of the political contract—hence, of the political order. If Las fuerzas
extrañas literarily investigates the possibilities of a continuity between intellect, biological
and cosmological life, the “stories with animals” within it address perhaps the most crucial
aspect of that field of research: the one where a gap or a missing link between human and
animal has historically been posited, questioned, argued for and against, placed and
displaced in order to trace the landmark that would hypothetically define humanity—and
with it, the concept of the political, among others.
In this sense, Derrida (51) has considered that human beings could be described as the
“autobiographical animals,” in reference to the account of itself, the presentation of itself, the
incessant autobiography that the human species has for centuries been writing and edifying.
This narration of the self of humanity, both in a philosophical and in a common sense, is
always founded on the thesis of a limit, rupture or abyss between those who call themselves
“humans,” on the one side, and the entity that those who recognize themselves as humans
call “the animal” or “animals,” on the other. Agamben (2004, 33-38) has similarly talked
about an “anthropological machine,” of which the ancient version works mainly in the realm
of metaphysics, whereas its modern version belongs to the field of natural sciences. In both
cases, Agamben asserts, what is at stake in this machine is the production of “the human,”
by means of a set of oppositions at whose center resides the distinction between human and
animal, as well as the one between human and inhuman. Hence, Agamben concludes (37),
this machine “necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a
capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion).” In this game of
exclusion-inclusion, what the machine actually produces, Agamben says, is a state of
exception, a zone of indistinction where the human is animalized (and hence excluded) and
the animal is humanized (and hence included). The concrete results of such an operation
are a number of historical figures whose violence consists in both capturing and excluding its
victims in a mortal state of indetermination: the Jew that anti-Semitism has seen as the non-
human within humanity; the slave, the barbarian, the stranger, which the machine has
constructed as an animal entity under a human form. Because it produces this zone of
indistinction, the anthropological machine is a bloody and mortal device, Agamben warns
us, whose mechanism we must understand in order to be able to, eventually, stop it.
The figure of the animal functions thus as an inverted mirror of humanity whose images have
crucial consequences. One of the innumerable symbolic effects of Darwin’s theory of
evolution, towards the end of the nineteenth century, was to ignite new questions about the
limit between humanity and animality, about the possibility of scientifically tracing such a
limit and its foundations, and even about the existence of the boundary at all. The fantastic
narrative of Las fuerzas extrañas is in many senses propelled by this basic assumption of
Darwin’s theory of evolution: the common origins of all living forms. The anxiety generated
by this new conception of the species was even formulated by Darwin himself at the end of
The Descent of Man:
We must, however, acknowledge (…) that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels
for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living
creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the
solar system (…)—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
(Appleman, 254)
Many of the narrations of Las fuerzas extrañas investigate the interrogatives opened by this
premise of evolutionism, even when they manifestly attempt to negate its Darwinian
formulation, or at least partially contradict it.
“Yzur,” for example, inquires into the possibility of a latent humanity of the animal, thus
inverting the notion of a latent animality of the human entailed by evolutionism. With a
monkey as its protagonist, this narration alludes to the innumerable enterprises that by the
late 19th century attempted to finally uncover the origin of the human being, how had the
human evolved from the animal, and what exactly had the missing link between them looked
like (Agamben 2004, 32). In effect, in “Yzur” the narrator tells us that, after having bought a
monkey from a bankrupt circus, one afternoon he reads that the natives of Java considered
that the monkeys’ lack of language was not due to incapacity, but to abstention: they do not
speak, Javanese people would say, so that they are not forced to labor. The mention of Java
seems an allusion to the discovery of some fossils made in that island in 1891; according to
Agamben (2002, 34), Ernst Haeckel immediately deduced that those remainders pertained
to the missing link on which he had previously speculated, which he had characterized as a
monkey-man and named Pithekantropus Alalus, since the main difference between this
creature and the human would have been the lack of language. The Javanese legend that the
narrator of “Yzur” encounters is precisely a reformulation of Haeckel’s Pithekantropus
Alalus, insofar as it complicates the notion that the ability of language defines the boundary
between man and animal. From the Javanese hypothesis, the narrator draws his own:
monkeys were once men that, for some reason, stopped talking, after which they effectively
lost the phonic and mental ability of language; hence, those primitive men would have then
regressed to their previous animal status. In order to prove his idea, and intuiting the latent
and arrested humanity of his own chimpanzee, the narrator decides to teach Yzur how to
speak, on the basis that there is no scientific reason for which monkeys would not be capable
of acquiring language. Using as a model the methods for the teaching of language to deaf-
mute people, the narrator decides to begin Yzur’s education by the development of his
phonetic apparatus. At some point he mentions, nevertheless, a methodological procedure of
his that surely differs from the methods applied with deaf-mute people; he describes that he
starts every lesson with two affirmations addressed to Yzur: “I am your Master,” first, and
then “You are my monkey.” (207) He does so, the narrator explains, in order to bring to the
monkey’s “spirit” the certitude of a total truth. Truth is then here defined as a hierarchical
relation between human and animal, even when the lessons aim to prove that that specific
animal is also human, that he once was and can potentially be a human being.
After three years of sustained effort, the monkey only learns to pronounce the vowels and a
few consonants. Just when the narrator begins to feel resentment against Yzur because of
the latter’s “rebellious muteness,” (206) he learns that the monkey effectively is able, but
refuses, to speak. One night the narrator’s cook affirms that he found the monkey “speaking
real words.” (206) The next day, when at the lesson Yzur only utters his usual limited
sounds, the narrator, convinced of perceiving a gesture of irony in the monkey’s behavior,
beats him. Yzur then falls ill, the narrator says, “of intelligence and sorrow.” (207) At this
point of the story, the narrator completes the description of his initial speculation about the
previously-human-life of monkeys. The curious detail is that now it becomes evident that his
thesis—his primate-genealogy, his anthropo-primate-biography—reduplicates as history of a
species—an animal-once-human species—the specific story that the narrator tells us about
his own experience with Yzur. Mise-en-abyme, the narrator’s theory of the origin and decline
of the primate-once-human species, that is simultaneously his theory of the origin of the
human-all-too-human-species, both repeats and explains the story of the narrator’s
relationship and experiment with Yzur. Or on the contrary, the narrator’s theory attempts to
explain by repeating, by imagining an evolutionary mise-en-scène of his own master-slave
relation with his monkey. Since his genealogy posits that some old anthropoids of the jungle,
ancestors of today’s monkeys who at that moment possessed the ability of language, were
once forced to silence, and hence to an “intellectual suicide,” by a “barbarous injustice:”
(207-8) they were violently dominated by—and thus became slaves to—stronger
anthropoids, who were the ancestors of today’s human beings:
Infortunios del antropoide retrasado en la evolución cuya delantera tomaba el humano con un
despotismo de sombría barbarie, habían, sin duda destronado a las grandes familias cuadrumanas del
dominio arbóreo de sus primitivos edenes, raleando sus filas, cautivando sus hembras para organizar la
esclavitud desde el propio vientre materno, hasta infundir a su impotencia de vencidas el acto de
dignidad mortal que las llevaba a romper con el enemigo el vínculo superior también, pero infausto de
la palabra, refugiándose como salvación suprema en la noche de la animalidad. (Lugones 1996, 208) [9]
In “Yzur” the humans’ fall into violence is correlative to their conquest of language:
language and violence belong together since they together demarcate, in this speculative
athropology, the limit that distinguishes humans from animals. The narrator’s genealogy
asserts that it was the ancestor of today’s human being who exercised despotic violence
against the weaker anthropoids that later became monkeys. The latter would have thence
renounced language, in order to break the “superior but ill-fated link of the word” (208) that
would have related them with their human oppressors. These are the ones who become
human beings, more or less as we know them today, whereas the weaker anthropoids
regress into pure animality through their renunciation of language. Thus, the narrator’s
theory states that the human becomes human through the exercise of violence against the
weaker, to which he dominates and submits to slavery. Through such originary act of
violence, humanity not only conquers a weaker biological variety, but it also conquers
language as its exclusive ability, and with both, it conquers as well the status of species, its
own foundation as a separation from the weak. The latter, instead, regress into the muteness
of animality, as a refusal to slavery and violence and a silent protest—indeed, a protest
through silence—against the law of the strongest.
“Yzur” and “Los caballos de Abdera” are key short stories if one observes Lugones’
fantastic fiction from the viewpoint of his political essays. Miguel Dalmaroni has interestingly
studied the political implications of both narrations, but differently from my analysis,
Dalmaroni’s relates Lugones’ short stories to the author’s role as State intellectual during the
first two decades of the twentieth century. Although there are coincidences in our viewpoints,
I think that the allegorical tendencies in Dalmaroni’s reading obliterate the vitalist elements
in Lugones’ narrative, which I not only consider crucial in Lugones’ fiction, but also see as
resonances between the latter and his political positions. I analyzed how “Yzur” sets out a
game of paradoxes that arise out of the relations between two sets of oppositions: on the one
hand, the contrast between freedom and slavery; on the other hand, the contrast between
human and animal life. Lugones’ political essays were often concerned with that same
constellation; in fact, it is there where Lugones searched for a definition of the political. His
turn from the left to the right political wings was precisely defined by an explicit
reformulation of the relation between those two dichotomies. This shift is particularly visible
when one contrasts two specific areas of Lugones’ political essays: on the one hand, the
essays on World War I that he wrote between 1912 and 1917, and later compiled under the
title Mi beligerancia [My Beligerance, 1917]; on the other hand, the political essays that he
wrote during the 1920s, particularly from La organización de la paz [The Organization of
Peace, 1925] onward. I will briefly exemplify this counterpoint.
During the period between 1912 and 1917, as he explains it repeatedly in his articles on World
War I, Lugones’ main contention against the German position in the conflict was that
Germany’s militarized intervention entailed a barbaric violation of the law through the
imposition of its military force over international treatises. This is why he considered WWI a
last and definitive confrontation between despotism and freedom. The triumph of the former
would be catastrophic, Lugones argued, because it would entail the predominance of brute
force over the law, a predominance that Lugones understands in this moment as the core of
authoritarianism. The triumph of the political ideals of the Enlightenment would instead
assert the predominance of the law over material force, which Lugones conceives as the
main characteristic of the politics of freedom that he sees represented in Great Britain,
France or the United States. In this sense, Lugones does not hesitate to make use of the
polarity through which, a century before, Sarmiento had attempted to elucidate both the
internal conflicts that defined the character of Argentina and his own political project:
civilization and barbarism. In fact, Lugones dedicates to Sarmiento his first article on the
situation that later led to the war, in 1912. Five years later, WWI is explained by Lugones as a
confrontation between civilization, “which subordinates everything to the principle of
equality,” and barbarism, “which aspires to absolute dominion by means of force,
constituting such dominion as its only moral sanction.” (1917, 158) Of this series of
oppositions between spirit and matter, law and force, freedom and despotism, reason and
dogma, justice and power, through which he attempts to understand a conflict dominated by
the escalation of violence—a conflict that he rightly perceives as a historical juncture—
Lugones always adheres, in these articles written between 1912 and 1917, to the civilized
terms and questions the irrationality and injustice of the barbarian ones. Moreover, he often
poses that the thin line that divides one side from the other, and hence, according to his
diagnosis, two possible historico-political destinies of humanity, coincides precisely with the
thin line that divides the human from the animal. Without justice and freedom, Lugones
asserts in 1912, “the human condition is nothing but a zoological fact.” (1917, 22) And the
war, caused by “the absolute predominance of selfish interests, which has reduced all the
problems to a question of force,” (24) threatens to reinsert within humanity the law of the
jungle, to regress humanity into its animal condition. Hence, Lugones would often equate
Germany’s attitude in the conflict with animal behavior, because of its abuse of the rule of
force and its disrespect for the law:
La necesidad no reconoce ley’, dijo el imperio. Pero, asegurar o mejorar la propia vida a costa de otra
vida inocente, es el procedimiento característico de la fiera. Así procede el irracional, y con él se iguala
el hombre cuando lo imita. (1917, 179) [10]
It is particularly in La organización de la paz (1925) when Lugones acknowledges a
change in his political positions that affects his definition of the relation between law and
force, humans and animals. The articles compiled in this book mostly deal with the
aftermath of WWI—the international relations after the peace treatises and in the context of
the formation of the League of Nations, whose aim was to bring peace to the world. In the
preface that he added to introduce those articles, Lugones declares that his historical and
political criterion has been radically altered by the war and its consequences. The war, he
says, made him appreciate the fallacy of the ideology of democracy and pacifism; he argues
that, based on a notion of indefinite progress that posits an ethical telos for human evolution,
that ideology is a generous illusion that does not conform to reality and is hence dangerous
to the young nations, since it can compromise their destinies. Nations as well as individuals,
he adds, have to live their lives in accordance with their possibilities and conveniences. He
asserts now that the vital prosperity of nations justifies their enterprises because vital ethics
are defined by the success of life. Every conflict between morality and life, Lugones claims
now, is a mystical perversion, since morality is a teleological system elaborated by human
reason, whereas life lacks any aim that can be appreciated by human beings. One lives as
one can, as one is able to live, and this is the reason and dignity of force: this is, Lugones
declares, the lesson that since 1914 history has been teaching us, and these are the
foundations of his political essays from now on. “The principle of subordination of force to the
law,” he affirms now, “expired with the war.” (65)
Thus, Lugones’ revised political positions are founded on a vitalist perspective. Politics
becomes now for him, in direct contradiction with his previous positions, an experimental
science that excludes as much metaphysics as emotion; on the contrary, Lugones now
asserts that any sentimental abstraction applied to politics cannot but mean a hindrance to
the victory of nations. In straight opposition to what he had asserted before, now Lugones
affirms that humanity is not a political entity, but only a zoological species, foreign to all
the artificial conceptions that we call politics or morality (67). For the fascist Lugones,
humanity only coincides with itself in its biological constitution: nothing else characterizes
human beings as such, and they have nothing else in common. Thus, he argues that
democracy and socialism, which now he considers inextricably linked with each other,
promote a system of government that is contrary to the interests of nations, since those
ideologies are based on the mistaken notion that humanity is a political entity, that its
members share something else than their biological constitution. This idea is now for
Lugones nothing but nihilist mysticism: an abstraction that, because of the ecumenical
character that it assumes, negates any possibility of durable aggregation among people.
Geography, race, local convenience, history: all that constitutes nations, the late Lugones
asserts, is contradicted by abstract notions of humanity that can only result in the dissolution
of political entities. These abstractions are, in his viewpoint, not only mistaken in their
definition of humanity, but they also pursue an impossible aim: the concord and peaceful
coexistence of mankind through the abolition of fight and force. For the vitalist Lugones, on
the contrary, life itself is a state of force, and this defines as much its biological quality as it
determines its political potential. This is how he defines life at the beginning of his later,
fascist period:
Estado ajeno a la razón y a la voluntad, porque es una resultante de actividades orgánicas cuya
determinación ignoramos; con lo cual, incapaces de gobernarlas, tenemos que atenernos solamente a
sus consecuencias, limitándonos a intentar entre estos últimos [sic] ensayos de relativo equilibrio por
medio de la ciencia experimental llamada política. (1925, 11) [11]
It was only when Lugones renounced a definition of politics whose aim was freedom, that he
committed himself to a politics defined as the law of the strongest. The first definition
considered politics as a separation from the realm of mere survival; the second one made
survival its only object, and the biological dimension of life its only task. As I hope to have
demonstrated here, many of the materials of Lugones’ political thought were already a
central matter of reflection in his fantastic fiction of the early 1900s. The latter investigated
the tensions between physical force and symbolic articulation, as well as the boundaries
between human and animal; the former sought, within the same nets, a key for the definition
of the nation-State.
Notes
[1] Arguing against allegorical or strongly referential readings, José María Naharro-Calderón
has questioned critical analyses that, like mine, read in the “Cosmogony” a statement of
principles that the fictions thematize. I will later explain with more detail how my argument
differs from Naharro-Calderón’s.
[2] Unless otherwise noted, all the translations below are mine and their only purpose is
clarification for non-bilingual readers: “All the manifestations of life are forms of thought,
since they are forms of the absolute energy in its eternal and double work of integration and
disintegration; but then, forces are also intelligent beings in proportion with their degree of
proximity to the energy from which they proceed.”
[3] In the pages of La Montaña, the socialist magazine that he co-directed with José
Ingegnieros, one can find articles where Lugones declares (61-2): “Protestamos de todo el
orden social existente: de la República, que es el Paraíso de los mediocres y de los serviles;
de la Religión que ahorca las almas para pacificarlas; (…) del Estado que es la maquinaria
de tortura bajo cuya presión debemos moldearnos como las fichas de una casa de juego
(…)”
[4] “Thus, some State policies on education, labor and election have induced Lugones to
think of himself, insofar as he was a poet, as a State affair, and hence assert—in a peculiar
way—that literature was one as well.”
[5] “With the presence of these inventors, the texts threaten the ideologically unitary concept
of realist character, the analytico-referential reason and the scientific-literary models
developed by naturalism and originated in positivism, which defended the ideal of
observation and the transparency of statements.”
[6] “The harmony and moral of life consist in its own normal function, which is (…) a state of
force. (…) In a state of force, war is a natural episode imposed by fate: one outcome among
many others. The disavowal of force is a mystical delirium that would drag us to degradation
and stupidity, since it would entail to negate life in one of its noblest manifestations.”
[7] “The empty spaces between the bridges, as well as the necessary room for the
movement of the string that touches them, made the small size of the device a requirement.
When it sounds, the fourfold wave becomes one and emerges through the microphonic [sic]
horn exactly like an ethereal missile. This discharge is repeated as many times as I press the
key, which allows the waves to issue with no perceptible interruption—that is, with much more
frequency than the bullets of a machine gun—and form a veritable stream of dynamic ether
whose power is incalculable.”
[8] “In effect, the head of our friend was empty, without even an atom left of his brain. The
ethereal missile, due to who knows what mystery—perhaps a mistake—had disintegrated
his brain, spreading it out in an atomic explosion through the pores of his cranium.”
[9] “Misfortunes of the anthropoid that was falling behind in evolution, while the human was
taking the lead with a despotism of somber barbarism, had doubtless dethroned the great
quadrumanous families from the domain of the trees—their primitive Eden—decimating
their population and capturing their females in order to enslave them from their mothers’
wombs. Impotent in the face of this defeat, they chose with mortal dignity to break away
from the superior but ill-fated link of the word that connected them with their enemies,
taking refuge in the night of animality, their supreme salvation.”
[10] “‘Necessity does not recognize any law,’ the empire said. But to secure or to improve
one’s own life at the expense of other innocent life is the characteristic procedure of wild
animals. This is how irrational beings proceed, and when man imitates such beings, he
makes himself their equal.”
[11] “A state that is alien to reason and will, since it is the result of organic activities whose
determination we ignore. Thus, since we are incapable of governing them, we only have to
conform to their consequences. We have to limit ourselves to attempt among them some
trials of a relative balance through the experimental science that we call politics.”
Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio. (1998) Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Hellen-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
_________________. (2004) The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attel. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Appleton, Philip (2001). Darwin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Borges, Jorge Luis. (1965) Leopoldo Lugones. Buenos Aires: Pleamar.
Botana, Natalio. (1975) El orden conservador. La política argentina entre 1880 y 1916.
Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.
Dalmaroni, Miguel. (2006) Una república de las letras. Lugones, Rojas, Payró.
Escritores argentinos y Estado. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
Derrida, Jacques. (2006). L’animal que donc que suis. Paris: Galilée.
Esposito, Roberto. (2005) Immunitas. Protección y negación de la vida. Trans. Luciano
Padilla López. Amorrortu: Buenos Aires.
_________________. (2008) Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1976) “Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie.” In Histoire de la
sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.
________________. (2003) “Society must be defended”. Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.
________________. (2004) Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France.
1978- 79. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard.
Jackson, Rosemary. (1981) Fantasy, the literature of subversion. New York: Methuen.
Kittler, Friedrich. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young
and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
López, María Pía. (2004) Lugones: entre la aventura y la Cruzada. Buenos Aires: Colihue.
Lugones, Leopoldo. (1917) Mi beligrancia. Buenos Aires: Otero y García.
__________________. (1923) Estudios helénicos. Buenos Aires: Babel.
__________________. (1925) La organización de la paz. Buenos Aires: La Editora
Argentina.
__________________. (1930) La patria fuerte. Buenos Aires: Círculo Militar.
__________________. (1930a) La grande Argentina. Buenos Aires: Huemul.
__________________. (1931) Política revolucionaria. Buenos Aires: Librería Anaconda.
__________________. (1932) El Estado equitativo. Buenos Aires: La Editora Argentina.
__________________. (1979) El Payador. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho.
__________________. (1996). Las fuerzas extrañas. Madrid: Cátedra.
__________________ and Ingegnieros, José. (1996) La Montaña. Periódico Socialista
Revolucionario. 1897. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.
Naharro-Calderón, José María. “Escritura fantástica y destrucción realista en Las fuerzas
extrañas de Leopoldo Lugones.” Hispanic Review, Vol. 62, Núm. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 23-34.
Rock, David. (1975) Politics in Argentina 1890-1930. The rise and fall of Radicalism.
London, Cambridge University Press.
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. (1993) Facundo o civilzación y barbarie. Buenos Aires:
Austral.
compiled in Leopoldo Lugones’s Las fuerzas extrañas [Strange Forces, 1906]. This
anthology would prove one of the most interesting and influential works by an author who
occupied the center of the Argentinean literary scene during the turn of the twentieth
century, and simultaneously built a polemical reputation through his alliances with the State
administration, his aristocratic manners and his political metamorphoses. Las fuerzas
extrañas consists of twelve short stories and a final “Ensayo de una cosmogonía en diez
lecciones” [“Essay for a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons”]. About the latter, Borges (72)
speculated that it constituted Lugones’ shy attempt at formulating a cosmogony in its own
right, a hypothesis that is not too bold if one considers the bold ambitions—in quantity,
variety and intensity—of Lugones’ works, which include poetry, fiction, several biographies,
a commission on the history of the Jesuitic Missions in Argentina, essays on literature, a
series of studies on Ancient Greek culture, innumerable articles on national and
international politics, and in the last years of his life, several meticulous, megalomaniac
programmes for the national administration. In its ambiguous fictional status, the
“Cosmogony” of Las fuerzas extrañas enunciates the metaphysics that underlies most
of the narrations of the anthology, if not all of them.[1] Its main thesis is that all the
manifestations of life are forms of thought, and therefore, all the physical and biological
forces are intelligent beings:
Todas las manifestaciones de la vida son formas de pensamiento, puesto que lo son de la energía
absoluta en su eterno doble trabajo de integrarse y desintegrarse; pero entonces, también, las fuerzas
son seres inteligentes en proporción con su mayor vecindad a la energía de donde proceden. (207, My
emphasis) [2]
I underline here the word “forces”—which from the title of the collection illuminates a path
of reading for the short stories included in it—as an introduction to my major argument: that
the hypothesis that physical and biological forces are intelligent beings is a literary preamble
to Lugones’s late vitalist fascism.
In his late political essays, published during the 1920s and the early 1930s, Lugones will
argue that life is so unequivocally identical with “a state of force,” that every juridical
institution, every logical system, every political ideal that does not submit to those biological
imperatives constitutes a hindrance to life’s proper dynamics. My claim is that these
heterogeneous texts—the fantastic fictions compiled in 1906, on the one hand, and the philo-
fascist essays published three decades later, on the other—intersect at their respective
biopolitical imaginations. I argue that, through his borrowings from evolutionism, science
and occultism, Lugones elaborates first a fantastic literature, and later a political position,
both of which investigate the biopolitical characteristics and potentialities of the modern
nation-State. These two moments of Lugones’ writing simultaneously absorb some elements
from, and propose a reflection on, a peculiar stage of development of the modern liberal State
in which biological life as such becomes immediately political—it becomes, in fact, the very
task of politics. This is, at least, how Michel Foucault (1976, 2003), Giorgio Agamben (1998)
and Roberto Esposito (2005, 2008) have conceptualized the historical net that goes from the
social Darwininist theories of degeneration of the late 19th century to the Nazi concentration
camps of the mid 20th: as the result of a complete overlap between biological life and politics.
The authors differ in the way they trace the origins of such phenomenon: Esposito situates in
Hobbes’ political philosophy the first significant interrelation between the notion of life and
the definition of politics, whereas Foucault localizes in the 18th century a new awareness of
humanity as a species that creates the conditions for biological life to become the main
object of the political, and Agamben finds in the concept of homo sacer an articulation of the
relation between life and politics as a historical continuum from antiquity to late modernity.
Despite these and other differences that I cannot detail here, the three authors coincide in
defining the emergence of eugenics that eventually produces the Nazi extermination camps
as the culmination of a historical process of convergence between biological life and politics.
In the words of Agamben (1998, 148):
The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately
political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given. (…) The totalitarianism of our
century has its grounds in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains
incomprehensible.
Moreover, Agamben relates this politicization of life with the vertiginous passage from the
first liberal democracies to the totalitarian states of the 20th century:
[Only] because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to
understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary
democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states (…) [These] transformations were produced in a
context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only
real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring
the care, control and use of bare life. (1998, 122)
Thus, the expansion of political representation through universal suffrage, and later the first
collapses of liberal democracies under the advance of militarized or totalitarian governments,
are both at the heart of the biopolitical reconfiguration of the State. Lugones, for whom
politics was always a primal concern, was very involved with both of those moments of the
political history of Argentina. He was, early in his youth, a revolutionary socialist who
despised the emergent institutions of liberal democracy—the Congress, the European
Parliaments or universal suffrage—because of their inherently bourgeois character.[3] Soon
afterward, Lugones became very close to the élite that governed Argentina, precisely during
the decisive years in which this élite was losing some of its hegemonic power and debating
the possibility of a transition toward a democratic system of representation based on
universal suffrage. Miguel Dalmaroni has rightly argued that, during this period between the
early 1900s and 1920, literary modernization formed an alliance with State modernization in
Argentina. Dalmaroni analyzes the prominent role played by Lugones in this connection; he
claims that the State policies for the formation of citizenship gave Lugones a reason to see
his own figure as a poet, and his own literature, as State affairs:
Así, ciertas políticas educativas, laborales y electorales del Estado le han dado a Lugones motivos para
creerse él mismo, en tanto poeta, una razón de Estado, y sostener entonces, de un modo singular, que
la literatura lo era. [4]
Lugones’ identification with the nation-State, nevertheless, later effected in him a distancing
from poetry and an increasingly active involvement with politics. Around the 1920s, a
reactionary and philo-fascist Lugones became one of the most radical opponents of liberal
democracy. He actively participated in the first military coup d’état in Argentina, and had
the aspiration of performing the role of leading intellectual of the military government that
came to power after that takeover, aspiration to which he devoted several books with detailed
political reflections and programmes (Lugones 1930, 1930a, 1931, 1932). María Pía López (29-
35) rightly remarks that this tendency to write regulations and programmes characterized
Lugones as a State intellectual, and became particularly emphatic during his fascist period.
It is thus clear that, despite his political mutations, Lugones was always intensely engaged in
observing the development of the modern nation-State—with all its paradoxical, even
terrifying consequences and potentials. Because of this reason, some of his literary and
political pieces are rich voices of a dialogue that he sustained with his own historical time.
My claim is that the central topic of such conversation is the biopolitics of the modern nation-
State.
There is a group of short stories in Las fuerzas extrañas that more specifically deal with the
topic that, according to my hypothesis, connects the whole collection: the possibility of
immediacy between biological life, the cosmos and the mind. This group includes “La fuerza
Omega” [“The Omega Force”], “La metamúsica” [“Metamusic”], “Viola Acherontia,” “El
Psychon” [“The Psychon”] and “El origen del diluvio” [“The Origin of the Flood”]. José
María Naharro-Calderón has analyzed in three of these titles the same moment of absolute
immediacy, of fleeting erasure of the symbolic order, that interests me here. Based on
Rosemary Jackson’s study on the fantastic, Naharro-Calderón sees in that epiphanic kernel
a subversive punctum of these short stories:
Con la presencia de estos inventores, los textos atentan contra el concepto ideológicamente unitario del
personaje realista, contra la razón analítico-referencial y los modelos científico-literarios desarrollados
por el naturalismo y posibilitados por el positivismo, los cuales defendian lo óptimo de la observación y
la transparencia de los enunciados. (32) [5]
Although I find Naharro-Calderón’s analysis interesting and rigorous, the binary logic
through which he opposes realist representation to the fantastic seems to me poor to think
the complex relations between literary form and intellectual history. Moreover, I think that
an analysis that contrasts Lugones’ fantastic narrative with other contemporary discourses,
including Lugones’ political essays, may find less subversive and more reactionary potentials
of that aspiration to immediacy between human thought and cosmos.
As its title suggests, “La fuerza Omega” entails a whole theory about the notion of force,
hence offering a particularly rich ground to explore the relations between Lugones’ fantastic
fictions and his late political essays. Indeed, “force” is the signifier that links and synthesizes
Lugones’ trajectory from the fantastic short stories reunited in 1906 to the fascist political
essays of the late 1920s and early 1930s. First, Lugones’ fictions speculate on a notion of life
as a perpetual struggle of forces that become matter and vice versa; this hypothesis
supposes that biological life is continuous with, if not identical to, thought and intelligence.
Later, Lugones’ political essays will assert that the notion of force determines the continuity,
if not the identity, of biological life with politics. For this vitalist Lugones, the legitimacy of the
law depends exclusively on a state of force, which is in his viewpoint continuous with the
struggles of biological life. Conversely, the political ideals that attempt to interrupt those
allegedly biological tendencies are for the fascist Lugones a mystical fallacy. The notion of
force is thus central to Lugones’ late political thought, since it provides a biological
foundation to his rejection of liberal institutions. In 1925, for example, he asserts:
La armonía y la moral de la vida consisten en su propia función normal que es (…) un estado de fuerza.
(…) En un estado de fuerza, la guerra es un episodio natural impuesto por el fatalismo de la vida: un
desenlace entre tantos. Negar la fuerza es un desvarío místico que arrastra a la degradación y a la
imbecilidad, porque es negar la vida en una de sus más elevadas manifestaciones. (1925, 12) [6]
In “La fuerza Omega,” the narrator tells us about his friend, an obscure and poor scientist,
not related with any academic environment and devoted to manufacture “little industrial
inventions” (97) that he sells for little money and despises as what he does “[just] to earn a
living.” (98) The narrator explains that their friendship originated in the discovery of a
common fascination for the occult sciences. In the context of such a friendship, the scientist
habitually comments his intuition that there is “a tremendous force” soon to be discovered, a
force that he describes as belonging to the “inter-ethereal forces.” The scientist expects that
this event will “modify the most solid concepts of science,” since the aforementioned forces,
he affirms, “in accordance with the assertions of occult knowledge, more and more depend
on the human intellect.” (98) A certain force is thus expected to revolutionize the knowledge
established by positive science and to justify a basic assumption of occultism that, in the
narration, the scientist describes as “the identity of the mind with the directional forces of the
Cosmos;” or “the identity between the laws that rule human thought and the universe.” (98)
The assumption of such an identity, the scientist explains, implies the expectation that one
day every kind of mediation between the mind and “the original forces” will be eliminated;
machines and matter should hence, he points out, tend to be suppressed.
Over the course of the plot, the scientist in effect detects a force that he describes as “the
mechanical power of sound” [“la potencia mecánica del sonido,” 100], and whose discovery
is the consequence of his hypothesis that sound is matter. Interestingly enough, the
character asserts that his find was stimulated by the ideas that involuntarily came to his
mind while “modifying phonographic discs.” (101) In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
Friedrich Kittler argues that the age inaugurated around 1880 is marked by the
technological differentiation of optics, acoustics and writing, thus exploding what until then
was “Gutenberg’s writing monopoly.” (16) According to Kittler, these new machines “take
over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of
muscles.” (16) Technological differentiation is hence correlative—and sometimes
consecutive—to the scientific research on the physiology of eyes, ears and brain inaugurated
towards the end of the nineteenth century as well; and it entails, according to Kittler, “a clear
division between matter and information” that is necessarily accompanied by a split up of
the human being into physiology and information technology (16). My claim is that, in spite
of the mystical halo that surrounds the theories of the scientist in “La fuerza Omega,” at
stake in the experiments described in Lugones’ short story is precisely the division between
matter and information described by Kittler. The scientist’s attempt to prove the identity
between the mind and “the original forces” that rule the movement of the universe, as well
as his endeavor to grasp one of such original forces, are both an effect of and a response to
the divisions—the reduction of bodies and individuals to formulas—that, according to Kittler,
occur as part of the process of technological differentiation initiated around 1880.
Thus Kittler claims that, by the end of the nineteenth century, science and technology are at
the center of a radical transformation of long Western traditions: whereas technology
operates a segmentation of optics, acoustics and writing, science reformulates the notion of
“soul” into the physiology of the nervous system. The media technology emergent by the fin-
de-siècle consisted precisely in an implementation of the functions of the nervous system: “A
telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear—the stage was set for the
phonograph,” (28) Kittler remarks. According to the reflections that it elicited by the time of
its invention, the phonograph made particularly apparent the kind of interactions between
science and technology that were at stake in its design. This is the case, for example, of an
essay by the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, which compares the anatomy of the human
brain and the functioning of memory with the mechanism of the phonograph. Hence, Kittler
points out, not only the development of media technology had required new scientific
research on the nervous system, but also vice versa, neurophysiology after Broca and
Wernicke’s theories modeled itself on the phonograph: “Records turn and turn until
phonographic inscriptions inscribe themselves into brain physiology,” (80) Kittler asserts.
But this is not all. A second hypothesis of Kittler’s study considers the close interactions
between the development of media and war technologies, particularly during World Wars I
and II. Although Lugones’s Las fuerzas extrañas was published some years earlier than the
main developments in war technology that Kittler deals with, that second aspect of the latter’
s essay is nevertheless relevant with regard to Lugones’ short story—and particularly
pertinent to my analysis of it as a preamble to this author’s late reflections on war and (or
rather, as) politics.
In effect, in “La fuerza Omega” the scientist’s work on phonographic discs “involuntarily”
brings to his mind the idea that sound may be or become a mechanical force. From this
hypothesis he draws the conclusion that, if addressed to the center of a body, such a
mechanical force may be able to perforate it and even destroy it. With these ideas in mind,
he manufactures a device whose small size disappoints the narrator, because of its contrast
with the powerful forces suggested by his friend. But the scientist describes the small
machine by analogy with several implements of war, thus implying its destructive power:
Los vacíos entre diapasón y diapasón, tanto como el espacio necesario para el juego de la cuerda que
los roza, imponían al aparato este tamaño mínimo. Cuando ellos suenan, la cuádruple onda
transformada en una, sale por la bocina microfónica como un verdadero proyectil etéreo. La descarga se
repite cuantas veces aprieto el botón, pudiendo salir las ondas sin solución de continuidad apreciable,
es decir mucho más próximas que las balas de una ametralladora, y formar un verdadero chorro de éter
dinámico cuya potencia es incalculable. (107. Italics are my emphasis) [7]
As soon as he described his invention, the scientist proceeds to a demonstration in which he
destroys a massive object within his laboratory. The narrator and a third friend are
astonished. But the most surprising detail of the little destructive device manufactured by
the scientist is the fact that nobody but himself can make it work. This is, the scientist
asserts, the mystery of “his” force, whose mechanism he does not fully understand: the
machine depends on the scientist to work, because it partially is him, it is part of him. Some
faculty “passes through him,” allowing the scientist to see, without materially perceiving it,
the center of the body that he aims to disintegrate; this is how his “ether” is projected
against the object in question. The device is therefore potentially a dangerous weapon, albeit
one that is also attached to and dependent upon the scientist’s mind—or perhaps we should
rather say to his brain, in spite of the scientist’s mystical desire to eliminate matter. The
power to destroy belongs both to the machine and to the mental abilities of its inventor.
Hence the force discovered by the scientist not only provides him with an enlarged capacity
for destruction, but it also seems to emphasize his charisma. This possibility, nevertheless, is
complicated by the conclusion of the story, in which the narrator relates how one day he and
another friend encounter the scientist sitting dead on his chair. On the wall close to his head,
they find a strange substance that—the necropsy confirms—turns out to be the scientist’s
brain. The narrator explains:
Efectivamente, la cabeza de nuestro amigo estaba vacía, sin un átomo de sesos. El proyectil etéreo,
quién sabe por qué rareza de dirección o por qué descuido, habíale desintegrado el cerebro,
proyectándolo en explosión atómica a través de los poros de su cráneo. (109) [8]
Attached to the scientist’s nervous system (eyes, ears, brain), the device—derived from the
reflections on the destructive power of sound, elicited by the mechanism of a phonograph—
threatens to become a weapon of mass destruction, but ends up destroying the mind in
which it originated and exposing the brain to which its mechanism was attached. A self-
destructive turn of the mind’s power on itself: this is the paradoxical result of the
identification between the intellect and the forces of the Universe. The mind disappears,
leaving in its stead a flattened brain, and a destructive device that nobody knows how to use.
The secret to control it has died with the occultist-scientist, who attempting to gain control of
the forces of the universe was instead dominated by a new agreement between technology
and his own nervous system. In the scientist’s attempt to eliminate all mediation between his
intellect and “the original forces of the Cosmos,” his own intellect becomes the undesired
mediation between the nervous system and war technology, and is hence annihilated. Since
mediation is precisely the dimension of humanity and of politics that modern biopolitics
erodes: while biological life becomes immediately political, the nervous system becomes
immediately attached to war technology. The scientist is hence exterminated by the life that
his own theories and practices expose to both the exercise and the intervention of violence.
In spite (or rather, because) of its high degree of abstraction and its mystical character, “La
fuerza Omega” announces many of the biopolitical aspects of Lugones’ late political
writings. Both the notion of a revolutionary “force” that is expected to annihilate all
established knowledge, and the notion that the forces of the universe are so identical with the
human intellect that all mediation between them should be eliminated, may be considered a
fictional preamble to Lugones’s late political claims. These assert that, after World War I, the
enlightened notions of law and politics have become obsolete. Instead, Lugones comes to
argue that the forces displayed historically as violence—which are exemplarily condensed in
the notion of war, and which are, according to him, continuous with the forces of biological
life—rule the political. Curiously enough, in his political essays Lugones formulated his
transition from socialism to fascism through a transformation in his conception of the limits
between the human and the animal, a topic that his fictions had previously explored
extensively.
Four of the short stories of Las fuerzas extrañas visibly investigate the relations between
humans and animals—“Yzur,” “Un fenómeno inexplicable” [“An Inexplicable
Phenomenon”], “Los caballos de Abdera” [“The Horses of Abdera”] and “El escuerzo”
[“The Bloat-Toad”]. Through a reflection on the figure of the animal, these stories
simultaneously rethink the boundaries of the political and the boundaries of humanity with
regard to the rest of organic life. Indeed, one could say that any reflection on the limits that
separate and unite humans and animals entails a consideration on the boundaries of the
political space and life. Since the figure of the animal (not animals themselves) traditionally
demarcates the limit of the political contract—hence, of the political order. If Las fuerzas
extrañas literarily investigates the possibilities of a continuity between intellect, biological
and cosmological life, the “stories with animals” within it address perhaps the most crucial
aspect of that field of research: the one where a gap or a missing link between human and
animal has historically been posited, questioned, argued for and against, placed and
displaced in order to trace the landmark that would hypothetically define humanity—and
with it, the concept of the political, among others.
In this sense, Derrida (51) has considered that human beings could be described as the
“autobiographical animals,” in reference to the account of itself, the presentation of itself, the
incessant autobiography that the human species has for centuries been writing and edifying.
This narration of the self of humanity, both in a philosophical and in a common sense, is
always founded on the thesis of a limit, rupture or abyss between those who call themselves
“humans,” on the one side, and the entity that those who recognize themselves as humans
call “the animal” or “animals,” on the other. Agamben (2004, 33-38) has similarly talked
about an “anthropological machine,” of which the ancient version works mainly in the realm
of metaphysics, whereas its modern version belongs to the field of natural sciences. In both
cases, Agamben asserts, what is at stake in this machine is the production of “the human,”
by means of a set of oppositions at whose center resides the distinction between human and
animal, as well as the one between human and inhuman. Hence, Agamben concludes (37),
this machine “necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a
capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion).” In this game of
exclusion-inclusion, what the machine actually produces, Agamben says, is a state of
exception, a zone of indistinction where the human is animalized (and hence excluded) and
the animal is humanized (and hence included). The concrete results of such an operation
are a number of historical figures whose violence consists in both capturing and excluding its
victims in a mortal state of indetermination: the Jew that anti-Semitism has seen as the non-
human within humanity; the slave, the barbarian, the stranger, which the machine has
constructed as an animal entity under a human form. Because it produces this zone of
indistinction, the anthropological machine is a bloody and mortal device, Agamben warns
us, whose mechanism we must understand in order to be able to, eventually, stop it.
The figure of the animal functions thus as an inverted mirror of humanity whose images have
crucial consequences. One of the innumerable symbolic effects of Darwin’s theory of
evolution, towards the end of the nineteenth century, was to ignite new questions about the
limit between humanity and animality, about the possibility of scientifically tracing such a
limit and its foundations, and even about the existence of the boundary at all. The fantastic
narrative of Las fuerzas extrañas is in many senses propelled by this basic assumption of
Darwin’s theory of evolution: the common origins of all living forms. The anxiety generated
by this new conception of the species was even formulated by Darwin himself at the end of
The Descent of Man:
We must, however, acknowledge (…) that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels
for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living
creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the
solar system (…)—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
(Appleman, 254)
Many of the narrations of Las fuerzas extrañas investigate the interrogatives opened by this
premise of evolutionism, even when they manifestly attempt to negate its Darwinian
formulation, or at least partially contradict it.
“Yzur,” for example, inquires into the possibility of a latent humanity of the animal, thus
inverting the notion of a latent animality of the human entailed by evolutionism. With a
monkey as its protagonist, this narration alludes to the innumerable enterprises that by the
late 19th century attempted to finally uncover the origin of the human being, how had the
human evolved from the animal, and what exactly had the missing link between them looked
like (Agamben 2004, 32). In effect, in “Yzur” the narrator tells us that, after having bought a
monkey from a bankrupt circus, one afternoon he reads that the natives of Java considered
that the monkeys’ lack of language was not due to incapacity, but to abstention: they do not
speak, Javanese people would say, so that they are not forced to labor. The mention of Java
seems an allusion to the discovery of some fossils made in that island in 1891; according to
Agamben (2002, 34), Ernst Haeckel immediately deduced that those remainders pertained
to the missing link on which he had previously speculated, which he had characterized as a
monkey-man and named Pithekantropus Alalus, since the main difference between this
creature and the human would have been the lack of language. The Javanese legend that the
narrator of “Yzur” encounters is precisely a reformulation of Haeckel’s Pithekantropus
Alalus, insofar as it complicates the notion that the ability of language defines the boundary
between man and animal. From the Javanese hypothesis, the narrator draws his own:
monkeys were once men that, for some reason, stopped talking, after which they effectively
lost the phonic and mental ability of language; hence, those primitive men would have then
regressed to their previous animal status. In order to prove his idea, and intuiting the latent
and arrested humanity of his own chimpanzee, the narrator decides to teach Yzur how to
speak, on the basis that there is no scientific reason for which monkeys would not be capable
of acquiring language. Using as a model the methods for the teaching of language to deaf-
mute people, the narrator decides to begin Yzur’s education by the development of his
phonetic apparatus. At some point he mentions, nevertheless, a methodological procedure of
his that surely differs from the methods applied with deaf-mute people; he describes that he
starts every lesson with two affirmations addressed to Yzur: “I am your Master,” first, and
then “You are my monkey.” (207) He does so, the narrator explains, in order to bring to the
monkey’s “spirit” the certitude of a total truth. Truth is then here defined as a hierarchical
relation between human and animal, even when the lessons aim to prove that that specific
animal is also human, that he once was and can potentially be a human being.
After three years of sustained effort, the monkey only learns to pronounce the vowels and a
few consonants. Just when the narrator begins to feel resentment against Yzur because of
the latter’s “rebellious muteness,” (206) he learns that the monkey effectively is able, but
refuses, to speak. One night the narrator’s cook affirms that he found the monkey “speaking
real words.” (206) The next day, when at the lesson Yzur only utters his usual limited
sounds, the narrator, convinced of perceiving a gesture of irony in the monkey’s behavior,
beats him. Yzur then falls ill, the narrator says, “of intelligence and sorrow.” (207) At this
point of the story, the narrator completes the description of his initial speculation about the
previously-human-life of monkeys. The curious detail is that now it becomes evident that his
thesis—his primate-genealogy, his anthropo-primate-biography—reduplicates as history of a
species—an animal-once-human species—the specific story that the narrator tells us about
his own experience with Yzur. Mise-en-abyme, the narrator’s theory of the origin and decline
of the primate-once-human species, that is simultaneously his theory of the origin of the
human-all-too-human-species, both repeats and explains the story of the narrator’s
relationship and experiment with Yzur. Or on the contrary, the narrator’s theory attempts to
explain by repeating, by imagining an evolutionary mise-en-scène of his own master-slave
relation with his monkey. Since his genealogy posits that some old anthropoids of the jungle,
ancestors of today’s monkeys who at that moment possessed the ability of language, were
once forced to silence, and hence to an “intellectual suicide,” by a “barbarous injustice:”
(207-8) they were violently dominated by—and thus became slaves to—stronger
anthropoids, who were the ancestors of today’s human beings:
Infortunios del antropoide retrasado en la evolución cuya delantera tomaba el humano con un
despotismo de sombría barbarie, habían, sin duda destronado a las grandes familias cuadrumanas del
dominio arbóreo de sus primitivos edenes, raleando sus filas, cautivando sus hembras para organizar la
esclavitud desde el propio vientre materno, hasta infundir a su impotencia de vencidas el acto de
dignidad mortal que las llevaba a romper con el enemigo el vínculo superior también, pero infausto de
la palabra, refugiándose como salvación suprema en la noche de la animalidad. (Lugones 1996, 208) [9]
In “Yzur” the humans’ fall into violence is correlative to their conquest of language:
language and violence belong together since they together demarcate, in this speculative
athropology, the limit that distinguishes humans from animals. The narrator’s genealogy
asserts that it was the ancestor of today’s human being who exercised despotic violence
against the weaker anthropoids that later became monkeys. The latter would have thence
renounced language, in order to break the “superior but ill-fated link of the word” (208) that
would have related them with their human oppressors. These are the ones who become
human beings, more or less as we know them today, whereas the weaker anthropoids
regress into pure animality through their renunciation of language. Thus, the narrator’s
theory states that the human becomes human through the exercise of violence against the
weaker, to which he dominates and submits to slavery. Through such originary act of
violence, humanity not only conquers a weaker biological variety, but it also conquers
language as its exclusive ability, and with both, it conquers as well the status of species, its
own foundation as a separation from the weak. The latter, instead, regress into the muteness
of animality, as a refusal to slavery and violence and a silent protest—indeed, a protest
through silence—against the law of the strongest.
“Yzur” and “Los caballos de Abdera” are key short stories if one observes Lugones’
fantastic fiction from the viewpoint of his political essays. Miguel Dalmaroni has interestingly
studied the political implications of both narrations, but differently from my analysis,
Dalmaroni’s relates Lugones’ short stories to the author’s role as State intellectual during the
first two decades of the twentieth century. Although there are coincidences in our viewpoints,
I think that the allegorical tendencies in Dalmaroni’s reading obliterate the vitalist elements
in Lugones’ narrative, which I not only consider crucial in Lugones’ fiction, but also see as
resonances between the latter and his political positions. I analyzed how “Yzur” sets out a
game of paradoxes that arise out of the relations between two sets of oppositions: on the one
hand, the contrast between freedom and slavery; on the other hand, the contrast between
human and animal life. Lugones’ political essays were often concerned with that same
constellation; in fact, it is there where Lugones searched for a definition of the political. His
turn from the left to the right political wings was precisely defined by an explicit
reformulation of the relation between those two dichotomies. This shift is particularly visible
when one contrasts two specific areas of Lugones’ political essays: on the one hand, the
essays on World War I that he wrote between 1912 and 1917, and later compiled under the
title Mi beligerancia [My Beligerance, 1917]; on the other hand, the political essays that he
wrote during the 1920s, particularly from La organización de la paz [The Organization of
Peace, 1925] onward. I will briefly exemplify this counterpoint.
During the period between 1912 and 1917, as he explains it repeatedly in his articles on World
War I, Lugones’ main contention against the German position in the conflict was that
Germany’s militarized intervention entailed a barbaric violation of the law through the
imposition of its military force over international treatises. This is why he considered WWI a
last and definitive confrontation between despotism and freedom. The triumph of the former
would be catastrophic, Lugones argued, because it would entail the predominance of brute
force over the law, a predominance that Lugones understands in this moment as the core of
authoritarianism. The triumph of the political ideals of the Enlightenment would instead
assert the predominance of the law over material force, which Lugones conceives as the
main characteristic of the politics of freedom that he sees represented in Great Britain,
France or the United States. In this sense, Lugones does not hesitate to make use of the
polarity through which, a century before, Sarmiento had attempted to elucidate both the
internal conflicts that defined the character of Argentina and his own political project:
civilization and barbarism. In fact, Lugones dedicates to Sarmiento his first article on the
situation that later led to the war, in 1912. Five years later, WWI is explained by Lugones as a
confrontation between civilization, “which subordinates everything to the principle of
equality,” and barbarism, “which aspires to absolute dominion by means of force,
constituting such dominion as its only moral sanction.” (1917, 158) Of this series of
oppositions between spirit and matter, law and force, freedom and despotism, reason and
dogma, justice and power, through which he attempts to understand a conflict dominated by
the escalation of violence—a conflict that he rightly perceives as a historical juncture—
Lugones always adheres, in these articles written between 1912 and 1917, to the civilized
terms and questions the irrationality and injustice of the barbarian ones. Moreover, he often
poses that the thin line that divides one side from the other, and hence, according to his
diagnosis, two possible historico-political destinies of humanity, coincides precisely with the
thin line that divides the human from the animal. Without justice and freedom, Lugones
asserts in 1912, “the human condition is nothing but a zoological fact.” (1917, 22) And the
war, caused by “the absolute predominance of selfish interests, which has reduced all the
problems to a question of force,” (24) threatens to reinsert within humanity the law of the
jungle, to regress humanity into its animal condition. Hence, Lugones would often equate
Germany’s attitude in the conflict with animal behavior, because of its abuse of the rule of
force and its disrespect for the law:
La necesidad no reconoce ley’, dijo el imperio. Pero, asegurar o mejorar la propia vida a costa de otra
vida inocente, es el procedimiento característico de la fiera. Así procede el irracional, y con él se iguala
el hombre cuando lo imita. (1917, 179) [10]
It is particularly in La organización de la paz (1925) when Lugones acknowledges a
change in his political positions that affects his definition of the relation between law and
force, humans and animals. The articles compiled in this book mostly deal with the
aftermath of WWI—the international relations after the peace treatises and in the context of
the formation of the League of Nations, whose aim was to bring peace to the world. In the
preface that he added to introduce those articles, Lugones declares that his historical and
political criterion has been radically altered by the war and its consequences. The war, he
says, made him appreciate the fallacy of the ideology of democracy and pacifism; he argues
that, based on a notion of indefinite progress that posits an ethical telos for human evolution,
that ideology is a generous illusion that does not conform to reality and is hence dangerous
to the young nations, since it can compromise their destinies. Nations as well as individuals,
he adds, have to live their lives in accordance with their possibilities and conveniences. He
asserts now that the vital prosperity of nations justifies their enterprises because vital ethics
are defined by the success of life. Every conflict between morality and life, Lugones claims
now, is a mystical perversion, since morality is a teleological system elaborated by human
reason, whereas life lacks any aim that can be appreciated by human beings. One lives as
one can, as one is able to live, and this is the reason and dignity of force: this is, Lugones
declares, the lesson that since 1914 history has been teaching us, and these are the
foundations of his political essays from now on. “The principle of subordination of force to the
law,” he affirms now, “expired with the war.” (65)
Thus, Lugones’ revised political positions are founded on a vitalist perspective. Politics
becomes now for him, in direct contradiction with his previous positions, an experimental
science that excludes as much metaphysics as emotion; on the contrary, Lugones now
asserts that any sentimental abstraction applied to politics cannot but mean a hindrance to
the victory of nations. In straight opposition to what he had asserted before, now Lugones
affirms that humanity is not a political entity, but only a zoological species, foreign to all
the artificial conceptions that we call politics or morality (67). For the fascist Lugones,
humanity only coincides with itself in its biological constitution: nothing else characterizes
human beings as such, and they have nothing else in common. Thus, he argues that
democracy and socialism, which now he considers inextricably linked with each other,
promote a system of government that is contrary to the interests of nations, since those
ideologies are based on the mistaken notion that humanity is a political entity, that its
members share something else than their biological constitution. This idea is now for
Lugones nothing but nihilist mysticism: an abstraction that, because of the ecumenical
character that it assumes, negates any possibility of durable aggregation among people.
Geography, race, local convenience, history: all that constitutes nations, the late Lugones
asserts, is contradicted by abstract notions of humanity that can only result in the dissolution
of political entities. These abstractions are, in his viewpoint, not only mistaken in their
definition of humanity, but they also pursue an impossible aim: the concord and peaceful
coexistence of mankind through the abolition of fight and force. For the vitalist Lugones, on
the contrary, life itself is a state of force, and this defines as much its biological quality as it
determines its political potential. This is how he defines life at the beginning of his later,
fascist period:
Estado ajeno a la razón y a la voluntad, porque es una resultante de actividades orgánicas cuya
determinación ignoramos; con lo cual, incapaces de gobernarlas, tenemos que atenernos solamente a
sus consecuencias, limitándonos a intentar entre estos últimos [sic] ensayos de relativo equilibrio por
medio de la ciencia experimental llamada política. (1925, 11) [11]
It was only when Lugones renounced a definition of politics whose aim was freedom, that he
committed himself to a politics defined as the law of the strongest. The first definition
considered politics as a separation from the realm of mere survival; the second one made
survival its only object, and the biological dimension of life its only task. As I hope to have
demonstrated here, many of the materials of Lugones’ political thought were already a
central matter of reflection in his fantastic fiction of the early 1900s. The latter investigated
the tensions between physical force and symbolic articulation, as well as the boundaries
between human and animal; the former sought, within the same nets, a key for the definition
of the nation-State.
Notes
[1] Arguing against allegorical or strongly referential readings, José María Naharro-Calderón
has questioned critical analyses that, like mine, read in the “Cosmogony” a statement of
principles that the fictions thematize. I will later explain with more detail how my argument
differs from Naharro-Calderón’s.
[2] Unless otherwise noted, all the translations below are mine and their only purpose is
clarification for non-bilingual readers: “All the manifestations of life are forms of thought,
since they are forms of the absolute energy in its eternal and double work of integration and
disintegration; but then, forces are also intelligent beings in proportion with their degree of
proximity to the energy from which they proceed.”
[3] In the pages of La Montaña, the socialist magazine that he co-directed with José
Ingegnieros, one can find articles where Lugones declares (61-2): “Protestamos de todo el
orden social existente: de la República, que es el Paraíso de los mediocres y de los serviles;
de la Religión que ahorca las almas para pacificarlas; (…) del Estado que es la maquinaria
de tortura bajo cuya presión debemos moldearnos como las fichas de una casa de juego
(…)”
[4] “Thus, some State policies on education, labor and election have induced Lugones to
think of himself, insofar as he was a poet, as a State affair, and hence assert—in a peculiar
way—that literature was one as well.”
[5] “With the presence of these inventors, the texts threaten the ideologically unitary concept
of realist character, the analytico-referential reason and the scientific-literary models
developed by naturalism and originated in positivism, which defended the ideal of
observation and the transparency of statements.”
[6] “The harmony and moral of life consist in its own normal function, which is (…) a state of
force. (…) In a state of force, war is a natural episode imposed by fate: one outcome among
many others. The disavowal of force is a mystical delirium that would drag us to degradation
and stupidity, since it would entail to negate life in one of its noblest manifestations.”
[7] “The empty spaces between the bridges, as well as the necessary room for the
movement of the string that touches them, made the small size of the device a requirement.
When it sounds, the fourfold wave becomes one and emerges through the microphonic [sic]
horn exactly like an ethereal missile. This discharge is repeated as many times as I press the
key, which allows the waves to issue with no perceptible interruption—that is, with much more
frequency than the bullets of a machine gun—and form a veritable stream of dynamic ether
whose power is incalculable.”
[8] “In effect, the head of our friend was empty, without even an atom left of his brain. The
ethereal missile, due to who knows what mystery—perhaps a mistake—had disintegrated
his brain, spreading it out in an atomic explosion through the pores of his cranium.”
[9] “Misfortunes of the anthropoid that was falling behind in evolution, while the human was
taking the lead with a despotism of somber barbarism, had doubtless dethroned the great
quadrumanous families from the domain of the trees—their primitive Eden—decimating
their population and capturing their females in order to enslave them from their mothers’
wombs. Impotent in the face of this defeat, they chose with mortal dignity to break away
from the superior but ill-fated link of the word that connected them with their enemies,
taking refuge in the night of animality, their supreme salvation.”
[10] “‘Necessity does not recognize any law,’ the empire said. But to secure or to improve
one’s own life at the expense of other innocent life is the characteristic procedure of wild
animals. This is how irrational beings proceed, and when man imitates such beings, he
makes himself their equal.”
[11] “A state that is alien to reason and will, since it is the result of organic activities whose
determination we ignore. Thus, since we are incapable of governing them, we only have to
conform to their consequences. We have to limit ourselves to attempt among them some
trials of a relative balance through the experimental science that we call politics.”
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| Mariana Amato, Sarah Lawrence College |
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| Force Majeure: Leopoldo Lugones toward a Vitalist Fascism |
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