“Let there be no doubt: this is a thoroughly political book, which asks the most important, the most essential of political questions. Which is, precisely: What is the smallest difference that may actually make a difference? . . . There is a double irony here. The first is that those who are so intent on 'being political' or putting politics first, seeking a program or party line to proclaim or to follow, inevitably end up mired only in false pieties and the spectacle of morality ('virtue signalling' and the like) that we see all too insistently wherever we look. The second is that . . . the one properly political question, the question of the 'perhaps,' only arises when we step back from politics, when we try to withdraw from the turmoil, when we hesitate before entering the fray, when we realize that everything is in doubt, and when we acknowledge that 'what is to be done' is far from self-evident, being as it is a matter that politics itself can never resolve. Without it, however, there is no politics at all. The very possibility of politics, in other words, as Williams eloquently tells us, depends upon the infrapolitical.”---Jon Beasley-Murray, author of Posthegemony

Powerful in its assessment and truly revelatory in its ability to demonstrate the need for a ‘different relation to the political,’ Infrapolitical Passages gives language and scope to a new politico-economic conjuncture and offers us the opportunity to fully appreciate the scale of this shift. It asks us to walk away from the old, tired narratives of political modernity and to reflect upon the need to effectively start over in our reflections on what the political means now and what the future within what Williams call the ‘Post-Katechontic’ shall now consist of.---Abraham Acosta, University of Arizona

Gareth Williams has a gift for announcing problems, perhaps intractable, and then reeling them in and walking them back out step by step. You find yourself confronted with ‘infrapolitics,’ ‘decontainment,’ ‘narco-accumulation,’ and ‘katechon,’ which may or may not ring a bell. It all seems intimidating, but then a couple of pages later you feel like you’re handling a new concept, and connections start to litter your consciousness. It’s brilliantly useful.---Joshua Lund, University of Notre Dame

Gareth Williams is Professor of Spanish and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, where he is Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Exordium: Extinction and Everyday Infrapolitics | 1

Introduction | 9

Passage I. Contemporary Turmoil: Posthegemonic Epochality, or Why Bother with the Infrapolitical? | 33
Prometheus Kicks the Bucket, 35 • Katechon, Post-katechon,
Decontainment, 54 • From Hegemony to Posthegemony, 74 •
Why Bother with the Infrapolitical?, 97

Passage II. Narco- Accumulation: Of Contemporary Force and Facticity | 107
Toward Narco- Accumulation, 109 • Toward Facticity, 117 • Facticity,
or the Question of the Right Name for War, 129 • Decontainment
and Stasis, 135 • Theater of Conflict I: “Here There Is No Choosing,” 144 •
Theater of Conflict II: 2666, or the Novel of Force, 148 •
Toward the Void, 162 • The Migrant’s Hand, or the Infrapolitical Turn to Existence, 167

Notes | 191

Works Cited | 231

Index | 243