Desire to This, get lost […] first found in the rite of sacrifice the satisfaction that we now find in reading novels.

G. Bataille, History of eroticism

Words lose, lost y pérdida In modern languages ​​they trace back to the Latin word sorry, verbal form composed of the root of-, what does it mean give in the group of Indo-European languages” (Benveniste, 1983, p. 54), and by the prefix per-, which indicates, in the case at hand, deviation (Ernout and Meillet, 2001, p. 497). The root do-, from which we get Greek doron and Latin donum (The donation in both cases), is already interesting enough for historical analysis, as it refers to certain fundamental institutions of Western legal and economic life. Specifically, the verbal form we are analyzing (I forgive/I forgive) acquires in Latin the meaning of give or spend uselesslyAnd in an even more pronounced sense, lost means spoil, ruin o destroy (Ibid., p. 180). The participle is derived from this verbal form. perditus (lost) and the substantivized form petition (which Nebrija records at the end of the 15th century, in the Spanish-Latin vocabularyas the loss or perditionModern languages ​​develop an immeasurable variety of meanings of This and the be lost with which they put into operation effective mechanisms for attributing failure. These meanings range from the loss of profits and the wasted time and money (thus the English lose), even to corruption and moral disorder (thus in Spanish the word perdition, with a strong religious imprint), passing through straying and dishonor (in French we have it is lost y lose reputation), the loss or deprivation of a loved one (the Italian lose) nor defeat military. 

To lose y be lost These are, as Georges Bataille provocatively reminded us, secret desires in which Western modernity (especially itself) has failed to recognize itself: the proscribed and cursed part of the modern bourgeois subject. A reconstruction of the modern rationalization process offers some clues in the direction to which Bataille's diagnosis points. As the old Weberian genealogy reminds us, it was not the irrational striving of profit (more typical of the adventurous capitalism) which characterized the modern capitalismbut rather “the aspiration to profit achieved through incessant and rational capitalist labor, ever-renewed profit, the profitability“(Weber, 2011, p. 58). The essence, then, of modern capitalism was not only the pursuit of profit, but the driving style of life [way of life] rational means by which that was pursued: “rationally legitimate gain” (Ibid., p. 102). As the Weberian genealogy completed, that way of life It was able to take root in the modern bourgeois subject through the influence of the asceticism active, rational, and worldly that carried the ethos of a certain Protestantism so relevant to the development of the West. Thus, modern professional life was marked, from its inception, both by the pursuit of the greed, as by the asceticism and rational driving of the life that accompanied her. For the nascent modern era, it wasn't simply a matter of not Thisbut also not be lost, This last concept is one we tend to forget when tracing such a genealogy. This, at be lostThe dual imperative of normalization, both economic and moral, characteristic of modern professional life. Hence, Weber reminds us of the ideal of countenance of puritanical asceticism as something that lies at the base of the nascent bourgeois way of life: the rejection of excessive affections and luxuries, but also the prevention against the temptations of unclean lifeHence Weber's emphasis on self-mastery and self-controlvalues ​​“that still represent the best types of peopleman English and Anglo-American” (Ibid., p. 169). No This, at be lost; at the spoil, at fail. But not spoil o This What exactly? Above all, time: “the first and foremost of all sins is the dilapidation of time” (Ibid., p. 214). In this way, Weber led us to that dark origin of the modern calculating mentality and echoed the weighty words of Richard Baxter, so laden with consequences for modern capitalism: “Keep up a high esteem of time and be every day more careful that you lose none of your time” (Ibid., p. 215). 

A cross-section of the bourgeois subject, tracing the transition from the origins of the rationalization of modern professional life (16th and 17th centuries) to the consolidation of the bourgeoisie as a class (18th and 19th centuries), will allow us to complete this line of analysis. As Franco Moretti has shown in his excellent monograph (Moretti, 2014), the world of the bourgeois is the world of utility (the orientation productive of all effort), the industrious (the diligent labor that does not se lose in leisure) and efficiency (economic action and without waste). It is also the world of the regularity of everyday orders, a world normalizedas characterized by the obsessions of the era. Thus, the bourgeois world exhibits a constellation of keywords contrary to wasteful spending (constellation of values ​​contrary to the futility from the pérdida in any of its meanings). It appeared clearly, as the arc of philosophy from Rousseau to Nietzsche would critically show (Löwith, 2008, pp. 310-341), that the problem of bourgeois society It was associated with the reign of rationalization and calculation in all domains of human life, something that generated aberrations ranging from selfishness and pride to suffocating moral control (as those thinkers pointed out). All these values, contrary to the pérdidaThey seemed suitable for a society increasingly structured around property and manners (economic and social capital, but also symbolic and cultural capital). However, they would not escape the problematization and criticism of their contemporaries. This, at be lostThat was the double reminder of bourgeois life. It is this cosmos of values ​​that also conquers the prose of the novel, with its representation of tranquil (continuous and everyday) actions and with its taste for precision and detail: “the logic of rationalization permeates the very rhythm of the novel” (Moretti, 2014, p. 104). The paradigmatic example, both in content and form, is Defoe's novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), a strange adventure novel (of getting lost, of shipwreck) which transforms into a precise account of rational and methodical labor where nothing is lostThe (serious) narration of the everyday, key to this serious genre (as Moretti reminds us), postpones for a little over a century the function that Bataille provocatively assigned to the novel from the other side of the process: to satisfy the desire of This y get lostThis last function will be implemented, among other literary devices, by the fantastic tale in the 19th century and, as Italo Calvino recalled, due to the progressive predominance of the fantastic everyday about what fantastic visionary during the second half of the century: “the gradual internalization of the supernatural” (Calvino, 2019, p. 17), introduction of the principle of pérdida in that doubly normalized bourgeois consciousness. But this would develop progressively during modernity. The novel, intermediate genre Typical of a middle class, it was situated from its beginnings between two extremes expensive from which he escaped: “the aristocratic heights of tragic passion and the plebeian depths of comedy” (Moretti, 2014, p. 93).

At the end of this dual process, which spanned the crucial centuries of modernity, linking the asceticism puritan with the productivity bourgeois, it was clear that the pérdida (The wasteful spendingIt was the economic principle (in the broadest sense) that had been denied and repressed. This dual process had chained human activity to the useful works and had closed all access to unproductive consumptionas Bataille observed in his more decidedly anthropological writings. Observation disenchanted His (in the Weberian vein) observation of a lackluster and mechanical world, insofar as the sphere of unproductive consumption It was the access door (already lost) to the sacred“The true holiness of Calvinist works lay in the abandonment of holiness—in the renunciation of all life that had, in this world, a semblance of holiness.” splendor“(Bataille, 2009, p. 141). The bourgeois world was the most alien thing to that splendor, just as he was unfamiliar with the old economy of Don, for which “wealth appears as an acquisition insofar as the rich man acquires power, but is entirely oriented towards the pérdida because that power is characterized as the ability to This“(Bataille, 2008, p. 122). Beyond the proposals, the diagnosis was clear: the denial of the pérdida (check the This, at be lost) was the axis of the modern standardization process, a standardization (economic and moral) that called the subject to order and guaranteed the cohesion of the social body. Foucault offers us a similar diagnosis, who sees the emergence, between the 17th and 18th centuries, of “a new mechanism of power,” which he characterizes as “one of the great inventions of bourgeois society” and which he calls disciplinary powerA mechanism of power that “falls, first and foremost, on bodies and what they do, rather than on the land and its produce. It is a mechanism that allows for the extraction bodies, time and work more than goods and wealth” (Foucault, 2003, pp. 39-40). Drawing on that modern negation of the pérdidaThe new mechanics of the discipline, implemented by efficient institutions, will operate for Foucault as a knowledge-power. normalizer about bodies and their productive times, generating what he calls a “normalization society” (Ibid., p. 41). A society that, in addition to normalizing, will operate its mechanisms of political exclusion based on the double bind of this moral and economic normalization, as shown by the political history of the 19th century (JM Fradera, 2015). This is the case, for example, of the Colonial constitutions 19th-century, in which “the We take care of your rental property in Valencia. of the political subject (the national elector) are thoroughly discussed,” properties defined both by the professional and economic capabilities of the metropolitan citizen, as well as by “the moral qualities that distinguish the select property owner and, later, the pusillanimous middle classes” (Ibid., p. XXXVIII). Rules economic and moral factors that serve to exclude, to deny "access to citizenship, to voting and to a full political identity" to women, workers and "individuals who were part of the peoples uncivilized” (Ibid.).

We can still add something more, after this long journey, about the relevance of the pérdida (and its negation) in the modern era. Following another narrative that also has one of its starting points in Max Weber, the theory of secularization, there is another sense in which the Modern Age is an era that No. loses, that preserve certain hopes and expectations of meaning. From the secularization of theological categories in modern state theory (as noted by Carl Schmitt), to the secularization of salvation history in modern progressive philosophies of history (as noted by Karl Löwith), the era we are studying seems keep with insistence old hopes, resisting their pérdidaAs Odo Marquard repeatedly stated, the revolutionary philosophy of history entailed a readjustment of theodicy and eschatological hopes for emancipation (Marquard, 1999, p. 35). The fact that this campaigns of ideals and hopes that would inevitably haunt him, processes of pérdidaand disillusion and postponementIt was an undeniably modern, but slow and expensive, Ultimately, this is a learning process that we only find completed in the late 19th century. This learning is consummated in Freud, who sees precisely in “cases of offense, postponement, and disillusionment” (Freud, 2003, p. 240) the hidden causes of the melancholy, that dangerous fixation and withdrawal of libido in the face of a loss, that kind of pérdida who doesn't want to or doesn't know ThisThe possibility of understanding the period studied as a time exposed to major cultural processes of disillusion y fixation melancholic (something that would affect the dynamics of empires to the same or greater extent than the revolutionary processes mentioned above), the possibility of understanding it as a time of dejection reluctant to pérdida The idea that energizes desire (the displacement of libido toward new objects and ideals) would be suggested by another thinker from the late 19th century. Nietzsche's philosophy, his announcement of the dawn after the sunset, contrary to that melancholic fixation, would summarize an enormous amount of work duel, closing the temporal arc of modernity with a learning of the lost. As Miguel Morey has rightly pointed out, Nietzsche's message insistently warns that "substituting faith in God with belief in progress does not at all safeguard us from our solitude" (Morey, 2015, p. 15). The image with which Nietzsche conveyed this doctrine of solitude, an image that that great man carried with him duel and that learning of the pérdidaShe spoke for herself: “Indeed, we philosophers and free spiritsUpon hearing the news that "the old God is dead," we feel as if illuminated by a new dawn; our hearts overflow with gratitude, surprise, premonition, expectation—at last the horizon seems free again, […] of our The sea is open again, perhaps there has never been such an open sea” (Nietzsche, 2014, p. 859).

Message from pérdida, writing of dueldoctrine of lonelinessNietzsche's philosophy displays a cheerful brilliance despite the difficulty and dread of the task posed by the death of God, even where those qualities are most apparent. It introduces something of the This and the be lost in the exercise of thought (something that had been denied) but without resorting to the conveniences of dogma, instead invoking those values ​​as conditions of possibility for a true coming of age (Morey, 2015, p. 14). Much more could be said about the links between the thought, the pérdida and loneliness in a non-melancholic vein, in an enlightened vein, and one that does not, therefore, renounce the public use of reason. On the other hand, in its transgressive aspect, Nietzsche's image evokes, following Didi-Huberman, a lifting, something that also inextricably links it to the pérdidaWell, as the French philosopher recently reminded us, “isn’t it true that This It lifts us up after the pérdida has it brought us down? Isn't it true that This What makes us desire after grief has immobilized us?” (Didi-Huberman, 2020, p. 7). What lifts us up is made of pérdida and every uprising implies a certain lost. Freudian teaching, which includes the pérdida as an essential dimension of desire and life, and which, in a similar vein to that pointed out by Didi-Huberman, reminds us that the melancholic has abandoned, through a certain process, “the psychic constellation of the rebellion“(Freud, 2003, p. 237). Mourning, loneliness, lifting, rebellion o revoltAs we have been understanding them, these are some of the concepts that allow us to reverse the meaning of the pérdida as a failure. The appeal to the intellectual legacy of Nietzsche and Freud, which closes the period studied here, allows us to reevaluate the failed meaning of the loss, to carry out our own transmutation of values. pérdida as a constitutive element of thought, life, and desire. That is the reversal we propose here. In short, we have had occasion to appreciate the importance of the negation of loss, in any of its senses, for the modern era in the broadest sense. We have had occasion to observe a lack of reconciliation with this principle in the modern era, a situation that linked the pérdida to the various mechanisms for attributing failure. Given the current spread of economic rationality known as neoliberalism, with its logic of self-investment and self-interested calculation in all areas of human life (a corollary of the modern denial of the pérdida), it will be good to remember this need for the pérdida for life. And, as Kristeva says, now that “Europe itself is threatened by a melancholic regression, of pérdida of identity, values ​​and pride” (Kristeva, 2017, p. 10), it is worth remembering, also to the melancholic tribe of philosophersthat culture is the space where collective identities are formed through the creation of losses.

Bibliography:

Bataille, G. (2008). The notion of expenditure. In The Sacred Conspiracy. Essays 1929-1939 (pp. 110-134). Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo.

Bataille, G. (2009). The cursed partBuenos Aires: Las Cuarenta.

Benveniste, E. (1983). Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions. Madrid: Taurus.

Calvino, I. (Ed.). (2019). Fantastic Tales of the 19th CenturyMadrid: Siruela.  

Didi-Huberman, G. (2020). Desire to disobey. What lifts us up, 1Madrid: Abada.

Ernout, A. and Meillet, A. (2001). Etymological dictionary of the Latin languageParis: Klincksieck.

Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. Course at the Collège de France (1975-1976)Madrid: Akal.

Fradera, JM (2015). The Imperial Nation (1750-1918). Vol.IBarcelona: Edhasa.

Freud, S. (2003). Grief and Melancholia. In Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Essays (pp. 231-247). Madrid: Alianza.

Kristeva, J. (2017). Black sun. Depression and melancholyGirona: WunderKammer.

Löwith, K. (2008). From Hegel to Nietzsche: The revolutionary breakdown of thought in the 19th centuryBuenos Aires: Katz.

Marquard, O. (1999). An Apology for Contingency. Philosophical Studies. Valencia: Alfons el Magnànim.

Moretti, F. (2014). The Bourgeois: Between History and LiteratureBuenos Aires: FCE.

Morey, M. (2015). Small doctrines of solitudeMadrid: Sexto Piso.

Nietzsche, F. (2014). The Gay Science. In Complete Works. Vol. III. Mature Works I. Madrid: Tecnos. Weber, M. (2011). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mexico: FCE.

Index of illustrations:

Fig.1: Cafeteria politics, (The good bourgeois)by Honoré Daumier. Published on April 21, 1864 in Le Charivari. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, 1962. Met MuseumPublic domain.

Fig.2: A maid shows an old man his pockmarked face in a hand mirrorColored lithograph by Langlumé, 1823. Public domain of the Wellcome Collection.