Transfiguration. Towards the end of Nuestra confianza en nosotros: la Unidad Popular y la herencia del por venir (Ufro, 2023), Rodrigo Karmy suggests that the experiential texture of Salvador Allende’s political years amounted to a sort of corporeal transfiguration of historical time, but also of the political subject within modern architectonics of the inter-state sovereign system. The death-martyrdom brought a new world into order, radically transforming the sense of historical assumptions and its immanent refutations and accelerations. For those of all that know Karmy’s philosophical investigations working through this intuition, it is impossible not to see that ‘transfiguration’ does not entail ‘sacrifice’, but rather it implies the figure of the martyr [1]. And we also know from Erik Peterson that martyrs are absolute witness to truth of an irrevocable event; in other words, those that transcend the core materiality of the mere opinions and matter-of-factness as to remain faithful to the unfathomable to a world brought to abrupt change (and at times, this means also despair). Karmy writes: 

“Se produce así una transfiguración radical de Allende que trastoca enteramente el juego de la teología política, tal como ha sido planteada bajo los avatares del fantasma portaliano: si en esta última, el cuerpo físico termina desmaterializado en un cuerpo institucional, tal como ocurrió con el devenir del general Pinochet,  en Allende termina desmaterializado en una potencia por venir (no en cuerpo institucional), aquello que Walter Benjamin llamaba lo «nunca sido»: «Siempre estaré junto a ustedes», dice el presidente usurpado por el golpismo esa triste mañana de septiembre” [2]. 

The truth of transfiguration – and in a sense every event of truth is always carried by the energy what is transfigured – marks the incommensurable distance between the eternal persistence of the word and the historical movement guided by the precepts of civilization. Whereas the political grammar organizes itself through an indiscriminate institutional corpus and a set of moral binding obligations upon its citizens; the truth of transfiguration is the keeper of the night of the soul that, like the myth of Er, signals the passage between the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead. When transfigured, the dead can become even more lively than those allegedly “alive”; where those alive become embodied and rigid statues or mummies. As such, the energy of transfiguration remains outside the cloisters of history and its memory sites, since its realization takes place whenever there is a drift outside and beyond the suturing of the world as mere stated and enclosed fact.

Voice.  The “we” (Nosotros) in Karmy’s thesis does not signal the constituent political unity of the People nor a partisan form that can exert force towards the inversion of the sedimented historical order. In his archeological endeavor, the ‘nosotros’ indexes a non-numerical instance through the vocative raises its own question to the past. This does not imply that there is a “collective voice” that must enact its point of annunciation through representation and mediated forms; the voice emerges as an exception to the grammaticalization of the constitutional order and its statuary production as expression of legislative will. The voice is the exteriority to every scheme of reproduction. But, what is a “voice”? Following Emilio Recabarren, Karmy connects the voice to the very act of creation: in other words, a voice to the truth implies the vocative of what has truly never been there before. Like the chorā, the voice is both at the reemergence of its origin and medium rather than substance; and this is why the voice, unlike the written language, cannot be subsumed to the reification of mimesis and generative substance [3]. The voice is what every time remains irreducible to the order of discourse difference, historiographical narrativity, and the original letter and spirit of the law. And even in traditions without “Constitutions”, law cannot escape its written and grammatical framework; this is why in Common Law, the Constitutional authority is supplanted by the historical absorption of habits, manners, and tradition into the force of legal codes and binding statutes. It is a high merit of Karmy’s Nuestra confianza (2023) to reminds us that the happiest moments (and perhaps the only moment worth saving, that infinitely returns against the grain of historical progress) of the revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century are to be found in the evocation of the voice and its popular music (something that can also be said of the Cuban Revolution, for instance). This esoteric orphic thread evidences the disjointed relation between the polis and the mythic transfiguration when facilitated by the prophetic overtones of the musical nomos in the genesis of the West [4]. Hence, whenever there is a voice, the suture of politics to the theology cannot amount to the continuous transaction upon the survival and agony of the living.

Freedom from revolution. Unlike the reverential or formalist accounts written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean Unidad Popular, Karmy’s essay invites us to dwell about a political experience after its epochal exhaustion: the collapse of the horizon of the philosophy of history implies the internal implosion of the modern revolution’s infrastructure (constituent power, moral justice, militant subjectivity, sacrificial energy). For Karmy to arrive at a certain nearness to the well lighted tradition of the UP is to abandon once and for all the civilizational eon of sedentary political hegemony (“a revolution in world history” bringing about the age of the nomads to an end, claimed historian Edward Gibbon) that has now paved the way for the unlimited forms of planetary government exerted through the rationality of the management of population and the distribution of the economy [5].

The farewell to the revolution and its reverse – it is well known that De Maistre claimed in the wake of the French Revolution that the opposite of the revolution is not a counter-revolution, but what is all together contrarian to it – means to put a halt to the paradigm of force (positive and immanent hostility) that has oriented actions, expectations, passions, and even dreams taxed at the fictive illusions of an abstract Humanity devoid of any possibility of happiness in the world. It is only after we can leave behind the revolutionary metaphysical mimesis that a new sense of freedom could emerge away from the dominion of the land-surveyors of the Earth. Abandoning any clamors oriented towards the future, it is now for us to attune to the everlasting traditions that are unrelinquished to the endless rubble of time. 

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Notes 

1. Rodrigo Karmy. “The Absolute Gift: Martyrdom as Destituent Power”, SAQ, 122, 2023, 157-170.

2. Rodrigo Karmy. Nuestra confianza en nosotros (Ufro, 2023), 183.

3. Ibid., 102.

4. Gianni Carchia. Orfismo e tragedia: Il mito trasfigurato (Quodlibet, 2019).