Just a few days ago there was an esoteric exchange between Giorgio Agamben and Alberto Moreiras on the difficulty of the ‘other beginning’ and the ‘via di uscita’, a propos of a recent meeting on desecularization and theology that took place in Granada, Spain. The notion has been in the air for some time now, since two years ago this was the central problem in a 2024 meeting in Berlin. That the exchange was esoteric is not in question, since it presupposes undertaking the conditions of the conversation and papers of the meeting as well as multiple books from both Moreiras and Agamben, and I do not think that the nuances have been taken into consideration. But it must be noted that there is an exoteric dimension to the contention as well: Giorgio Agamben has favored the ‘via di usicita’ in different figures (mainly Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin; and we know that Agamben’s overbeckian urgeschichte is a clear cut rejection of an epochal beginning); and, from his end, Alberto Moreiras has also thematized the other beginning of thought and aleotropic excess in his most recent Tiempo Roto (2025), which cuts through Heidegger’s thought, and thus not limited to what is understood as heideggerianism. I want to reject the idea that these two notions – ‘via di uscita and other beginning – are just two forking paths in postheideggerianism, as complicated as it is to go beyond Heidegger’s end of Western metaphysics. And I think – and in fact I am convinced- that both Agamben and Moreiras are soliciting something that radically escapes Heidegger’s thought even when it emanates from it; a bit like what Derrida says that the chôra escapes the categorial order of Plato even though it emerges from the Timeus.

There is no doubt that at stake is a breakthrough in thought. Of course, stating this puts a finger into something fundamental; but, alas, the devil is always in the details. I am in no position to unravel the implications of the two options – new beginning and via of exodus – and to that extent I am still taken by Moreiras’ interpellation in the first day of the meeting about my own position regarding the new beginning, which I am in no way read to respond. Of course, Nicolas Poussin comes to mind (I cite from memory his epistolary words to Chantelou): “I am in the profession of mute things”. A claim of silence that in no way refrains from language and writing. Yes, I am no painter, although I am interested in painting and what painting can offer and donate to thought and philosophy. And we live in an epoch at the end of painting, and yet painting outlives everything as in a metaphysical remnant, as Kurt Badt reminds us in his great work on Cézanne.

Giorgio Agamben notes in his little Il tempo del pensiero (2023) how Heideger declared his Le Thor seminared that he always thought that Cézanne was the other figure of the tradition that resembled his own path. It is a curious analogy to a painter and the painterly praxis in the age of technological subsumption. Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, since I am working on a small book on the communication between painting and thought, and I want to understand what painting has to offer.

As a preliminary response to the difficulty that emerged in the ‘new beginning’, I am left wondering if the threshold is an intermediary space to arrest the jump beyond nihilism, which is ultimately what is at stake. This has been my way- I am all for changing that – of reading Agamben’s work: to remain at the threshold in order not to force the overcoming of nihilism, even if that anti-nihilism takes the force of antiphilosophy or thought of the unthinkable (Moreiras). Can thought breathe from the rest and imperturable dwelling in the threshold, if understood as mediated by the hand and the eye at a distance? This is for me the problem of painting as the last activity at the end of metaphysics. A duration that escapes the regime of the ontic but that does not dare to point to transcendence nor does it accept the inevitability of anthropological struggle. Yet, duration is the condition of breathing in a landscape: if we face it, is there even the need to begin or retreat?