Author: infrapoliticalreflections

Casa Bayona’s pensive slave. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the Church Santa María del Rosario of Havana there is a pendentive cycle completed in the 1770s painted by the baroque artist José Nicolás de Escalera – whom according to Guy Pérez Cisneros, was truly the first professional Cuban painter of the tradition – that includes a black slave in a pensive pose seating on a lower step, just below a Dominican priest who figures prominently in the middle of the picture holding a Bible and raising his right arm forward [1]. It has been noted that the figure of the black slave is also the first portrait of a slave in the New World, and its meaning has been highly disputed. The enigmatic slave or liberto portrait shows the man in a thinking pose, with a folded long white shirt, and what seems to be a wooden rosary hanging in plain sight. It is hard to make the details of his facial expressions, but it is obvious that his gaze is neither upwards nor directed at the viewer, but rather suspended, as if were, in a moment of attention and rest (and also listening?). The context here is fundamental, since Santa María del Rosario Church was commissioned by the Count of Bayona, a wealthy member of the sacarocracia (sugar plantation owner) after a previous church was burned to the ground by a slave revolt that took place in 1727 in an act of complete defiance to Christian indoctrination. 

The event that only has come down to us in just a handful of mentions and erasures of the colonial archive is featured prominently, as we know, in Manuel Moreno Fraginals’ El Ingenio when the historian documents the spiritual schism of the eighteenth century colonial plantations of the island. According to Fraginals’ historical account, the slave insurrection in the plantation took place in the wake of a theatrical enactment proposed by the Count of Casa Bayona in an act of repentance and humility aiming to mimic a well known moment of the Christian story: one day the Count washed the feet of twelve slaves, and when he finished he made them sat with him for dinner. Later that afternoon the slaves revolted and burnt down the whole sugar mill, including the chapel, to the ground. The episode ended with a plantation mayoral officer hunting down the runaway slaves, who was ordered to place the heads of the dead slaves high in spikes for the Count and everyone to see them [2]. It is an early staging of visibility and bodily dominion that the modern epoch will take to its final conclusion. 

The portrayal of human suffering was a symptom of the impossible hegemony of christianization of body and soul that the missionary Nicolás Duque de Estrada decades later will try to deploy in his pedagogical treatise Explicación de la doctirna cristiana acomoada a la capacidad de los negros bozales (1823), which argued that obedience of slaves could be achieved by implating “guilt” and work ethic in the affective interiority, in the forum internum of their souls. But even Estrada was of the fact that after sixteen hour workdays the Christian ascesis was imperceptible and little more than convoluted chatter to the ears of the slave. It is almost as if the slave, separated from the politico-theological inscription of salvation, was already outside the subjective domination of productive bondage and political freedom.

When Escalera was commissioned to do the cycle of frescos at Santa María del Rosario he was asked to combine a twofold narrative: the history of Christian salvation and the story of the Casa Bayona. At the center of the altar piece is the world as a common house or oikos, that carries history and its bodily sovereignty forward. One possible reading of the pensive slave shown in Santa María del Rosario’s pendentive is to assume that this figure is completely outside the eschatological vision embodying a sense of freedom that only painting could have documented in its unique and mute language. This raises the question about the relation between painting and freedom in which the figural emerges unmistakably fixed beyond historical narration. Although writing about Cézanne’s late work, Kurt Badt once suggested that there is no such a thing as the representation of freedom, but rather “painting generates a concept of freedom as two-faced: negatively, it is liberation from isolation and resistance, positively to the serious gentleness of freedom….expression in freedom to the scene from nature, which declares the world to be existing together, a mutual self-supporting and carrying of things” [3]. The pensive slave portrayed in the pendentive does not embody freedom understood as the spiritual accumulation of rights and duties known to the order of historical transformation; rather is an absolute pictorial appearance of freedom because it embodies, in its non-separation of life and thought, a static moment of a being that contemplates the liberty of his potency.

What is striking about the collective portrait where Escalera inserted the former slave is what we can call, following Bernard Berenson, a dimension of the ineloquent that appears just as “mute, with no urgent communication to make, and no thought of rousing us with look and gesture. If they express anything it is the character, essence rather than momentary feeling or purpose. They manifest potentiality rather than activity. It is enough that they exist in themselves” [4]. In the pensive gesture of his pose, the slave is the untouched existence and the revolt that rips the escathological narrative that ordains the interiors of Santa María del Rosario. Malraux once noted that the age of the divine disdained the realistic portrait of an ordinary person, because he was too distant and mundane from the stone conclave of the gaze of the gods. The slave’s inexpressive ‘naturalness’ refrains from partaking into a mood compensated by the semantic compulsion of the colonial painter, because his naturalness discloses the indestructible soul that has transfigured the realm of the divine. 

The unfathomable mystery of the pensive slave or liberto is the obscure and yet luminous portrait of a life in thought that is, at the same time, the thought of a life that is forever inexpressive, and as such the highest state of imperturbable freedom in the aftermath of worldly destruction. The ‘gentleness of freedom’ that Badt locates at the heart of painting is the imperative of the stream that carries, and yet restrains, thought and appearance into the figure of life. The freedom that anchors painting – because such freedom is never realized in painting except as vulgarity – becomes a tacit secret for which ultimately there is no image.  

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Notes 

1.Guy Pérez Cisneros. Características de la evolución de la pintura en Cuba (Ministerio de Educación, 1959).

2. Manuel Moreno Fraginals. El Ingenio (Crítica, 2001), 99.

3. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (Faber & Faber, 1965), 314.

4. Bernard Berenson. Piero Della Francesca: The Ineloquent in Art (Chapman & Hall 1954), 7.

The idea of a world state. by Gerardo Muñoz

As a theme for his 1949 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, an American scholar, Robert Hutchins, decided to titled his conference “St. Thomas and the World State”. It is obvious that Hutchins had fresh in his mind the fact that the long European Civil War of the twentieth century, which included two World Wars, was a direct consequence of warring nationalisms and militarized nations that in our times it is once again has lavishly returned with even higher lethal consequences. There is a major historical difference, however; and that is the fact that whereas the nationalisms of the twentieth century were distinct territorial struggles in the wake of crumbling empires, the emergence of the new nationalisms are concerted, nourished, and aligned to the global commanding American imperialism. The techno-political ideal of an influential figure on American elites such as Peter Thiel takes the form of warring nations and firms against the possibility of a global world state to secure peace, interdependence, and free movement of populations across borders and communities [1]. It is fair to say that contemporary technopolitical dominance is a combination of imperial and national forces through the perpetual administration of anomia or lawlessness. 

What is striking about Hutchins’ 1949 lecture is that although Aquinas’ philosophy of law has been traditionally understood as the most important source of natural law, in his proposal Thomas’ actuality is able to fulfill positive law against the instrumental morality of nationalist empires (the United States and the Soviet Union then) that “in the absence of positive law; they may be expected to break the peace” [2]. For anyone that knows the emergence of the European state as coterminous with the secular authority of legal positivism will find this emphasis contradictory at best. The very notion of positive law requires principles of sovereign authority and normative internal recognition of its command coordination in order to consolidate a stable political form over time. This is a contradiction that Hutchins was aware of throughout his lecture. Consider, as an example, when he claims that: “The origin and meaning of the saying that a state has the natural right to sovereignty therefore, is that one state may not forcibly impose its will upon another. It means that Catholicism should oppose the foundations of a world state by force” (36). 

Or, when glossing over the obvious tension between the right of national sovereignty and a potential international federal state in the views of popes and Catholic thinkers: “I think they know that the national state is no longer the perfect community and that positive law is required to make the world community an effective political organization. I believe that they are making two points that are of the utmost importance: first, they are saying that any world government must be a federal government; and second, they see that world must come into existence by consent and not by conquest” (34). However, any student of modern political thought knows that consent and coercion are two internal modalities of governance for legitimate rule. Hutchins’ notion of “consent”, along with positive law, remains not only unthematized, but dependent on a circular of definition of law; that is, the “common good”, which is not a political concept, but a theological and moral notion extracted from the philosophy of history of Christian salvation. 

Towards the end of the lecture, Hutchins goes beyond strict positive law as if searching for some substantive ground: “…the West should not only survive, but also revive and rescue a deeper conception of human civilization than the one recently current, which enters around a religion of progress by resourceful greed and technological mastery of non-human nature” (42). But Hutchins’ plea for the retrieval of a past memory of the West runs astray when it relocates Church and State into a dual predicament of a new world state for peace on the conditions of the same structure of political theology that are no longer operative, but that actually make up the very ground of the modern collapse into nihilism – nihilism that political form does not remain immune to, quite the contrary. In fact, it is the most salient symptom of civilizational collapse. In the same way that Ernst Jünger immediately after the war called for the subsidiary spiritual assistance of the churches in the face of technological power- “the true conquest of nihilism and attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches” – Hutchins will also repeat that only the conjointment of Church and State “must now work together for world peace founded on university charity…and universal democracy” (44) [3]. And the same thesis has found a clear expression in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aetenae (2021): “To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil…Church and Empire are called to operate in harmony” [4]. This speaks directly to what we have recently called the plasticity inherent in the historical adaptations of thomism in social life [5].

This plasticity amounts to the administration of desperate souls from the structures of the state and Churches, without ever transforming the mere survival of life on Earth. This leaves us with the notion of kingdom, which Hutchins introduces in opposition to the political community of city life (polis), but only to reabsorb it into the order of political theology. And it is at this threshold, that we can claim that the kingdom is not a political theological category, but an experiential allowance in which life, the dead and languages occur beyond and before political determinations. It is no surprise, then, that Ivan Illich called the kingdom primarily a mystical experience: “I will dare to formulate a hypothesis: the kingdom is what constitutes the authentic mystical experience, if the mystic knows what experience is really constituted by. The mystical experience of the believer is the conscious experience of the kingdom before the parousia. The mystical experience is the fruit of love, and, therefore, it is also accessible to every lover. The awareness about its meaning is the fruit of faith…” [6]. 

We tend to forget that both national units and the contemporary empires of world building and destruction have been first and foremost enemies of spoken living languages and idioms. On the one hand, the historical grammars to build the unity of people’s official language, and in our days the rise of Artificial Intelligence has clearly become the last stage through which power abandons languages to computational and rhetorical obsolescence. This opening towards awareness is not an article of faith through consent nor a moral predicament that can be adequate prima facie into a political register; it is fundamentally a linguistic experience that allows for the delicate cultivation of peaceful coexistence taking place not in a world, but between them: “To learn a language in a human and mature way way is to accept the responsibility for its silences and sounds. The gift a people gives us in their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than its system of sounds…The greater the distance between two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love” [7]. 

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Notes 

1. “Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel On Ancient Prophecies And Modern Tech,” in conversation with Peter Robinson, October 2024, Hoover Institute: https://youtu.be/wTNI_lCvWZQ?si=M8-qrBh-G7bYZPfw

2. Robert M. Hutchins. St. Thomas and The World State (Marquette University Press, 1948), 15. 

3. Ernst Jünger. The Peace (Henry Regnery Company, 1948), 69. 

4. Pope Francis. “Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aeternae (2021)”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20210325_centenario-dante.html 

5. Gerardo Muñoz. “The social efficacy of thomism”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/31/the-social-efficacy-of-thomism-by-gerardo-munoz/

6. Ivan Illich. “Concertning Aesthetic and Religious Experience”, in The Powerless Church and other selected writings, 1955-1985 (University of Penn State Press, 2018), 86.

7. Ivan Illich. “Missionary Silence”, in The Church, Change, and Development (Urban Center Training Press, 1970), 121.

The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

The central question that “The Aleph” raises is as banal as difficult to answer: who is Beatriz Viterbo? For one, she is dead. Borges’ Leibnizian experiment with the infinite point of the universe is that even assuming that we account for all the possible predicates of this person we still cannot exhaust who lurks behind “Beatriz Viterbo”. In a way, Beatriz remains encrypted in a house soon to be demolished, remaining unattainable and mysterious in the passing of the world. As we know, there have been critics that have taken up the detective task to understand the significance of the name Beatriz Viterbo by probing the story’s dedication to Estela Canto, who later became the rightful owner of the original manuscript, and that connects to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of its cantiche structure as well as the figure of Beatrice [1]. However, as Giorgio Agamben once said regarding the Italian poet, it is utterly senseless to attempt to identify a subject behind Beatrice, since what is at stake in Dante’s poetics, perhaps of all poetics, is the experiment of language as an experience of love [2]. What the name Beatriz Viterbo enacts is no different. 

Indeed, in Borges’ Beatriz Viterbo this experience of love is one that fundamentally lacks images and predicates of this world; which means that love, if to be held as an intensity of the living, in the name harbors the region between life and death, between memory and forgetting. These distinctions are not oppositional, but rather an angular index that defines erotic intensity; and, as we know, the name is the supreme vehicle of the impropriety of oneself because it precedes it. As Borges writes in “The theologians” also included in The Aleph: “There are some that look for love in a woman in order to forget her; in order to cease thinking about her” [3]. The fundamental formlessness of love does not depend on neither images nor acts, but on the enduring vocative or song (canto) that shines forth in the open secret of the name. 

This is why the portrait of the deceased is insufficient for the narrator of the story. In a moment that is the clearest parallelism to the concatenation of “things seen” in the aleph, the name appears four times in repetition: “Beaitriz, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre…” [4]. If Osip Mandelstam once remarked that the “eye is an instrument of thought”, one could say that the the voice of the name is the instance where language and thought coincide without remainder; a convergence of Heaven and Earth, of the dead and the living in the grain of the voice. There are no static images of Viterbo because her mysterious life, the unlived life with the narrator, is precisely the missing image guarded by the name. In the basement, facing upwards to peek into the aleph, we are told that he, Borges, will be able to “establish a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz” (“podrás entablar un diálogo con todas la imágenes de Beatriz”). But what the aleph cannot yield is the missing image that is only the event of his irreducible linguistic contact proper to his memory. Once again Maldelstam: “The word, the name, is a psyche…does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten” [5]. But what is not forgotten is not that quality or that image of a person, but the enduring rustling of a name that recalls the oldest human experience: the mystery of the voice.

It might also be for this reason that Beatriz Viterbo recalls not just Dante’s divine and eternal Muse, but the world of the dead; the vetus in ‘Viterbo’, that is, the oldest or ‘most ancient’ life that dwells in the underworld, because its direct provenance is the archaic Etruscan civilization [6]. If Beatrice, as the trope of transcendence beyond the Earth has been a repeated object of literary interpretation, Viterbo as the vetus burial has rarely generated any interest (if the house of Viterbo is being demolished, this also means that in her proper name is the burial site at the end of remembrance). 

In the cadence of the name “Beatriz Viterbo” we can hear the transit between the living and the dead, the invisible and the present, the possible predications as well as the defaced; a work of oblivion in virtue of its own caducity. “Me trabajó otra vez el olvido”, writes Borges towards the end evoking the erosion of forgetting in the void of nonpresence: the working of eros pushes to the end, towards absolute oblivion through the very accruing of remembrance. Life is this immemorial that is encrypted, as if were, in a handful of names. 

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Notes 

1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges : A Literary Biography (Paragon House, 1988), 414.

2. Giorgio Agamben. “No amanece el cantor”, in En torno a la obra de José Ángel Valente (Alianza Editorial, 1996), 49.

3. Jorge Luis Borges. “Los teólogos”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 50.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El Aleph”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 189. 

5. Osip Mandelstam. “The Word and Culture” (1921), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1975, 531.

6. Adolfo Zavaroni. Etymological Dictionary of Etruscan Words (2024), 310.

The love of painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

There might very well be an internal affinity between painting and love that at some point it becomes indistinguishable. A painterly picture can become love unquenched for that which remains persistently fixed and unrealizable. In one of the short essay books of his Big Sur period, Henry Miller asked this very question of painting. For him panting had a wondering origin that crosses the hand, undoing what we can easily enact. The erotic dimension of painting, thus, has nothing to do with the image or figure of the beloved, but rather with a specular limitation staged in the ability to allow the unseen to be incorporated in the visible scheme of the world. Only if we are able to see – and by the same token, only if there we are facing an event of painting – can something like use can be liberated from the constraints of mimetic compulsion. Miller writes in To Paint is to Love Again (1960): 

“To paint is to love again. It is only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to a certain manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat or unpalatable unless it is our power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see .See into and around. Or, as John Marin, once put it – “art must show what goes on in the world” [1]. 

The place of painting for Miller is an imperturbable state that refuses to be fixated on objects, but in the invisible region (as in the figure of the chora) that allows for the thing in the world to be used. This is why Miller considered Japanese watercolor and prints an absolute primer of the pictorial: it taught him the appearance of worlds within the world, regionalizing the surroundings never logically stated unto itself, which in modernity it became the catastrophic horizon of autonomy towards its posterior liquidation. This is why Miller, very much like Carlo Levi, understood that the crisis of painting in the Western tradition ultimately signaled a general sense of social terror as a new phase of human desperation attenuated by the circulation of social fictions. 

At the height of the the closure of civilization, painting reemerged, if Kurt Badt’s axiom is correct, as the last metaphysical activity of human praxis. A metaphysical activity that holds on to the experience of belief in suspended appearance of originary anthropogenesis. For Miller, in painting as much as in love “one must be a true believer” [2]. And this assertion must be understood in the backdrop of Miller’s experiential retreat in the landscape of Big Sur: an experience away from the closure of American city life in research of a “feeling of aloness as spiritual achievement”, as a relation of oneself towards disclosure [3]. In this sense, the painter is a counter-social figure that, refusing to make stir in the world, turns to serenity, silence, and to the pressing contours of the unfathomable beyond any prefiguration. The believer in painting – who is a figure of belief in the desert, after the flight of the gods in the nocturnal vigil of history – is the thrust to the experience of things without barristers or shortcuts to what is revealed.

The age of automation in mid-century transformation of American industrial production serves as the historical backdrop of Miller’s indictment regarding the poverty and eventual disappearance of painting due to the autonomization of human praxis and the gigantic scale in spatial organization. Following Georges Duhamel’s prognosis in America: the menace (1931), he shared the intuition that the crisis of dexterity meant the impossibility of realizing painting, now situated beyond the grasp of human absorption [4]. A land without landscape that, as Adorno noted, bears no traces of the human hand. And this was seen already in the 1950s when the rise of abstract expressionism in North American announced not just the end of easel painting, but the funeral of the whole pictorial tradition. The barbarism of gigantic and unlimited Americanism would run counter to painting as a sensorial activity that embraced the vital limitations of its region. 

Miller’s insistence on painting was an eulogy to a life as experience – painting is indistinguishable from the hands and souls of the painters that he encountered and shared his life – and the value of poverty as absolute necessity for a life that regionalizes our contact with the world. It was through the love of painting that humanity could only restore its divine presence without rest.

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Notes 

1. Henry Miller. To Paint is to Love Again (Cambria Books, 1960), 17. 

2. Ibid., 39

3. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34.

4. Georges Duhamel. America: the menace (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 85.

Gethsemane as experience. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a panel in the Museo del Prado titled “Agony in the Garden”, attributed to the French painter Colart de Laon (1377) whose religious work barely survives (this panel is, in fact, one piece from an original triptych). The scene portrays the well known stay of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsamane on the Mount of Olives, where solitude and abandonment prepares the interval for the moment of transfiguration. If anything, Gethsamane is an experience of inwardness outside itself, which the painter has marvelously captured in the figure of Jesus raising his hands in supplication to the starry skies and god. Or so we think. The crisp blue tone of the sky immediately reminds the view of the vault of the Villa Farnesina that Fritz Saxl has interpreted as the transmission of a previous pagan astrological faith in the pictorial composition. The intense blue tone coupled with the emphatic stars arrest our imagination, but also that of the humane and worldly Christ.

What kind of experience is to look up into the firmament from man’s place on Earth and the cosmos? And what are we to make of the inability of the civilized human being to look into the blue depth not as a mirror of Nature, but of the non-totalizable and irreducible experience of solitude? It must be said that in a post-mythical world, the increasing loss of the opening of the sky goes hand in hand with the boundless loss of the Earth. And this is why we are tempted to read Colart de Laon’s picture as a gesture that renders legible the passage of the same movement: the Jesus that raises his hands outwards to the sky; and, simultaneously, the dozing Jesus that inhabits the contemplative state at the center bottom of the picture. To live in the world is defined neither by the experience of the time of arrival of the sky nor by the inward experience of the soul, but by the ability of transiting from one state to the other. And only there the worldly divine can be disclosed beyond the sclerosis of form.

This might also explain why Søren Kierkegaard following the German hymnist Gerhard Tersteegen could write in a gloss of his diaries that Jesus arises from the love feat into the path of Gethsemane: “It is always this way: Gethsemane lies closest to the highest bliss” [1]. The highest place is not the moment of absolute transcendence through faith; it is the secret that for Tersteegen expresses a kenotic hymn that empties life in the direction of poverty and death. In other words, the “highest bliss” is the experience of expropriation of every life; making life and death become indistinguishable in the vacillating night. A night beyond time and without god.  

Perhaps not just the “religious experience”, but all experience has as its central paradigm, the highest bliss in the face of death in which language can only account for it in its muteness and reverence. This is not an experience of vital teleology of humanity, but of a furtive relation. “Hacía sobre ella la experiencia”, as a Chilean writer once put it in the imperfect tense. But this can only mean to do an experience on the dissolution of oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. Journals and Notebooks V.7 (Princeton University Press, 2014), 368.

Verónica Jaffé’s translation of the “Andenken”. by Gerardo Muñoz

Verónica Jaffé’s most recent Poesía, traduccion, libertad (2024), which gathers some of the translations already contained in Fredrich Hölderlin: Cantos Hespéricos (La Laguna de Campona, 2016), features an introductory essay where she reflects on translating Hölderlin’s poetry from the German into her own creative visual renderings of Spanish. Reflecting on the difficult task, if not utterly impossible, of translating “Andenken” (in Spanish she opts for “Recuerdo” and not “Memoria”), Jaffé departs from an important observation that we must take into account here: the fact that this late hymn has been catalogued as a proemial composition. What does it mean that “Andenken” is to be read as a proem? As we know from the Ancient sources, the proem is an oratory prelude to the topic deployed in a text; in other words, it is the persuasive caesura of language before any argumentative exposition. Hence, the composition of the proem is something like the pure mirroring of language. This could explain why Hölderlin’s “Andenken” while prima facie about memory and thinking does not have a guiding thread to restrain it; it unfolds the enactment of its own recollection through the sayable.

If “Andenken” is a long proem – the space where the poem and proem absolutely coincide – then this means any translation must keep the poetic possibilities of oration in preamble, in path of preparation. Jaffé offers two distinct trans-creations of the famous poem’s last lines. The first reads thus: “Un mar que guarda los recuerdos / que da amores, que los toma / para que solo queden después / como tesoros / en quienes recuerden y en quienes escriban” [1]. In the second version, even more elaborate and idiosyncratic, Jaffé writes: “de pensar con todos / mis amores, es decir / pensar fijando / papel y lápiz / sobre tela / en memoria de todos mis muertos” [2]. It is noteworthy that the famous literal last lines of the “Andenken”, suspended in an enjambment, appeals to a canvas that is splattered with the memory of the dead. It seems of all the dead of the human race. What does it mean that the act of remembrance is the recollection of all the dead? Poetic imagination, if a testamentary document, appeals to the archaic where the living and the dead inhabit the world through image [3]. For Jaffé – but this also an intuition that Hölderlin shared in his pindaric translations – the beginning is not a previous stage, but in media res of the event of language. 

The recollection of language within proem attests to the exilic dimension of language; the site where no one truly ever belongs to: “…la lengua en mi país que no me pertenece”, writes Jaffé [4]. This means that the authentic remembrance of language is not a national language, but always ex patria lingua, or a language outside the telluric fabric of the national community. Because we are always walking strangers in our own language, the contact with the dead repeatedly reemerges in the memorial grain of the voice. 

As C.M. Bowra has noted, Pindar’s allusion to Memory takes place in the context of the Muses: “[the poet] invokes Memory because she embodies the accumulated wisdom of the past, and the Muses because they pass on this wisdom to him. What he asks from them is the ability to deal properly with what they give….men are blind if they do not pursue wisdom with the help of the Muses” [5]. If the “Andenken” should be read as a proem, this is because recollection is always fixed in the irreducible experience of our voice that recalls language from its beyond.

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Notes 

1. Verónica Jaffé. Poesía, traducción, libertad (Editorial Blanca Pantin, 2024), 38.

2. Ibid., 40. 

3. Ibid., 40.

4. Ibid., 51.

5. C.M. Bowra, Pindar (Oxford, 1964), 33.

Enamoured psyche. On Pablo Oyarzun’s Hölderlin, el recuerdo (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

The concluding verses of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Rembrance” or “Memoria”), “Yet what remains, the poets found” stands as one of the preeminent testaments of modern poetry, and in Heidegger’s famous characterization, as a declaration of the task of the poet. At least since the time of Stefan George and Max Kommerell, the figure of poet or Dichter, a hyperbolic figure of illumination and guidance caught in the net of poetry and philosophy, was already dependent on Hölderlin’s mysterious words. What remains in what the poet remembers and clears for foundation? What is the relationship between remembrance and what is ‘found’ or ‘established’? “Andenken / Remembrance” is a hymn from the late period, which means that it must be read in consistency with Höderlin’s poetological framework as it reaches its maximum degree of intensity in its declaration and deliverance. Pablo Oyarzun’s most recent Hölderlin, el recuerdo (Mudana ediciones, 2025) is a powerful and subtle contribution to the understanding of this poem that measures up to the task in its attention to lexicon and structure, metaphysical condensation, and the vortex of ‘memory’ that discloses the poem. One of the merits of Oyarzun’s philosophical hermeneutics, if we can call it that, resides in its refusal to incorporate philosophical doctrines to inform the major questions of the hymn; rather, he favors the very unfolding of the poem ramping its internal structure for possibilities (Oyarzun 18-19). Rereading “Remembrance” opens a path between philosophy and poetry in the dawn of the realization of metaphysics, whose price was paid by crushing the possible and the voice of the poem. 

For Oyarzun the poet’s remembrance is that of appropriation of what is proper, and thus inappropriable, and to which the hymn can only ‘thank’ in the way of thinking as figure in the face of the unfathomable. Following Heidegger’s reading to a point, to give thanks is also to welcome and greet that lets humans and things be in their truth; since greeting always assumes otherness as foreign into presence (Oyarzun 29-30). And in presence life acquires texture, depth, singularization, but also conversation; a reminder that will control the rhythm of Hölderlin’s hymn. What is brought to presence, then, is neither a possession nor a legible inheritance, but the non-synthetizable modulation of what is proper in virtue of being absolutely alien (Oyarzun 34). What is recalled in this poem that remembers and thinks the unthinkable? Is it just a stage for Hölderlin to poetically transfigure his well known travels in Bordeaux? Oyarzun tells us that even if that is to be taken into account, the foreigner path is only essential as a way of homecoming, making the site (and song) into the hymn (Oyarzun 42). There is relation to the absolute other, but only as transitory to becoming and divine destiny in the world: “…el espíritu ama, porque precisamente así, ensa autoalienación puede transitar a lo otro que lo otro, es decir, apropiarse de lo propio […] el pensamiento del Ereignis está condicionado estructuralmente poesía ex-propiación, por ese retraimiento, distracción o retiro (Entzug), solo puede el cual se da lo propio (Oyarzun 54-55). Höderlin’s poem sings from the lacuna of its own expropriation of the abode. And that abode is ultimately the unworking of remembrance and memory that is defaced in being absolutely intimate and irreducible.

In order to elucidate the contours of this memory and its oblivion, Oyarzun follows Dieter Heinrich observation that: “este movimiento [of remembrance as transcendence] conocedor de su propio curso y a la vez desviado del mismo, aspirando a un conocimiento en que algo perdurable (lasting), con gratitud, reine aún en la superación – esto es remembranza” (Oyarzun 61). What is remembrance if not what unweaves time? It is not an actual faculty of human psychology, nor a spectral incorporation of a missing object; rather, it is the non-syntheizable partition between language and the wound of existence; a separation that is only redeemed in the way of remembrance that deposes an ideal recollection of missing facts in preparation for recomposition. Oyarzun’s reading will depend on clearing the notion of severability as a condition for remembering and forgetting as it makes an entry into the poem’s final verse about the “fixating eyes of love” (den Blick heften). Helena Cortés Gabaudán translates it as “y el amor también fija aplicadamente los ojos” [1]. “Y también”, “but also”, a conjunction of persistence that Oyarzun reads as an inexorable attachment to memory and separation, and the memory of separation (Oyarzun 68). Because there is no sliding towards remembrance without departure, coming into the presence welcomes the memory that, in that very moment, has transformed our souls. 

Ultimately, for Oyarzun the vortex of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” is love understood as the supreme citation that enacts the place of both thanking and remembering: “Amar es recordar, frecuentar con el recuerdo (el pensamiento), lo amado, incluso allí donde lo amado está presente, porque así lo resguarda de la mera posesión y agradece su presencia. Amar es pensar-en, un modo, tal vez el más entrañable, de Andenken, amor” (Oyarzun 73-74). And this means that what remains and endures, as Adorno observed in his well known essay on parataxis in Hölderlin’s late poetry, is neither of the logical nor of the temporal indexes, but the event of language as originary creation and donation without contestation (Oyarzun 77). This is the instance where Hölderlin’s strange case of the divinization of the word – and this is the particularity of the hymn form, an element that is never teased out by Oyarzun – becomes absolute and intransigent. It is Höderlin’s absolute proximity with the classical world, but also its radical separation in the post-mythical world of dissenchantment. It can be said that that what endures ‘thanks’ the love of remembrance in its persistence of the word that does not allow history and the crisis of tradition: “en nombre de la cosa que queda, en la fragilidad de su tiempo, que es ese mismo quedar” (Oyarzun 79). 

The poem becomes the verbal and sayable site where the poetizing resides, as well as the greeting and farewell of departure, just like the spectral sailors of the poem. What endures intimately can be called love as a form of the immemorial (Oyarzun 80). And that is because in inscribing, or holding on to the irreducible origin, poetics becomes the supreme form of love – the love in separation – of an expropriated language that welcomes us home in conversation with friends. This attests to the spirit of Hölderlin’s well known letter to his friend Böhlendorff in 1802: “A los artistas les hace falta la psyche entre amigos, el nacimiento del pensamiento en la conversación y la carta. De lo contrario, no gozamos de nada de esto para nosotros mismos” [2]. And this intoxicated love in language that departs from separation situates Hölderlin as radically different from the Chirstian agape and its bond of perfect unity for securing salvation (Colossians 3:14). A salvation that Hölderlin overcame in the drama of Empedocles, enacting the impossible incorporation of the aorgic physis through the writing of the tragic myth. 

Now we are also able to understand why Hölderlin transited to the hymn as the supreme form of the poem; not because because it is the origin or its last stage, but a suspension of language retrieved is gathered in the two moments of salutation and farewell, celebration and lamentation [3]. The hymnal dimension of the poem becomes language as such, which Oyarzun calls the immemorial without ever alluding to the notion of hymn. Indeed, the love of remembrance only becomes possible as a disjointed factum of experience anchored in its abyssal noncorrespondence  (Oyarzun 84). Thus, to remember is to love the caducity of life – “este ya no es la signatura indeleble del amor”, as beautifully expressed by Oyarzun – in a world in which the testament of language awaits no resurrection. 

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Notes 

1. Friedrich Hölderlin. Poesía esencial (La Oficina, 2017), Trad. Helena Cortés, 129. 

2. Friedrich Hölderlin. Correspondencia completa (Ediciones Hiperión, 1990), trads. Helena Cortés & Arturo Leyte, 554. 

3. Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce: Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022), 246-247.

Zoning and the inalienable. By Gerardo Muñoz

The notion of “zoning” in American public law refers to the compartmentalization of land use (residential, governmental, industrial, among others), as well as the “zones” of the administrative framework that dispenses its delegated power. It is a common fact that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which includes the “Taking Clause”, states that taking territory must always be equitable compensated. The Fourteenth Amendment included during Reconstruction implements a non-discriminatory standard into zoning as division of space for political representation, and what is usually referred as “redistricting” in any given state. This means that the operative semantic and legal field of “zoning” refers simultaneously to both land as property, and territory as a spatial index of political representation. Of course, modern revolutions, whether in 1776 or in 1789, were stealth transformations of space into these two tier units of alienated property and representation, as we know from the territorial census in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Likewise, the framework of Americanism as a political civilization is that of landsurveying, which ultimately means not just to make coterminous sovereign authority to territorial limitations, but to make transactions between world forms (territory and its inhabitants). If “zoning” has become a fundamental point of contention in all spheres of American life – from housing to development, from political representation to governmental “taking”, from wildlife sites to the circulation of good and services of the metropolis – is because the essence of Calvinism was fundamentally a settler cosmos that reduced life to usurpation of territory. In this sense, Bruno Maçaes is right that in the age of planetary Americanism the predominant form of domination is world-building and world-destroying. The perpetual social war over “zoning” is precisely the movement of building and destroying life-worlds through the linguistic justification of the administrative legal apparatus. 

In his forgotten book Nomos and Physis: Origin and Meaning of One (1945) on the severability of the two notion of “order” in Ancient Greece, Felix Heinimann notes that the triumph of nomos over physis implied a separation from the world of “reality” and “deeds” from that of rhetorical language that came to dominate it (nomos). In the present, the separation between nomoi and physis is the void that is perpetually governed by the attenuation of zoning: the creation of artificial worlds, but, at the same time, the composition of artificial languages. But the paradox is the following: the world of nomoi ceases to have any contact with that of physis; and physis, the natural world, becomes an artificial life world only responsive to irreflexive and undetermined practices of social exchange. This means that zoning is the vector of force that constantly separates human beings from both the world and language, and ultimately stripped its “humanity” from the species-being. 

As the zoning process plunges extensively into all spheres of practical and intellectual relations of human beings, an increasingly grouping of unalienable life emerges in a polar night. Here solitude in language brings forth the warmth of the unalienable. Perhaps it is in this night, where a trivial amor mundi will be cultivated for other generations, as beautifully suggested by Tim Ingold. A vita nota that will only commence on the lines that are invisible and opaque to the shining surfaces of zoning.

En apertura. Respuesta a comentarios sobre La fisura (2025) en Ñuñoa. Por Gerardo Muñoz

Lo que sigue a continuación es una síntesis escrita de mi réplica en la presentación de La fisura posthegemónica (Doblea Editores, 2025), en la que intervinieron Mauricio Amar, Ángel Octavio Álvarez, Miguel Ángel Hermosilla, y Lieta Vivaldi el 3 de octubre en Ñuñoa, Santiago de Chile. Esos comentarios aparecerán en el próximo número de la revista Escrituras Americanas.

Agradezco enormemente las intervenciones de mis amigos Ángel, Miguel Ángel, Lieta, Mauricio, porque en última instancia un libro no es nada sin la posibilidad de ser encarado y llevado fuera de sus límites. Mauricio Amar preguntaba por la apuesta general del libro, y quizás pueda decir algo sobre esto. Este libro se inspira en lo que me gustaría llamar la escritura del adiós o del farewell. Siempre me ha llamado la atención que, al comienzo de este siglo, dos pensadores que admiro profundamente escribieron por separado dos libros de farewell: me refiero a Farewell to an Idea (Yale U Press, 1999) de T.J. Clark, y The Exhaustion of Difference (Duke U Press, 2000) de Alberto Moreiras. Respectivamente, adiós al modernismo pictórico, y a la suma metareflexiva sobre América Latina. Al menos para mi La fisura es una forma de decirle adiós a cierta reflexión política contemporánea. Y decir adiós supone atravesar el problema; por eso mismo, el hilo del libro es un problema de hegemonía que ha dominado el horizonte reflexivo y práctico del pensamiento teórico.

Ya aludimos al colapso de las formas de mediación, y se nos suele olvidar que forma es política, y la política es sólo posible mediante una forma. Si queremos pensar contra la dominación, a espaldas del vector retórico de la hegemonía, debemos tomar muy en serio cómo la forma hoy solo cumple la tarea de la dominación sobre la existencia y la palabra. La insistencia compulsiva que las formas ofrecen desembocan en su cierre letal (en la jerga de Alex Karp) sobre cada uno de nosotros. Ángel Octavio veía que el problema se nos presentaba como salida a otra parte. ¿Pero, qué salida? 

Toda salida remite a una trascendencia menor: podemos salir al cielo como interioridad espiritualizada; o bien, podemos salir a un espacio demónico nocturno, un hacer noche, como versa el título del nuevo libro de Constanza Michelson. No deja de ser un síntoma de época que algunos hoy insistan en el vector de la espiritualización como vuelta a la tierra, aunque ésta sea el desierto en free fall que produce el declive (stagnation). El último Tronti, con el que tuve la suerte de intercambiar, lo recogía: el único combate hoy pasa por la interioridad (xeniteia). Pero el problema aquí es que el mundo no coincide con la Tierra. Y lo que interesa, entonces, ese justamente esa no-coincidencia, esa fisura, con respecto al mundo del viviente que hoy aparece como búsqueda de región. Y la región está en su acontecer fuera del mundo más que en el fuero interno. 

O podríamos decir que está en la apertura del paisaje. No hay salida a un lugar sometido a la viabilidad ecológica. O no puede terminar ahí. Al final de cuentas, como vio un pensador en su momento, la revolución industrial fue la segunda revolución, puesto que la primera había sido la relativa a la agricultura entendida como asentamiento en el terreno. En apertura entronizamos con el cielo; o, en la bellísima definición de Kurt Badt comentando la obra pictórica de Constable: “el cielo es el órgano de los sentimientos”. El cielo aquí no es el espejo mítico que habilita la autoafirmación que conduce al humanismo catastrófico; más bien, es el punto de fuga que no se dirime en las particiones del suelo. Es curioso que la dominación en curso ya está operando como el diseño geoespacial del cielo. Esto es lo que comparte la figura del palantir de la Inteligencia, así como la Tianxia, doctrina “Todo bajo el Cielo” del emergente imperio chino. En apertura mantenemos las intermediaciones entre cielo y suelo en el fin de nuestro tiempo. 

Intervención para la presentación de Escritos desde la tierra baldía (2025) de Idris Robinson, UMCE, Santiago de Chile. Por Gerardo Muñoz

Ya no me toca decir mucho más sobre Escritos desde la tierra baldía (Irrupción Ediciones, 2025) de Idris Robinson, que se adelanta a la publicación de finales del este año de la versión en inglés publicada por Semiotexte, bajo otro título, The revolt eclipses whatever the world has to offer. El título en inglés en realidad tiene una afinidad chilena implícita, pues remite a una expresión de una conversación que tuve con Idris en los meses tras la revuelta de George Floyd, y que fue publicada en la ahora inexistente Revista Disenso. Estamos hablando de la primavera del 2021, lo que quiere decir que ya casi cinco años nos separan de ese momento. Creo que ambos estamos muy agradecidos no solo por la acogida en el catálogo de Irrupciones Ediciones, sino también por una colaboración de pensamiento real, que hace que todo sea un poco más llevadero y fecundo. En este comentario simplemente quiero registrar tres planos que pudieran contribuir en torno a la escena de escritura de Idris para luego conversar. 

En primer lugar, creo que como podrá ver el lector que se asome a la páginas del libro, lo que llama la atención de inmediato es una pulsión en el lenguaje que pudiéramos caracterizar de inmediatez y caída. Pongo el énfasis en este nudo, porque no se ha reparado lo suficiente, me parece, en la relación entre el acontecimiento de la revuelta y el lugar de la lengua. Creo recordar que Willy Thayer lo tematizó con cierto énfasis en una discusión sobre la “constitución menor” en un número de Papel Máquina de 2021. Idris es un pensador de escritura escasa, contenida, tenue; y, sin embargo, en esos meses del llamado “American hot summer” del 2020 su voz desbordó a la letra con regularidad. Un desborde que no tiene nada que ver con el reportaje de los hechos – no es un John Reed con nuevos días que conmovieron al mundo desde Minneapolis – aunque también los incluya desde luego, sino con la posibilidad misma de “decir” al calor de una instancia temporal que trastoca y anima. Si hay momentos de “golpes a la lengua”, ¿no es el acontecimiento de la revuelta la instancia donde la lengua hace presencia pura?

Ya que hablamos de presencia, en Escritos hay un timbre zigzagueante que pasa por dar lugar a la presencia de la existencia afroamericana; dejarla actuar en el teatro de su entorno. ¿Qué significa esto? Yo recuerdo que hace algunos años, el tren regional de New Jersey, el NJTransit, tuvo muchos problemas técnicos, y entonces durante un final de mes se habilitó montarse en tren sin pagar. Y durante esos días, los que tomamos el tren vimos de repente algo sorprendente e inédito: tribus de jóvenes afroamericanos – algunos tan jóvenes como de la junior high  – en pura algarabía y con sus rostros de absoluta felicidad se montaban al tren de Trenton a Manhattan por vez primera. La “muerte social” contra la existencia afroamericana de la cual Floyd es sólo su expresión extrema, no es reducible al momento de un siniestro, sino que es contra todo el mundo de circulación de lo social. En ese momento en el que el precio se ponía en suspenso, se abolía la cruda violencia que subyace la atadura entre la tarifa y el salario. Cuento esto porque me parece que la escritura de Idris tiene una operatividad que busca descomprimir esa violencia social contra la presencia indexando una textura experiencial, desfigurada. Y esta es su diferencia con las otras dos tendencias del pensamiento negro en Estados Unidos: el activismo político democrático (BLM), y el afropesimismo, que es una metateoría disolvente, aunque ciertamente muy comprometida con zonas autográficas o experienciales de escritura. Me parece que leer a Idris con esto en mente nos ayuda a afinar sus diferencias ante esas otras dos opciones del pensamiento crítico contemporáneo. 

Y finalmente, la elección del título relativo a la tierra baldía obviamente remite al famoso long poem The Wasteland de T.S. Eliot, que Idris recoge en varios momentos de sus escritos, aunque sin remitir al poeta. La wasteland para Eliot, como sabemos, constituía el horizonte en marcha de la modernidad protestante y maquínica ante la que él reaccionaba desde su catolicismo reaccionario; en Idris, en cambio, la wasteland es lo que ya habitamos, el espacio tortuoso y siniestro de la interconectividad, de las infraestructuras metropolitanas, de la exposición social regulada. Por banal que parezca creo que es muy atractivo haber puesto el énfasis en la tierra baldía, porque parte del colapso epocal en curso tiene que ver con la conquista del espacio; ya no el espacio de los astros donde Musk y los otros personajes de Silicon Valley quieren instalar sus fundos, sino la tierra misma que pisamos, y que ahora sentimos como lugar inmundo carente de sentido de ‘región’. La tierra traducida a superficie para ingenieros o world builders, por decirlo con Bruno Maçaes.  

Pensar hoy supone pensar sobre y en el espacio, haciendo espacio para abrir el no-espacio que le devuelve su dignidad contra toda reducción de lo intercambiable. La modernidad fue la época de la temporalidad, de la filosofía de la historia y del mesianismo; hoy, de la mano de Idris, podemos abrir la pregunta por el pensamiento en región, que tiene prioridad con respecto a la organización y a la economía política. Escritos desde la tierra baldía nos da paso a esto y a más. Muchas gracias.