Author: infrapoliticalreflections

L’illusion comique of politics. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the November-December issue of Revista Sur in 1955, Jorge Luis Borges famously published “L’illusion comique”, an indictment against Peronism as a form of social theater, where melodramatic and overacted public liturgy energized the orchestrated pace of the modern mass politics. But unlike in Cornille’s baroque play, for Borges the political ensemble of the l’illusion comique is one in which social actors have become autonomous and fully aware of the script of their acts, and if they would play along fully conscious and in “willing suspension of disbelief” (the expression is cited directly from Samuel Coleridge) [1]. This secularized form of the l’illusion comique is one in which theatricality is ever-present and unabsorbed, since its ultimate purpose is to conceal and justify a “terrible reality” (una realidad atroz) even when it aims to invert or dislocate it. It is clear that in our time, the l’illusion comique is an extension of a political agency that has convinced itself that the street topos is in radical opposition to the crisis of modern state form. No greater l’illusion comique than that which imagines that one more rush of goliardic spirituality will produce the dawn of a new beginning.

The order of the sentimentalization and pathos was the way that Borges described the l’illusion comique of the 1940s, the era of the high modern state conducting the social masses; however today the illusion is flat and rhetorical, always assertive of its metonymic mediation. In just one example of rhetorical inflation, the Prime Minister of Spain recently constructed a analogy that stopped short of a full personification: “It is time for the Parliament to have the appearance of the streets”. If Parliaments or legislatures bodies cannot truly provide legislative acts any more on behalf of those that they allege to represent, what follows is the last gasp of the legislative state that appeals directly to its naked constitutive sources as “streets that speak”. We are thus in a strange and bizarre world in which streets act and speak, and parliamentary houses become mute and sterile. And yet, what does it mean that the streets speak or have spoken?

It is obviously nothing like the coming to the possibility of a unison voice, but rather the form that politics undergoes once cybernetics becomes effective through its optimization of public opinion. If Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” would write facing Van Gogh that the “painting speaks” (it is that which speaks), it was because truth is disclosed in the proximity of what is being shown. Obviously, this disclosure has little to do with intentionality or the function of a commodity or utensil that tries to drag the viewer into the mirror of semblance. The proximity to a voice or picture severs us from the common place in which we are customarily gathered, which is why painting remains an exclusive site for unmediated truth.

Hence, when we are told that “streets speak” there is nothing being disclosed except what is already enacted by the theatre of the l’illusion comique: the management of opinions to be decided on the plane of force and struggle, submission and rhetoric, hegemony and the cheap thrills of affection later absorbed in representation. As Pedro Sánchez has told us in the open, streets and parliaments today are not in opposition, on the contrary, they are the two poles that hold up the l’illusion comique that energizes whatever little remains for what we call “politics” under the defunct notion of social mobilization. It has been said that the machinery of the modern sovereignty revolved around tripartite structures of ‘crown, parliament, people’ oriented towards election, debate and statute. In the waning of modern politics, we are left with the dual structure of executive power and streets that act in place of the void of statute and the legislative state.

Any attempt to escape the undisclosed world of opinions needs to break free from the illusion comique that continuous to parody both reason and comedy. The verses from Ciaran Carson’s The Irish for No (1987) obviously come to mind: “Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. In the ruins: obliterated streets, the faint impression of a key” [3]. There are no real exits when there are only ghastly impressions that lead us to the penumbra of the l’illusion comique, merely enough to survive in nihilism.

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Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “L’illusion comique”, Sur, N.237, Noviembre-Diciembre 1955, 10.

2. Ciaran Carson. “Smithfield Market”, in Collected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 99

Liturgical senses. On Cristina Campo’s Diario Bizantino (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Cristina Campo was a modern mystic who gravitated towards the liturgy of the poetic word. Now thanks to the scholarship of Victoria Cirlot, the Spanish reader is able to read her complete poetry in the bilingual edition Diario Bizantino: Poesía (1945-1977) (Siruela, 2026), which serves the missing companion to the essays collected in Los imperdonables (Siruela 2020). It is difficult not only to differentiate modern genres in Campo’s writing scene, given that both essays and poems (and also her letters, published in multiple volumes by Adelphi, but not yet collected in Spanish) revolve around the same concern around the liturgical depth of the word and the image as indispensable units of raising to the divine transcendence lodged in a treasure chest of secrets. For Campo modernity is the temporal movement that laceration this longing for the mystery, where language insofar it serves the purposes of justification never ceases to participate in the spectacle of imagery and the tradition of the rite that grants access to the experience of the senses. Hence, mutilation does not seem a harsh verb: to slash and separate becomes a misnomer for the closure of “this world”, which is not only the material world of immanence, but one in which the autonomy of imagery – and thus the passive act of imagining – enters into a terminal pauperization elevated by fictitious, at times melodramatic, ornamentation of meaning. 

To leave the reduction of meaning implies a sense of the liturgical. As Cirlot notes in her brief, yet lucid introduction to the volume, it is impossible to not read Campo’s poetic word within the coordinates of her understanding of the liturgical praxis as a mode of artistic development. In fact, in her essay “Note on the liturgy” (1966), Campo would claim that liturgy was a celebration of the divine mystery that is instantiated by the charity of language as an “ecstatic mirror of creation” [1]. If liturgy is a mode of an ongoing work of art in the shadow between the living, the dead, and language it is because, as Florensky also noted – another figure revered by the Italian writer – it is the abyss of a sense of freedom raises to the freedom of the senses beyond fixity of mimetic representation through objective spatial groundness. Around the same years that Campo was meditating on the need to alleviate modern poetics from the maladies and the self-inflicted wounds of the Ego, the Catholic poet Octavio Smith, a member of the Orígenes group, would also celebrate the liturgy as the condition of an image that carries forth folded in the vocative, the offices and rites made possible by pure charity [2]. The partition and participation of poetic language is not just an abstract entelechy of the koine for human language; but, more importantly, it is the charitas that saves language because it appeals to the extasis of beauty. Campo will write that the liturgical scene: “…as in poetry is a splendorous charity, more on the side of necessity than of the useful. It is regulated by harmonious forms and rites that, inspired by creation, surpasses itself in extasis” (Campo, 17). It is the excess of language beyond language that finds dwelling space in the abyss that enacts as witness of a comprehensive cosmic reality. 

And charity will be less than nothing if it would not carry in its interiority the nexus with the dead and the transmigration of the soul that are now joined with the living. The examples abound: “…se nel mio trachea / contemplarai di un’altra migrazione….nessun vincolo univa questi morti / nella necropoli deserta” (Campo 38). In Campo’s poetry the liturgical charitas is not an event of absolute faith overturning, but what is already occurring, a rhythm, that is both fixed and suspended between actual presence and the non-present, “the destiny between the hand and the flower” (como il destino tra la mano e il fiore)”, that has clear echoes of Coleridge romantic dream (Campo 48). And yet in Campo’s poetic liturgy there is no moment of awakening, but realization that existence is transnatural, never hidden in the order of the natural world, but in the “perfumed cloud of language” (nell’odorosa nube della lingua) (Campo 84). If language participates in the flaming and enduring rite of the living and the dead, it is because it keeps track of the pure absence and the negative of the voice, that is both present and absent in the mouthing of every prayer, and as the symbol that longs to devour language itself: “la Tigre Assenza, ha tutto divorato, di quetso volto rivolto a voi!” (Campo, 92). In the praxis of liturgy, the highest celebration through hymns and chants seem to permanently reveal – and perform its revelation – of the abyss that cross language towards its own rebirth and pulsating elucidation. This passion for absence that devours speech becomes the transport of Campo’s poetic dwelling from beginning to end. 

Obviously, the major poem in the collection is “Diario bizatino”, that is structured around four parts and published posthumously in 1977, and whose first verse can easily become the vortex of the poetic exploration: “Due modi – e io vengo dall’altro” (“Two worlds – and I come from the other one”) (Campo 94). The poetic word assumes the reality of the gnosis as a threshold that is no longer between the past and future time of salvation, but the very schism that allows the passage from the living and the dead to resurface. It is a threshold that cuts through the soul itself: “…è il taglio vivente ed efficace / più affilato della duplice lama / che affonda sino alla separazione dell’anima veemente dallo spirto delicato” (Campo 94-96). To come from “other world” and to transit into “this one” is perhaps to be a little bit dead or undead among the living in the whirlwind of the names. As Campo writes in a defining verse of the long poem: “…al centro del Sole là dove il Nome! Rapisce in vortice immoto alla vita del mondo, zampilla nuovi sensi dal mondo della morte” (Campo 96-98). To be with the dead is no theatrical imposture of a void ritual that questions the meaning of “this life” – perhaps the most commonplace Hamletian condition inherited by modernity – but it is the instance that allows the senses of the world of the dead to creep on us as an unexpected ambush.  

This is why the mirage of the Byzantine becomes the new Sun in the middle of the darkest Night, and the moon soon gives way to eventual coming of the Sun (Campo 99). The liturgical plane of the senses extends to what language can receive in both giving and receiving through the analogical being that is lacking in sequential time. Here Campo’s East is in sharp contrast with Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”, where all that lives is “caught in that sensual music / all neglect monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing” [3]. If for Yeats Byzantium is a site of alchemical rejuvenation and rebirth, Campo’s ageless Byzantinism nourishes the dead in which language finds beauty and pain as the supreme witness. In all accounts of what is invested in a language that cannot speak of the unfathomable revelation, for Campo the poetic word is weighted as a song to “testimonaire, a ferire / a insolibuilmente saldare / a inguaribilmente  separate” (Campo 118). The influx is the ultimate liturgy of separation, between language and being, the idea and reality is never completely lost. Or it could very well be lost, but only in what remains merely visible in this world.

This is why Campo never felt the need of the production of writing, not when the liturgy brings closer the excavated eyelids of pavid “gazes ingrained to the memories, to the ground, and to the dying psyche”, as she writes in the last verses of “Ràdonitza” (Campo, 120). In the way of “Burnt Norton” well-known bird – “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, and that is about right when it comes to what can be abandoned from the viewpoint of language. Between this world and its other – the triumph of Manichaeism outlives in the celebration of the fluvial depth of poetry – the divine apokatastasis of what remains unsaid, and yet well kept in the form of a diary. 

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Notes 

1. Cristina Campo. “Note sopra la liturgia” (1966), in Sotto falso nome (Adelphi, 1998), 129-135 

2. Octavio Smith. “Liturgia, Poesía, Mundo”, Islas, N.2, January-August, 1960, 485-492.

Riverrun. On Catalina Porzio’s Ensayo del agua (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

A hymn to the overflowing currents of water and language, Catalina Porzio’s Ensayo del agua (Mundana Ediciones, 2026) opens with a pindaric scene of celebration: “Una vez que la mano se ensambla a la copa olvida la autonomía que las rige….en esa comunión indisoluble, chocamos los cristales con estridencia y porfía por la satisfacción repetitiva de oírlos tintinear. Descontando que un exceso de entusiasmo haga estallar en mil pedazos la escena” (Porzio 12). Water is the pouring of wine and liquor; but it is also the mystery of oceans and the human necessity of quenching one’s thirst. It is all of this, sure, but a series will not do given that water is formless and defies the mimetic faculty that has allowed humans to draw associations high above in the sky. Porzio’s prose defies this temptation of crafting a topoi of water, opting for a dance of forms, descriptions, and enchantment brought together and dissolved by the sargasso sea of her own prose. To claim that writing is like swimming or paddling in water is a poor description to pin down what Porzio achieves in this essay. Her gesture is more versatile without stepping into an abyssal onanism, and this means that to begin to understand water, a certain levitation prose might be in order. A levitation that brings water both near and far. And this is because water escapes the metaphorical reduction of language, and it is always the event as such (just like the title insinuates it: it is not an essay about water, but the essay of water or a water essay). 

I am tempted to write “splash!” but this brings to mind David Hockney’s visual world, which is always frozen and imperturbable, at times undisclosed; whereas Porzio’s prose is agile, elegant, and strangely inviting, and thus uninterested in the mute surroundings of the West Coast. Perhaps it is much better to enact Joyce’s lexicon: riverrun down by the waters forms of Viña del Mar, coastal central region of Chile, and into the fragments of infancy and balnearios, and finally making a turn at Tolousse-Lattrec’s La Toilette. As Porzio tells us while making a stop: “Parece imposible hablar del agua a secas, pues dada la fluidez de su naturaleza, cambiante y escurridiza, invita continuamente a la deriva, haciendo inevitable los desvíos, las disgregaciones” (Porzio 44). A riverrun from a certain attachment – uninterested in the play of signifiers and graphism – of writing, which means that Porzio’s poetic prose is highly engaged in vivid synesthetic imagery. In fact, this overflowing prose is accompanied by the light of painting, and most importantly of the hand that orients the voyage throughout the book. 

The experience of the prose, in this sense, is not just an exercise in writing, but one of absorption, because it is only after being arrested that jubilation triumphs over reason (and one could also add: over grammar). “La algarabía desconoce la razón”, we read about halfway (Porzio 64). Of course, it is silly to say that good prose needs pictorial supplementation and artifice; what I am trying to say is that, while reading Porzio’s essay, absorption is the hand that discloses the world of sensorial celebration. The hand retains in the overflowing currents of riverrun downstream. Painting is both an instance of the light that absorbs and that renders imperturbable the errant topography of experiences. And this is why Porzio is right in reminding us that “y es que navegamos gracias al olvido” (Porzio 66). If there is a work of memory it is because we are deep in the waters of Lethe, and perhaps the unfathomable image of experience is what gives us a hand in the dangling spiral motion. 

As we know, this is at the heart of Hölderlin’s “Andenken”, where the verse “But it is the sea that takes and gives remembrance” validates both memory and oblivion of a human experience that quenches its thirst in the mystery of time (ultimately only a letter separates “sed” from “ser” says Porzio towards the end of the book). At the risk of vulgarizing Porzio’s essay – although her writing is not fully disconnected from the handles of the present – I would claim that precisely the ongoing barbarism of our technological epoch is precisely that it has failed to endure its voyage to Lethe, which is why it is committed to untruth and permanent lies at the same time that forces the human species to permanent memorization, while drying up its once opulent rivers of the West. And if rivers have become a scarce resource in our times, it only makes sense that the same can be said of human language, which is increasingly devoid of dialogic interlocution and the possibility of naming now replaced by automatized coding (some scholars have noted that Finnegans Wake’s “riverrun” also lodges “-ren” might be referring to the name). What happens when riverrun, which is the speculum of human experience in both language and water, dries up? This is the central question that arises from Porzio’s beautiful experiential essay.  

In the last pages of Ensayo del agua (2026), Porzio tells us that when an old man of her acquaintance was asked what he will miss most of this world he responded with great conviction: talking (Porzio 104). And as it is also quite obvious for Porzio that the necessity of conversation is not just an intrinsic institution of our social life; it is also the cave (to recall here Porphyry’s reading of the nymphs water caves in Homer) where the living and the dead enter into the purest of conversations, because “…ambos gesticulan, y en la fantasía de encontrarse, transporatados ilusoriamente en la cámara del tiempo, no cabe duda, se entenderían” (Porzo 105). If  language is always downstream, at the riverrun outlet, it is because it is both the communicating vessel as well as the immaterial gesture that flourishes without beginning and beyond the imagination of the end times. Avoiding the self-assigned role of the doctor of civilizational decay, Catalina Porzio’s  Ensayo del agua (2026) ultimately unfolds a unique choreography: a gesture of language that allows us to move throughout the epochs in order to feel at home anywhere.

Memory and hell. by Gerardo Muñoz

If a possible definition of hell is the incapability of finding an exit or escape, then it is tempting to say that the artificial construction of memory as perpetual remembrance is the ultimate hellish condition for human beings. This was the fictional nightmare in May Sinclair’ old gothic short story “Where their fire is not quenched”, in which the permanent condition of being stuck in a single active memory is called the ‘last hell’.  As we read towards the end of the story:

“There can’t be anything worse than this. This isn’t the worst. We are not quite dead yet, as long as we’ve life in us to turn and run and get away from each other; as long as we can escape into our memories. But when you’ve got back to the featherest memory of all and there is nothing beyond it – when there is no memory but this – in the last hell we shall not run away from any longer; we shall find no more roads, no more passages, no more open doors. We shall have no need to look for each other [1]”. 

It might have been possible that this story inspired Borges’ “El Zahir”, which tells story of a magical token encrypted in a twenty cent coin that becomes impossible forget to the point that present and past memory becomes one with the zahir, and the zahir becomes all that there is to one’s memory and remembering. An absolute and available memory without forgetting not only absorbs the possibility of forgetting, but also that of the love only achieved thanks to the foreign or strange. This is why the character in Sinclair’s story tells the lover that all that remains is loathing – a loathing and a loathing spirit, “loathing each other” – which appears as an inverted transfiguration of love. Yes, memory is essential to enter into what remains loved, but if the object of eros is absorbed without any distance or oblivion, then there is no tenor of affection, since exteriority is suspended and folded in pure interiority.

This is why in Hölderlin’s “Andenken” we read that “But it is the sea that takes and gives remembrance / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed…” [2]. It is in the temporal existence crossing the world where there is a poetizing, thanks to language, that allows for both the flourishing of remembrance and forgetting. It is in this trembling sea of life where love that can ‘pin’ or hold on – which is closer to Höderlin’s heftet – that which crosses our path as a mystery of the irrevocable. It makes all the sense that in Sinclar’s story reliving a single remembrance implies the specular suspension that pin our distance with the world: “We shall have no need to look for each other”. There is no more ‘looking for’, but also not ‘looking at’, as in the gaze that mesmerizes before a human face. 

Because every-thing is already visible and penetrable without reminder, there is no heftet that appropriates what is improper. This is a different sort of hell: not one defined by eternal punishment or damnation, but of the privation of sensation can only emerge in the contact between life and language. What is still disturbing in May Sinclair’s gothic story, and which makes it completely contemporary and realist, is that there is a humanity that can adapt, even after their death, to the confinement of an eternal memory without forgetting, and in doing so it can infinitely endure this last stage of hell. 

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Notes 

1. May Sinclair. “Where their fire is not quenched”, in Uncanny Stories (Hutchinson & Co, 1923), 36-37.

2. Friedrich Höderlin. “Remembrance”, in Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Books, 1998), 253. 

Painting in the evening of the world. by Gerardo Muñoz

That painting was an activity at the end of its long tradition – a tradition that perhaps coincides with the very genesis of anthropogenesis – appears explicitly in Cézanne’s late conversations with Joaquim Gasquet, which is full of rambling thoughts and anxieties. At some point in the dialogues, Cézanne says in context of the pictorial tradition: “Rubens…that is another age, all that. We are in the evening of the world. Painting, like everything else, is vanishing….” [1]. Cézanne’s work is already the painting of the evening of the world, which is the closure unto itself, not so much a deprived world of certain elements or things, but a privatized space of intelligence and logic. This structure is alien to the painter who only pledges alliance to what is seen and revealed: “The painting owes allegiance to that lone. Never to the logic of the brain…and if he abandons that logic, he is lost. Painting is first and foremost an optical affair” [2]. 

What the essence of technology enhances in its computational and logical capacities to make the world legible, it loses in the optical capacity for the thinking of vision, that flickering and always novice opening to the world. The calamity of the automation of the world resides in the blinding legibility where thinking-eyes, as in Cézanne’s expression, are rescinded and a thing of the past. Of course, in the name of the present legibility of blinding lights, the past will also be reduced to a pile of stuff that can be assembled and registered – as in the vulgar poet Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ “The Aleph” – but in exchange for abandoning the truth and sensation. 

Well before the argument of Veblen on the centrality of engineers in this new world, Cézanne was aware that the future belonged to the engineers of nature, who can both bend and straighten the crooked lines of the world, and whose final realization is the nuclear organization and the pacing of energy distribution. It does not take too much to see an overtly furious Cézanne around 1890s: “Nature abhors a strain line. And to hell with engineers! We are not road surveyors. A lot they care for color, whereas for me sensation is at the root of everything” [3]. The personal outcry ‘to hell with engineers!’ is still being heard today, although we are less convinced that such an imperative has any chance at halting the ongoing vanishing sensations of the world. 

Michael Fried has argued that Fraggonard’s The Swing and Blind Man’s Bluff are two pictures that appear to us as also harbingers of an extinction of a world (the world previous to 1789 that is) [4]. Whether it is Fraggonard or Cézanne, there is an imperturbable core in painting in witnessing the moment that the world is vanishing, and retaining whatever remains of the “world” for generations capable of seeing and feeling. Borges’ aleph (a supreme optical affair) once again comes in handy when faced with the vision of the infinite: “Algo, sin embargo, recogeré”. In other words, something remains imperturbable at the end of the world. Is this what painting stood for in late Cézanne? To gather something from the world, to make it imperturbable appears as the supreme task of painting.

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Notes 

1. Joachim Gasquets. Cézanne: A Memoir with conversations (Thames & Hudson, 1991), 170.

2. Ibid., 161.

3. Ibid., 166

4. Michael Fried. Collected Writings, Volume II (Eris, 2026), 281.

You are the task. by Gerardo Muñoz

Out of all of the Zürau aphorisms of Kafka there is one that reads as follows: “You are the task. No pupil far and wide (Du bist die Aufgabe. kein Schüler weit und breit) [1]. It resonates profoundly in our days as the idea of “education” and its inherited traditions are liquidated by the essence of technology. What Kafka could have meant by the idea of “task” (in German Aufgabe or in Spanish tarea) is to be deciphered in the intellectual context of the time. In his gloss to this aphorism, Reiner Stach has emphasized something elementary and yet quite essential; that is, that the task is not an action of the subject, but the meeting place of both subject and object. There is only the task of existence, and only to this extent we are always students of life before everything else comes into being. In a later aphorism, Kafka seems to return to the question of task by adding: “Two tasks at the beginning of life: to keep reining in your sphere, and to keep checking whether you might have gone into hiding somewhere outside your sphere” [2]. Something escapes, and that which is other than what is appropriate in life might just be the infinite work of the task of existence. 

If there is a “theology” in Kafka it is something other than one conditioned by an efficacious action directed towards God. Again, these questions were up in the air in Kafka’s milieu at the time, and it suffices to remember Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (1915) as an emblem, when the old astronomer tells his pupil Kepler: “One thing alone: carry out my work; do not let this tremendous labor utterly perish…” [3]. Writing in close proximity to Felix Weltsch’s theology of transcendent action in Freiheit und Gnade (1920), Brod understood that humans are only legitimate and participating in the “good” if it assists in the poetic energy of God. Here the notion of the task corresponds to the higher and more geometrico order of God. For Kafka, on the contrary, there is no task that is oriented as a supplement to a divine order that must be realized; it is rather a sensible education that had no beginning and no end, learning without texture because it has no fixed object. This Kafka’s task is an exilic (galuth) practice that cannot be territorialized in a promise of nationhood or state authority. The paradigmatic figure of “this task” is Sancho Panza, because as a lucid and sensible fool he is able to enjoy life to the very end. To experience the task without a destiny is to be able to stretch experience to the end of life. 

This is precisely why Sancho Panza stands the paradigm of the task of a life that dwells in freedom. Let us recall carefully what Kafka writes in his short parable “The truth about Sancho Panza”: “Sancho Panza, a free man, maybe out of a certain feeling of responsibility, yet imperturbable, followed Quixote on his adventures and from them he had a grand and successful entertainment to the end of his days” [4]. The condition of ‘freedom’ that is proper to the task is imperturbable (gleichmütig), in which the pursuit of struggle and conflict is abandoned in order to complete and follow the task. But this “following” is not one of submission, but of segundear or sekundiere: “In the struggle between you and the world, second the world”, as he writes in another mysterious Zürau aphorism [5]. We remain in a state of the pure imperturbable when we second the world, because nothing appears to inflict us existence with the force of submission or obedience. Thus, freedom is not a substantive political category, but a lived and almost painterly instance in language that puts us closer (or apart) from our task. 

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Notes 

1. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 42. Translation modified.

2. Ibid., 186.

3. Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (Northwestern University Press, 2007),  124.

4. Franz Kafka. “The truth about Sancho Panza”, in The Complete Stories (Schocken Books, 1971), 610. 

5. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 106.

Excess and solitude. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is a commonplace to think that populations feel ‘lonely’ and ‘alienated’ from society, but perhaps this diagnosis is more of a prefigured talking point than the description of the state of things. In our present, solitude and retreat is a scarce good, as the chatter of automatized languages and images revolve without a moment of pause. In a recent book, the vice-president of a major technological software company, in fact, argues that “mobilization” extends to all aspects of the temporality of social life, which makes his “technological security” system unavoidable for the very motion of living’s one life. This is why in this configuration, the notion of “creation” as poesis has waned, and its institutional inertia is increasingly delegated to machines and market values. Precisely, the promise of “Artificial Intelligence” all things considered is not just productivity growth, it is also grounded in alleviation of a postpoetic social bundle where every form of self-possession – writing and singing, reading and painting, just to name a few – are slowly replaced. And this “replacement” – which is the only true replacement of our epoch – is an absorption of our relation to our own excess of existence. 

This is what Kafka understood with outstanding clarity more than a century ago in his well known letter to Felice dated February 1913: “‘Writing means revealing oneself to excess … This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why even night is not night enough. I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once” [1]. 

What does it mean that ‘writing means revealing oneself to excess’? For one, it does not mean to create a well crafted story or essay, but something much harder: to appropriate the relation with exteriority of life that makes the truth of writing to emerge, at least for a moment. This appropriation is what solitude guards and treasures, not as a “good” that can be administered and shared, but as a form of life where language and the idea connect in an instance of time. If the total mobilization of technology succeeds wiping this relationship, we should be reassured that the nocturnal excess of writing will be transformed into a white night of inert knowledge, which is contrary to the very practice of writing. One never writes what one “truly knows”; what attempts to write in order to know that which we did not know that already knew. And only this can be called a relation of excess. 

In her beautiful book A horse at night (Dorothy, 2022), the writer Amina Cain similarly says that: “To write, to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing. Of course there are those whole collaborate, but even then there must be moments of retreat. We retreat to read. We retreat to think….There is life that finds each one of us that one else should enter, lest they drive it off” [2]. The closure of the self-sufficient subject of technological mobilization is precisely the one that, by giving up his solitude and retreat that is constitutive of language, has ceased to have the creation and by extension the time of life. What is given up in the name of  a faustic “Intelligence” is the most sacred, the access to oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Franz Kafka. Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1988), 156.

2. Amina Cain. A horse at night: On writing (Dorothy, 2022), 35.

The last tzaddik. by Gerardo Muñoz


According to the Talmudic tradition there is a certain number of just persons, called the tzaddikim, that exist in every generation. Their divine and singular existence is known only to God, and according to the tradition if the world continues to exist it is only for their sake. They live in the desert of the world without ever being known by anyone in the public eyes. In this sense, the tzaddikim could be anywhere and everywhere as long as there is a nuance of humilitas. It is not clear, however, that the tzaddik is an ethical being in the polarity of thinking and action; but it is precisely this depth that renders him an opaque and mysterious figure. How many tzaddikim are there in each generation? 

Although Borges directs our attention to Max Brod as a modern source regarding the tzaddikim, it is actually Gershom Schlem who in an illuminating essay of this tradition records that it was the fourth century Babylonian teacher Abbaye who attached a number to these “saviors of the world” to thirty-six: “The world is never without thirty just men who daily receive the Divine Countenance” [1]. The world is not saved by the promise of redemption alone; what the tradition of the tzaddikim teaches future generations is that there is only redemption whenever something like a depth of existence is treasured as an embodied mysterium. In other words, it is almost as if in the tzaddikim the idea that “life is always elsewhere” is not only confirmed on the basis of faith, but on the inconspicuous existence that is divine in virtue of ceasing to be public and translucid. As Scholem says later on in his essay: “…these hidden just men belong to a higher order because they are not subject to the temptation of conscience which is virtually inseparable from public life”.

In a world pushed into full transparency, absolutely transformed into a reservoir of energy extraction and dispensation like the one that we are currently living, it is not all too difficult to imagine that even the secret lives of the tzaddikim are at risk of survival. And if the apocalyptic tone of our current gnosis has become predominant within the accelerated technological development, one could imagine that the opacity of the tzaddikim is slowly drying out, very much like the way that major rivers in the American desert are continuously being pushed to planned obsolescence and slow extinction. 

In fact, one could go further and say that there  is a clear analogy between rivers and the tzaddikim insofar as they are both pathways of generational communication of the human species with the world whose mouths that for millennia have made the condition of life possible. This means that in the same way that river mouths dry up, human language, with the advent of the barbarism of “Artificial Intelligence”, also becomes a new phase of desperate muteness, losing its capacity to pass forward its traditions and memories. Who is the last tzaddikim today? He or she will be the secret agent of language itself, the keeper of a divine surge that erupts even in the meanderings of a world out of tune. 

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Notes 

1. Gershom Scholem. “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men”, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schoken Edition, 1971), 252.

Peregrinus ubique. On Eduardo Prieto’s Los lugares de Petrarca (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Eduardo Prieto’s slim book Los lugares de Petrarca: Sobre naturaleza y soledad (Acantilado, 2026) counts not just as a book on the great Italian lyricist, but also as a coherent reflection on what it means to write and create from concrete places and in the mood of the genius loci. Before the world became infatuated with nationhood, borders, and migratory laws, there were only territories of changing topographies and natural phenomena, a gleaming spectacle to the eyes and an adventure to the those on foot. Petrarch lived in such a world of early modern Europe – this is the world after the crisis of twelfth century to use Thomas Bisson’s historical marker – hopping from locations to landscapes, making him an absolute peregrinus ubique, and thus a permanent exile (Prieto 20). 

Petrarch’s itinerary is expansive in the fourteenth century: from Monteppilier to Bologna to Napoles and Rome; from Fontaine de Vaucluse to Arquá in Padua, the different dwelling places of Petrarch are also analogical to figures of the surrounding of life, such as the river, the path, the garden, and the studiolo. For the peregrinus ubique, the ideal life was not to live outside of his homeland, but rather to find the attunement between place and soul as the ultimate liaison of the equanimous life. And this is precisely what Eduardo Prieto achieves in his wonderful book Los lugares de Petrarca (2026), which avoids the commonplaces of unidirectional biographies in order to weave a history of a mind that can only be written, as if were, from the the contours of its displacements and attentive to its landscape. This is why the famous, now topical, Mount of Ventoux rarely appears in Prieto’s essay; for one thing, because the rumor of the landscape is present in its invisibility in each and every of those places, and not just from centered on that text.

To speak of places is, first and foremost, to assume a certain distance from the life of the city life. Already during the time of Petrarch the emergence of urban centers, tied to economic abundance and growth, was becoming the new ground of what soon enough would become the nexus of social reproduction. Petrarch’s sensibility – which is the sensibility of the life of the poet at large – already takes notices of the corrosive allure of this social space, which will elicit corruption and “dirty vices” in the trades of the new public condition (Prieto 44-45). If otium is to be maintained, it needs to be an exile from the public and into the desert where solitude of mind can cultivate a sense of freedom and autonomy. But as Prieto reminds us, the desert of Petrarch is not that of the excruciating nothingness or abyss, but the locus horridus: “ámbito opuesto a la ciudad, el desierto se concebía menos como un espacio verídico que una utopía ambiental que se ofrecía a quienes buscaban un hábitat adecuado a su carácter: los héroes de lo solitario” (Prieto 45). Prieto will speak of a proximity with the divine of nature using the expression “ofrendas ambientales” (environmental gifts) of God that allow for a peaceful life within the limits of nature. In this sense, the solitary life of the peregrinus ubique it is ultimately not that exclusive: it is full of specters and the voices of the dead that emerges from the an existential depth that is more than just a handful of metaphors and rhetorical tropes (Prieto 49). This exiled life cannot be disconnected from its surroundings and its immersion into the landscapes in which it dwelled. 

However, it is also thanks to Prieto’s own analytical efforts that we see that the notion of landscape is not limited to the horizontal vantage point of the spectator; it is also the underworld of the geopolitical cavities, where caves, hidden myths, and overflows of ocean water nourish the human imagination with the infused sensation of the mythical (Prieto 67). If the exilic life is to inhabit a burrow like an animal, as Kafka thought, then the topographical landscape can only be understood as a complex texture of memories and forgettings that, given their ecological scale, embrace the human experience while also exceeding it. Hence the importance of the graden in Petrarch’s poetic cosmos until his last days in Vaucluse, because it is in this piece of nurtured land where the poet communicates and disputes belonging with the deities.

As Prieto writes in an incisive moment of his book: “Rodeado de tales aguas, existe un pequeño campo de piedras, y es allí donde Petrarca quiere planear un jardín para consagrarlo a esas musas que inspiran sus trabajos. Pero, para consagrarlo, Petrarca debe quitarse antes a las deidades que viven en común con la naturaleza, las misteriosas e impredecibles ninfas, tal vez acompañado de sátiros, silenos, o incluso del mismísimo Pan” (Prieto 87). And if already during Petrarch’s time, a post-mythical epoch, Pan was already declared dead, before the Nietzschean declaration of the dead of God; what was at least obvious in the loci of the garden is that it was a nourishment for the elevation of the soul, in the same way that only those with a beautiful soul could dedicate themselves to the microscopic civilization art of putting together a garden, a thesis that centuries later Ernst Jünger will repeat verbatim in his late diaries. 

Petrarch will spend his last days in his house of Arquà between the Euganian Hills of Padua, a landscape that can be discerned in the forthteenth century anonymous fresco that depicts Petrarch in his studiolo next to a right side open window (this is featured in the cover of Prieto’s book). The preparation for one’s death seems to require a slight alteration for the life of the peregrinus ubique; since it is not just the embodiment of truth of existence to death, but also of how that existence is embedded in the radiant opening of a place. In fact, this is what Petrarch longed for in his last days of Arquà: a dwelling place where exteriority and interiority can communicate within the tripartite arrangements of the home, the landscape, and the studiolo (Prieto 122). In a sense, ‘home, landscape, studiolo’ is the triangular form of the life of the soul that finally learns how to live beyond abundance and survival. It is the architecture of eternal life as its own indivisible garden. When in the nineteenth century, Count Conde Leoni opened up the tomb of Petrarch to examine his skull, the entire ossuary shattered into pieces, as if reminding us that life is never some bone relics in a grave (Prieto 134). What remains is the shadow of the pilgrim’s life, in its own voice and figure, that will endure throughout the centuries, and at times it will find an illuminated and candid resting place in wonderful book such Los lugares de Petrarca (2026).

Language as a garbage heap. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is an extraordinary description in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes el memorioso” that depicts his state of absolute nominalism as literally a landfill, a pile of trash. We read the following: “Y también hacia el alba: mi memoria, señor, es como un vaciadero de basuras”, which James Irby translates as “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap”. The absolutization of memory without oblivion and forgetting renders all the possible and imaginable names as already present, but also useless to the point that they cannot be voiced, let alone retained at a distance. The world of Funes is analogous to that of the advanced world of technology that we are currently experiencing at an accelerated pace: the so called Artificial Intelligence remembers every name and all entities as if it were picking up items from a landfill container. It does not really matter if the names picked are correctly or falsified; it is precisely that naming as such no longer has any enchantment that is only granted by the divinity of the voice. As language becomes contained as a “heap of garbage” any relation between remembrance and the human voice that for centuries had been the source of affection is eliminated. 

Exactly two decades after the publication of Ficciones (1944) in his Seminar of Le Thor, Heidegger will also take note of Heraclitus’ Fragment 124 in relation to a heap of garbage as a definition of the cosmos: “…in its complete appearing as fire, “the most beautiful ordering of all is surely comparable to a heap of randomly spilled garbage. This means that the innaparent joining together is superior to every visible ordering, even if it is the most beautiful possible (fragment 54)” [2]. The emphasis is placed on the order of the random that in its inappearance discloses appearance as order (κόσμος). Immediately Heidegger notes that the archaic notion of “world” in Heraclitus, his “heap of trash”, is radically different from the standard of the world today that secures all possible predictions and calculation, where there is room for everything insofar as every-thing is taken as an extension of energy. 

This garbage heap realizes itself through the force of “speaking” in the name of technological orderability, efficiency, and promises of economic growth. The new order of the world as trash is proportional to the slow erosion of language that in its accelerating caducity loses its capacity to remember and forget. It goes without saying that in our present, and especially in the United States, the educational and academic institutions have been at the helm in the process of facilitating this compulsive destruction of language and memory, which evidences the intimate liaison of the technician and the pedagogue in the configuration of the immonde. 

Borges’ Funes will ultimately die from a pulmonary congestion, which is a testament of death in spite of the horror of a language incapable of naming and letting go. And in his lecture, according to the transcription of one of his students, Heidegger concluded with this recommendation: “What remains essential is to continue along the same path without having concern for any of the publicness around us”. A hidden and conjured language would be the only last standing order, a keeper of truth and beauty, because unlike the machine it voices the names while also exposing itself to the possibility of forgetting them.

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Notes 

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “Funes el memorioso”, in Ficciones (Emecé, 1958), 76.

2. Martin Heidegger. “Seminar in Le Thor 1966”, in Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2012), 8.