Author: infrapoliticalreflections

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. 

.

.

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. 

.

.

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. 

.

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.

.

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. 

Technology and thinking. A reply to Samuel Contreras. by Gerardo Muñoz

The recent response to Nelly Richard’s stance against infrapolitics, has prompted an ongoing conversation although not always public. However , there has been a public reaction in a column by Samuel Toro Contreras, “El poder ya no está donde creemos” published in El Mostrador. I do not think that this reply is necessarily critical of Contreras’ article, since I tend to agree with its main framework. I mean this comment as a sort of recalibration of Contraras’ observation, which ultimately hinges upon on two central elements: first, that there is no need for “cultural war”; and second, that a debate regarding the centrality of politics (the hegemonic position) or the non-centrality of politics (infrapolitics) is already a duality surpassed by the question of technology. 

Of course, I agree with the analytical intuition deployed by Contreras that the essence of concrete domination today is to be analyzed in the organization of infrastructure. The transformation of sovereign power into the molecular and administrative dispersion of control has been invariably present in what infrapolitics has tried to think through in its different approaches. And not only infrapolitics, of course, but also other theoretical positions that refuse the fantasy of hegemonic politics. I do think that infrapolitics does not think this problem factually; what we continue to call “politics” – inherited from the Greek dispensation of the polis, in contrast to the chôra and the Arcadia, just to name two counterfigures – is already functioning as proto-infrastructure of the social community of norms and reproduction and the economy. The meson of the polis is the infrastructural design, to use the terminology of Alejandra Castillo, in which life is only possible as determined by the equivalent. The problem of technology does not begin with the locomotive, “cybernetics”, “Artificial Intelligence”, or what have you.

When Contreras writes that “la pregunta de base seria anterior, sobre que infraestructura técnica produce hoy aquello que todavía seguimos llamando política”, he is inadvertently endorsing infrapolitical thought, with the caveat that infrapolitics is not merely invested in the objective conditions of politics, but on those conditions of thought cannot be absorbed by politics. To say that politics amounts to infrastructure in our time is to say that the “destiny as political” as defined in European modernity can be paragraphed today as “our destiny is geopolitical”. This is another way to say that politics is no longer organized around time and decision, but on space and administration. 

To simply call this “politics” responds to the inertia of language that tends to obscure the terms of exchange. Infrapolitics does not claim clarity, but in the wake of the absolutization of infrastructure of the Gestell, it does favor the possibility of thought rather than exerting a new political primer of action or reform. In light of this, it is not the relation between technology and politics what is at stake; the authentic step back is the difficulty presented by the non-relation of technology and thinking. This might be a slight displacement from Contreras’ own position about infrastructure, and it is one that never really wanted to align itself with either politics or culture. 

Panza de burro. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is always something deeply unnerving and mysterious about the end of summer, which is not a mystery of time, but of place and its relation to where we stand or lack standing. George Oppen has a couple of verses that capture this sensation, even though he was far removed from the summer in this particular poem: “the self is no mystery / the mystery is that there is something for us to stand on”. And where exactly do we stand in the passing of summer? How do we voice this passage? This surely not a geographical location or territory, but the most primordial place that humans have to stand on: the habitation in language. So, the clear and opening of summer is a specific type of relationship that brings us closer to its voice. This is beautifully treated in Andrea Abreu’s novel Panza de Burro (2025), where read moments such as these: 

“Y volvía pa detrás y pesaba de nuevo con el dudo ven vive una aventura agamos 1000 lokuras voy aserte caricias ke no san inventario. Y entonces miraba a Isora  pensaba que a lo mejor, como no era capaz de carcarila como se acariaban o se abrazaban otras niñas podía hacerle caricias ke no san inventao y pasarle la mano por la parte de atrás de las rodillas o deslizar los dedos por encima de las costra de sus ûnas de los pies o rozar los revoltillos de carne que le salían por encima de las bragas” [1]. 

If on the surface Panza de burro is about the bodily proximity with her friend Isora, what the climatological phenomenon of the “panza de burro” (literally translates as the belly of the donkey that refers to the insular descent of humid clouds into the landscape) brings to bear is the experience of the idiom. In this sense, the dialectical rhythm of Canarian Spanish of Panza de burro is a decisive reflection to free language as an experience of proximity in the wake of this inexorable climate condition of summer. In the English language – curiously not so in Spanish – the expression “dog days of summer” is the idiom that refers to the boredom experienced by the end of summer.

This is a one of a kind of boredom that is fully immersive, lagging in a time that is both dead and not yet alive; a time of stagnation or decay, which is why in Swedish language it is referred as rötmånaden or time of the rot. The panza de burro of dog days of summer cannot longer be conceived as the dies caniculares that guides one’s destiny as in the frescos of Villa Farnesina. On the contrary, these days of suspended action and boredom is an attunement to the interiority of language and how language can be felt similarly to those clouds that cut through the mountains in the Canary islands leaving behind a spectacle of grey and formlessness. 

In Abreu’s Panza de burro, this phenomenon is explored at the most visceral and somatic level, that of the skin. And yet, a more precise way to see these transformations in the coming and turning of language into the spiritual region of the world. It is this experience in language that automatic machines will not be able to translate, as it lacks the abode of that “perpetual holiday” in the words of Cesare Pavese, and that we feel as the fleeting eternity of summer. 

.

Notes 

1. Andrea Abreu. Panza de burro (Barrett, 2025), 81. 

Sentence and prose. by Gerardo Muñoz

After more than ten years, I have recently reread several works of contemporary novelist Alan Pauls, and only now I have come to understand the precision of his language; a perfect combination of the rhythmic movement of a swimmer combined with a dry stroke of a brush on a canvas. This precision is not holistic, but found in every sentence of his prose. Aside from the content of his intuitions about literature or the almost microscopic development of frozen time of his characters, what Pauls ultimately teaches is that the unit of prose is the sentence, both its cadence and its ability to be severed and be brought to an end. This is precisely the meaning of the “period” (periodos) as the internal unit of the sentence: periodos is afterall, the circular moment of something that has a beginning and an end. The achievement of a good prose is the articulation of periods that can launch and make a sentence retire. 

For a novelist who is also a self-reflective essayist, it is puzzling that Pauls has not implicitly thematized the unity of the sentence in the craftsmanship of prose (although he has considered accentuation in an essay) [1]. But it is wholly absent in El factor Borges (2004), and his most recent collection of musings and glosses on reading and writing in a volume titled Trance (2014). It is perhaps too easy to overstate the fact that there cannot ever be a general theory of the sentence, because both tone and periodos are expressions of style. The construction zone of a well crafted prose can only be analyzed in the movement of the sentence. In a fabulous moment of his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the sixteenth century grammarian and poet Abrabham Fraunce writes the following regarding the sentence: 

“The beginning and the end of a poemt must not be the beginning or ending of prose. For the beginning, a little consideration will suffice, for the middle, less; but in the end the chief care is to be had, for it is most examine, and the longest in memory. It must therefore be sweetly contruied, that it seem not hasty and abrupt: it must also be varied and changed often time…if the same foot should in the end be continualed repeated.” [1]. 

In his treatise of rhetoric, Fraunce connects the end of the sentence, the coming to the periodos to the work of memory and sweetness. Perhaps because the cadence embedded in the sentence is the instance that allows us to connect past and present without hesitation or interruption; not the moment of suspension and surprise, but of landing in language, so that something, once again, can commence. This is also why a novelist in Spanish like Alan Pauls has not ceased to be fascinated by the idea of the past, especially in El pasado (2003), but also in his historical trilogy about his coming of age in the seventies. In other words, it is not enough to write the past in mere prose; the most important solicitation is to lodge its memory in the nest of the sentence. It is only here where memory arrives at a region called “home”.

.

Notes

1. Alan Pauls. “Elogio del acento”, in Temas lentos (Random House, 2022), 52.

2. Abraham Fraunce. The Arcadian Rhetorike (Oxford University Press, 1950), 34.

Only a miracle can save us. by Gerardo Muñoz

Joseph Roth’s last novella Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939) places the salvation of the human being through the event of a miracle. More than once, the narrator of The Legend of the Holy Drinker tells us that homeless Andreas had “indeed experienced the miracle of faith” [1]. The fact that this “miracle” is intertwined with the magical reappearance of money alerts to the fact that omnis credit, the belief in all things, might be at the center of the mystery of the adventurous last days of Andreas Kartak, a homeless migrant that one day is given a sum amount of money by a generous stranger with the only condition that he repays it at some point to the sanctuary of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in a local parish [2]. 

The very essence of the miraculous money is connected to charity as existential expenditure, that allows Andreas to defer from ever repaying to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux at the Batignolles Church, thus tearing apart the modern notion of credit that binds investment and anticipation of the future. And Andreas is never able to repay the debt to the Saint, it is because the miracle is not in abundance, but in the permanent state of poverty that in turns confirms the sanctification of the holy drinker. In all rigor, Roth’s final message, a few days before his own death, seems clear to us: only a miracle can save us from the futurist religion of abundance and capital. 

But first, what is a miracle? This is the notion at the heart of Roth’s secret testament in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939). It is obvious that a miracle is always an exception to the ordinary and the predictable; an exceptional occurrence that not only resists to follow a rational causation and calculation, but it is something that betrays it. This is why at times miracles have been displaced to the irrational sphere of a natural occurrence. It has been said that in modernity, capitalist value form is both first nature and rationality where the human shuts himself in and God is expelled out. If there is a humorous or parodic element in The Legend of the Holy Drinker, it is precisely that this nexus is inverted and loosen; in other words, when miracle replaces the naturalization of value it is no longer conditioned by human labour and surplus value, but through the mystery of charity that does not aggregate abundance of goods. This is a charity of absolute poverty and continuous stagnation. 

Andreas’ miraculous charity incarnates the holy life of the saint insofar as he can only experience himself towards the appropriation of his own character, and ultimately his death. According to Esther Steinmann in her important study on Roth, the figural symbolism of the holy drinker was based after the Byzantine model of the sainthood; those madmen followers of God that can only experience the world from outside the world as if were, because they are only concerned with a preparation of towards death, which also speaks to Roth’s Catholicism infused with Hasidic undercurrents [3]. And this can be confirmed by the novella’s last lines: “May God grant such a good and easy death” [4]. 

Why should death be delivered “good and easy”? Here it can be argued how for Roth, the “common good” was not a political project of a distributionist state, but rather a state of being and a form of life that is enmeshed to both death and the dead. This is way that Roth’s solicitation of a resurrection of the Austro-Hungarian empire must be properly understood: not as a political form to save civilization from itself, but rather as a defense a world that, because it is oriented towards decline and expansive exteriority or internal exile – a roaming land of errant beings – it maintains a relation to the humus of the dead [5]. If there is hope for rebirth it is because there are miracles that cut through both history and nature, and in doing so they make apparent the charity of the infancy of humanity, very much like the little girl Thérèse, a transfigured saint, that appears in the final pages: “…about living and dying; and the girl called Thérèse, she too accompanies them”. 

Notes 

1. Joseph Roth. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022), 11.

2. Gerardo Muñoz. “Charity and Faith”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/16/charity-and-faith-by-gerardo-munoz/ 

3. Berta Ares Yáñez. La leyenda del santo bebedor: legado y testamento de Joseph Roth (Acantilado, 2022), 178.

4. Joseph Roth. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022), 99.

5. Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, letter from July 1935: “I only care for God and the Earth, and what I feel as my terrestrial obligation: contributing to the coming of a Catholic Empire”, in Ser amigo mío es funesto: Correspondencia (1927-1938) (Acantilado, 2014), 56.

On American language. by Gerardo Muñoz

Towards the fourth part of “A language of New York” included in This in Which (1965), George Oppen registers something like the ultimate struggle of the poet with its nemesis: language itself. Fully aware of the erosion of language of his time, Oppen writes in these verses both a warning and a strategy: “Possible to use / Words provided one treats them / As enemies. Not enemies – Ghosts Which have run mad / In the subways / And of course the institutions and the banks. If one captures them / one by one proceeding / Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense” [1]. The polemic against the darkening automation of language, the public consolidation of kallopismata orphne, is resolved through a possibility of use that is redirected elsewhere, at least away from the nihilism of vicarious denomination and exchange. 

This “possible use” is perhaps nothing else than the treatment that language receives in the voice, which becomes its ultimate speaking experience. If language is always outside and beyond itself, always exceeding its meaning and place, it is because its trembling tonality cuts through both meaning and sense. The construction of the concluding verse cannot be dismissed: “Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense”. Oppen fails to place hope as action towards a higher entity (meaning and sense); rather he sends the poetic voice to meaning and sense. The redemptive quality of language is to be found in this fall and trembling of the voice that, because it has interrupted both meaning and sense, it can inhabit a state of bliss or perpetual hope. In other words, hope is not just an affective state of human being, but a possible turn, a necessary one, in which language is appropriated in all of its impropriety. If words had to be treated as enemies it is precisely to be redirected to the swirling vocative current that divides meaning and sense as the ultimate region of the poetic being where there is no longer a struggle. 

The catastrophe of Americanism is not just a political or economic reality, one that runs through being in language insofar it is understood as the vision of the use of the voice. Oppen was fully aware of this calamity when writing to William Carlos Williams that “there will be no poetry in America only insofar as that lesson is learned. People who are afraid to talk will not produce much poetry” [2]. It goes without saying that Oppen was not thinking of a new renaissance of poetry and literary producers, but just of the poetic being as one that subsists in the chiasmatic relation of language and voice. 

And if American subjectivity today has given up entirely on the use of its language – a use that is increasingly delegated to machines and telematic automation  – it is precisely, because already historically they ceased moving into “hoping to meaning and sense”. This does not mean that we Americanism strives in absolute muteness; on the contrary, running away from sense means the plugging of meaning into sense and of sense into meaning, which is the definition of the construction of argumentation. And argumentation is the delivery of force in the interiority of language. When Adorno & Horkheimer once defined the United States as “the country of argument” they touched something profound [3]. It is only when language is ripped from argumentation that poetic possibilities are restored, and perhaps also redeemed.

.

.

Notes 

1. George Oppen. This in Which (New Directions, 1965), 25.

2. George Oppen. The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), 39.

3. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), 51.