Roberto Calasso’s short and epigrammatic posthumous book Bobi (Anagrama, 2026) on the opaque figure of Roberto Bazlen has just appeared in Spanish. It is a nebular autobiographical book that does not attempt to render legible the subterranean and oblique figure of Robert Bazlen, but rather to filter some of his obsessions and tonalities, many times through his own voice. Calasso is well qualified to write such book as a frequent stroller companion of the anonymous man of Trieste. There is no aura of the detective mystery about the person’s auratic psychic life, establishing a sharp contrast to Del Guiudice’s polyphonic narrative in Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983). But in this short memoir book, I am particularly intrigued by a moment when Calasso inscribes Bazlen’s vortex of thought and life as an affinity for the acoustic.
Calasso quotes Bazlen (we assume that from his own memory): “Bazlen used to say regularly: “This does not sound too good”, and immediately we knew what he meant. His capacity to recognize sound was thorough” [1]. Calasso tells us, moreover, that he cared little about cultural or intellectual polemics of his time. All that matter was sound, the grain of the voice. His meridian crossing was the song and rhythm of another. It is this proximity to the light of the voice what allowed Bazlen to conceive life and writing as a unified sensible reality; mutually interdependent, and always intertwined like the threads in a rigged tablecloth. To inhabit the world without judgement – of History, of morality, of punishment and guilt, of retribution – means to secure an aperture to an acoustics that will remain close to us, albeit incomplete, in the dissonance and impropriety of meaning.
To be able to attune oneself to the voice is a practice that retreats from the order of the world; that is, to descend into anonymity in order to inhabit a subterranean region, which speaks to Bazlen’s insistence on tugurios or spelonche, which Calasso does not hesitate to render as naked spaces, miniature deserts or caves to immunize oneself from the chatter of the world: minima chôra where something could take place or not. It is hard to define them but we know perfectly well what these are. Perhaps we can be more emphatic: to listen to the voice is already the encounter. And very much like Osip Mandelstam’s figure of the interlocutor, true poetics (and first and foremost that of life) “is ever moving toward that more or less distant, unknown addressee, whose existence the poet cannot doubt without also doubting himself. Only a reality can bring to life another reality” [2].
Bazlen’s notion of writing as the writing of life, experience as writing, very much like Mandelstam’s dialogic poetics, finds a tugurio so that language can emerge in absolute presence. And this is precisely what Bazlen understood in the becoming of life against the metabolic strain of survival, since the repression of the voice will result in the annihilation of what is most alive. Calasso recalls Bazlen’s affirmation: “In a world of death – there was an epoch where one was born alive and would later die. Today, on the contrary, one is born dead – and only a few are able, little by little, to be alive” [3].
For Bazlen there is no community of the living granted in immanence, because to live means to conquer the putrefaction of the culture of death, which is only permanent revolution and hostility. But one cannot conquer death from death; that is, by means of the beautiful soul’s literary prose of the world. It does not take Hegel to say that this is still unwarranted insubordination and permanent bondage. What is then to be alive? It is a resurrection that takes place as an existential decision, that is “at a point in life when a fundamental decision has to be made. I believe that was his passion, and his masterpiece” [4]. This is Del Giudice’s indictment, although surely not fully at odds with Calasso’s autobiographical sketch of Bazlen. In the melodic contact the possibility of a vita nuova is transfigured in not-knowing because the Western modernity is devoid of any notion of ethical destiny. Indeed, “et tout le reste est littérature”, as Verlaine famously wrote. For Calasso’s spectral portraiture in Bobbi (2026), the adventure is to remain alive well beyond completion and needs, as evidenced in our encounter with his languishing voice and memory.
.
.
Notes
1. Roberto Calasso. Bobi (Anagrama, 2026), 83.
2. Osip Mandelstam. “El interlocutor”, en Gozo y misterio de la poesía (El Cobre Ediciones, 2005), 71.
3. Roberto Calasso. Bobi (Anagrama, 2026), 55-56.
4. Daniele Del Giudice. A Fictional Inquiry (New Vessel Press, 2021), 123.
In an issue of The Listener in 1935, the renowned British art historian Kenneth Clark penned a short article titled “The Future of Painting” that can be read as an early eulogy to the tradition of the pictorial craft. As a provocation – this was still the high tide of Modernist art – the ‘future’ of painting for Clark was undeniably reaching a point of irreversible exhaustion, at least in the Western tradition. In a phenomenological reduction of two major strands of modern painting – what he called “pure painting” that included Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; and, on the other, “super-realism” as the artistic consciousness that bypassed “spiritual salvation”, such as that of Surrealism and other visual experiments – Clark’s indictment deployed an indictment on what he sought as the end of the “plastic spirit”: “We must keep in mind the possibility that in the western world the plastic spirit is really exhausted and that art will be lost for many decades” [1].
For Clark, it was not that art ceased to exist as an autonomous practice of sensorial activity; it was rather that its imaginative and spiritual endeavors had a future only if mediated and “linked up” (sic) with the evolution of a “new social economic system” driven by the standards of productivity and mass spectatorship. Unlike Clement Greenberg’s reflexive plea of modernist painting as the triumph of the dialectical inversion of flatness over depth, for Clark the convergence of pictorial relation with social objectivity resulted, in the tradition of a post-Cezanne world, in draining the inherent sensible communication of painting and myth. This meant that modernist painting tout court was devoid of any mythical relation. In fact, one could very well claim that the outwardly material support (the flat canvas) of the picture became its most dramatic corroboration. Modernist painting was the triumph of social symbolization insofar as it served as a reminder of the objective space that could only be taken as unserious gratification of its own objectivity.
It does not take too many readings of Greenberg’s large claim on modernist painting to see that behind “flatness”, its very surface, lurks variations of the aura of subjectivity, expressed in “success of self-criticism”, “resistance to the sculptural”, and the drive towards systematic consistency viewed in the mirror of the “convergence of spirit with science; their concern does show the degree which Modernist art belongs to the same historical and cultural tendency as modern science” [2]. Or so writes Greenberg in his landmark text. If Greenberg goes out of his way to invite modern science into the field of aesthetics it is precisely because Modernist art has been able to spell out the potential for representation into an autonomous surface that has given up depth to the conscious effort of its material limitations as its primary concern (imagination, the divine, the liturgical theatrical aura are all secondary). It is perhaps against this backdrop that one can understand what Clark means by the exhaustion of the “plastic spirit” that underpins his prophetic understanding of the decline of painting.
But what is, ultimately, the “plastic spirit”? It is not referring to sacred representation nor artistic inspiration of the artist, but rather the receptive affinity of the pictorial gesture with nature without ever being reducible to its material support (flatness). If painting exists, it is because its lovely being “is neither sensuous nor spirit, but rather the ungraspable, diffusing over the figure…this being is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone is what the Greek language called [kharis] and we call grace” [3]. What the ‘plastic spirit’ discloses in its suspension of judgement through very disclosure of appearance is the imperturbable space, and by extension ungraspable, where figuration arrest an instance of eternity. In this sense, it always resists any assertion towards the future, because it dwells in the opening of a space “there” that fails to coincide with the material extension and limitation of the canvas.
This is what perhaps Walter Benjamin had in mind in an early fragment where he reflected on painting as an art of paradise or a state other-than-being grounded in visual contours: “Painting, too, generates space spiritually; its generation of form is likewise grounded originally in space, but it generates space in an other form. Not the dimension but the infinity of space is constructed in painting. This happens through the surface, in that, here, things develop not their dimensionality, their extension in space, but their being toward space. The depth yields infinite space. In this way, the form of concentration is given, but this now requires for its fulfillment, for the allaying of its tension, a presentation of the infinite in itself and no longer as dimensional and extended” [4]. Was not this the ungraspable caesura between depiction and nature already pointed out by Schelling?
Painting is depth, or at least it is about a certain way to accout for depth. And depth, fundus, before it takes the form of a flat spatial region in ‘thereness’, it is eminently the display of the figure that emerges from it. This “space otherwise” – that is not just a different spatial arrangement or geometrical calculation – is something of the infinite that makes both flatness and the diachronic arrow of time collapse in its unattainable rigor brought to bear in the affection through figures and colors. Every painting shows therenesss, but that is only possible through the depth of interiority that remains invisible. This can illuminate what Osip Mandelstam said of the plastic spirit when writing that “painting is also much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving. To appreciate a picture you must go through a process making of restoring it” [5]. It is in this renewal that the imperturbable depth of painting fulfills before the abdication of the future. And from the “depths of nature” into the blossoming manifestation of appearance, painting recalls, beyond words, what in the sequence of time is understood, and yet often neglected, as the ungraspable.
.
.
Notes
1. Kenneth Clark. “The Future of Painting”, The Listener, October 2, 1935, 578.
2. Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91.
3. F.W.J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, Vol. 3, 2021, 146.
4. Walter Benjamin. “The Rainbow, or the Art of Paradise”, in Early Writings 1910-1917 (Harvard University Press, 2011), 225.
5. Osip Mandelstam. Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante (Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 79.
We have attempted to read Florensky and Schmitt side by side, and certainly many fundamental questions have been raised converging profusely on the problem of Catholic form. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that some questions have not been pursued at length, and they exceed the modest purpose of this short seminar. As a way of synthesis, I want to press against one question that seems to me to link both thinkers in the wake of secularization, and especially modern representation. Modernity is always too many things at once – it is purely the force of the contingent, but ultimately it is the temporalization of space through objectivity and its necessary legibility. It seems to me that the spatial question is a guiding thread, not the exclusive one, that connects Florensky and Schmitt’s interventions circa 1922. It is obviously the problem that the German jurist never ceased to reflect upon, if we recall how in the very end of his work he situated the very arcana of the law in relation to the visuality of the Homeric “kai nomon egnō”, a predicament for seeing space laying before the law; that is, subsumming the sense of worldly opening into the necessary predicate of a legitimate ground for order.
Schmitt’s purified, prima facie formalist conception of the Catholic form, is also fundamentally spatial, because the primordial essence of the duality of the ekklesia as an institution comes about through the dominion of life unifying the communities and burgs into an internal system of legitimation that builds a concrete order (in recent years the work of Anna Grzymala-Busse has convincingly tracked the morphologies from the medieval church the modern city state and the rule of law). As we know, for Schmitt Rome (Catholic form) is Raum, spatial arrangement, dilation of orders and institutions, representation and decision elevated beyond the fundamental norm. In this sense, the thesis on the ‘visibility of the Church’ hinges upon the opening of the world as always already oriented towards salvation through the structural deficiency of human beings (original sin) and communitarian order of representation and delegation. This is why Schmitt remains a modern political thinker – perhaps the most acutely aware of thinkers when it comes to the fragility of the political project based on the specular visibility of legitimation – because the fusion of the political and that of territory remains indivisible, in spite all of his self-conscious response to the force of immanence noted in Political Theology (1922). The liquidation of the limiting autonomy of the political against technical neutralization is only possible because “space” has been first subsumed into the visible nomos of the nomon egno.
It goes without saying that Pavel Florensky’s strategy is also extremely sensitive to visuality, but his position departs from the assumption that modernity is about the flattening of the unilateral and objective specular regime of visibility. One can recast what Alberti writes quite ostentatiously in De Pictura: “No one will deny that things which are not visible do not concern the painter, for he strives to represent only the things that are seen. Points joined together continuously in a row constitute a line” [1]. In Alberti’s visual inception of pictorial representation, space is already orienting the direction for the flattening of pictorial space that defines modern pictorial representation in the well established argument by Clement Greenberg [2]. Obviously, Florensky wants to break against the flatness of modern representation, which is the condition of possibility for the very nihilism of subject and object that becomes worldness because it has no longer any possible carving out the “thereness” of space. It seems to me that this is what Florensky is after when elaboration of the ‘reverse’ or ‘inverted’ perspective. The inversion here is not just an aesthetic problem of the autonomy of work of art in the new distribution of labor, and here is where liturgy marks a fundamental distinction in terms of the analytical paradigm that frames Florensky’s investigations. Around the same years, Romano Guardini in his The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) defined the liturgical experience as anti-aesthetic phenomenon, because in its communion of souls, it gathers the visible as well as the invisible, whose exclusive beauty shines in the light of truth and not of delimited notion of “work”. For Florensky moving past linear perspective, and by extension objective representation, is the path that prepares “a new structure of thinking” as such [3]. In virtue of its own experiential depth, “a certain spiritual excitement, a joly that rouses one’s attention to reality itself. In other words, perspective too, if it is worth anything, should be a language, a witness to reality” [4].
The so-called inversion of perspective is a destructive operation at the level of sensibility against the traps of illusionism and abstraction, opening in the concrete and yet not-yet-here space where life and its alterity enter into contact. This is why Florensky claims that it is “the content of space that is transmitted, but not the organization” [5]. And in a more densely and rich moment of the “Reverse perspective” (1920) he writes the most clearly expressed elaboration of this new structure of thinking: “To sum up. It is possible to represent space on a surface, but only by destroying the form of the thing represented. Yet it is form, and only form, that visual art is concerned with. Consequently, the final verdict is proclaimed for painting, as for the visual arts in general, to the degree that it claims to provide a likeness of reality: naturalism is once and for all an impossibility” [6]. As it is obviously clear, Florensky is not thinking destruction in virtue of restating a metaphoric sacralization of nature; rather, for him the liturgical depth of the reverse perspective discloses an experience is only possible in the contact between the possibilities of the world and being. It is this region that he call the “abyss of own freedom”, and that the attempt to contain it through the hegemony of the matheme and calculation only amounts to “as tasks of insane presumptuousness” [7]
The turning of experience must inhabit this abyss of freedom retreating from an “unmoving monumental and ontological massiveness of the world, activity by the cognising spirit that lives and labours in these thresholds of ontology” [8]. Thus, accounting for that ontological reduction makes possible inhabiting realities in the world that never become validated through representation. As Florensky writes in a short piece published around these years: “Obviously our living remoteness from reality must again destroy realism in art as well. There are realities in the world; one comes to know them by coming into living contact with them through work in the worldwide sphere….art can unite us with realities are inaccessible to our sense – such are the formal prerequisites of any artistic reality, and a tendency that rejects even one of them thereby forfeits its right to be called realism” [9].
If the Christian liturgy remains the most “realistic” experiential arrangement for Florensky it is because the texture of space appears in its non-visibility as the “missing aspect of what what we might call the surrounding world…it is this surrounding world, place as such, which the liturgy addresses” [10]. It is this surrounding world, that is both beyond the world and yet within it, almost folded unto it, what I would claim that relates tendentially to the notion of the chora (χώρα), not as an interchangeable modulation of “place”, but as what allows externality as the requirement of experience to be indifferent to sense because it its presence is that of possibility. John Sallis in an essay on the notion of the chôra puts it in a way resonates with the abyss of freedom withdrawn by Florensky:
“One could say—though not without some risk of falling into the dream in which the chora (χώρα) is conflated with place—that the chora (χώρα) is the other of being, not just in the sense of being other than being (as every eidos except being would be other than being), but rather in a more abysmal sense, in a sense irreducible to a difference of sense. One could say, too, that the chora (χώρα) is the outside of being, that it is what enables externality as such and thus makes it possible for something outside being nonetheless to be” [11].
We should linger on those words: “a more abysmal sense, in a sense irreducible to a difference of sense”. But this abyss is not what refers to an ontological vacancy that becomes operative for the subject; it is the excess that allows being, and for that matter “ethical being”, to have composed duration in its region. I think it is possible to accept the minimalist thesis of the liturgy as the sanctification of “time-place that the world is” (this is the syntagm deployed by Hemming) beyond divine revelation, but only if one takes up the chôra as the space of spaces (ur-space) at the end of secularization, a transformative leap that transcends time to land somewhere in the depths of regionality. It is the region that makes the passage, as Florensky would say, fata voletem ducunt, nolentem trahunt, from interiority to exteriority without ever achieving consummation, perhaps as a folded relation. The stakes are enormous no doubt. In an entry in his recent Quaderni XIII (Quodlibet, 2025), Giorgio Agamben defines it in a particular way that traverses Heidegger, but also beyond him. This is a difficulty disclosed by the chôra, and it is the beginning of further challenging investigations waiting for us:
“It is the choice of this misleading conceptualization that leads Heidegger to privilege, like Hegel, time and action over space and contemplation. Not “Being and Space [chôra],” as in Plato, but “Being and Time,” as in Hegel. Even the “wonder that beings are” becomes a task and a “sacrifice”. Instead, the aim is to understand this wonder ethically as “use” (“to use it again in order to contemplate it”). Admittedly, in his later years, Heidegger attempts to rewrite Being and Time as “Being and Space”; yet here too, the conceptualization remains imprecise because it does not sufficiently question itself. (Although he merely acknowledges the inadequacy of language, he continues to propose terms that are necessarily deficient.)” [12].
.
.
NotesNotes
Notes
1. Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting (Penguin Books, 2004), 37.
2. Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 90.
3. Pavel Florensky. “Reverse Perspective”, in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (Reaktion Books, 2002), 246.
4. Ibid., 254.
5. Ibid., 258.
6. Ibid., 258.
7. Ibid., 260.
8. Ibid., 269.
9. Pavel Florensky. “On Realism”, in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (Reaktion Books, 2002), 181
10. Laurence Paul Hemming. Worship as Revelation: The Past Present and the Future of Catholic Liturgy (Burns & Oates, 2008), 47-48.
11. John Sallis. “The Politics of the χώρα”, in Platonic Legacies (SUNY Press, 2004), 42.
12. Giorgio Agamben. Quaderni XIII 2020-2021 (Quodlibet, 2025), 248
It is noteworthy to remember that around the same moment in mid-twentieth century, two dissertations on the notion of sin were written by two emblematic representatives of late liberal political thought: John Rawls’ undergraduate thesis A Brief Inquiry Into The Meaning of Sin and Faith written at Princeton University in 1942; and only a few months later Torcuato Fernández-Miranda’s El pecado como concepto fundamental del problema filosófico, a través del pensamiento agustiniano (1943), a doctoral dissertation written at the Law School of the Universidad de Madrid. Both scholars would soon become exemplary figures of Atlantic liberalism in their own ways; the first developing the most consequential and systematic work of normative political thought since Kant; and, his Spanish counterpart, becoming the leading constitutional reformist in the Spanish transition to democracy and architect of the “Ley para la Reforma Política” of 1976 enacted that year in parliament.
Leaving aside major conceptual difference between the two programmatic works, what is symptomatic of them is precisely that a fundamental theologicalconcept is transplanted and weaved for the needs of a political vocabulary that aims at the reinvention of a tradition that could not longer sustained its own secular commitments to individual autonomy and the rational control of state authority. And if we are to follow Eric Nelson’s reading, the intrusion of the doctrine of sin in late modern political thought was the last nail in the coffin of a secularized Pelagianism that dominated the basis of the different normative projects of modern political theory.
In the new administered world the ground of mediation and legitimacy is wobbly and precarious, thus the notion of sin will infuse an exoteric desecularizing anthropology that ironically attempts to “save” politics through its impolitical other that deploys an instrumental conception of original in order to redeem human collective action through divine grace and mercy (clearly a benevolent inversion of Calvinist damnation). This is why in Rawls’ dissertation levels a critique of individual egotism and moral arbitrariness through the operative efficacy of sin. Rawls traced this morphology from Philip Leon who had already articulated it in his Ethics of Power (1935): “What is the nature of this delight in sin itself? It is, Augustine suggests , a delight in at least a factional opposition to the right, in doing unpunished what one ought not to do, in an imitation of godliness, in a shadowy symbol of omnipotence in the search for a shadow – in sort, in the romantic adventurous for the absoluteness” [1]. What political thought in its reduction of civil society– now distinct from the source of authority and concerted legislation – will craft is the regulatory and counterbalancing mechanisms of social ordering without exception. Precisely, one could say that in the wake of the introduction of sin into late political philosophy the new heresy becomes the shadow or the conspiracy against the social domain that will amount to absolute infraction, a plain crime.
If the primal scene of sin originally emerged in the context of a fratricide – and thus, in relation to the dead and to the burial and wandering, which will lead to the justification of territorial settlement – it is altogether symptomatic that this snapshot of the slowpaced instance of desecularization appears as a force that only makes living possible within the social bond, fusing Kingdom and justice, compensation and salvation, punishment and rewards, retribution and distribution in an endless cycle that, because it has lost any mediation to redemption, it can only outlive itself by the coordinating services of social force (and there is no surprise that post-rawlsian thinkers precisely developed a theory of exclusive positive law from the conception of service).
One of the consequences is this mutation is that it allows us to think how the end of secularization is not just the usurpation of the theological sphere, but also the realization of the subsumption of human deficiency and stratification as social leveling (a central operative notion that will later enter Rawls’ A Theory of Justice with decisive consequences) will offer legitimation through the total administration of social life even when done in heuristic ideal of a “classless society” dependent on the enforce of a “priestly service” (hierourgounta) that deifies itself as an indivisible administrative of the social temple. Sin guarantees a vicarious subjectivity that is the starting point for implementing the social distribution of needs and services.
At this point, one can recall Erik Peterson’s humorous exposition of this closure that speaks to the ‘social progressive politics’ that still dominates well into our days: “There is perhaps no better symptom of this than the construction of roads between China and Tibet with the purpose to destroy the places in which there are still ascetic practices outside society…our capacity for leveling, as least theologically understood, will ultimately generate the collapse of Heaven and Hell” [2]. For Peterson, the inaccessibility of exteriority [of the desert of the Fathers, and the ‘desert of deserts’ that opens a place] leaves us with the unbreathable and darkening atmosphere of the Social.
.
.
Notes
1. Philip Leon. The Ethics of Power or the Problem of Evil (George Allen&Unwin, 1935), 240-241.
2. Erik Peterson. “Fragmentos”, in Tratados Teológicos (Ediciones Cristiandad, 1966), 251.
Giovanni di Paolo’s “Paradise” (1445) is a small scene once featured as a predella of an altarpiece from Siena’s San Dominica cathedral. Albeit its miniature proportions it is a striking image of Paradise that puts us in front of a choreography of encounters of the dead, as if the heaven was not a superior and separate stage of life in the cycle of salvation, but rather a continuous stretched territory that takes off where “this life” had left. In its rather simple and rhythmic composition, surrounded by citrus and vegetation, Di Paolo offers the viewer a state of paradise that is not about absolute bliss or bathed in irresistible enchantments, but rather something that in poverty reveals itself in proximity, literally face to face, with an other, perhaps a friend or lover. If we zigzag across the figures it is almost as if the picture would confirm Roberto Antelme’s intuition that “the only transcendence is the relation between beings”. And nothing else is the painterly texture of paradise beyond life. In this way, one can define the earthly paradise as a space where transcendence is dispensed because it primarily welcomes and senses otherness.
One of the striking details of the picture is precisely the positioning of the hands of each couple. Just take a second to gaze around them. These are hands that gesture towards a supreme affection; it is the hand that reciprocates and welcomes. It has been noted – for instance, in Berenson’s A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend (1910), that Sienese painting of the fifteenth century introduced a new pictorial attention that manifested the coming to life of the spiritual. In Giovanni di Paolo’s Paradise the flickering hands, moving around the bodies, are perhaps signifying the initial touch of renewal between heaven and earth. In fact, it is almost as if the sliding of hands was the vehicle for the nongranular transition into the arrival of heaven. In a way of synthesis, one could say that paradise is always at the distance of the hand; which is why painting and happiness remain in an intimate dialogue regardless of themes or historical epochs.
And one can ponder whether the absence of paradise from imagination in the wake of the absolute intrusion of hell in reality, is not precisely a world where the incommensurability between hand, nature, and language become indistinguishable; the transparency of sameness in an expansive totality well beyond reach. To be in nearness is not just an ethical transcendence between beings, but ultimately allowing a divine region to flourish for possible encounters. This is why Angelus Silesius says that “nothing exists except you and I, without both of us then god would not be god, and the heavens will cease to exist” [1]. Paradise is, as Di Paolo’s painting reveals, not the utopia to come in another time, but the inconceivable place never fully detached from the experiences in this earth. As Karl Barth once wrote: “As the place of God in heaven is, of course, a place which is inconceivable to us. It cannot be compared with any other real or imaginary place. It is inaccessible. It cannot be explored or described or even indicated. All that can be affirmed concerning it is that it is a created place like earth itself and the accessible reality of earth which we can explore and describe or at least indicate; and that it is the place of God” [2].
This inconceivable place of God is the apocatastasis of what sorrounds us, of what has touched us, and of what we have touched; and this includes above all, the nexus of the living and the dead in a strenuous thought that gathers itself in what has loved. This space outlives the world of the living in order to express the divine that is, precisely, the unmediated appearance of each encounter. This means that painting paradise does not commission what a new life should look like as a way to overcome a previous existence of deficiencies and missed opportunities inscribed in felix culpa; what is recollected, and thus the only true apocatastasis, is a path to presence that knows neither end nor name that is self-contained in the ur-space of depiction.
.
.
Notes
1. Angelus Silesius. El peregrino querúbico (Ediciones Siruela, 2005), 2005.
2. Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, III (T&T Clark, 2010), 149.
I remember that around 2007 there was a graffiti in Venice that read: “Non c’è nessun Virgilio a guidarci nell’inferno”, which can be rendered as “There is no Virgil that can guide us in this hell”. Many street graffitis come and go, and are easy to forget, but not this one. What does it mean that we live in an epoch without the company of the Roman poet Virgil? The suggestion prima facie is quite clear: if our voyage in the present entails a concrete hell (the subjection into economic domination and nihilism), it is an evermore so repulsive voyage as we lack the presence of the poet who can bear witness to the passing of an epoch and the possibility of the coming of a new earth.
But why Virgil? As Erich Auerbach already noted, for Dante the historical Virgil is both the poet and the historical witness, given that the Roman poet’s exemplary descent into hell was the preparation of a “terrene Jerusalem (earthy Jerusalem), the universal peace that came to pass during the Roman Empire, proposed and glorified in light of its future mission…Virgil led the way as a poet because of his description of the realm of the dead; he was thus a guide through the afterlife because he knew the way. But it was not only as a poet that was destined to lead. He was destined because he was a Roman and a human being” [1]. It would follow that an age dominated by the realization of absolute indifferentiation – this is the frame of nihilism after all – highly repressive of any proximity with the dead, can have no use of any Virgil even if one would offer to open a path to leave hell behind. The artist will not be understood or recognized as either human or poet, but rather taken as fully inhuman and incomprehensible. And this perhaps speaks to the tonality of terror and blindness that defines the undifferentiated suspended posthistorical time.
That there are no Virgils to cast a forward light outside the epocal hellish condition entails that we are left with an absolute politicization over life and death that takes the form of a novel technical imperium. We know that in Antiquity, political unhappiness and disarray was a common state of affairs (and also exile from civil life); life was conditioned, although not totally subsumed, by cycles of domination and insubordination during volatile civil stasis. But still in that historical epoch, a poet like Virgil, as both human and poet, was able to turn away from the “harsh and evil world, and sets out for Arcadia where he allows no hope, not even any desire to do something about the suffering world, to lighten his sorrow and despair” in the communion of friendship and concordia to retreat from static political absorption [2]. When we say that our predicament is that of a a world without Virgil, this should not be understood as a reiteration of Max Kommerell’s paradigmatic Jugend ohne Goethe (“a youth without Goethe”); but rather, more fundamentally, as the impossibility for the human species to imagine a sense of redemption in world that reduces itself to exchange and strife. In other words, the absence of the memory of Virgil speaks directly to the ever-increasing incapacity of existence to dwell beyond the imperatives of a calamitous attenuation of destruction and oblivion. We should keep in mind that Dante’s memory of Virgil was a symbol for the poetizing myths of a new life; and, in turn, Virgil’s own Arcadian nomos was the confabulation of reality and myth expressed in a language that measured itself against the orderability of imperial force. The triumph of total politicity, which is to say the coupling of the political into effective dispensation of technology, mutes not only the voice of the poets, as much the contact of speech and the passing of the world into nothingness.
In The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch describes this very passage through the mystical death and cosmic transcendence of the Roman poet himself, who now enters “a primal darkness which had held itself hidden behind the furthermost starry orb and now, independent of the arching path of lights, indeed, without putting out a single one of them it filled the dome of existence with impenetrable darkness: the essential world-darkness burst forth, that uncreated darkness which is infinitely more than the mere loss of light or absence of light…” [3]. For Broch, the passing of the world in the wake of the death of the poet does not coincide with the silence constitutive of speech, but with the severability of a language transformed as fully transparent and unmediated, in Broch’s words “all understanding, consummating, might and commanding; the world of pledge, the pure word, becoming so overpowering that nothing could withstand it” [4].
Extrapolated to our times, the liquidation of language takes form of absolute theatricality of the word, ascending to rhetorical and computational transparency. And in this unnerving cacophony, where everything is communicated, is realized in the historical project of cybernetics and automatized languages. The ethical texture of speech becomes unattainable for both humans, as poetizing beings, as they become incapable of inhabiting the dislocated abyss between myth and reality, now pivoted to a linguistic closure that commands them into the high noon of despair. An endless despair that has relentlessly lost with the inception of the divine.
.
.
Notes
1. Erich Auerbach. “Figura” (1938), in Selected Essays: Time, History, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 2014), 108
2. Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind (Dover Publications, 1982), 293.
3. Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil (Vintage, 1972), 471.
I still remember quite well how, a few years back at the Harvard University Bookstore, the Loeb Collection of Latin And Greek Classics, with their crimson and green covers respectively, were nowhere to be found on the shelves. And a slim store clerk when asked told me that those books on “dead languages” were no longer carried at the store. If this anecdote transmits anything is precisely the central question that still lingers from the pulsating notion of “dead languages”. What does it mean that a language is dead; if there is, in fact, such an ontological status for any language that has been traced from our past? This question returns to us today with some urgency as the most recent avatar of cybernetics, “Artificial Intelligence”, positions itself high above not just the alleged “dead languages” of the antiquity that many readers cannot longer master, but also the living spoken languages of human race as a whole.
Prophetically, this was the problem confronted by W.H.D Rouse in a short text titled “Machines or Minds?”, and published in The Classical Weekly in winter of 1913. And as we know, Rouse, a trained philologist who translated Homer and Plato, was also the creator of the Loeb Classical Collection published by Harvard University Press beginning in 1912. The task of reviving the “dead languages” in Rouse’s program was a way to contest what he saw as the collapse of civilization in the face of rise of machine and the colonization of “leisure time”, as it was becoming a world of pure “electric force” (a topoi of modern civilization that will also finds its place in the writings of Warburg, Schmitt, and Florenski as we have recently noted ).
In a description that resonantes in form and spirit with Carlo Michelstaedter’s forecast that the future of language will amount to an international language composed of technical terms, Rouse was more refined and precise in defining this instrumental transport by connecting the rise of science with that of English as a homogenous planetary language. Thus, inverting the assumption that “dead languages” are the defunct and no longer spoken idioms of past civilizations and archaic cultures; for Rouse it is “English”, and more specifically, scientific English that is ultimately a dead language, as it transmits nothing, as it is fundamentally detached from linguistic experience and imagination. As Rouse writes in one moment of his essay: “The very languages give what English does not give. Modern English is full of roundabouts, of metaphors without meaning, verbiage, shams; Greek and Latin are plain. The English language is largely dead: Greek and Latin are living languages. […] The scientific English sentences are all dead: they either wrap a single sense in meaningless words, or they seem to have a meaning when they have none [1]”. The rhetorical artifice to which language succumbs expresses itself not through the use of words, signs and icons, but in a proliferation of discourse that no longer communicates anything precisely because it has communicated everything out of the fallacy of absolute representation and absorption of a flat system of wordless objectivity. In Rouse’s indictment of human decline finds its correspondence in what language’s entry into what he called the “Dagon of Science”, opening a new scenario for human historical destiny: “never was there a world that cared less for truth in speech and thought” [2].
There is a huge risk in reading Rouse’s defense of the “classical languages” (Latin, Greek) as a humanist blueprint for a forthcoming antiquarian revival, a nihilist outlook that is being fulfilled in the United States as a parodic reiteration of Winckelmann’s neoclassical imitation ideal. Against the reification of dead languages as fictive “living entities” positioned as tools for knowledge and expertise, division of labor notwithstanding, what was fundamental for Rouse in the dead languages of the past – and in this sense, any language – is the ability of bringing about the experiential dimension of its use, thus connecting thinking and the experience without separations [3]. In other words, Rouse, very much like the last Émile Benveniste, found interest in classical languages not as a moral principle of civilization and identity foundation, but rather a site for the immediate experience between speakers embedded in a degree of the lived [4]. This is also why a poet like Eliseo Diego would state in Conversación con los difuntos (1991) reading other languages is a form of friendship beyond presence of the living. The conversation in languages is a way to keep open the passage from the living to the dead and back.
And whoever lives in language dwells in the memory and traces of all the dead languages, inscriptions, voices, and rhythms, because these contain the past as a reservoir of the figure of life. The consolidation of basic English as the hegemonic medium of communication with the return of extreme nationalism emerges, as Erich Auerbach wrote from his Istanbul exile, “to a ruse of providence designed to lead us along a bloody and tortuous path of an International of triviality and a language of Esperanto”. In this scenario, the slow annihilation of the human species takes place outside the world; that is, in the field of language, which has now become the central historical program of domination against the lived experience that connects the dead and the living. As languages become an autonomous frame of order and force, human beings’ existence is transformed into a mobile receptor of rhetoric, information, and opinion.
.
.
Notes
1. W.H.D Rouse. “Machines or Mind?”, The Classical Weekly, V.6, 1913, 85.
2. Ibid., 86.
3. W.H.D Rouse. “Latin as a Universal Language”, Nature, February, 1916, 706.
4. Émile Benveniste. Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 67.
In several places of his Lectures of Aesthetics, Hegel refers to Dutch painting as a way to thematize the concept of completion that fulfills being in the world. For a moment his commentary brings to bear a state of the mundane while avoiding the vulgarity of the overachieving surface that would define the general tendency of modern painting. True, Hegel’s indictment of Dutch painting does not negate the modern sensibility either, insofar as the portraits of the Flemish tradition fail to disrupt that is always held incredibly visible in the frame of pictorial representation. The artistic triumph of Dutch painting depends on a specific oscillation between the inner and outer experience of the subject visible range of depiction. This is not an exclusive one-directional movement towards the immanence of life; which Carlo Levi will denounce as the estrangement from the world, but rather a synthesis that gracefully falls on the sensuous activity of painting just at the moment that appearance dispenses in the world.
Thus, the emergence of Dutch painting was only possible in a specific form of life that was resolutely experiential in nature and spiritual rich. As Hegel writes in a first moment in the Lectures: “the Dutch in their taverns, at weddings and dances, at feasting and drinking, everything goes on merrily and jovieall, even if matters come to quarrels and blows; wives and girls join in and a feeling of freedom and gaiety animates one and all…this spiritual cheerfulness in a justified pleasure, constitutes the higher soul of pictures of this kind” [1]. And this spiritual freedom, sublated from the necessities and constraints of external things in the world, validates a concept of the ‘ideal of life’ that is transcendent only to its sense of living. Hegel notes that Protestantism facilitated the Dutch a materiality for this sense of worldly transcendence, of communitarian deificatio, allowing them to have, in his words, “some footing in the prose of life” [2]. So, Dutch painting is predominantly concerned with depth; and this depth is not concerned with the absorption of the spectator, but quite literally, almost in a physical way, enmeshed in the inner tonality of everyday figures. This is their inner being made visibly manifest. The manifested and gathered presence of this inner and outer movement of the infinite is precisely what retains the imperturbable trace of the divine beyond time; indeed; an eternal Sunday of life, as Hegel says in another important moment:
“This painting has developed unsurpassably, on the one hand, through and through living characterization in the greatest truth of which art is capable…For this reason we have before us no vulgar feelings and passions but peasant life and the down-to-earth life. lower classes which is cheerful, roguish, and comic. In this very heedless boisterousness there lies the ideal feature: it is the Sunday of life which equalizes everything and removes all evil; people who are so whole-heartedly cheerful cannot be altogether evil and base”. [3]
It is well known that in the art historical discipline, the moment of Dutch painting has been understood within the framework of the scientific and optical revolution of that century; a new “faith in the eyes”, to follow Francis Bacon’s terms, capable of generating a concrete and rational knowledge of the “common world” of a new, more geometrico, regime of light [4]. But nothing could be further from how Hegel’s synthesis approached the sensibility of Dutch painting; mainly, as fundamentally a site of the overcoming of evil because it was not alien to the comic downfall of human experience. In Dutch painting, Hegel reminds us, it is not that evil or wrongdoing is removed from the factical life; rather, it means that the comic is a nested experience that can grasp and transfigure the miseries or the disasters beyond taxative transactions of the social world and preparing the conditions for a kallipolis.
Although it is not clear who are the Dutch painters that Hegel had in mind when writing about a painting that enters into the “Sunday of life”, certainly the pictures of Pieter de Hooch – “A Dutch Courtyard” (1660) comes to mind – where distant and miniscule figures smile at each other in the open encounter of a place. The erasure of evil from painting is achieved not from stating the dogma through which the world could transcend and reverse the fall from nature, that is something like a new “faith in the visible”; it is more the event that accounts for the surrounding as it becomes oblivious to the very artifice of depiction. In this sense, the imperturbable state of Dutch painting is achieved as a life that dwells in the folds of the world as it retreats from the force of anticipation. And, if according to Chrysippus, evil is nothing but losing the capacity of affection or mediation of our inner sensibility; what the Dutch pictorial order brings to bear is that the ‘good’, rather than being a substantive function of the will and contingency, it can only be accessed in a form of life that is indistinct from the inconspicuous and breathable space through which it dwells.
And what is the sensibility of the comic if not what remains ungraspable in each and every in a painterly expression in a world in consonance, a place without remainder? In other words, if there is a painting that has abdicated from evil, it is because its has attuned the soul to an exteriority that is no longer dependent on the weight of the sign. It is still the business of the mute things (Poussin) in order of the beautiful. This is the state the state of grace that Schelling thought the plastic arts could bestow human sensuous experience after the irredeemable apotheosis of nature: “In painting a lovely being that is neither sensuous nor spiritual, but rather ungraspable, diffuses itself over the figure and nestle into all the figures and to each oscillation of the extremities. This being, which as we said, is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone, is what the Greek language calls kháris and we call grace (Anmut) [5]. And the movement of grace in painting is what initiates the transfiguration of death – the muted voices of the dead – into a divine whose sole task is the disclosure of presence.
.
.
Notes
1. G.W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics. Volume I (Oxford University Press, 1975), 169-170.
2. Ibid., 597-98.
3. G.W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics. Volume II (Oxford University Press, 1975), 886-887.
4. Svetlana Alpers. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91.
5. F.W. J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri : The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, 2021, Vol. 3, 146.
In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the Newtonian thematization of the limit afterall). In particular gloss 554 strikes a tenor for our current epoch: “Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes an opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say that there is nothing fine about it” [1]. In the world after the fall, the intramundane system of felix culpa, is already one of dual power.
In many respects, this image is stronger than that of nihilism as the oblivion of walking upwards gazing at the abyss, because it connects the social pressure of “opinion” to that of the common ground that makes out of blindness the legitimacy of vacuous enlightenment. In the very void that truth will carve out for authority, Pascal seems to imply that the imperium of opinion will reign as a dual power of administration and mediation with the world. This is why for Pascal, force without opinion is indocile; but opinion without force amounts to the persuasion of solitude of the last man in the earth. At the heart of the groundlessness of modern legitimacy there is the necessary organization of opinion or doxa that will regulate the community of the living and the dead because ultimately its end is to master the mystery of language in its inability to name.
Of course, Pascal thought that language could overcome the fictive empire of opinion, which in its modern avatar of propaganda is meant to design apocalyptic tendencies towards self-destruction in the course of historical development. As a “properly speaking wholly animal”, the human can only dwell in a poetic region “entre-deux”, that is, between the abhorrent light and the infinite depth of darkness, where language endures through the symbol well beyond the experience of the fallen corruption of nature. As Lezama Lima reminds us in a short essay on the French thinker, the poetic region in Pascal is ultimately the experience of language as a mystery of creation that refuses to accept the post-mythic condition of nature and human boredom that will euthanize the use of linguistic creation [2]. Now it can be said that the intrusion of the infinite chatter of opinion takes place precisely in the logged forest of speech, which consolidates its rhetorical autonomy of language away from the possibility of distance and self-constrain of the sayable. The statecraft of rhetoric is the infrastructure of the reign of opinion, because here the draining of the depth of being is supplanted by alienated voluntary participation at the very ground of nothingness. Nihilism takes a decisive step forward when language can become any differential sign to communicate what has become impossible to be said outside the cubicle of the enthymeme.
Paraphrasing the ancient wisdom of Pindar’s famous opening verse in Fragment 169 (“Law, νόμος, the king of all”), Pascal assures us of the fragility of this imperium: “An empire based on opinion and imagination resigns for a time, and such an empire is mild and voluntary. That force reigns for ever. Thus opinion is like the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant” [3]. Is it possible to separate, nevertheless, the reign of opinion from that of force; and, secondly, the circulation of force as grounded in a fabric of language that has already descended into the empire of opinion without any trace? In a way, there is no modern politics without the presupposition of the autonomy of a field of opinion integrated into “rational control”, to use the expression of American political theorist Harvey Mansfield. And even if Carl Schmitt could state in his Constitutional Theory (1928) that no democratic secular state could effectively exist out without opinion as a diffused and disorganised form of acclamation, it is now completely obvious to us that the post-liberal state configuration, persists in a constant state of the fluctuation, compartmentalization, and archic steering of opinions. What survives the utter collapse of the category of political modernity is the flattening of language into “opinion” that provides standing to the epochal anomia.
Following classical philologists we are tempted not to ignore that in the word anomia entails not just the suspension of legislated norms and positive commands, but also the decline of the distance between existence and the divine that in antiquity, in the age of Pindar, subsisted under the notion of eunomia as harmonious attunement of the very lived experience. In other words, the consolidation of opinion is a long historical effect of the erosion of distance and perspective that restricts the capacity to “ascertain a spiritual excitement…and if worth anything, a language, a witness to reality” [4]. To bear witness in language is a poetic enactment that, at heart of its solitude, refuses the glacial ripples of the force of opinion vested in reality.
How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the “new”, even though the price to be paid is always on the side of an overachieving cynicism and hypocrisy mediated by discourses of all kinds. At one moment of his dialogue Eupalinos or the Architect, Paul Valéry claims that whenever deep reflection is pushed by raw force, this unnatural attitude almost always misses truth: “The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced…we must do or suffer violence to see better or differently” [1]. The claim to see clearly beyond the immanent veils of the rhetorical commonplaces is still our question, although rarely posed. If our suspended epoch is that of formless rubble and extinction, one way in which this question could be reformulated today is to ask what does it mean to envision and live in the desert? Is not the desert condition, its suspended and dead temporality that gathers existence in the void, the only authentic event of posthistorical time?
This is the problem that haunts Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari, (1940), in which the waiting for an invasion and hoarding armies is conflated to the event of a wait that is infinite and excruciating, very much like the video art of Douglas Gordon at the end of the century. The steppe is a form of deserted land without forestation and depth; it is the very triumph of the symbolization of time stretched into a unified surface that recalls the emptying momentum of every form. It is nothingness as an absolute event, as Buzzati writes: “….the ramparts, the very landscape, breathed an inhospitable sinister air…At this moment Drogo was looking at the northern world – the uninhabited land across which, or so they said, no man had ever come. No enemy had ever out of it; there had been no battles; nothing had ever happened” [2]. How to account, and how to live, beyond mere survival, in a world nothing happens; that is, where the “nothingness” is the very schism between existence and world? When speaking hyperbolically of the Fortress in the steppe where the protagonist Drago is stationed, Buzzati will refer to this mundane condition as a “thankless world”.
It goes without saying that a world beyond “thanking” is a world that is unworldly in its sensible and intelligible mediations, because it no longer appears to grasp the irreductibility of presence; it needs to repress what appears figuratively in its disclosure. This is why in the vast openness of the steppe, in its blinding clearing of legibility, there is only blindness and hallucinations that are always compensatory to the pain endured by the nihilism of a disjointed time. The waiting of the barbarians does not longer hold the concept of prefiguration once held by situated or concrete politics (Turgot’s high-modernist axiom comes to mind: “we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present”); it is rather the impossible, contingent and retroactive narration that fictive communities need to elaborate to endure the ongoing pain at the end of the social bond. This is the price to be paid to survive in the glacial habituation of nihilism.
It might be very well that what can be glimpsed in the temporal wreckage of the steppe is nothing but the mute language of pain that brings presence near without political translation, because it is always an excess to the stabilization of forms. In an interview published in Milan’s Il giorno in 1959, Buzzati referred to the landscape of the steppe as “Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier…it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting”. But this strain of waiting is the thrownness of existence and its absolute distance from the world. In fact, towards the end of the novel we read a condensation of this inconspicuous tonality: “It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are from their affection for reach, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence, the loneliness of life” [3].
What remains is language not because it can describe or narrate, but because only the voice can measure up to the tonality of pain. In his short prologue on the Spanish edition of the novel, Borges claimed that Buzzati’s desert is both real and symbolic of the void, although the symbol no longer transmits any legible sense of totality; it prefigures a certain exhaustion of symbolization. The truth of language in the absence of form can no longer adequate itself to events or situations; it is now the voice that gathers the turbulence of pain in the waiting of the coming of presence already inhabited. Whenever that voice fails to speak, as René Daumal observed in his unfinished Mount Analogue (1952), life amounts to an empty carcass and a restless cadaver of oblivion. As presence fails to materialize in the world of forms and events, the only realist position is the conjuration of life as a form of expressive self-exile refusing to participate in the hallucinatory social pressure that desperately masks the serenity of a static and inapparent landscape – it is the passive eye that contemplates the plain silence of the steppe while preparing the schism for a possible transfiguration [5]. It is perhaps this passive contemplation what Andrew Wyeth’s faceless Christina laying on the grass has always been yearning for.
.
.
Notes
1. Paul Valéry. “Eupalinos or The Architect”, in Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1989), 75.
2. Dino Buzzati. The Tartar Steppe (Canongate Books, 2018). 31.
3. Ibid., 220-221.
4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El desierto de los tártaros”, in Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos (Alianza Editorial, 1988), 22.
Infrapolitical Reflections 