Author: infrapoliticalreflections

The soul of things. On Alice Rohrwacher’s Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption.  In a certain sense,  Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of  immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In  the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the  moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.  

Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema  (2023), she admits that  any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles –  presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33). 

As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema. 

The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the  cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye. 

No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.

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Notes 

1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.

2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.

The irreducible in language: a note on Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947). by Gerardo Muñoz

At the outset of L’espéce humaine (1947), Robert Antelme discloses the difficulty between language and experience that lays at the heart of the book, and which is never thoroughly assumed at the level of form in the novel. L’espèce humaine (1947) is ultimately not an account about the impossibility of describing what took place in the camps; from the banal physical violence to the desperate hunger, from the microaggressions to the slightest movements and carnage of bodies in space; from the joyful smiles in the most miserable of scenario where the ultimate goal was for the human life to slowly rot; the sequence of actions engage in no struggle to bring to a crisis the level of representation. And Antelme goes into painstaking efforts to give us a full picture of what took place, only to never talk about it again in writing or in personal conversations as Marguerite Duras tells us [1]. So, what to make of Antelme’s initial affirmation in the “Forword” where he states that: “…during the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive and we felt a frantic desire to describe it as such as it had been…[..]. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be checking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” [2]. The unimaginable for Antelme is a sort of threshold of language; a limit for the unrestricted, that is, for what could allow for an experiment of language after the catastrophe, or in the wake of the civilizational catastrophe that is consummated in the camp. 

This delirium and anxiety over language – to tell it now and how it happened and to tell “the world”, only to immediately acknowledge the impossible task of doing so – does not take place at the order of the narrative; it is first and foremost something that we get a glimpse of at the end of the book as the liberating soldiers enter the rubbled towns only to encounter the incontinence of the survivors “talk and talk, and pretty soon he isn’t listening anymore” [3]. At that moment, the face to face between human beings will follow “to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge”, Antelme tells us [4]. But what type of untransmittable and nocturnal knowledge is Antelme referring to here? It is not about some ethical exigency of the defacement of experience through linguistic construction; it is rather the torrential and densely weight of description and events, that numbs and deposes language in the very mediation of its effective sayability. The experience of human suffering and domination is untransmittable not because there is a deficit in language or the effacement of representation; but, on the contrary, precisely because there an excess of language that flattens irreducible suffering to an anaphoric socialization of speech that tacitly accepts inhumanity at face value. And that socialized distribution of speech underserves suffering, in virtue of equalizing an expansive chatter that neutralizes in survival the inherent pain of the irreducible human species within the imposible ordeal of total annihilation. 

Antelme’s L’espéce humaine  is stubbornly nominalistic in its thick descriptions of things and events, and it wants to avoid metaphoric transports. He prefers to call things as he sees it and get to the thicket of things in the most nauseating of repetitions. In a way, the hellish atmosphere of the concentration camp resides in the slow moving degradation of human life deprived of the world. However, there is one moment where Antelme resorts to calling a situation ‘hell’; that is, precisely, to an account of the transparent use of language, the raw incontinence and commanding force towards exteriority, as if there is no longer a caesura or separation between being and language once enunciation has been homogenized as commanding force. This is a language without a secret or unsaid, moving against the outside of consciousness in the same depretatory form as the same administrative machinery that has lifeless bodies as its target. In this way, language being turned into the force of speech will not only foreclose itself to the world, but it will signal the very intangibility by virtue of the flattening of verbal communication as an immediate and furious call to an annihilation of appearance. Antelme writes in this admirable moment – one of those instances where description of the state of things is incepted by the negation of the very conditions that allow for the narrative order: 

“Degradation, and flabbiness of language. Mouths whence nothing any longer ever came that was ordered, or strong enough to last. A weakly woven cloth fraying to bits. Stencens succeeded one another, contradicted one another, expressed a kind of belched up wrtnessness; a bile of words. They were all jumbled together: the son of a bitch who’d done it, the wife left on her own, food, drink, the old lady’s tear, the fuck in the ass, and so on; the same mouth could say it all, one thing after the other. It came forth all by itself; it would be empty. It only stopped at night. Hell must be like that, a place where everything that’s said, everythat’s expressed, comes forth equalized with everything else, homogenized, like a drunkard’s puke” [5]. 

The incontinence of language at the limit of what can be said is a secondary hell; that is, the last contortion that the inhumanity of the human can offer outwards in order to outlive in a moment of minimal pleasure, since the absolute pain of a glacial existence has been deprived of any real contact with the world and things. It is a linguistic hell – the looping language of the camp, will only mirror also the linguistic codification that around the same years will be elevated to the paradigm of cybernetics and the regime of information theory – will now appear as a unified block of application, enforcement and extraction. Hence, we should take Antelme at his word: language has become “flabby”, and it is a “puke”. It is circulation without sense, as in the looping mechanics of the furnaces charted by the Nazi engineers that appears in the recent sequence of the film Zone of interest (2023). It is not that sayability loses it claim to the autonomy of its form before an event; it is also that by virtue of its own degradation against the erasure of events, it can only be unified, packed, homogenized and rendered into equivalence in the wake of the absolute triumph of the historical project of alienation and external objectivity.  

The passage of the old hymnal texture of language as solace and lamentation could only entail the conservation of communication, which for Theodor Adorno writing during the same years as Antelme (1946-1947) will deduce as the “techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere whose shelter he can thrive” [6]. That the experience of the camp for Antelme ultimately meant that the “executioner can kill a man but cannot change him into something else”, must be placed in tension with the epochal transformation of a hellish experience of language at the service of the nihilistic service of equivalence that unveils its purest semblance at the camp [7]. The unitary reduction between the “socialized Man” and the “deportee” enters into a proper focus that Antelme was able to grasp with uttermost honesty: “…that there is no inherent difference between the “normal” system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a shepherd image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live” [8]. At the risk of an overtly mannerist claim, it seems to me that the kernel of Antelme’s intellectual effort is to withdraw from the condition of hell that is condensed in the block of ice fixated in the ruinous material of language [9]. Memory, experience, friendship, truth, writing, the soul – these are all tools to chip against the brute reification of the glacial subjection at the price of ultimate solitude. Is there anything else worth a shot? In the last pages of L’espéce humaine, Antelme returns to the question of “freedom”, only to claim that “to be free” implies to “say no to everything” – and could we also refuse the language as it declines into flabbiness, equivalence, and its putrid decline, as overflowing mountain of trash that covers up the ongoing pain of the human species? [10].  

Sure thing, the hölderlinean enduring and difficult task of the “free use of one’s own” appears here with some urgency as the requirement of traversing the attunement to pain. Antelme seems to have wanted to offer a negative theology to “forever starting anew”, in which the irreducible of human sayability is posited as the condition of the “only transcendence between beings” [11]. “To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience;  a prefix that for us designates distance and separation” [12]. Aren’t distance and separation two conditional criteria for grounding the irreducible? The habitation of the speaking being can harbor the contours of the unfathomable expression on the reverse of social tribulations, which is always the primal nomos of equivalence. Allowing the expansion of the irreducible as a the site of an ordinary accumulation of freedom preserves a sensible region for what takes place (“whatever happens” — and is not this taking place the opening of the non-site of the chorá?) in a language attuned to the relentless event that has forever touched us. This is already the site of the unimaginable beyond and away from the language of survival that permeates everything in both times of peace and of war. 

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Notes 

1. Marguerite Duras. El dolor (Alianza editorial, 2019 ), 71.

2. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 3.

3. Ibid., 289.

4.Ibid., 290.

5.  Ibid., 135. 

6.  Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the damaged life (Verso, 2020), 33

7. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 220.

8. Robert Antelme. “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 22. Dionys Mascolo makes more or less the same claim in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) when speaking about the stratification of species in the camps and the division of classes in society: “l’intuition aveuglante de tous les survivants est celle d’avoir fait quant à eux, sous une forme extrême, cette expérience: que l’organisation de la société en classes telle que nous la vivons est déjà une image de la division de cette société en espèces, comme dans les camps”, 87.

9. Robert Antelme. “Revenge?”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 15.

10.  Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 291..

11. Robert Antelme. “The Smiling Angel: Rheims Cathedral”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 10. 

12. Maurice Blanchot. “The Indestructible”, in The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 

Humanity’s way out: antinomies of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945). by Gerardo Muñoz

In an early review of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), Renato Poggioli noted that one of the important merits of the novel was that in spite of the authort’s political commitment, the narrative was “neither partisan nor ideological. I dare to say it is not political; the author even apologizes for this at the end of the volume” [1]. Poggioli, of course, is referring to Vittorini’s Postscript where he states, favoring a thin notion of the autonomy of art, that the end of art is to “seek in art the trace progress of humanity is altogether different from fighting for it upon the political and social terrain” [2]. This is enough evidence to bring to bear Vittorini’s humanist project grounded in a faith in the “progress of the human species” that he wrestled with throughout his life, and that he never really abandoned according to Franco Fortini [3]. Of course, Vittorini’s ‘progressivism’ is not bounded to ironclad guidelines of political economy and the science of a materialist history, rather his position is the attempt to flee from it, to undertake a different path in which humanity and inhumanity could enter into an improper and inconspicuous relationship towards presence. 

Here we can part ways with Poggioli’s suggestion that Uomini e no (1945) is not “sufficiently political” because the characters do not dare to make political slogans or identify themselves with a concrete political party line (the Communist Party that Vittorini himself identified with in spite of having written a non-political novel) during the underground resistance during the years of fascist domination in Milan during the interwar years. If Uomini e no (1945) drifts aways from engaging in a formal political identification to mobilize the narrative persuasion it is because for Vittorini there is an original struggle for “life” that necessarily precedes subjection and political action: it is the struggle of human species to confront the difficulty of its own inhuman threshold, which becomes necessary to account for in any materialist conception. The whole tension of the novel hinges on the unnerving formal composition of the narrative with the asphyxiating dread and angst of the character that embodies the existential the practice of an incarnated struggle beyond survival. 

However, what is beyond survival? What comes after the desert of a world that soon enough – in the words of Theodor Adorno at the height of the mid century – will turn human life into “mere functions within a monstrous social machine in which “life does not longer lives”…in which what grows is the scope of socialization and its functions. What I want to say is that liberty has become a mere pretext to enhance the ways of domination” [4]. If politics is the religion of modernity (political theology suturing the void with authority), the accumulation of liberty can only be understood as the moment of expansion and reproduction of effective domination. In a way, the metropolitan scenario in Uomini e no (1945) foreshadows the evolving historical epoch of this ‘monstrous socialization’ as a civil war or stasis, in which the mere survival of political struggle is proportional to the dispensation of death of humanity as the last dialectical movement of humanity against itself; that is, towards the concrete extinction of the human. For Vittorini the swerving black sun of fascism and political militancy (in its idealized version invested in the paradigm of sacrificial structure of history) can only amount to the realization of epochal nihilism and the fertilization of the expansive desert in the novel at the expense of sacrificing the erotic mediation with the world, which entails the liquidation of the sensibility external to human: “Love, in those deserts, is at its most squalid; it is not that life is absent from but the life it has is not alive. You are thirsty and have a chance to drink; there is water. You are hungry, you have a chance to eat; there’s bread. There is a spring and alms around, just the one you are looking for. But it  is only a mirage, it is not the thing itself” [5]. The fundamental question posed by Vittorini is never truly resolved by Uomini e no (1945): crossing the desert to achieve something like an erotic distance with the thing itself as ultimately the confirmation of one’s irreductible destiny. No doubt, there are moments where this emerges in strange ways, at the limit of narration and as a linguistic declaration. This is scripted through the exchange with the old lady Selva on happiness: “We work in order that men be happy. Isn’t that what we are working for?…Men need to be happy. Would there be any point to our clandestine newspapers? To our conspiracies?” [6]. 

Is happiness a subterfuge to return to the world, or is happiness, authentic non-compensatory happiness, the stimmung of life as it retreats from the delegated representations of civil society? The suspended dialectical closure at the level of form in Uomini e no (1945) provides a preliminary resolution to the question of happiness amidst wreckage; a collapse that speaks to Vittorini’s impossibility to bring into synthesis political action and existential authenticity. The narrative texture of Uomini e no (1945) is a preparatory exploration – showing the false exists in the meantime – towards the possible liberation of man’s passions, even against the premises of a reconciled ‘Humanity’ capable of leaving behind the antinomies of humanism and antihumanism at the service of the ‘communist way’. And we know that for Vittorini the commitment to ‘Communism’ was inscribed not in the idea or the organizational tactics but in the notion of the “way” (una via), capable of opening possibilities to counter the coercive efficacy of the administrative social apparatuses that turn historical progress into a totalizing desert [7].  How to do so – is there any legible index to the “via comunista”? As a novel Uomini e no is preparatory towards this retreat from the confusion of the inhumanity of the human on the one hand, and the total humanization of the world to deface the possibility of happiness and experience with the world itself. 

In this sense, Fortini is right in describing the lyricism of the novel as attuned to a funeral oration or song (“canto funebre”), which is also a prolonged farewell to the ideals of Vittorini himself as a moral humanist; that is, as someone committed to the ideals and abstraction of redemptive self-sacrificial christology and the self-serving autonomous action of the pardon as man’s last hope to absorb the inhuman kernel into the vita nova of a redeemed universal Humanity. And in fact, these are two “endings”’ of Uomini e no (1945): the self-immolation and sacrifice of the protagonist N2 waiting to confront the Nazi official Cane Nero, and the final sequence of the worker that refuses to murder a German soldier because he looked “sad” even when standing on occupied soil, even when he occupies the role of the protectorate of the nomos of the earth [8]. These are the novel two preparatory distinct actions in the dense fog of the interregnum: the Christological path of sacrifice of N2  – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, which according to René Girard’s defines the advent of the Christian sacrificial  practice- seeks a last action of resistance holding on to “humanity’s internal weakness”, which carries the elevation of secularized mythic discharge of subjective martyrdom [9]. On the other, the milanese worker offers redemption as a form of secret forgiveness (without a justification and without a why) to the occupier, and in this way integrate the inhuman into the human species as the solution to the repeated rumination over the movement of struggle and resistance: “Why, without being in any way forced to do so, had they entered this duel to the death, and why did they continue to wage it?” [10]. 

In his early reading of Uomini e no (1945) Franco Fortini offered a thesis that I am tempted to call the domestication of the wolf argument; an inversion of Hobbesian anthropology and the Christian felix culpa in which struggle’s optimism will ultimately transfigure the internal wolf unto the human’s heart [11]. But we know that the homo homini lupi depends on a thick notion of anthropology, of the human’s unfathomable deficiency in relation to ‘object reality’ so that any domestication of the wolf within humanity is also an anthropological quest; perhaps the last “route” of negating humanism through substantive acts (sacrificial sacrifice and forgiveness) in the attempt to reconcile the wolf with man. But this is the very enterprise of civilizational techniques of adaptation proper to the tooling of political anthropology – that is, the domestication of the savage wolf entails its conversion to the passive dog. Could there be a way out to the final verdict of dialectical form beyond struggle, and the reconciliation of humanity with its negation? Perhaps this is only registered as the unthought in Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945); an experience that prepares a return to the world through the conatus essendi, or  the preservation of each thing’s being as their are. This is registered in only instances of the novel in the backdrop of a landscape; indeed, outside the subject of self-reflection, and beyond the premises of radical evil proper to moral platitudes. And the moment reads like this in chapter CXXX: “The long dusty road, the drowsiness, the hay, the stitches where the cicadas were: everything that was, and that, along with everyone who is lost, still wants to be. And the sky filled with kites? The sky that was filled with kites” [12]. The perseverance of the conatus essendi puts to rest what the delegated forms that politics and morality have to offer as temporal substitutes for dragging the historical promise of humanism within epochal nihilism. 

In this suspended imagery of an arid landscape, Vittorini descends to the preservation of things as they open to their manifestation of another sense of freedom – no longer tied to the paradigm of historical liberation nor to the assumption of synthetic anthropological determinations to sooth pain – comes upwards, always silently, through the order of description outside the human. And is not in this description what Gianni Carchia would call “the non-human…a gesture of farewell to the idealist movement; a farewell to the exaltation of the human up to the highpoint of its explosion. The refusal to substitute the dead god for a human that in the depredatory scope of totality crosses every limit, every transcendence, and infinity” [13]? This transposition of this  proximity with this “other-than-humanity” ( what Humanity can no longer hold on to) is the secret to Vittorini’s infrapolitical impasse in Uomini e no (1945) that holds the key to his insistence on a notion of “freedom” against the subject incapable of overcoming itself in the face of the abstraction (morality) or ideological  reassurance (militancy) [14]. One could assume that the worker’s last line in Uomini e no (1945) – which also coincides with Vittorini’s mimetic repetition in his “Postscript” – in the form of a promise (‘I’ll learn better’) registers the final attempt to grasp what remains on the exterior fog of humanity: a notion of freedom that, in seeking ‘a way out’, insists in the possibilities of establishing contact with the world. Thus, the program of historical liberation can only be achieved against historical and civilizational fixation; traversing the polarity of humanity and inhumanity, and thus deposing the sublimated sentiment of pain that social domination can administer as an unending process of degenerated and moribound humanity as mere continuation of the fictive life.

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Notes 

1. Renato Poggioli. “Review of Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini”, Books Abroad, Vol.20, N.4, 1946, 393.

2. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 199.

3. Franco Fortini. “Ma esisteva Vittorini?”, L’Expresso, 4, 2 febbraio 1986, 86.

4. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. “El mundo administrado o la crisis del individuo”, Pensamiento al margen: revista digital de ideas políticas, N.19, 2023, 200.

5. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 34.

6. Ibid., 13. 

7. Elio Vittorini. “El comunismo como vía”, in Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 279.

8.  Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 50.

9. René Girard. Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 65. 

10. Ibid.,  196.

11. Franco Fortini. “Che cosa può l’uomo: Uomini e no” (1945), in Saggi italiani (1987), 253.

12. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985),190. 

13. Gianni Carchia. “Glosa sull’umanismo”, L’erba voglio, N.29-30, 1977, 9.

15. Elio Vittorini. “La libertad es difícil” (1956), en Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 382.

A certain life. A note on Marguerite Duras’ La vie tranquille (1944). by Gerardo Muñoz


Let us imagine a person that in a short period of time finds himself haunted by successive deaths, abandonments, missed encounters, displacements, and lost possibilities – the list could go on. All of this amounts to a loss of world. This is obviously the narration of anyone’s life, and every moment of it would seem to imply an internal necessity of its unfolding as felt in the weight of its coming together in remembrance. Obviously factical life will continue on – and it always goes on – but the ultimate question will reside in the relationship between existence and the narrative order of that past. All of Duras’ narrative world is almost entirely a direct wrestling with the possibility of going against this specific weight of narrativization, because to narrate means to forget oneself from the experience of being in the world here and now. The demand of recollection imposes rhetorical limitations to the unfathomable present. Remembrance is the courtyard of historical and religious necessity where self-transformation takes a secondary role in a massive and alienated narrative of causes and reasons.

Duras’ first novel La vie tranquille (1944) reacts strongly against the burden of memory in the name of forgetting: “Once you lose the ability to forget you are deprived for a certain life” [1]. But what could a “certain life” amount to? Obviously, this forgetting here does not mean a neutralization of conflict in life (as in the status of a civil war in a political community); rather, it entails a sort of rebirth, in which the density of life refuses the crushing force of fictitious acceptance dispensed by the order of the past. That loosely defined “certain life” does not qualify nor situates “life” to the survival of “this life”; on the contrary, it seeks to open life to its open and self-evolving possibilities. In other words, there is “only one life” because there are only irruptions of the tragic possibilities that will always elicit a vita nova. The “certain life” that is always lacking allows the infinite possibilities of rebirth in the face of the eruption of the tragedy. And tragedy requires affirmation and exposition to the world in a strong sense. This could very well be the ultimate tone and color of the adventure for Duras.

Dionys Mascolo once wrote that Marguerite Duras’ literary and cinematic work is a transfigurative elaboration of the the tragic, and for this very reason the active undoing of the civilizational narrative at least since the humans of the neolithic that had resulted in the production of justifications and reasons to live “our life” [2]. And in a way the irruption of the tragic is the confirmation that civilization does not have the last word of absolute moral order. But life  – and this is the “mystery” coloring a good part of Duras’ imagination – is always about keep afloat the possibility of the certain life without the threats of self-absorption and destruction in the wake of nihilism and abstract political equality between beings in the world. A “certain life” (our certain life without qualifications other than being attuned to the object of our passions) is always elsewhere, and for this very same reason as a transfigured revelation outside of what appears as the enclosed necessities of ‘this life’. “A certain life” is a higher indented form of the theos unto life, whose transcendence is not regulated by an article of faith or the anthropological deficiency of sin (this is at bottom the difference between Christ and Saint Paul). In other words, the tranquil life that many readers have generally understood as wilful irony wrapping Duras’ narrative bears the truth to that life – the only one worth affirming as destiny – must always be outside itself. As the character of La vie tranquille (1944) confesses in one of the peak moments of the monologue in the second part of the novel:

“I’ve existed for twenty-five years. I was very little, then I grew and reached my size, the size I am now and that I’ll be forever. I could have died in one of the thousand ways people die, and yet I managed to cover twenty-five years of life, I am still alive, not yet dead. I breathe. From my nostrils emanates real breath, wet and warm. Without trying, I managed to die of nothing. It advances stubbornly, what seems halted, in this moment: my life. …My life: a fruit I must have eaten without tasting it, without realizing it, distractedly. I am not responsible for this age or for this image…” [3]. 

The bite into the fruit in this monologue differs from the metaphoric self-confession that ascertains the theological irreversibility of  original sin and felix culpa; it signals the passage of the narrative of life into denarrativization. Here a “certain life” might open against the fluvial current of the order of necessity that will make the subject into a bundle of legible and memorable infortunios. The passage to the tranquil or serene life, however, is not just grounded in the description of a trembling account of onself. In Duras, it has a proper name: thought. In fact, as we will find in the last part of the novel: “You must advance with the last of your powers;…with the power of thought” [4]. And following Mascolo to the letter, one could say that this ‘power’ is misplaced – it is not a power of the subject to force a will to do or act – it is rather a passion of thought (“la passion de la pensée”) that elevates itself against necessity and actualization through a “refusal” of any given historical order. 

This is to say, the breakthrough to the ‘certain life’ or the ‘serene life does not presuppose a counterpolitical strategy, as much as the movement of thought enacted in refusal as condition for any democratic requirement that no one can ultimately possess, as Duras a decade later will go on to write in the third issue of Le 14 Juillet [5]. The serene life is only possible as an infinite movement of denarrativization. The inhabitation of the world in La vie tranquille (1944) was already preparatory for the gesture of ‘refusal’ where a certain life follows a retreat from the hypsipolis apolis (superpolitical apolitical) into the existential xenikos of a contemplative life that is irreducible to both the principles of humanity and the normative regulations of social interaction. The serene life is only achieved when the separation of thought and life enters into the  incommunicable sense of persuasion (the ancient peitho) capable of decompressing the vector of force that has only produced a generic humanity of political depredation, acceptance, and excruciating tonality of boredom. Duras’ writing – at its best moments – is an intense search of this kind; a search does not end in neither politics nor literature, but on what remains outside of them.

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Notes 

1. Marguerite Duras. The Easy Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 90.

2. Dionys Mascolo. “Naissance de la tragédie”, in A la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (fourbis, 1993), 397.

3. Marguerite Duras. The Easy Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 96-97.

4. Ibid., 114.

5. Marguerite Duras. “Responses à l’enquête auprès d’intelectuels français”, Le 14 Juillet, N.3., 1959, 5-6.

Elio Vittorini on the time of existence. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Elio Vittorini’s short travel book Sardegna come un’infanzia (1957), entirely composed of painterly vignettes of his visit in the thirties, there is one of them that immediately jumps out at the reader, because it is the only moment where the radiance of the image and the possibilities of thought touch each other without any reservation. It is almost the moment in which the senses of what is felt and seen mysteriously touches a region that is not entirely political, even though it figures as the highest ‘political moment’ in Vittorini’s chronicle.

Vittorini is observing the ordinary lives of the common people in Sardinia when all the sudden he writes the following: “Now, and in spite of everything, those sitting down, almost drowsy and without much to do, are in life. The others in the struggle are not, especially if they fall into consciousness by the struggle and the movement, without understanding any other pleasure than that of the full warehouse. The secret is to struggle for existence, but without being colonized by the struggle’s idealism…in this way, there will be true life in the very roaming path. I have always understood activism for activism’s sake as the business of flies that, once they have taken off, they begin to scratch their head or sharpen their legs” [1]. It is almost as if written the parable of the fly is written for our times, where so many are blinded by the secularization of a Jesuit figure of the militant. The activity of fly, just like that of the political militant, falls into the pretense, thanks to the allure of his self-consciousness, that something moves in spite of its complete paralysis. The fly only moves in the metaphysical abstraction from ideal projection to material outcome and preconceived ends that it knows beforehand. Nothing moves and nothing ever can amount to a discovery or an event. The fly will recurrently miss the world because it has become obsessed by the illusion of its movement, convincing itself that flying over fresh dung is something entirely different.

The political subject is primarily the subject of the accumulated freedom, but it can rarely grasp ‘a way out’, as Peter Red claims in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”. Vittorini’s roaming and inert path is the sentiment of true life (“the serene truth of life”, he will say in a few pages later), which is always on the predicated on the possibility of experience against the crust of ideological falsification – even when this process is narrated from the point of view of the proletariat as the motor of the dialectic of history of its self-overcoming to completion. The ‘secret is to struggle for existence’, which entails how to grasp life as utterly outside that can only be shaped by a contact with the world. Perhaps by “sensing” the world without ever becoming its master; rather, what’s involved is a task of a cultivation that must remain singular by virtue of its own irreductibility. 

And in a way, this was Vittorini’s own heterodox understanding of communism where there is according to him there was no “collective building of the soul, but rather the destitution of false differences so that once those regulated differences are abolished, new possibilities of absolute differences can flourish” [2]. This is why Vittorini could not find solace in the political militant or the engaged intellectual, except as figures already acting as smugglers of the planned obsolescence of a civilization overtly defended by those facilitating its own demise [3]. In the landscape of Sardinia – by the most passive of roles, he was merely a theōrós after all – Vittorini unravels the metapolitical blackmail of the epoch in order to conquer the most essential and inapparent: the time of existence in a minuscule world within worlds – and thus, always in a permanent state of infancy – that treasures something immense because it will be forever remain unknowable.

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Notes 

1. Elio Vittorini. Sardegna come un’infanzia (Mondadori, 1957), 64.

2. Dionys Mascolo & Edgard Morin. “Une interview d’Elio Vittorini”, Les Lettres françaises, 27 juin 1947: https://entetement.com/une-interview-delio-vittorini/ 

3. Elio Vittorini. “La civilización no es algo que defender” (1937), in Diario en público (Gadir, 2008), 86.

The Etruscan bona lux in Paradiso. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Chapter Ten of Paradiso, José Lezama Lima’s magnus opus, we encounter a curious dialogue between Cemí and Fronesis colored by a fortuitous reference to the Etruscan world, which speaks to the poet’s profane, and at times monstrous form of Catholicism. As it is known, even for an ecclesiastical authority like Tertulian, all Etruscan mythological and iconographical inventions had to be incorporated into the Roman civilizational state in order to wipe out the barbaric fraudsters and con artists soothsayers and liver readers out of date from the new revelation [1]. I have recently written on Lezama’s transfigurative Etruscan theology into his conception of the poetic image, therefore here I will only note how this particular transfiguration is enacted in the very existential outlook of the characters in novel. It seems to me that confirms that for Lezama the Etruscan sensibility was not to be understood solely as a resource of his complex poetics, but rather as an ethical form pertaining to the demonic in life. It is no surprise, then, that this happens in the reiteration of the encounter – the whole of Paradiso as the memorable final lines emphatically show is about recommencement of the unfolding of life – between the two friends: 

“Bona lux, como saludaban los etruscos – le dijo Cemí… Ex templo, en seguida entre los romanos. Todo lo que no es en seguida es demoníaco, dice Kierkegaard. La vaciedad de la mañana se había trocado de pronto en la alegría del encuentro. – Vamos en seguida al cafecito de enfrente para hablar un poco – a Fronesis le pareció que la palabra cafecito, dicha por Cemí, bailaba en la mañana” [2]. 

I have not been able to find or corroborate that Etruscans, whose language is still a linguistic mystery, in fact greeted each other with something slightly similar to ‘bona lux’ as Lezama makes Cemí say. And it is still strange to think of Etruscans in relation to light and the morning phase of the day. What could it mean in this context where a minimal theory of the encounter is sketched (‘the encounter had brought happiness to the emptiness of the morning’) that Lezama explicitly identified the alleged mysterious Etruscans with a “good” light or illumination that is self-transformative? Lezama could have known the work of pioneer English archeologist George Denis, whose Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) reminds us how even in the tomb underworld of the Etruscans, there were always banquets decorated by lamp lights, erecting a threshold between the noche oscura of the infraworld of the dead, and the colorful landscape of the living image merging without reminder thanks to the bona lux of the encounter [3]. Is this it, then, a folded communion between the interiority of the dead and the exteriority world of the living? Obviously, nothing could more alien from Lezama’s intricate poetic world than a direct metaphoric restitution of the Etruscan world fixed in the autonomy of modern poetry, which will amount to a desperate attempt to deify language through a ‘spiritual drama’ as the conquering of self-absorptive verbal immediacy (it is in fact “en seguida” of the presentist time of response). 

As Lezama had written in the gloss “Conocimiento de salvación” (1939): “Todos los grandes intentos poéticos contemporáneos, desde la poesía pura hasta el surrealismo, no son otra cosa que un esfuerzo desesperado por prolongar la percepción de temporalidad rapidísima, o trocar el estado sensible – ocupado según Schiller en mantener al hombre en los límites del tiempo – en ajustada percepción” [4]. But what is suspended here is the possibility that living poetically and sensibly – the dwelling of a serene life encountering in company of others, that is, in concordia – validates the attunement of life with its demon. And this was at the heart of Lezama’s perception of the Etruscan everlasting mystery: not simply what remains foreclosed in the arcanii of the infraworld, but the liberation of human potentiality through the grasping of its prophetic images: “Los etruscos ofrecían una palabra misteriosa, el potens, si es posible, a esto se añade el hoc age, házlo, es decir si es posible hazlo. El potens por la imagen hace posible la sobrenaturaleza” [5]. The potens stands in as the name for the incommensurable distance of living among things (theín). Hence, the only common good resides between things, and not in a substantive higher source.

In a thorough rejection of the supreme moral order proper to rationalist natural law, Lezama will take the enlightened pictorial sense of the Etruscans as the realm of possibilities that can organize life in the  presence of what it has discovered: “un splendor formae…las imágenes como interposiciones de la distancia entre las cosas…ya no su enemistad, sino una llaneza de inmediato” [6]. The enlightened form produced by the encounter realizes a state of happiness that, thanks to the free use of language – the spoken word as the greeting voice in this case – it enacts a dance beyond sense becomes moving. This is why it is through the unknowable charitas of language that human beings become equals to the momentary gods of things in the world. Or at least puts them in proximity. One can believe that is the occasion for the gleaming abundance of  bona lux – the mystery where something finally begins. 

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Notes 

1. Lucy Shipley. The Etruscans (Reaktion Books, 2023), 163.

2. José Lezama Lima. Paradiso (Ediciones Cátedra, 1980), 478.

3. George Denis. The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (John Murray Street, 1848), 37.

4. José Lezama Lima. “Conocimiento de salvación”, in Analectra del reloj (Origenes, 1953), 251-252.

5. José Lezama Lima. “Apuntes para una conferencia sobre Paradiso”, en Paradiso (ALLCA XX, 1996), 712.

6. José Lezama Lima. “Las imágenes posibles”, in Analectra del reloj (Origenes, 1953), 179.

Thrasymachus, the paradigm of force. by Gerardo Muñoz

Few characters are more memorable in the first book of Plato’s The Republic than the sophist Thrasymachus, whose shadow is still very much looming around us given that it is obvious that today everything in our contemporary world is optimized through force. Thrasymachus’s strict identification of reserve power (potentia) with justice (ius) is in many respects prophetic, since it already subordinates the ideal of justice with practical reason and effective norms, a crowning achievement of modern political power. This is why Leo Strauss could claim in The City and Man that Thrasymachus’ position is ultimately a defense of the thesis of “legal positivism” that brings to fruition the legitimate order and the police powers of the city. In other words, Thrasymachus discovered that the requirements for the permanence of an active social order of a police entails the mediation of the two dimensions of legal authority: obedience and the internal recognition of a secondary rule that liquidates the possibility of raising the question of what is “just” (now internal to the organization of internal powers). If the aim of “justice” becomes the optimal application of effective rules and norms that provide the services of the city, then political rule becomes an infallible and uncontested logic. Politics is ultimately force, and force is the energy organized by politics in the city. 

As Strauss writes: “Thrasymachus acts like the city, he resembles the city, and this means according to a way reasonably acceptable to both…Thrasymachus is the city. It is because he is the city that he maintains the thesis of the city regarding justice and that he is angry at Socrates for his antagonism to the thesis of the city. Thrasymachus’ rhetoric was especially concerned with both arousing and appeasing the angry passions of the multitude, with both attacking a man’s character and counteracting such attacks, as well as with play-acting as an ingredient of oratory” [1]. Well before the general equivalent of contractual commercial relations, Thrasymachus’ rhetorical deployment functioned as a techne alupias against the unwarranted passions of human beings. And, contrary to the common opinion that separates the craft of sophistry from the unity of rational discourse (logos), Thrasymachus’ defense of force presupposes the autonomy of language in the rhetorical construction (very much like modern poetry centuries later) to serve as the hospice of rational pondering in the polis. To make language the exclusive battle ground: even in antiquity it was said of Thrasymachus, “you are just like your name, bold in battle”. And Plato wanted to hold on to this picture. This ultimately means – and it is still at the center of our contemporary predicament – that the coming of the “Social man” in the city is only possible on the condition of a primary transformation of the event of language and the speaking being. This is why if Thrasymachus was the “pioneer of rhetoric and elocution”, as it has been claimed, it is only because his appeal to the pragmatics of political power was mediated by the invention of the ‘mystery of the prose style’; that is, of reducing the non-grammatical mediation to the orderability of a prose adjusted as an instrument to the world [2]. The enslavement of the passions is the commencement of the social prose in which we are forced to act in our alienated roles.

Only when language becomes rhetorical communication it is possible to grasp the world as a case of an entity of legibility and knowability, where reasons (inclusive and exclusive, that is, as what can be delegated for my own interests) and political rule converge without residue. What will become obvious through the cybernetic dominion over “information”, it was first elaborated as the pressure of rhetoric where the logical force of predication took its force to disclaim myth as the unappropriated experience of worldly phenomena. The art of rhetoric does not render “truth” obsolete; it rather incorporates theoretical and systemic deductions – a flattening of logos without myth -, so that the event of truth can no longer stand as the unsurveyed horizon of the intelligibility [3]. The consolidation of force means this much: that Thrasymachus’ prose of the world is not just an exclusive political program of the “fictitious”, as much as a program for the total attainability of the world; a world that by becoming fully accessible and objective, it pays the high price of eclipsing the presence of things, and the event of truth and naming in language. A world without kallipolis that will only distribute and perpetuate ad infinitum injustice as the corollary for the triumph of immanence of force.

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Notes 

1. Leo Strauss. The City and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 78.

2. Bromley Smith. “Thrasymachus: a pioneer rhetorician”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1927.

3. Gianni Carchia. “La persuasión y la retórica de los sofistas”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 60.

Politics as our passion? by Gerardo Muñoz

Philippe Theophanidis has recently brought to my attention an emphatic statement in Dionys Mascolo’s Lettre polonaise sur la misère intellectuelle en France (1957): “La politique est notre passion. Nous en parlons, ne faisons que cela, et tout l’ennui du monde est dans ces dialogues-disputes, dans cette démarche perpétuellement contentieuse qui donne envie de s’occuper de n’importe quoi d’autre, de plaisanter, de se taire, de s’en aller” [1]. These are intense words not entirely divorced from a deep sense of desperation entangled with a commitment to realism – minimally understood as bringing into thought how things looked at the time. In a recent collaborative introduction to the writing scene of this group (preliminary work towards an upcoming seminar) – which included Mascolo, but also Duras, Vittorini, Blanchot, and other continental friends – we took into consideration how the heterogeneous and internal tensions were brought into bear in the effort to connect the creative act to the existential texture of communication and concrete world events [2]. 

Mascolo’s statement must be read as historically marked and situated, as who today could claim that “politics”, however broadly or loosely understood, is the exclusive “object” of our passion? Mascolo seems to have been aware of the subordination of passion into politics, leading to dialogues and disputes where nothing could facilitate the clearing of a way out. When politics becomes the final object of one’s passion it could only mean that the reign of chatter has liquidated our experience with the world. And it is at this point where the ‘missing word’ that attunes the search for one’s passion can regress as nihilism; that is, as mere force to steer rhetorical valence and representational exchange within the expansive intramural rules of civil society. Restricting one’s passion to the determination of politics merely inverts the order of modern legitimacy (i.e. the repression of passions by the interests), compressing both terms as a higher principle of politics. 

If at the outset of modernity contractualism suppressed the passions in exchange for sovereign security from the fear of violent death; in the attempt to elevate the passion to the grammatical height of politics, what is rendered obsolete is precisely the possibility of securing an existential site of freedom outside and beyond politics, that is, in the the nonplace of the passion itself. Of course, one could also read Mascolo’s apothegm in light of his revolutionary politics, in which the name of “politics” solicited the revolutionary emancipation of the civilizational alienation of the human species towards a transformative sequence beyond the scarcity of needs. But the problem of the category of revolution is that it remains tied to the very development of the legitimacy of the political and its erosion (for Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the configuration of the state is the crowning revolutionary event against disorderly barbarism), which the members of the Saint-Benoît Group were first hand witnesses in the postwar epoch.

I think this speaks to my suggestion that the assertion ‘politics is our passion’ was historically embedded; a sort of last breath of trying to hold onto the utopia that will soon crumble in every active paradigm of planetary order (postcolonial, Soviet state planning, European communism and social democracy). But at least – and this is what remains of interest, as I see it – the Rue Saint-Benoît friends had the courage to confront it in order to enact a farewell to the very assumption of ‘revolution’, which already in 1968 was clearly moot. In the words of Maurice Blanchot after the events of 1968: “…but from now on I will hold onto an exigency: to become fully conscious, and always anew, that we are at the end of history, so that most of our inherited notions, beginning with the one from the revolutionary tradition, must be revised and, as such, refuted. […]. Let us put everything into question, including our own certainties and verbal hopes. The revolution is behind us: it is already an object of consumption and, occasionally, of enjoyment. But what is before us, and it is terrible, does not have a name” [3]. Thus, to conflate “politics” as the passion could no longer offer solid ground in the intra-epochal interregnum of suspended historical time. Just a few years later, Duras will claim that politics had little to offer, since there is an “absolute equivalence between all political programs, and only right ideology seems to be able to do politics as such. We no longer believe in politics…there is only a burrow of hope. We must submit ourselves to the hard evidence of its total degradation” [4]. To dwell in a delimited burrow means a return to the rooting of place and new geographies beyond the temporal axis.

One can read both Duras and Blanchot’s elucidations of the collapse of modern politics and its negation (the ius revolutionis) as a corrective posture to move past Mascolo’s hope to make the unfathomable texture of one’s passion coincide with the object of a political project, even if understood as an archipolitics. But it is precisely in the abyss opened by a terrible and nameless epoch that a new light is casted on the free-standing and ungraspable nature of the passion; the irreducible law that establishes a contact between the ethical life and the world beyond objectivation as both excess and deficit of the tribulations of political order. Perhaps a modification to Mascolo’s thesis is now necessary: passion is what escapes every possible fall into the objective world, and for this very reason it is a ‘refusal’ of what the compensatory bond of politics can offer under the sermo humilis of stagnant artificial utopias. There is no political passion just like there is no political friend, since both friendship and one’s passion remains always objectless, only mediated by the overcoming of the preconditions of fear and of delegated life. In Manuale di sopravvivenza (1974), Giorgio Cesarano will claim that passion was the name of the coming historical program of a sensible presence resisting the “annihilating force of social objectivation” of the world [5]. And the Italian poet will define the passion as the sacred taking possession of the return to appearance. A transformation of politics could only emerge after one’s passion could finally prevail experientially against the terrible and nameless (and unnamed) world organized towards planned obsolescence and generalized humiliation. And it goes without saying that we are still very much our predicament. The caesura between passion and politics has now become spectacularly absolute and irreversible.

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Notes 

1.  Dionys Mascolo. Lettre polonaise sur la misère intellectuelle en France (Éditions de minuit, 1957).

2. Gerardo Muñoz & Philippe Theophanidis. “¿Por qué volver a la Rue Saint-Benoît? Conversación sobre un seminario, Ficción de la razón, February 2024: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2024/02/26/gerardo-munoz-y-philippe-theophanidis-por-que-volver-a-la-rue-saint-benoit-conversacion-sobre-un-seminario/ 

3. Maurice Blanchot. “On the Movement” (1968), in Political Writings 1953-1993 (Fordham University Press, 2010), 109. 

4. Marguerite Duras. “Entrevista en A Fondo” (1979): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmnVBenAoyw

5. Giorgio Cesarano. Manual de supervivencia (Kaxilda, La Cebra, 2023), 75. 

Tradition according to Wallace Stevens. by Gerardo Muñoz

The fact that there is a continuous and secret communication between painting and tradition is something that has been registered in the genesis of myth well into aesthetic autonomy of modernity and the artificious equivalence of difference that regulates the temporal caducity of the new [1]. In a specific sense, the crisis of tradition in the contingency of the modern has the activity of painting as a privileged site because it holds the outside together in a perpetual unveiling; as if the human species were permanently exiting the shadows of the cave every time a hand strokes an animated brush over a surface. Painting clears the site of the inaccessible so that true life can emerge without the crutches of incorporated scripts of social organization. But what could it mean to think of ‘tradition’ in a painterly manner? In a poem of 1945, unequivocally entitled “Tradition”, Wallace Stevens seems to offer a response and an outlook for our consideration. 

In a conversationalist style, Stevens thinks that tradition is an uncontrolled question insofar as it can only be assessed through poetic form. Of course, for Stevens the character of tradition could not be grasped neither in a compilation of well delineated forms nor detailed through “a set of laws…to identify it is not tradition” [2]. As it was for Hölderlin’s practice relation to Greek antiquity, tradition is something that is always missed or unfulfilled from its uttermost strangeness. It is, as he asks in the fifth stanza “an unfamiliar sum, a legend scrawled in a script we cannot read?” [3]. The illegible transcription of what is passed as tradition holds to the incommensurability between what remains unfamiliar and what is already familiar and perceptible. We must resist the attempt at disambiguation, since any relation to tradition must be anachronistic as Nicoletta Di Vita has suggested [4]. Thus, for Stevens “tradition is always near”, at hand. And the hand calls forth the mystery of painting. It keeps a world at the threshold of the verbal. The placement of nearness, however, will be on the side of formlessness that characterizes the genesis of one’s existence. In other words, the true task of approaching tradition is neither at the level of the construction of forms nor about the analogical pairing of historical evolution; it is the painterly relationship between life and the experience in the world that precedes and outlives the time of life. This is what Stevens will denote a “ascending the Humane”; meaning a life qualified by fulfilling the adventure of a destiny that is capable of addressing the outside. In the most emphatic verses of “Tradition”, Stevens shows his absolute nearness to what he has in mind: 

“Ascending the humane. This is the form 

Tradition wears, the clear, the single form,

The solid shape, Aenas seen, perhaps,

By Nicolas Poussin, yet nevertheless 

A tall figure upright in a giant’s air.” [5]. 

The use of “form” in the first verse is most definitely mischievous, but it is also the playful ambiguity that Stevens wants to bring to our attention. One way to read it is to circle back to the sense in which the painterly becomes the utile passage between life and world. After all, tradition “wears” the dress of nature, although this is only facilitated by the sensible activity of painting. Exactly a decade later in the essay “The Whole Man” (1955), and speaking directly to the rise of cybernetics and technico-political technicians that had consolidated their mastery over the events of the world, Stevens will suggest that “Modern art often seems to be an attempt to bridge the gap between facts and miracle…to succeed in doing this, if it can be done at all, seems to be exclusively the task of the specialist, that is to say, of the painter” [6]. Why the painter and not the poet? At a very general level, the two figures are interchangeable; however, if one takes the painterly mediation, it becomes possible to claim that painting has a more subtle expressive footing in showing the nearness of tradition.

Painting is the non-language that  gathers the formless tune of tradition: “The vigor of art perpetuates itself through generations of form. But if the vigor of art is itself formless, and since it is merely a principle it must be, its form comes from those in whom the principle is active, so that generations of form come from generations of men. The all-round man is certain to scrutinize form as he scrutinizes men, that is to say, in relation to all past forms” [7]. Thus, for Stevens the possible tradition is that which creates a space in which a new life can take place in the world attentive to the transmission of forms. Of course, not any world, but to “live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it” [8]. This is why Steevns will differentiate between two modalities of the task of poetry: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience; favoring the second because of how it folds our existence within the given order of space and time. 

Is not painting, precisely, a frozen instant in the spatial and temporal coherence that reveals, in turn, a hidden harmony that never fully coincides with nature nor stands in opposition to it? [9]. This is why “tradition wears” but it is also the transitory body of Aenas, which Stvevens inserts in the poem as a matter of ut pictura poesis in relation to Nicolas Poussin’s “Venus presenting arms to Aenas” (1639), which is ultimately the story of the persuasion unto one’s destiny. As it is well known, Poussin captures in a sequence Aenas being directed to his destiny invested in the arms of war. But where is destiny embodied for Stevens? Is it in the gesticulating figure of Aenas or in floating Venus that occupies the central sky of the landscape? It is almost as if Stevens acquired, as Walter Friedlander said of late Poussin, a “sublime vagueness” in visibility of the inner workings of imagination drifted from the physical imbalance of the activity of imitation [10]. 

After all, for Stevens Poussin stood precisely as the source of partition and the miniscule, confirming the primacy of “imagination” against the rhetorical compression that renders legible the modern abstraction [11]. Following André Gide who had had written on Poussin’s work, Stevens repeats without any elaboration that Poussin is to be taken “little by little” (peu à peu), so that only then its pictorial absorption can unfold against what at first sight appears as a theatrical and self-enclosed translucid stage. This is the distant ‘traditionalism’ that Stevens wanted to reject if the work of art was to endure, and still have the vigor to generate a tranquil and peaceful state of mind solicited by the late Poussin. Painting could only be expressed as a ‘mode’ — which for Poussin stood for moderation and restraint, but more importantly as the condition of a certain sensible order “by which the thing keeps itself in existence” both firmly and invisibly, that is, beyond enunciation [12]. Otherwise, as Gerald Cohen once claimed, tradition becomes the thing that you can only hold on to when it has relaxed its hold on you ceasing to color the genesis of life [13]. And while tradition cannot be fully absorbed by rules or forms of pictorial depiction, it does retain the “good that we have loved”, dispensing a noeud vital in which the divine (theos) disengages us from the compression of objective reality and into the nearness of the eternal. This is the integrity of painting that allows Stevens to proclaim the ascendance of the supreme human “good”: tradition is kept alive by the soul of an erotic deification. After all, “God and imagination are one” Stevens will suggest in the fragments of Adagia [14]. Against the edifice of sedimentation and rupture, repetition and originality, possession and abstraction; tradition will name the disembodied genesis of appearing between things in a “reflected seeming-so”. 

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. “Per un’estetica dellainvecchiato”, in Dario Lanzardo, Dame e cavalieri nel Balon di Torino (Mondadori, 1984).

2. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 595-596

3. Ibid., 595.

4. Nicoletta Di Vita. Il nome e la voce (Neri Pozza, 2022), 28.

5. Ibid., 596.

6. Wallace Stevens. “The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 874.

7. Ibid., 875. 

8. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 904. 

9. Monica Ferrando. “L’ultimo quadro di Poussin”, in L’oro e le ombre (Quodlibet, 2015), 82.

10. Walter Friedlander. Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (Harry Abrams, 1964), 82.

11. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 737.

12. Cited in Étienne Gilson’s Painting and Reality (Cluny Media, 2020), 173. 

13. G. A. Cohen. “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value”, in Finding oneself in the other (Princeton U Press, 2013), 155.

14. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 914. 

Living among the gods. On Monica Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

For anyone familiar with the delicate thought of Monica Ferrando, the short book just published, Arcadia Sacra (Il Molino, 2024), makes it impossible not to read it in light of her the two previous works, the ambitious Il regno errante (Neri Pozza, 2018) that reconstructs the political paradigm of the nomos of Arcadia, and L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), which brought to light the corrupted meaning of a theopoetic understanding of “election” and its appropriation by an effective economic theology apparatus that governs over the destiny of the modern edifice. Arcadia Sacra continues Ferrando’s highly original reconstruction of the unforgettable myth of Arcadia within the obscure setting of secular  modernization in which painting itself has come into crisis to the point of utter obsolescence. We might be the first epoch in the history of humanity (or even prehistoric, since painting goes back to the non-original origin of the caves, as Ferrando has argued) in which painting itself is lacking and almost non-existent [1]. And although Ferrando does not allude to the present directly, it goes without saying that by choosing as her focal point Titian’s early picture “The Flight into Egypt” (1508), the vision deployed in the essay can only speak to us as urgently, where the thematics confronted by the Renaissance of Venetian painting returns to our present in a fractured flash: imperial conflagration, unlimited deployment of force, usurpation of territory and  multiplication of legal checkpoints, and the accelerated disconnection between architecture and nature, color the ongoing devastation of the vantage point of the landscape now eclipsed by the radiant artificial confinements of the contemporary metropolitan designs.  

Already during his postwar years in the United States, Theodor Adorno observed how the unbounded sadness of the American landscape has nothing to do with an inhuman romantic sublime; it was rather that the landscape feels as if it bears no traces of the human hand [2]. If Americanism configures the long lasting night of planetary nihilism; this is so, not only due to capitalist subsumption and production of human life, but fundamentally because of the inherent obliviousness of the  landscape that forecloses dwelling in the world. But the myth of Arcadia, as Ferrando will insists, is no utopia nor crafted rhetoric (the bucolic genre as an aesthetic compensation to the normative grid of the social bond); it is also the question about the earthly ground of existence, and the necessary attunement with the things that have been domesticated into order of the metaphysics of idolatry and objectivity (Ferrando 28). In this sense, Arcadia does not name another world to come; it is a world that has been registered many times, reappearing whenever the hand reaches out in proximity as if caressing the landscape’s skin.

The mytho-poetical deployment of Arcadia returns amidst a world in conflagration, and for Ferrando this has fundamental political implications insofar as it shows a way out from the grammar at the service of force and political dominion of commanders and soldiers – which is always already exercised as legitimate to coerce and to become a tool for the regulation of abstract mediations – into the voice of poets, painters, and shepherds (Ferrando 51). Arcadia reveals that the human species is a ductile animal that can sense by the ability to touch and use. This is why Arcadia stands as a third space outside the political dichotomy of empire and republicanism, between the struggle of usurpation and conquest, and the techno-political administration of common goods of social distribution and institutional delegation. The abstract humanism of the Renaissance, as Heidegger once claimed alluding to Machiavelli’s political thought, is also the commencement of a specific political technology rooted in certainty and justification that can only conceive representation as the ground for the production of an “effective truth” [3]. The virtuous homini militari of the Italian city states anticipate the neutralization of force as legitimate rule that will prepare the stage of modern political realism based on fear and normative rule of law. The final efficacy of force is to transform the sense of the world into a mere object, as Weil clearly understood it in her essay on Homer’s Iliad. One of the key insights of Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024) is that it shows that, parallel to the revolution in political technologies taking place in Renaissance Humanism, the image of Arcadia was being rediscovered in treatises and paintings in order to remain faithful to a different attunement of the nomoi, in which the philosophy of history of sacrifice, endless civil wars, and destruction of the Earth do not constitute true destiny (Ferrando 14). In an exoteric way – and it is so, because the craft of the painter is, precisely, depiction and figuration of the nakedness of what appears before our vision-  painters like Titian, Veronese, and Bellini, became witnesses to the acquiescence of the nomos mousikos, which far from soliciting the conceptual density of a theory of Justice; it registered the preeminent condition of poetizing nature of  living in the vanishing world. Indeed, it was in the musical nomos where the soul could establish the communication between exteriority and interiority within the gleaming order of things. 

If Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art suggests that the erection of work occupies the open space of this clearing; Ferrando will thematize how Boccaccio’s understanding of the Earth as radiantly divine was drawing upon the tradition of Arcadia will emerge as the pictorial space of the artists to disclose the vibrant sense of a necessary freedom (Ferrando 43). This means that living among the gods is not reducible to panentheism, if understood as oppositional to monotheism; rather, it was the opening to the event that gathered forms of life,  creations,  affections, and territories. In other words, there will always be gods whenever the world is not enclosed into the homogenous surface of a unified planetarity. And is not painting the quasi-originary activity of human anthropogenesis (the event of being in the world as such) the  sensible evidence that negates any conceptual and political translation directed towards action and justification? After all, painting is, among other things, the business of depicting mute things, as Nicolas Poussin famously claimed. 

But muteness must be qualified and expanded, since Arcadia is no asylum or final refuge of man. Titian’s “The Flight into Egypt” depicts a rite of passage, but also opens to a set of rhythmic connected activities that lead to the landscape. Thus, as Monica Ferrando reminds us, building from her previous Il regno errante, Arcadia is also the material experimentation of acoustic energy; music, or the the nomos mousikos, no longer guided by the command of political service, directed by attunement of the lyre and the syrinx, will speak the unwritten language of the human soul. Painting and music convergence at the nonsite of permanent formlessness. And it is rhythmic music allowing improvisation and experimentation that reimagines a different conception of the polis; a transfiguration of political life, in which the principle of civility in all of its complexity (citizenship, objective transference and negation, civilizational fortitude) will no longer articulate the principal axis of the human commonwealth. Neither a source of higher natural law nor a mere expansion of positive norms, the nomos of Arcadia for Ferrando entails: “inalterabile a unire intimamente musica e legge, entrambe  ágrapha, non scritte, se non nel cuore. L’interdipendenza tra modi della musica e nomoi della città, che sarebbe vano interpretare secondo un rapporto causale, trova nella stessa parola nomos un compendio inesauribile, ribadito nella Politeia: «Non si introducono mai cambiamenti nei modi della musica senza che se ne introducano nei più importanti nomoi della polis” (Ferrando 54). The separation of law from music – as Ferrando will say for poetry and philosophy in later pages – will ultimately lead to the moral struggle towards the rise of the fictitious (and whoever can impose it through their effective hegemony) against the emergence of the “love of thought” (l’amore del pensiero) (Ferrando 57). In this sense, the moralization of justice and its conversion into a specific historical grammar (lex scripta in the juridical apparatus) will ground the order of the polis in which the human will be absolutely sacred so that the sacred nearness between existence and the world – the atopia where the promise of happiness can take place – will vanish forever. As Carlo Levi saw clearly during the postwar years, the rise of the political administration of fear will coincide with the decline of painting as the source of being in liberty within the senses [4]. And, in our days, the historical termination of secularization can only be felt like an unending glacial interregnum (it is no surprise that Disney’s epochal blockbuster is precisely a defense of alienation of a cold being in a Frozen castle) in which the prehistoric reminiscence of the garden can only appear as an afterthought or mere representation, always out of reach, and viciously grazed by wild beasts before our own eyes.  

But seeing is already an exercise in prefiguration of a world that returns where painting stands as the medium for a mediation between the formlessness and the soul. This is why, above all, pictorial space is a privileged surface from which to flee our condition of unworldly inmates of our times. In a certain way, painting does not just bring to bear truth against the regime of calamitous fictions; it is also bears witness, as Ferrando states towards a high moment of Arcadia Sacra (2024), to the rediscovery of a new mental space that revives the attunement to a state of the world no longer reduced to the depredatory practices of civilizational extraction and consented servitude (Ferrando 77). The tradition of painting is not just a collection of forms and artistic conventions, but the ongoing concert that facilitates our movement (and being moved) towards happiness.

This is the promise of the itinerant Mary’s passive and inclined face in Titian’s early masterpiece. It does not come to surprise that for Ferrando, the mother dwells among the gods of peace, in contrast to the figures of the commander or the inquisitorial or priestly judge that monitor an endless narrative of intra-species civil war (Ferrando 63). It should not go without saying that at the same time that some contemporary scholars in the face of a historical crisis of legitimation attempt to revive the aura of the homini militari, the precepts of the ragion di stato and the technical virtues of the charismatic Prince; it has been the work of Monica Ferrando, in fully in display in Arcadia Sacra (2024), that invites us to turn to the counters of eros of painting that, almost stubbornly, transmit to us the infinite possibilities of life among the green blades of grass in Pan’s spiritual land (Ferrando 82) [5]. The sacredness of Arcadia resides in this unbounded exteriority that thanks to the mystery of the mother, is always commencing; and, having achieved happiness, it wants to know nothing about bring the world to conclusion. Beneath the arcana imperii (Rome) and the bylaws of the polis (Athens), the landscape of Arcadia remains a harmonious passage of our cohabitation.   

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Notes 

1. Monica Ferrando. “Editoriale”, De pictura 3, 2020: https://www.quodlibet.it/rivista/9788822011643 

2. Theodor W. Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Verso, 2005), 73.

3. Martin Heidegger. Acerca de Ernst Jünger (El Hilo de Ariadna, 2013), 113.

4. Carlo Levi. “Paura della pittura” (1942).

5. I am thinking here of the works of several American  historians of political thought and  legal scholars in recent years that have mobilized efforts to restore a “neoclassical”, Renaissance centered political tradition, as a response to the crisis of modern liberalism. The most prominent list includes, although it is not limited to James Hankins’ Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard U Press, 2020), Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (Cambridge U Press, 2023), and Adrian Vermuele’s endorsement of Renaissance imperial categories such as Ragion di stato, Lex Regia and the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, see his “Sacramental Liberalism and Region di Stato” (2019) and “The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia” (2023). The pastiche of this neoclassical investment made possible by rhetorical and hermeneutical deployments of instrumentalized myth, it is something that I have taken note of in “¿Revival de la tradición legal clásica?” (2022). Drawing a parallel to this classical absorption in American political thought, one could say that this is a reiteration of what Monica Ferrando herself has analyzed in her chapter on German Romantic Neoclassicism and the Winckelmann aesthetic project in her L’elezione e la sua ombra. Il cantico tradito (Neri Pozza, 2022), except now that it lacks aesthetic meditations (there is no Dichter als Führer), thus culminating in the direct exercise of applied executive force.