Three notes on Rodrigo Karmy’s Nuestra confianza en nosotros (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Transfiguration. Towards the end of Nuestra confianza en nosotros: la Unidad Popular y la herencia del por venir (Ufro, 2023), Rodrigo Karmy suggests that the experiential texture of Salvador Allende’s political years amounted to a sort of corporeal transfiguration of historical time, but also of the political subject within modern architectonics of the inter-state sovereign system. The death-martyrdom brought a new world into order, radically transforming the sense of historical assumptions and its immanent refutations and accelerations. For those of all that know Karmy’s philosophical investigations working through this intuition, it is impossible not to see that ‘transfiguration’ does not entail ‘sacrifice’, but rather it implies the figure of the martyr [1]. And we also know from Erik Peterson that martyrs are absolute witness to truth of an irrevocable event; in other words, those that transcend the core materiality of the mere opinions and matter-of-factness as to remain faithful to the unfathomable to a world brought to abrupt change (and at times, this means also despair). Karmy writes:

“Se produce así una transfiguración radical de Allende que trastoca enteramente el juego de la teología política, tal como ha sido planteada bajo los avatares del fantasma portaliano: si en esta última, el cuerpo físico termina desmaterializado en un cuerpo institucional, tal como ocurrió con el devenir del general Pinochet, en Allende termina desmaterializado en una potencia por venir (no en cuerpo institucional), aquello que Walter Benjamin llamaba lo «nunca sido»: «Siempre estaré junto a ustedes», dice el presidente usurpado por el golpismo esa triste mañana de septiembre” [2].

The truth of transfiguration – and in a sense every event of truth is always carried by the energy what is transfigured – marks the incommensurable distance between the eternal persistence of the word and the historical movement guided by the precepts of civilization. Whereas the political grammar organizes itself through an indiscriminate institutional corpus and a set of moral binding obligations upon its citizens; the truth of transfiguration is the keeper of the night of the soul that, like the myth of Er, signals the passage between the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead. When transfigured, the dead can become even more lively than those allegedly “alive”; where those alive become embodied and rigid statues or mummies. As such, the energy of transfiguration remains outside the cloisters of history and its memory sites, since its realization takes place whenever there is a drift outside and beyond the suturing of the world as mere stated and enclosed fact.

Voice. The “we” (Nosotros) in Karmy’s thesis does not signal the constituent political unity of the People nor a partisan form that can exert force towards the inversion of the sedimented historical order. In his archeological endeavor, the ‘nosotros’ indexes a non-numerical instance through the vocative raises its own question to the past. This does not imply that there is a “collective voice” that must enact its point of annunciation through representation and mediated forms; the voice emerges as an exception to the grammaticalization of the constitutional order and its statuary production as expression of legislative will. The voice is the exteriority to every scheme of reproduction. But, what is a “voice”? Following Emilio Recabarren, Karmy connects the voice to the very act of creation: in other words, a voice to the truth implies the vocative of what has truly never been there before. Like the chorā, the voice is both at the reemergence of its origin and medium rather than substance; and this is why the voice, unlike the written language, cannot be subsumed to the reification of mimesis and generative substance [3]. The voice is what every time remains irreducible to the order of discourse difference, historiographical narrativity, and the original letter and spirit of the law. And even in traditions without “Constitutions”, law cannot escape its written and grammatical framework; this is why in Common Law, the Constitutional authority is supplanted by the historical absorption of habits, manners, and tradition into the force of legal codes and binding statutes. It is a high merit of Karmy’s Nuestra confianza (2023) to reminds us that the happiest moments (and perhaps the only moment worth saving, that infinitely returns against the grain of historical progress) of the revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century are to be found in the evocation of the voice and its popular music (something that can also be said of the Cuban Revolution, for instance). This esoteric orphic thread evidences the disjointed relation between the polis and the mythic transfiguration when facilitated by the prophetic overtones of the musical nomos in the genesis of the West [4]. Hence, whenever there is a voice, the suture of politics to the theology cannot amount to the continuous transaction upon the survival and agony of the living.

Freedom from revolution. Unlike the reverential or formalist accounts written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean Unidad Popular, Karmy’s essay invites us to dwell about a political experience after its epochal exhaustion: the collapse of the horizon of the philosophy of history implies the internal implosion of the modern revolution’s infrastructure (constituent power, moral justice, militant subjectivity, sacrificial energy). For Karmy to arrive at a certain nearness to the well lighted tradition of the UP is to abandon once and for all the civilizational eon of sedentary political hegemony (“a revolution in world history” bringing about the age of the nomads to an end, claimed historian Edward Gibbon) that has now paved the way for the unlimited forms of planetary government exerted through the rationality of the management of population and the distribution of the economy [5].

The farewell to the revolution and its reverse – it is well known that De Maistre claimed in the wake of the French Revolution that the opposite of the revolution is not a counter-revolution, but what is all together contrarian to it – means to put a halt to the paradigm of force (positive and immanent hostility) that has oriented actions, expectations, passions, and even dreams taxed at the fictive illusions of an abstract Humanity devoid of any possibility of happiness in the world. It is only after we can leave behind the revolutionary metaphysical mimesis that a new sense of freedom could emerge away from the dominion of the land-surveyors of the Earth. Abandoning any clamors oriented towards the future, it is now for us to attune to the everlasting traditions that are unrelinquished to the endless rubble of time.

Notes

1. Rodrigo Karmy. “The Absolute Gift: Martyrdom as Destituent Power”, SAQ, 122, 2023, 157-170.

2. Rodrigo Karmy. Nuestra confianza en nosotros (Ufro, 2023), 183.

3. Ibid., 102.

4. Gianni Carchia. Orfismo e tragedia: Il mito trasfigurato (Quodlibet, 2019).

barbarism Carl Schmitt civilization Erich Unger exodus Hebrew universality Infrapolitics Joseph Roth Judaism marrano metaphysics origins Oskar Goldberg political theology state form Zionism

Erich Unger’s The Stateless formation of the Jewish People today. by Gerardo Muñoz

The same year that Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) appeared in the intellectual scene of the Weimar Republic defending the exceptional of the decision against immanentism, a short opuscule entitled Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (The stateless formation of the Jewish People, 1922) written by Jewish philosopher Erich Unger was published as an untimely response to the question of “Jewish identity” (Judentum) and its fate in the wake of civilizational collapse. The fact that this essay – as well as his 1921 book Politics and Metaphysics, which Walter Benjamin described as the most important political reflection of his time – has remained on the fringe of intellectual history, political theory, and the history of thought is something that anyone must seriously reflect upon. It should not come to a surprise that this text comes back today to attentive readers evidences how every creation, event of speech, or written word does not reside in the preventive invention of a specific audience; but, on the contrary, in the way that its words, images, and thought will generate the evanescence community of extemporal readers. The century that separates us in time from Unger’s essay bears witness to its ultimately proximity and prophetic calling.

In 1922, for Unger, very much like for us today, thinking about politics meant finding a way out of a catastrophic politics [1]. If Politics and Metaphysics had suggested the necessity of an existential and energetic exodus for breakthrough against civilizational sedentary absorption and domestication, in The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) Unger argues critically against a state Zionist project that artificially, and through the anti-universalism paradigm of force (just as Weil would argue during her war writings about politics in the West) will attempt to “absolute Judaism, and all the manifestation of judaism that remain outside, hostile to the state trend” [2]. For Unger, Zionism as a political ideology and state program fails to come to terms with the concrete “outside the world historical power” that characterizes the universalism of the Hebrews as a theology marked by dispersal in the West; that is, outside the philosophy of history of sacrifice and soteriological incarnation of the Christian eon [3]. Hence, Zionism’s political form of the Jewish people was epochally insufficient – too empirical and thus trapped into the modern logic of racial and biological survival – to express the true conditions to enact as the “a priori” for the question of Judaism as a grounded redemptive universality. And insofar as Zionism presupposes something “outside of itself” (corporeal and spiritual Judaism), for Unger “the demand for an imperial state…must modify its demand, since it should express its underlying basis of the demand differently” [4]. The Hebrew ‘universality’ was metaphysical as much as “concrete”, based on modal ritual and myth, and for this reason at a distance from the discharge of formal logical statements [5].

What did the apriorist consideration of Judaism mean for Unger? The hypothesis in The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) was far from bring esoteric: Judaism is a exclusively a spiritual, immutable soul matter that hoevers the surface of the corporeal; and, more importantly, “it governs itself independently through the insubstantial for of a concrete existence” [6]. In other words, for Unger before the unity of the “People”, the articulation of the “movement”, and the erection of a positivist constitution based on Zionist nationalist principles, one should consider the sensible fabric of a people – a dispersed, multiple, and metapolitical communities that have endured outside the geopolitical and sacrificial structuration of Christian history – that each and every time have insisted on the separation from the subsumption into a sphere of power and domination, into an ethnic-community validated by recognition and its claims to “consciousness” at the most empirical and material level. But this would amount to an effective liquidation – a surrogate for the acceleration of the dominant religion of historicity – of Judaism into yet another planetary religion, and an expression of power that integrates itself into the struggle for the nomoi of a contained and policed world. For Unger, “empirical Zionism” becomes the attempt to reduce Judaism to a “real self-executiving power” that will diminish the “supreme expression of existence” of Judaic spiritualism as “an inner experience that it is not historically given but that must precede it in order to make Judaism an endless and inevitable precondition of a truly world historical project” [7]. In this mold, Judaism will be dispensed into the theaters of the constitutive war of historical progress.

As such, Judaism as theologically transcendent is not to be conflated into the corset of a political fictive ethnicity, but rather as an autonomous transmission that allows the communication from soul to soul that descends all the way from its metaphysical beginning. And at this beginning that has exerted itself against the whirlwind of historical fixation (the very structure of civilization after Cain according to his mentor, the Jewish theologian Oskar Goldberg) were metaphysical and errant fragments of encounters and communication, of psychological energy and dispersal of shared spiritual goals. If this is lacking, then no political form [for Judaism] will arise, but only a foolish copy of the already-existing, because the spirit cannot be skipped and left out without the rising danger” [8]. It is telling that for Unger this rising danger can emerge not only from indirect powers that exert pressure against the unity of authority – as Schmitt would have in his framework of his theory of sovereignty in Political Theology (1922) – but also, and more dramatically, from the suppression and alienation of the spiritual interiority by which a “people” never coinciding with itself can arrive at the “crystallization point” (sic) outside of the individual [9].

Circling back to the problem of “catastrophic politics” – that Schmitt wants to “contain” through decisionism, and that Unger wants to overbecome through an exodus from political thresholds – at the crux of Unger’s indictment of the arcana of Western politics is the “it has set everything in such a way so that the metaphysical or religious area, the internal direction, stands as a mere private thing”, sidestepping the fact that even reality and the constitution of the principle of reality depends on interiority for the possibility of an outside. And it is this outside what allows the a priori historicity that Oskar Goldberg had defended in his book The Reality of the Hebrews (1925). As the late Bruce Rosenstock lucidly argued, for Goldberg (who stands as the unnamed reference in Unger’s position about an experiential Judaism), the “a priori” takes place in an ur-time in which the physical world was closely connected to the transcendental presence of the gods, in which the people cease to be a cultural, ethnic, or identitarian unit in order to become a humanity capable of “overcoming the catastrophic history of wars sparked by competition over scarce resources” [10]. In endorsing the instrumentalized politico-theological reduction of state Zionism, Unger sees the abdication of the “Jews as the people who have driven the spirit the furthest…to cultivate the spirit deeper, more skillful, more subtle, to be the most deeply suitable through this tension” [11]. A true and vital reality was in the conspiracy between souls, wherever and whenever these meet as the ultimate manifestation of the fidelity to the unspeakable mediation between the true life and the divine.

At the height of 1922, Unger did not suspend from a certain self-afflecting optimism, and towards the end of The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) he writes: “The Jews should not overlook their uniquely favorable situation; mainly, they have been materially unhistorical for two thousand years, and the only one that have not been beaten into a reality and into the shackles of the past or the empirical state that others have had to suffer” [12]. In Unger’s reading, Judaism and its errant communities (the ‘wandering Jew’ that Joseph Roth will narrate in these years, but that one must trace to the mythic texture from expulsion of Cain to the marrano) have shown the density to gather through spirit a resistance to the paradigm of force and the technicians in charge of dominating over materialism. As Unger states unequivocally: “the one who technically masters matter is ultimately defeated” [13].

This was Unger’s anti-promethean wager in 1922 skeptical of all political horizons oriented towards foreseeable catastrophes blinded to the underlying cyclical polarity of barbarism and civilization in the West. The wayward asymptote of a non-catastrophic politics was not to be found in the abstraction of the political concept or the mechanical construction of a state form through assimilation and usurpation, but in what Unger termed, in the most intense poetic moment of his essay, the Hebrew “ increasing decipherability of its own origin”. And unlike Enlightenment historians such as Edward Gibbon who saw the state as the irreversible revolution in world history that brought the age of the nomads to an end; for Unger the twentieth century meant the fixation of the state degenerating in the worst of barbarisms. It was the existence of the unit that must generate the internal limit to the political, and not the political as the external threshold to what is inherited in the world. And yet, insofar the events of thought, language, and imagination take place, the origin (urgeschichte) will always escape what has been sedimented by rubble and wars that fuel planetary destruction and collapse.

Notes

1. Erich Unger. Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922).

2. Ibid., 6.

3. Ibid., 10.

4. Ibid., 15.

5. Erich Unger. “Universalism in Hebreism”, trans. Esther J. Ehrman, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol.4, 1995, 307.

6. Erich Unger. Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922), 8.

7. Ibid., 19.

8. Ibid., 25.

9. Ibid., 24.

10. Ibid., 29.

11. Bruce Rosenstock. Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2017), 172.

12. Ibid., 31.

13. Ibid., 32.

arcana imperii Carl Schmitt Civil War civilization concrete order delegation Edward Gibbon Hobbes institutions J.G.A. Pocock Roman empire rule of law state Tacitus territorial power Tyranny

Tacitus’ arcana and political wisdom. by Gerardo Muñoz

During the flourishing of Renaissance civic humanism, the tradition of Tacitism, as well as the work of Tacitus, was broadly understood as advisory to the problem of tyranny within the cycles of political power’s rise and decline, unmasking imperial rule’s debasement and cruel domination [1]. It is in Edward Gibbon’s erudite project where Tacitus’ political wisdom receives an integral treatment about the institutional dimension of power and its cohesive structure based on both facts and theoretical presuppositions. For Gibbon, the wisdom of Tacitus is not merely anchored in theoretical speculation; rather, the rhetorical construction takes its energy from the convergence between historical facts and the physics of a concrete political order. Tacitus’ wisdom is practical but also flexible, and this entails that political realism is not about the opportunist dimension of power (although this most certainly occurs in every political community), but about the deployment of analytical understanding regarding faults, fissures, and disequilibrium of institutions. Tacitus’ thought is about vision, and this means looking at the cracks, identifying the asymmetrical correspondences, and teasing out the nuances of a particular reality.

This presupposes that Tacitus’ enduring notion of the arcanum imperii, far from posing a ‘mystery of the state’ (its legitimacy, rule, and mystical reserve), allows for a strong narrative about the latent crisis internal to every political community. Tacitism is, insofar as it confronts the crisis and ruin of a political order, draws a negative reflection on the ongoing force of civil war as a historical and existential condition of domination. In other words, no politics can exist without the concrete legibility of the faults of conflict, which ultimately entails that civil war and political power are constantly in proximity. The arcana delimits the problem of civil war as the internal contradiction of every imperfect institutional design that cannot transcendent its own crisis through conceptual reordering.

At the center of Tacitus’ arcana in Rome is the death of Nero as well as the fault lines of civil war: “The was revealed that arcanum of state, the discovery that emperors might be made elsewhere than Rome” [2]. Of course, Rome as the glorious center of power was fundamental and indivisible; but for Tacitus the argument condensed in the arcana is precisely that the corruption of politics takes place when political representatives (power delegated at the provinces) and that of the center ceased being in coordination, losing the grip of institutional mediations. Thus, the ruin of politics is best expressed by the disjointment of formal procedures between authority and delegation, the vesting of the emperor and territorial monopoly, legitimate rule and predatory corruption. When this happens the arcana is transformed into a permanent revolution that dissolves checked political rule into the willful triumph of the uncontained and proliferated fragmentation (this is why Tacitus looked back with nostalgia to the unlived era of Roman republicanism).

For Gibbon to hold on to the Tacitan tradition of the arcana imperii meant, above all, to underscore the esoteric relationship between history and revolution as part of the desire to understand political energy, which he posed as a methodological concern: “In our larger experience of history the imagination is assisted by a perpetual series of causes and effects , to unite the most distant revolutions” [3]. The arcana is political wisdom of a secondary source; that is, it’s not a normatively established political premise or category, but an excess to description of political order. Hence, it is not that the arcana imperii is a monocausal and ultimate foundation of instability – and in this sense he was still faithful to his conception of plurality of causation in defense of the study of literature and the imagination – the emphasis is placed, on the contrary, in the way in which grasping the archeological and heterogeneous field of tension that will reveal, in turn, the historical specificity of the arcana [4].

In other words, the arcana grants access to the fundamental features of the epiphenomenon of civil strife without a recourse to abstraction and the closure of the concept. In this way, it could be said that the arcana (in part in the reading that Gibbon undertakes of Tacitus) is continuously operating in three distinct registers: a) it is a comprehensive analytic of the plurality of causation that impact political conflict and civil war, b) it reports to the center of authority, probing its direct and indirect meditations on the ground; its forms of delegation and adjudication, and its production of legality and dominium and implementation; c) it demands to design a description and a narrative of the political situation in order to properly respond to the paradox of tyranny and corruption within a specific polity.

Having sketched out the operational effect of the arcana, we can say that the notion is far from being reducible to a Renaissance “ragion di stato” scenario assisting in the consolidation of power in the hands of the price; the arcana seeks to elucidate the contours and limits of the intensification of war and its risks; a problem that becomes central to Hobbes notion of the state [5]. To claim that this political wisdom is something that merely emerges technically-placed in the Renaissance “great men”, and systematically blurred in modern liberalism is a thesis that will need further elaboration about the resources of the state and the underpinning of modern legitimacy through civil society and its late-modern mutation into planetary imperial spaces. In a certain sense “Tacitism” opens the possibility of sketching the political crisis of in each distinct epoch. It is perhaps in this sense that Carl Schmitt invites us to think the issue in an entry of his Glossarium:

“The beginning of Tacitus’ Histories has moved me. Is it just rhetoric, like Ortega told me?’ Isn’t it about the identity of the situation, that is, existential participation, participation in one and the same nuclear and ancestral situation of our eon? Every word of that chapter of Tacitus is absolutely current: «Magna ingenia cessere; opus adgredior optimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevum. Of course, “ipsa etiam pace sacvum, bella civilia et exterior plerumque permixta.” The relationship between international war and civil war, that is not rhetoric but the horrible reality recognized and expressed, the non-distinction between war and peace.” [6]

The arcana never truly coincides with a philosophy of history or a rhetorical veneer of civil existence (social contract). The subversiveness of Tacitus plays out in thinking through the elaboration of a specific governmental organization [7]. And what is the “ancestral situation of the eon” if not the polar relationship between political order and stasis, the duality between civil war and the principle of authority, the nihilism of the will and the limits of a public rule of law, however ordered? Tacitus’ classical wisdom, invested in plotting legible facts with a singular narrative, far from raising itself to a “science of politics” or a set of “fundamental principles of order”, responds to potential fluctuations devoid of a universal grammar. In this way, politics remains closer to a physical experiment: an active self-evolving canvas in which the arcana is irremediably drawing upon the instituting and destituting of interconnected forces at play.

Notes

1. Arnaldo Momigliano. “Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition”, in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (University of California Press, 1990), 120.

2. J. G. A. Pocock. Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall, Vol.III (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25.

3. Ibid., 58.

4. G.W. Bowersock. “Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire”, Daedalus, Summer, 1976.

5. Richard Tuck. “Hobbes and Tacitus”, in Hobbes and History (2000), eds. G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell, 99–111.

6. Carl Schmitt. Glossarium: Anotaciones desde 1947 hasta 1958 (El Paseo, 2019), 7.

7. Ronald Syme. “Who was Tacitus?”, Harvard Library Bulletin XI, Spring 195, 185.

antiquity clergy Edward Gibbon Enlightenment erudition Freedom Hölderlin irony Persuation rationality rhetorical style universitas

Gibbon on the university and erudition. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his posthumous Memoirs from my life (1827), Edward Gibbon writes something quite striking about the modern English university in order to defend his alignment with the érudits. Now, to be an erudite was never something to be achieved at a university or academic discipline, it was something quite different in both style and form. Gibbon was quite crude when he writes:

“The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted with the vice of their origin. Their primitive discipline was adapted to the education of priests and monks; and the government still remains in the hand of the clergy, an order of men whose manners are remote from the present world, and whose eyes are dazzled by the light of philosophy. The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of public instruction; and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy and oppressive. Their work is more costly and less productive than that of independent artists; and their new improvements so eagerly grasped by the competition of freedom are admitted with slow and sullen reluctance in those proud corporations, above the fear of a rival and below the confession of an error” [1].

It is worth noting that Gibbon’s defense of erudition – the same erudition that will make him undertake the genetic project of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – is at least indirectly opposed to the reorganization of the university as infused by the ecclesiastical culture of priests and canon lawyers, which dominated the institution through the dogmas and platitudes legitimized by the currency of stable philosophical categories or doctrines. The university was always already an institution designed by the moral outsourcing of the intramural clerical rivalry among different levels of the administration and academic chairs. In a way, the future administrative clerk will be an impoverished version of the clerical denomination (homo homini clericus now realized through leading ‘cultural benchmarks’).

It is only at this point that Gibbon’s skeptical and ironic stance against “philosophes” – the secularized figure of the ecclesiastical priest – becomes quite clear, since the rational philosopher occupies the role of the judge in the internal institutional validity, conceptual arraignment, and liturgical enactment of the self-sufficient subject of knowledge. Gibbon reacted against this specific “Enlightenment” that harbored a universitas drenched in the undercurrents of barbarism against the ‘freedom to understand’. Or more precisely: freedom to land the sublime height of personal style.

Under the sign of erudition, Gibbon understood tradition as a stylistic transmission that did not differ much from Hölderlin’s archeological suggestion in regards to antiquity; mainly, that formation only takes place when “we give ourselves our own direction determined by impure directions”; only this way truth-seeking can commence without prejudice and obscurantism [2]. In this light, the object of happiness must abandon the hubris of priestly academic knowledge in order to pursue the “love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplying research each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure” [3]. It almost goes without saying that the fact that the contemporary university must justify every project, initiative, and prospect on behalf of current soteriological needs and values speaks to its organized alliance with barbarism against any possible form of personal erudition. But erudition, as something bestowed upon ourselves, will always persuade and humble men against the unreserved rhetorical force of the present.

Notes

1. Edward Gibbon. Memoirs of my life (Penguin Books, 1990), 77.

2. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The standpoint from which we should consider Antiquity”, in Essays and Letters (Penguin Books, 2009), 442.

3. Edward Gibbon. Memoirs of my life (Penguin Books, 1990), 98.

Carl Schmitt constitutionalism executive power guardian of the constitution legality Nocturnal council oath originalism Paolo Prodi political doctrine principles

The oath and the guardian of the constitution. by Gerardo Muñoz

The neutralization of an intense political movement tends to defy both institutional and implicit norms of the rule of law. The fact that former President Donald J. Trump has been charged with four different legal indictments – the hush money New York state case, the Mar-a-Lago Classified Documents case, the January 6th insurrection case, and the Giorgia election meddling case – have only boosted his cultish popularity among his followers who are now pushing for a second presidential term. On top of this, it is also important to note that none of the indictments truly bar Trump from reaching the executive office and engaging in a self-pardon. However, we have seen the emergence of a fifth possible venue to indict Trump elaborated in an important lengthy law review article co-written by jurists William Baude & Michael Stokes Paulsen that reclaims the sweeping and effective force of section three of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution [1]. The letter of section 3 is straightforward, and it states that anyone that has previously taken an oath to defend the United States Constitution, and engages “in insurrection and rebellion” disqualifies him from future appointments in any public office, although Congress could remove said disability with a sufficient majority [2].

There are two central qualifying conditions in the section: having taken a prior oath to the Constitution, and engaging or avoiding insurrection and rebellion against the unity of the state, which assumes that the current political situation is one of either the threat of secession or civil war (this was Lincoln’s standard). The fact that this has been proposed by one of the foremost exponents of constitutional originalism should already indicate the juridical pressure that American lawyers are facing at the moment [3]. If there is room for disagreement about the “objectivity of the context”, the fact that the applicability of section 3, Am.14. presupposes the state of a full-fledged civil war that confirms the unprecedented controversy about the political context – regardless if considered an open civil war or an institutional political crisis – in which the enforcement of the constitutional provision will be executed[4].

The precondition for the effectivity of the sanction, however, hangs on something that has been taken for granted by most commentators: that is, the fact that the public official has taken an oath, becoming what Baude & Paulsen denominate an ‘oath-taking category of person’, which implies that the self-defense and the continuity of the constitution relies on the structure and form of the oath. Of course, we know from the great legal historian Paolo Prodi that one of the fundamental categories of political authority of the state was the absorption of the religious vow and the sacrament into the oath expressing the collective will and intra-institutional regulation of a normative system of the rule of law [5]. The oath achieves the unity of institutional authority, but this is only possible if there is a common collective faith in the constituted community of the oath-taking practice.

Under this consideration, it is almost redundant to note that the object of this collective and consensual faith (fides) is the oath as the nexus of public trust between the word and the instituted reasons for action. Oath and faith – and its immanent dialectic, since it also implies the faith in the oath – just like the polarity of religion and the rule of law, can only be sustained on stable conditions of a robust secularized equilibrium now broken. In fact, this is what paves the way for the indirect powers of civil war. This implies that the dependency on the oath is invalid without fides; and, mutatis mutandis, it is only once that fides is separated from the oath that its self-executing force becomes possible in the field of factional forces.

This is something that is definitely not a new problem, since one can read in “Federalist 18” how the implementation of oath during the Greek polis did not lessen the exacerbation of the fragmentation between the rise of different factions [6]. In the same vein, Carl Schmitt reminded how Hindenburg during the Weimar Republic felt comfortable taking an oath prima facie, only to find himself later hostage to the absolutization of internal political hostilities [7]. Given that the oath is predicated on the faith of a “promise of future behavior” (Baude & Paulsen dixit), an oath discharged from the presupposition of a faith in the concrete institutional order, tends to reproduce an adverse relation between perjurers, legal sanction, and pardons. In this circularity any political system will no longer depend on the internal categories of legitimate rule and social representation, but rather on the parallel tripartite structure of oath-taking, compelled oath, and acceleration of instrumental exchange of burdens, misdemeanors or infractions.

This tripartite structure – oath, perjury, politization – orients the force of fides after the collapse of modern secularization and the rise of legal constitutionalism [8]. Indeed, the energy of desecularization can only be expressed with the efficacy of moral principles dependent on a political will that fluctuates on the coagulation of legislative majorities that will see their “truths”, “public reasons”, and “social sensibilities” as permanent marching orders (let us not lose sight that the Congress can override the force of proscription). This does not mean that there is no such thing as having taken on “oath to the Constitution”, which is at the center of the American political system. Nor can one ignore the fact that section 3 enacts a clear threshold against public office holding if engaged in the context of insurrection or rebellion. Furthermore, one should not confuse the expediency of the unit of the political with the external question pertaining to social facts or public opinion [9]. Rather the point is much simpler and stark: if a constitution is a normative system of rules and principles, its free-standing application can not respond on the basis of having faith in the future promise compelled by the force of the oath. This can only deepen the conditions for civil war that neo-constitutionalism facilitates through its flexible and discretionary principles (the primacy of ius over lex). In the shadow of the oath, the archaic jingle of the sacramental enunciation is heard one more time [10].

The oath should not be reduced to a candid constitutional interpretation or federal jurisdiction: it is eminently a political question about the form, scope, and urgency of the guardian of the constitution and its nocturnal council. It is perhaps pertinent to conclude by recalling Plutarch’s old maxim: “Children are to be deceived with toys, men with oath”, which today could very well apply to generic constitutionalism and political militants alike, two fierce contenders in shaping and distributing the the energies of the legal stasis [11]. And if wrongs committed are no longer done to the gods as in Tacitus’s sacramental maxim ( deorum iniurias dis curae), but first and foremost against the authority of a concrete order; this means that political differentiation emerges against the quiet harbinger of the sacralization of politics – an anodyne time in which men with oaths, quite often, also behave and act like children with toys.

Notes

1. William Baude & Michael Stokes Paulsen. “The Sweep and Force of Section Three”, U. PA. Law Review, forthcoming 2024: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751

2. US Constitution, Article XIV, sec.3: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability”.

3. Gerardo Muñoz. “El Originalismo y la Corte Suprema Norteamericana: un diálogo con William Baude”, January 2023, En Disidencia: https://endisidencia.com/2023/01/el-originalismo-y-la-corte-suprema-norteamericana-un-dialogo-con-william-baude/

4. “Prof. Michael McConnell, Responding About the Fourteenth Amendment, “Insurrection,” and Trump”, The Volokh Conspiracy, August 2023: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/12/prof-michael-mcconnell-responding-about-the-fourteenth-amendment-insurrection-and-trump/

5. Paolo Prodi. “Dalle Secolarizzazione alle Religioni Politiche”, in Storia moderna o genesi della modernità? (Il Mulino, 2012), 115–51.

6. Alexander Hamilton & James Madison & John Jay. The Federalist (Havard University Press, 2009), 107-108.

7. Carl Schmitt. “The Legal World Revolution”, Telos, N.72, 1987, 82.

8. Jack Goldsmith (Harvard Law) seems to hold this view in “The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences”, August 2023, New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/opinion/trump-indictment-cost-danger.html

9. Martin Loughlin. Against Constitutionalism (Harvard University Press, 2022).

10. Émile Benveniste. “Ius and the Oath in Rome”, in Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (Hau Books, 2016), 401.11. Plutarch. Lives. Agesilaus and Pompey. Pelopidas and Marcellus. Volume V (Loeb, 1917), 12.

Carlo Levi Civil War cybernetics depiction domination existence form of life garden geopolitics Rodrigo Karmy soul Theology

Towards a new life. On Rodrigo Karmy’s Stasiología (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

What comes after state form? The grounds for a self-evolving civil war at the heart of the social is what opens up in the wake of the collapse of the categories and grammar of modern politics. Stasiology becomes the fundamental unit to grasp the decoupling of the liberal state from its fixed guarantees and duties. Already during the crisis of legitimation of the seventies, we were told that the modern secular liberal state can no longer guarantee the conditions that made it possible, in the famous hypothesis developed by Böckenförde. The stasiological paradigm thoroughly governs the once implied mediations, social forms, and positive juridical norms of state-society internal mechanics without reminders and procedures. This is why all calls for political realism today are futile and insufficient; the only real existing realism is the one that must be confronted with increasing categorial inversions that ultimately channel the passage from a sufficiently ordered polity (the equilibrium of commerce and virtues) to the conflagration of the civil war as the production of social fabric.

All of this is implicit and glossed in Rodrigo Karmy’s excellent essay Stasiología: guerra civil, formas de vida, capitalismo (Voces Opuestas, 2023) in which the empty performance in the stage of fictitious contemporary sovereignty exchanged for the effective precautionary inversions that have become operative at a planetary scale: republicanism has given in to empire; the horizon of “liberty” nows entails dispossession and domination; authoritative and legitimate rule now means interpretative and exceptional discretionary execution; and, civil society (the modern civilizational unity for social cohesion) has become an axiomatic nexus to manage the tractions and turbulence of total economy (equivalence). The current state of things could not be more grim – and everything that passes through the sign of “order” (orderability, ordinary, ordo) elevates in the name of an self-sufficient abstraction that government paranoia to guide every deviation. The Leviathan stage has zoomed in into the pastoral exercise of uncontested dominion. Those that have claimed that the polis – precisely, as the sphere of social exchange and masquerade, in other words, of practical nihilism – is defunct are perhaps right in stating that its autonomy was destined to become the sheltered territory for pirates, delinquents, and the mafia. What is civil society today if not the confluence or the commuting space of the concert of all existing indirect powers?

For Karmy, abstraction and inversal do not mean just arbitrariness and formlessness lacking description. There is some rationality to what is arbitrary and anarchic in how the public powers are conjoined, distributed, and organized under several logistical units of optimal endurance: a) an axiomatic method that is immanent, flexible, and technologically sophisticated in its aversion to civil war; b) there is a process of exposition and vigilance that, conflating oikos and polis, makes hostis and inimicus indistinguishable, and by extension, coextensive to a global police (just as predicted by Carl Schmitt in the prologue to the Italian edition of The Concept of the political) that can manage and intervene in world-events as without residue. Expressively, Karmy reminds us, the police apparatus becomes the composition of cybernetic deployment based on the capillary consortium of information, reproduction, and differentiations. c) And finally, there is a nomic coupling between politics and geopolitics as the univocal destiny of a planetary humanity as a nihilistic mastery over nature, passions, and geographical localities. But if a century ago Benjamin suggested in One-Way Street (1928) that the power of the proletariat amounted to the measure of its convalescence, it seems that this is a materialist ideal that also has sunk deep into the anomia of the seas. Neither a “collective and sensible” proletariat nor a mobilized pacifist can enact the much expected epochal katechon; the immanent subject of Empire is already invested in the paradigm of force and counter-force, reinforcing what Karmy sees as the global practical and rhetorical geopolitics as an ongoing polemos: “Toda guerra es, ante todo, una guerra contra el pensamiento, Por eso abunda el análisis geopolítico” (Karmy 79). The manifest destiny of geopolitical grounding (knowledge, measurement, exposition) can only admit voluntary servitude towards the conflagration and the distributions of dominance and “influence” that has only intensified from the Iraq invasion of the early millennium to the Covid-19 pandemic techno-administrative measures.

But geopolitical dominance can no longer be said to integrate – there are too many cracks and holes in what it is still called, by inertia (Karmy calls it the ‘Newtonian hypothesis’) , the autonomy of the social. Similarly, its universality is a fallen one; but not because it has accepted the Augustuinian saeculum against the Pelagian heresy, but rather because its unitary mold consists in an internal stasis fractured within: a schism of every community from itself, a separation between things and forms in the originary sense of the Greek polis. Could another nomoi be recovered here? This is the last question posed by Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) through the poetic scene of Guadalupe Santa Cruz, whose turn to the garden is an involuntary act that gathers whatever is left of an ethical life from the ongoing devastation enacted by the barbarism of civilization. The garden is the threshold to a world according to Karmy reading Santa Cruz: “…al borde del mundo, el jardín es la figura que remite al cultivo de estilo, cuidado de la potencia de la imaginación, en último término, lo que designa un gesto” (Karmy 102-103). It is no coincidence that gesture and gestar is a polysemic term that allows to comprehend the figural and self-evolving of a transformation of life; “freedom” is not to deploy internal force towards the appropriation of advantageous outcomes and interest, but of the possibility of delineating the appearance of “a life” holding the unmeasurable world in proximity [1]. It is at this point where forms color how we become who we are.

What must be saved is not “life itself”, but rather the theōs between world and existence that opens “new possibilities” that is anti-scientific precisely because it is not incorporated by the pressure of objective absorption. The theōs is the invisible deviation from the worldly necessity of how things should be and what our lives should aspire to become; and only in this sense we are all martyrs as witnesses to this nearness. Extracting a further consequence from Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) one could claim that every desertion from geopolitical destiny – its unspeakable misery, its blatant bad faith, its farcical prepotence that forces a parodic eschatology – presupposes a return to a new life, which has always began at the surface of our face, as if anticipating reality prophetically: “Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world.” [2]. If the acclamations for a “New Man” concerned the humanist aspiration of the productive modernity; the vita nova concerns, first and foremost, the conservation of the partition of the soul, the only true entity of alienability where life conquers death. The practice of stasilogy sets out an exercise of this elegant depiction: allowing invisibility to prefigure and breach a new life from the trenches of a never ending struggle.

Notes

1. Monica Ferrando. “Gestare la figura. Note sulla pittura e il suo gesto”, Giardino di studi filosofici, Quodlibet, 2018.

2. Carlo Levi. The Two-Fold night: A narrative of travel in Germany (Cresset Press, 1962), 109.

authority Carl Schmitt Christianity Church decionism forms Franco Venturi HLA Hart Legitimacy modern state police powers political form positive law rule of law secularization Theology

Two side notes on Anna Grzymala-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Anna Grzymala-Busse’s recent study Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the Modern State (Princeton U Press, 2023) makes a compelling historical and data analysis grounded case for the emergence of the modern state through the process of the Church’s autonomization in its ongoing disputes with the European monarchs across the centuries. This process of the secularization of ecclesiastical forms (conciliarism, legal administration, the uniformity of procedures, rules for governing institutions, the emergence of educational training and mechanisms for political representation and fiscal control, etc), however, is silent about two defining features of the modern secular state. And I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that these two elements bring forth the way in which political authority was established after the victory of modern European Enlightenment. Busse’s book, if anything, has the felicity of putting in perspective, even if only in negative, the two pieces of the puzzle: a) coercion as guarantee by a legal process (not just the monopoly of force); b) and the inter-institutional coordination that we tend to associate with a ‘principle of an internal rule of recognition’ between different spheres of bureaucratic rationality. Busse admits for (a) that “….the authority of the people over the whole Church was not statelike. It depends on moral authority and influence, not on coercive control. Both kings and popes cajoled, convinced, and threatened rather than demanded or extracted force” (Busse, 78). But ruling on morality and influence are two weak presuppositions to guarantee systemic, homogeneous and uniform process required by institutional authority.

In other words, the Church was able to construct forms of civil mediations, although it lacked the power of efficacy; that is, a coherent set of reasons for action that would define a strong concept of sovereign authority as service (to put it in Raz’s well-known formulation). The classical apothegm by which ‘kings rule rule but do not govern’ (Rex regnat sed non gubernat) now is protracted by the exercise of an efficacious rule, which means laying out a combination of forms and a well-ordered power over coercive forms. In fact, this is one feature that will define the legitimacy of the Enlightenment according to historian Franco Venturi; the discovery of punishment understood within the scheme of a trade off between the “necessity of the right to punish when man was not able to re-establish communism” [1]. Hence, the genesis of modern legitimation is not exclusively “a given” vis-a-vis the structure of separation of powers and the ultimate source of the plenitudo potestatis; rather, it requires a second-step rule, as it were, to convalidate the specificity of institutional authority with ample concrete efficacy of police powers in charge of compliance and punishment. The reach and exercise of public police powers and the systematic ordering of penal codes through a criminal procedure and its guarantees (reasonable doubt, fair trial and due process, no crime published without a previous enacted law, nullum crimen sine lege) is what renders effective and “energic” the principle of authority.

Now, broadly speaking, when it comes to (b) Busse admits that (and this is in spite of its institutional schemes) laying down justice “…the church relied on secular enforcement, for example when it came to religious orthodoxy. […] The carrying out of sentences against heretics and apostates lay in secular hands – those found guilty were handed over the temporal authorities so as to not sully the clergy. Legal coevolution and influence, the struggles between popes and monarchs, and the diffusion of both canon law and personnel into the juridical systems were critical to the rise of constitutionalism and the rule of law in Europe” (Busse, 132-133). This asymmetry between two systems of legal jurisdiction confirm the inexistence of a strong internal rule of recognition that for H.L.A. Hart defines any robust modern legal system of public law. The internal rule of recognition, one must remember, is not a set of principles or norms for social action, but rather the internal mediation between a legislative authority and its internal obedience within a concrete application thereof. The internal rule of recognition binds a central authority with its specific formal enforcement in institutional union of primary rules and secondary rules to avoid the pathology of uncertainty. This is thoroughly absent from the free-floating institutional forms of the medieval church whose principal construction of primary rules was divorced from the objective and rational procedures of its internal coherence (the rule of recognition) that would ground, in time and place, the otherwise abstract primary norm and the pressure of contested social conflict.

But going straight to the crux of the matter, it follows that medieval templates as superbly redrawn in Busse’s studies lack the two fundamental determinations that ground the modern concept of law: law as the necessarily monopoly over coercion (the Austin thesis), and the concept of law as the construction of an internal rule of recognition to unite primary and secondary rules (the Hart thesis). But insofar as all major modern political concepts and mediations are secularized forms of religious and medieval forms – something we can say that Busse’s scholarship also confirms – we can then say that modern legitimacy will consist in the congruence of these two determinations to organize the mediations between civil society and state. Already in his early The value of the state and the significance of the individual (1914), Carl Schmitt will note of this formal transplant: “…the Catholic doctrine of the Pope as the infallible interpreter of the natural moral law and of the content of revelation, who receives the competence to declare state statutes that stand in contradiction with the moral law or ius divino-naturale to be non-obligatory in conscience. The exercise of his potestas indirecta which is regarded as an act of jurisdiction, and which is held, by many canonists, to be determinative of a statute’s validity in state law – contains real vis coactiva, even where the expression potestas directiva is employed in place of potestas indirecta (Suárez, de fide cath, 3.22.1)” [2].

For Schmitt, then, the process of rationalization between ecclesiastical form and the modern legal norms of the state is very much straightforward. This is what constitutes the very texture of secular modernity. But as we know, for Schmitt the secularization of forms was not enough – it must be said that he himself did not negate in his theory of adjudication of his constitutional thought – which is why the construction parameters of his ‘political theology’ proposes supplemental safeguards to isolate law and power, extending the power of secularization into the decision of the potentia dei asoluta (at times this was contained in the theological figure of the Katechon) [3]. But as Carlo Galli has noted, Schmitt’s political theology is far from a “political christology” or a substantive theological politics grounded in natural law; rather it is a resolute affirmation to defend any concrete order from the potential fallouts of the secularized cornerstones of rational neutralization (potentia directiva and potestas coactivva) of state authority [4]. Neither mechanic state forms nor a higher source of morality (natural law) would define the modern law; rather the autonomy of the political in the existential situation could provide the sufficient energy to avoid the self-defeating circularity of ius revolutionis (this is what most of the times is obliterated from the so called question of “decisionism”)[5]. If Busse is correct in making the case that all modern institutions have sacred medieval foundations; Schmitt’s concurrence in the wake of modern secularization will be to define the energy of the political as the defining element that must stand as the threshold of formal transplantations to have a chance within nihilism and against nihilism. It is both things. In other words, formlessness is the constitutive dimension of political forms; an element that defines, in my view at least, the strongest practical element of what it is to inherit a Christian political foundation. The process of secularization is thus infinite and groundless, ultimately without a moral foundation and universal design. Among its many achievements, a book like Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the Modern State (Princeton U Press, 2023) has the ability to refine what political theology is, what it meant, and what to make of its endurance and possible iterations in our present.

Notas

1. Franco Venturi. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 116.

2. Carl Schmitt. The value of the state and the significance of the individual, in Carl Schmitt’s Early Legal-Theoretical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2022), eds. Zeitlin & Vinx, 215.

3. See my “Schmitt y Hart: los puntos fijos del concepto de derecho”, 2022: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2022/11/07/schmitt-y-hart-los-puntos-fijos-del-concepto-de-derecho-por-gerardo-munoz/

4. Carlo Galli. Genealogía de la política : Carl Schmitt y la crisis del pensamiento político moderno (Unipe, 2019), 301.

5. Jorge Dotti. “Sobre el decisionismo”, en Lo cóncavo y lo convexo (Guillermo Escolar Editor, 2022), 391.

Bernard Berenson Carlo Levi dialect dialectic modernity Mystery painting Pasolini Poetry Theology TJ Clark world

After plasticity: on Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on painting (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Pasolini never ceased reflecting upon the painterly nature of the image outside of both literalness and abstraction. In Pasolini we are accustomed to be exposed to a set of antinomies: image and depiction, tradition and the primordial, figuration and the tactile, the world and its fragments. The publication of his miscellaneous writings on painting (and painters of the Italy of the 1950s-1960s) Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on painting (Verso, 2023), edited by Ara Merjian and Alessandro Giammei, provides depth and substance to document Pasolini’s insistence to the pictorial activity as an index of unmediated expressivity against the domestication of the accelerated capitalist form that soon enough will generate devastating consequences for idiomaticity and the pregramatical expression of a living culture. It is not too far-fetched to claim that painting remained for him a necessary condition of the cinematic; a specific craft that fundamentally rejected the impulse to naturalness and its mimetic performance. Pasolini remains attached to painting as a form of embodiment, a corporeal resource, and an energetic surface of positioning of light.

After all, as the editors of the book remind us at the outset, Pasolini was after the “plasticity of the image” (37). And plasticity pushes the dexterity of human creativity, but it is something else as well: it is a line of expansion into the prehistoric when it comes to the frontier of appearance. And perhaps Pasolini would have agreed with Gianni Carchia’s indictment in Il mito in pittura (1987) that the attempt of realizing appearance – even at the cost of failing at it – is the fundamental metaphysical node in which the entire history of Western painting stands. A good painting elevates itself to supreme theology, as Luca Giordano said of Velázquez. The problem of appearance in Pasolini’s scene of writing on painting is registered through partial indications: the tone of detailism, the violent and free moving impressionism, the struggle for stylistic contamination, or in the “fragmentary chromatic and interrupted aesthetic” (114). Pasolini’s eye is always accessible to the transient and expressive in a picture.

But the Italian filmmaker struggles with description of paintings, as if possessed by a permanent impatience that harbors his recurrent shortcomings. And he was not unaware: “I am not fluent in the terminology of painting, so forgive me if I sound less specific” (134). It is a declaration that does not only appear once in this collection. One could speculate that this dilemma is resolved by Pasolini in three ways: first, he can choose the painters from a personal criteria that would justify his awareness of painting as a prehistoric cultural activity. Secondly, Pasolini repeatedly alludes to the teaching of the great Italian art historian Roberto Longhi – who was responsible for the first formal analysis of Piero de la Francesca’s pictorial oeuvre – as companion and a maestro that during the Fascist interwar period gifted his students (and Pasolini among them) a different reality through commentaries on the seminal works of Italian Renaissance painting (155). Longhi’s anti-iconographical approach to the pictorial tradition allowed Pasolini a sense touch – not less real than the physical hand that caresses another body or hard surface – and the inexorable mystery-like quality of plasticity. Thirdly, Pasolini avoids coming near a possible ontological description of what, in fact, painting as such stands for him. Does it have an autonomous specificity, or an internal grammar, or perhaps an intricate dependence on other artistic activities (poetry, cinema, social criticism, politics)? Pasolini wanted to understand painting as a force of absorption even if ultimately blinding to the spectator. Nonetheless, Pasolini’s commentaries is rigid at the abyss between what painting is (or should be) and the painters or pictures that he explores in these pages.

This abyssal between word and depiction vouches for Pasolini’s unresolved tension with the nature of painting; a picture is always already dependent or attached to a peripheral phenomena that moves beyond the modern vista’s fulfillment towards totality. In fact, there are a few moments where painting is qualified, as in the text on Carlo Levi: “We are in the presence of something mysterious, ineffable. To speak about that something I can only fumble in the dark, since O a, without a proper terminology…but this ‘something’ is a mystery to me” (176). Or, when in the fragment “Dialectal painting” he suggests that “ [the dialectal tone] is not for the objective content of its figure sand landscapes, but also for the tone he uses to represent it (a tonalism drawn, we could say, from a crepuscular post-impressionism)” (81). Both fragments – so distant from each other in time; one from the fifties and the one on Levi from the seventies – provide an approximate orientation of Pasoloni’s fixation of painting in its specific muteness. This is not because it lacks language, but rather because it only speaks in its own dialect. A painted picture is always about resolving a situated uncanny appearance.

And for Pasolini only the partial profile of a picture – its superficial depth and strength of figuration, but also its lack of sentimentality and abandonment of lyricism that he would come to associate with the bourgeoisie worldview – was capable of dialectical valance, thus upending its misstep into the vulgarity of the “equality predestined and predetermined…the representation of such a world excludes the very possibility of dialectics” (186). This was his indictment of Warhol’s homogenous silkscreen prints and the general phenomenon of Pop Art and the neovvanguardias as coordinated efforts to surpass all that was past and present collapsing into “the voice of the homo technologicus…replacing history with a surreptitious and sacral prediction of history” (147). Bernard Berenson would have agreed to this: the inception of ‘knowing’ over seeing will only secure further mimetic and mystified (through mechanized and applied models in advance) points of departure for a subject of consciousness directed towards history. This is why for Pasolini the avant-garde can only “make the definition of that moment zero [of absolute beginning] profoundly insincere” (149). Painting and tradition walk along the abyss of nihilism. Only negatively can we say that for Pasolini painting is, then, an earthly activity; it is about being in the world in spite of the state of the world; attached to seeing even if the blurred limits perturb the open horizon.

The allure of a lagging postmodern and mechanized painting – but isn’t’ the eclipse of painting for the epoch as such? – for Pasolini exchanges, rather too quickly, lyricism (dependent on the romantic subject that attains it) for nuanced poetic sayability. After all, one of the most straightforward assumptions entertained by Pasolini is that “a painter is a poet who is never forced by circumstances to write in prose…” (106). A remark that comes very close to Poussin’s assertion that painting is an endeavor about the mute nature of things. The muteness of painting has granted artists the possibility to evoke the picture from poetry, as if word and image by entering into proximity can finally participate, side by side, into the mystery of appearance withdrawing from the “adumbrations of our present image-world”, as T.J. Clark recognizes it. There is something to be said in this respect about Pasolini’s long poem “Picasso” (1953) where the medium of poetry touches Picasso’s canvas only to flee from its empty abstraction, disclosing the cunning negation of the world. Or to use a trope common to Clark’s art criticism: Picasso’s fall of Icarus lacks any possible awakening in the present.

Pasolini’s last verse of the poem expresses what for him painting should avoid: “Sunday air…and his error is here [Picasso’s], in this absence. / The exit to / eternity lines not in this desired and premature love. Salvation is to be sought by staying in hell, with a marmoreal will to understand it. A society fated to lose its way is always bound to lose it: a person, never” (75-76). For him painting and Paradise are not meant to cohabitation – which bears witness to Pasolini’s long lasting commitment to the fallen modern world ascertained by the promethean durable struggle. Painting is poetically affirmed by retaining to what does not come to pass: the convulsions of this world. But a question remains: should not the distance implicated in seeing be sufficient in a fading world? Traversing this distance is the inherent divine task of painting; or, as Pasolini simply called it: “exquisite, mysterious – a new religion of things”.

Cézanne creation eternity ethos experience Freedom Mystery painting passions pictorial analysis style world

Under a single statement: on Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts: Late Style (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In his Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague (Thames & Hudson, 2023), Christopher Neve ponders whether there is something like an “experience” of late style in painting. He immediately sets up himself to the task in the last works of great modern masters, from Cézanne to Soutine. The notion of “late style” can only be raised at the definitive end of the artist’s path. The old age style is an aspotilla no longer dependent on approval and excellence; it favors inner capacity and dexterity of seeing. This is why late style is, probably, always self-transformative: it poses the notion of work under erasure as it comes near the zenith of retraction. For Adorno late style registers the failure of synthesis as well as the force of dissociation in the permanence of the catastrophic. Neve will perhaps agree this much: painting is not about fixing temporality (the density of the history, the vulgarity of the contemporary, the monumentality of the past); rather what remains is the fugitive scene of depiction. If the question of “late style” is immensely difficult to raise, that is because it resists conceptualization: it merely seeks to denote achievement and the ruinous; appearance and retreat; unlearning schematics and producing “from life” itself, to put it with Poussin’s pictorial vocabulary. Late style is not about the moment of judgement and recapitulation – it is what depiction can achieve in the twilight of creative powers. As Goethe once defined old age: “Old age is gradual retreat from appearance”. But this retreat animates the space that had remained secluded in the order of temporal abstraction.

There is no theory (and there will never be) of late style of pictorial representation. It is a question that merits the weight of description – which Neve combines, quite successfully, with that of emblematic instances of the artists’ form of life. In other words, late style does not require conceptual renditions; it demands the elaboration of strong descriptions that can grasp the resonance of a fundamental ethos. Neve glosses Delacroix’s ethical imperative: ‘only in old age does a painter finally know what sort of artist he should have been all along’. In late style there is coming to conclusion because there is a path for homecoming. This ethical dimension of the artist is neither regulated by form nor by epistemological conditions. Late style implies a stripping away of things; it bares a specific nudity: it can reveal interiority (the invariant) without argumentative absorption. If anything else, it is the non-knowledge of the gesturing hand. Neve points calls this “statement” when offering a treatment of Rembrandt’s old age: “…technique and the process of getting older, and that this was somehow done all in one, summed up and expressed undeniable and in confidence of one blow and as a single statement. And I wished that all painting could be like this” (46). We suppose Neve’s desire as hyperbolic, since painting under a single statement also implies the moment when the picture approaches the abyss between the hand and the order of reality.

Painting gravitates towards a single statement when it surpasses life by taking death seriously. There is much truth in reminding that the work of art aspires to its bare lyrical moment of decline and unworking of itself – this was also Cézanne’s moment of “not being able to realize!”- in order to flee from the objective fixation of the “thisness of nature”. Painting assembles a transfigurative force against the temporal succession of the pro-duction of a specific work on a surface. As expressed by the old Pisarro from the window of his studio quoted by Neve: “A little more work before dying” (54). True, nothing else but painting mattered to Pisarro, as Neve reminds us. Now, does this mean that he is holding on to the unchanged and muted essence of things as a “metaphysical solace” in the face of the whirling of a world in chaos? Perhaps there is something to this suspicion that must be reckoned with – painting comes close to theological presuppositions insofar as creation unsettles a disenchanted world and its fictitious mimesis. Alas, this is a question not fully posed by Neve, but it is also one of the ways in which his book could travel without much effort. The question of immortality of a picture has a point of departure here. But is immortality conceivable as a form of solace and fallen piety? One should refuse to ask this question in the form of generality. The works Titian, Goya, Cézanne, the dreary and posthumous glory of Velázquez or the suffering Soutine during the Nazi occupation are all efforts to pose the problem of late style painting as the ethical attunement of each artist.

In the most elevated and charged moment of Neve’s efforts to grapple with the notion of style he recurs to Soutine (and it requires us to turn to the picture “Children playing at Champigny” from 1942): “What you are seeing, when Soutine paints the Auxerre trees, is what I think happens in the work of most of the artists I haven written about here. This storm of temperament is true painting, an inexplicable combination of seeing, feeling, memory, response, imagination, and profound oddness. And so he turns away in exhaustion” (122). Late style registers the collapse of a possible fulfillment with the world by indexing a detour to the point where realization seeks to “return to simplicity and order”. Truth indicates the literal thereness on the surface devoid of illusions. So, solace does not have the last word; this is not how a painting subsists under a single statement. And that accounts for the ultimate risk: the ethical presupposition of painting exposes the artist to the “terrible freedom” as the distance between the passions (temperament) and the gesture within profound disorder and arbitrariness of nature.

Someone like Carlo Levi will find himself at home: true freedom cannot begin by the suppression of the passions in the name of interests; rather, the burden of freedom is the caesura of passions that displaces the otherwise inexorable fear of civilizational progress. Painting as the event of truth dethrones fear as the primary attunement in reality. Through our emperament one finds the exit from alienation, gathering the moment of depiction into order. There is a gentleness of freedom in the mutual self-supporting carrying of things, as Kurt Badt saw in Cézanne’s old style. And this might be the tragic element of painting and its fundamental antinomy.

For Neve this means nothing shorter than “the world reduced to a series of prodigious impulses, the revelation of the inner intact, the change taken to see the universe in a new light at the risk of failing utterly” (130). Late style is what reveals inner intact to the fruition of exteriority – this is the compass of visibility. A failed world followed by decline – two terms where mythic transfiguration moves painting to the eccentric luminosity of altering the jarring relation with the world. Old style enacts a catastrophe that refuses the insolvency of pulsation that binds character to the harmony of form. One might add that it could very well be that painting is, as revealed in the abyssal caesura of a late style, a stated mystery: a passionate life that profoundly perturbs the world, a transcendence that falls into an irrevocable eternity.

Carlo Diano clinamen event experience form of life friendship kenosis Lucretius metaphysics physics senses serenity truth void world

Naturae species ratioque. On Guillermo García Ureña’s Las semillas y el vacío: pensar con Lucrecio (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura is one of the most used and abused texts of the tradition, and like all classics it has had the most diverse receptions imaginable: the poem of modern science, a baroque expression of creationism for the English metaphysical poets, the precursor of historical materialism and atheism, and a tract of scientific positivism that laid the foundation for the regulation of nineteenth century social order. Once a text becomes an emblem, it usually means that it has lost its prehistoric imprint and place in the tradition. Against this backdrop, Guillermo García Ureña’s just published Las semillas y el vacío: pensar con Lucrecio (La Oficina, 2023) has the prudential gesture of disclosing the great Roman poem to its fundamental structure; attentively listening to its original complex articulation difficult to grasp with the categories of modern philosophical thought. In this sense, Ureña’s purpose is not to deploy another “philosophical account” of De rerum natura – endorsing and subscribing the influence of Epicurus and its later resonances in modern theories of physicalism and materialism of the continental schools – but rather to engage in its own ground exerting an original philological exploration of the text that opens up an array of different problems for thought. Whoever is looking for a “theory” of Lucretius will find none in this brilliant and well articulated essay. But the reader will find, nonetheless, a comprehensive hermeneutics of a text that stands as a threshold between the closure of Greek classical antiquity and the Roman reintegration of the tradition. Now, for Ureña De rerum natura proem discloses the originary understand of the epic, or épos, through which the stability of the things as they appear takes place; whether it is the Muses, the gods, being and language, the simulacra or the soul, the physical declination of creation (the atomic clinamen) and the final document of language invigorated in the corpus of the poem itself. De rerum natura is both a cosmology and a poetics with the ambition of elucidating the most obscure things of this world: Lucretius’ text defies a fixed representation through a choreography (a term that it is not used by Ureña, it must be said) that discloses the possibilities of worlds; the combination of worlds only to posit the question of how to live within them, which is another way of saying how to account for a form of life.

One of Ureña’s commitments is to hold on to Lucretius’ aesthetic and philosophical autonomy. This implies treating the influence of Epicureanism with great care; engaging with Epicurus insofar as the aesthetic autonomy and its loci of poetization reject the classical structure of the epic hero incarnated by the soteriological impulse of the great poet-philosopher (we know that this is the same problem that centuries later Hölderlin will identify through the tragic drama of Empedocles). Lucretius is writing after the twilight of the classical Greek genres. Furthermore, there is no community under an organized program of leadership and telos; on the contrary, there is only an existence that “one day will want to desert all of us” (41). True, the Epicurean notion of serenity (ataraxía) is retained and treasured; but only as the aspiration of every living being who seeks to transfigure the shadows of superstitiousness and fear that govern over the perceptive mediating forces in the world. In this sense, to dwell in the world does not consist in the limitless relationship with the simulacra; it is rather, the self-transformative exercise of freeing possibilities within the void in which forms of life can emerge. As Ureña reminds, the rainfall of the atom is as fast as that of thought itself. It is already an image of thought, as well as the figure of imagination. And the image of thought validates the history of cosmos as a patchwork of accumulations and deflections, creations and destructions, repetitions and disintegrations in a swerve of forms that infinitely recline on its ethical possibilities (139). It is altogether interesting that Ureña reminds us that, in fact, De rerum natura is not interested in staging the things in Nature; on the contrary, at the center there is the question of the ‘nature of things’ in the luminous expression of their irreducibility. This is what modern onto-theological closure brings to a process of domestication, whether through the composition of the civil structure (limitless exchange according to philosopher Felipe Martínez Marzoa, who figures prominently in Ureña’s book) or through the progressive historical structure commanded by the essence of technology that blurs the relations between forms and techniques.

If De rerum natura abandons universal history and historical narration, it is because its structure is profoundly kenotic: it can only be assigned as contingent historical transmission of the most immediate and sensorial (not necessarily “true” in the metaphysical sense) that allows the convergence of the history of forms of life and natural history (140). The operation of subtraction implies the transfiguration of freedom through the becoming of forms – their interests, constructions, and pacts (foedera naturae) as guarantee for a plastic relationship between things in a world that is always already a fragment in the void. The highly attractive Lucretian notion of foedera or “pact” (that expresses separation in coming together: a com-pact that de-compacts) is almost the inversion of the modern principle of irreversibility, if one were to take Hans Blumenberg’s legitimation hypothesis at face value. And this is so because a foedus or pact is insufficiently strong to resist the impact of the clinamen, but indispensable for the emergence of a body that materializes its own fate towards dissolution.

The lack of unity of being allows for the existence of simulacra as that which does not have sufficient matter to compose itself as foedera; and so, it is a material semblance as an image without figure that makes it an ephemeral entelechy. In this choreography between the downwards of atoms and ephemeral intermittence of events the taking place of the world emerges a topoi of a combination of rhythms that intertwine the weight of bodies and the animation of souls. The possible combination and stylization of multiplicities in separation is the way in which a form of life emerges as the desertion from superstition and fear that hinges upon the irreversible stabilization of a principle of reality. Ureña does not go this far into the wager of Lucretius’s text – and he does not have to in his close reading of the text – but it is precisely this thick dimension of the ethical primacy that makes Lucretius’ dislocated comprehension of materiality a vibrant tune against the weight of alienation that we are still struggling to abandon.

The struggle against the alienated life – the alienation from the world, and the external manipulation of the simulacra that has become a gnostic planetary form of “TV Democracy’ (Schmitt) of the “society of the spectacle” (Debord), which implies the usurpation of our imaginal and erotic relationship with the world – well understood, does not mean to relocate the confrontation at the level of political order; it rather, rests on what we have understood by order and disorder for the reconstitution of a happy or contemplative life (naturae species ratioque). This serene life declines the offer to negotiate at the arena of sacrifice and legitimate domination, favoring the event of friendship. At this point Lucretius comes closest to Epicurus’s society of friends – studied by Carlo Diano in an important 1966 conference in relation to the organization of the passions and the transmission of love – that can guarantee a content life in the presence of “other joyous gazes” (glossing Diano’s terms) away from the persistence of war and the compensatory administration of pain. This is the ultimate treat of De rerum natura: the exemplary dimension of the serene life takes shape through the community of friends, the civilizational invariant of the human experience (prehistoric times, the classical epoch, and in our times) that abandons the paradigm of perpetual war that obfuscates omnia cordi.

It is not too ambitious to claim that only at this point we finally grasp the full extent of the Lucretian épos: not just an ephemeral and contingent declension of the primacy of atoms in the void; but, more importantly, it can disclose the irreducibility of an experience with friends. Ureña wisely closest his book with an image of the “buena vida en compañía” (the good life in companion) that insists that serenity is only possible (or desirable) in the open landscape, a nowhere-land of an eternal foedera (or a sinousia, as it appears in Plato’s Symposium) that even if temporarily too short-lived or inconsequential it paints an earthly paradise just above the grass: “poder tendernos unos juntos a otros en el césped suave, cabe un arroyuelo, a la sombra de un árbol copudo, y regalar el cuerpo sin grandes dispendios; sobre todo si el cielo sonríe y la estación del año esparce de flores el verdor de la hierba (II, 29-33)” (203). It is this inconspicuous and mute experience that strangely holds on to the passing of the world.

Infrapolitical Reflections

Author: infrapoliticalreflections

Three notes on Rodrigo Karmy’s Nuestra confianza en nosotros (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Erich Unger’s The Stateless formation of the Jewish People today. by Gerardo Muñoz

Tacitus’ arcana and political wisdom. by Gerardo Muñoz

Gibbon on the university and erudition. by Gerardo Muñoz

The oath and the guardian of the constitution. by Gerardo Muñoz

Towards a new life. On Rodrigo Karmy’s Stasiología (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Two side notes on Anna Grzymala-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

After plasticity: on Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on painting (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Under a single statement: on Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts: Late Style (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Naturae species ratioque. On Guillermo García Ureña’s Las semillas y el vacío: pensar con Lucrecio (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz