After more than ten years, I have recently reread several works of contemporary novelist Alan Pauls, and only now I have come to understand the precision of his language; a perfect combination of the rhythmic movement of a swimmer combined with a dry stroke of a brush on a canvas. This precision is not holistic, but found in every sentence of his prose. Aside from the content of his intuitions about literature or the almost microscopic development of frozen time of his characters, what Pauls ultimately teaches is that the unit of prose is the sentence, both its cadence and its ability to be severed and be brought to an end. This is precisely the meaning of the “period” (periodos) as the internal unit of the sentence: periodos is afterall, the circular moment of something that has a beginning and an end. The achievement of a good prose is the articulation of periods that can launch and make a sentence retire.
For a novelist who is also a self-reflective essayist, it is puzzling that Pauls has not implicitly thematized the unity of the sentence in the craftsmanship of prose (although he has considered accentuation in an essay) [1]. But it is wholly absent in El factor Borges (2004), and his most recent collection of musings and glosses on reading and writing in a volume titled Trance (2014). It is perhaps too easy to overstate the fact that there cannot ever be a general theory of the sentence, because both tone and periodos are expressions of style. The construction zone of a well crafted prose can only be analyzed in the movement of the sentence. In a fabulous moment of his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the sixteenth century grammarian and poet Abrabham Fraunce writes the following regarding the sentence:
“The beginning and the end of a poemt must not be the beginning or ending of prose. For the beginning, a little consideration will suffice, for the middle, less; but in the end the chief care is to be had, for it is most examine, and the longest in memory. It must therefore be sweetly contruied, that it seem not hasty and abrupt: it must also be varied and changed often time…if the same foot should in the end be continualed repeated.” [1].
In his treatise of rhetoric, Fraunce connects the end of the sentence, the coming to the periodos to the work of memory and sweetness. Perhaps because the cadence embedded in the sentence is the instance that allows us to connect past and present without hesitation or interruption; not the moment of suspension and surprise, but of landing in language, so that something, once again, can commence. This is also why a novelist in Spanish like Alan Pauls has not ceased to be fascinated by the idea of the past, especially in El pasado (2003), but also in his historical trilogy about his coming of age in the seventies. In other words, it is not enough to write the past in mere prose; the most important solicitation is to lodge its memory in the nest of the sentence. It is only here where memory arrives at a region called “home”.
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Notes
1. Alan Pauls. “Elogio del acento”, in Temas lentos (Random House, 2022), 52.
2. Abraham Fraunce. The Arcadian Rhetorike (Oxford University Press, 1950), 34.
Joseph Roth’s last novella Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939) places the salvation of the human being through the event of a miracle. More than once, the narrator of The Legend of the Holy Drinker tells us that homeless Andreas had “indeed experienced the miracle of faith” [1]. The fact that this “miracle” is intertwined with the magical reappearance of money alerts to the fact that omnis credit, the belief in all things, might be at the center of the mystery of the adventurous last days of Andreas Kartak, a homeless migrant that one day is given a sum amount of money by a generous stranger with the only condition that he repays it at some point to the sanctuary of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in a local parish [2].
The very essence of the miraculous money is connected to charity as existential expenditure, that allows Andreas to defer from ever repaying to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux at the Batignolles Church, thus tearing apart the modern notion of credit that binds investment and anticipation of the future. And Andreas is never able to repay the debt to the Saint, it is because the miracle is not in abundance, but in the permanent state of poverty that in turns confirms the sanctification of the holy drinker. In all rigor, Roth’s final message, a few days before his own death, seems clear to us: only a miracle can save us from the futurist religion of abundance and capital.
But first, what is a miracle? This is the notion at the heart of Roth’s secret testament in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939). It is obvious that a miracle is always an exception to the ordinary and the predictable; an exceptional occurrence that not only resists to follow a rational causation and calculation, but it is something that betrays it. This is why at times miracles have been displaced to the irrational sphere of a natural occurrence. It has been said that in modernity, capitalist value form is both first nature and rationality where the human shuts himself in and God is expelled out. If there is a humorous or parodic element in The Legend of the Holy Drinker, it is precisely that this nexus is inverted and loosen; in other words, when miracle replaces the naturalization of value it is no longer conditioned by human labour and surplus value, but through the mystery of charity that does not aggregate abundance of goods. This is a charity of absolute poverty and continuous stagnation.
Andreas’ miraculous charity incarnates the holy life of the saint insofar as he can only experience himself towards the appropriation of his own character, and ultimately his death. According to Esther Steinmann in her important study on Roth, the figural symbolism of the holy drinker was based after the Byzantine model of the sainthood; those madmen followers of God that can only experience the world from outside the world as if were, because they are only concerned with a preparation of towards death, which also speaks to Roth’s Catholicism infused with Hasidic undercurrents [3]. And this can be confirmed by the novella’s last lines: “May God grant such a good and easy death” [4].
Why should death be delivered “good and easy”? Here it can be argued how for Roth, the “common good” was not a political project of a distributionist state, but rather a state of being and a form of life that is enmeshed to both death and the dead. This is way that Roth’s solicitation of a resurrection of the Austro-Hungarian empire must be properly understood: not as a political form to save civilization from itself, but rather as a defense a world that, because it is oriented towards decline and expansive exteriority or internal exile – a roaming land of errant beings – it maintains a relation to the humus of the dead [5]. If there is hope for rebirth it is because there are miracles that cut through both history and nature, and in doing so they make apparent the charity of the infancy of humanity, very much like the little girl Thérèse, a transfigured saint, that appears in the final pages: “…about living and dying; and the girl called Thérèse, she too accompanies them”.
Notes
1. Joseph Roth. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022), 11.
3. Berta Ares Yáñez. La leyenda del santo bebedor: legado y testamento de Joseph Roth (Acantilado, 2022), 178.
4. Joseph Roth. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022), 99.
5. Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, letter from July 1935: “I only care for God and the Earth, and what I feel as my terrestrial obligation: contributing to the coming of a Catholic Empire”, in Ser amigo mío es funesto: Correspondencia (1927-1938) (Acantilado, 2014), 56.
Towards the fourth part of “A language of New York” included in This in Which (1965), George Oppen registers something like the ultimate struggle of the poet with its nemesis: language itself. Fully aware of the erosion of language of his time, Oppen writes in these verses both a warning and a strategy: “Possible to use / Words provided one treats them / As enemies. Not enemies – Ghosts Which have run mad / In the subways / And of course the institutions and the banks. If one captures them / one by one proceeding / Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense” [1]. The polemic against the darkening automation of language, the public consolidation of kallopismata orphne, is resolved through a possibility of use that is redirected elsewhere, at least away from the nihilism of vicarious denomination and exchange.
This “possible use” is perhaps nothing else than the treatment that language receives in the voice, which becomes its ultimate speaking experience. If language is always outside and beyond itself, always exceeding its meaning and place, it is because its trembling tonality cuts through both meaning and sense. The construction of the concluding verse cannot be dismissed: “Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense”. Oppen fails to place hope as action towards a higher entity (meaning and sense); rather he sends the poetic voice to meaning and sense. The redemptive quality of language is to be found in this fall and trembling of the voice that, because it has interrupted both meaning and sense, it can inhabit a state of bliss or perpetual hope. In other words, hope is not just an affective state of human being, but a possible turn, a necessary one, in which language is appropriated in all of its impropriety. If words had to be treated as enemies it is precisely to be redirected to the swirling vocative current that divides meaning and sense as the ultimate region of the poetic being where there is no longer a struggle.
The catastrophe of Americanism is not just a political or economic reality, one that runs through being in language insofar it is understood as the vision of the use of the voice. Oppen was fully aware of this calamity when writing to William Carlos Williams that “there will be no poetry in America only insofar as that lesson is learned. People who are afraid to talk will not produce much poetry” [2]. It goes without saying that Oppen was not thinking of a new renaissance of poetry and literary producers, but just of the poetic being as one that subsists in the chiasmatic relation of language and voice.
And if American subjectivity today has given up entirely on the use of its language – a use that is increasingly delegated to machines and telematic automation – it is precisely, because already historically they ceased moving into “hoping to meaning and sense”. This does not mean that we Americanism strives in absolute muteness; on the contrary, running away from sense means the plugging of meaning into sense and of sense into meaning, which is the definition of the construction of argumentation. And argumentation is the delivery of force in the interiority of language. When Adorno & Horkheimer once defined the United States as “the country of argument” they touched something profound [3]. It is only when language is ripped from argumentation that poetic possibilities are restored, and perhaps also redeemed.
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Notes
1. George Oppen. This in Which (New Directions, 1965), 25.
2. George Oppen. The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), 39.
3. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), 51.
Roughly extending a little over fifteen years (2000-2016), the epistolary exchange between Jacques Guigou and Jacques Camatte is made available in a short book entitled Capital et Devenir Humain: Correspondance avec Jacques Camatte (L’Harmattan, 2026). Truth to be told it is an uneven correspondence at times, where the sustained conversation in time seems to be interrupted around some specific years, and in other moments there is an abundance of certain editorial requests (the publication and translation of books by Giorgio Cesarano primarily) that interfere from a more thorough substantive correspondence. Be as it might, this correspondence does bring to bear the reflexive consistence of the thinker behind Invariance in his last phase of his work, most specifically in the wake of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, which was already read by Camatte as symptomatic of the internal hostility of the human specifies embedded in the stasis of struggle as the central “engine of development of capital” (Guigou 20).
Both autonomous capital and its regimes of representation (Politics) will only be sustained and driven by internal strife whose apocalyptic destiny has now become all too apparent; even more so than during the years when the Camatte & Guigou exchange was taking place. These historical mediations, however, are a bit of a misnomer, since the correspondence does show that Camatte’s undertaking of Hegel’s cunning of capital as the realization of the effective movement of historical accumulation was already part of the theoretical discoveries of the seventies in Invariance. The “effective end of Capital” seen through the mirror of Hegelianism meant that political reaction and its negation turned the essence of politics reactionary at its core. Later in the correspondence, in fact, we get a glimpse of the essence of “reactionary thinking” when Camatte tells his interlocutor that reaction can be understood as the continuation of a dynamic duality that is expressed in the very movement of autonomous Capital (Guigou 65-66). This is why Camatte’s horizon of reflection differed from the Debord’s situationism; it is not just because of a disbelief in the presumption of a remnant of the autonomy of art in their practices, but rather because their very dyad between art and life, public and private, contingency and necessity, language and the image expressed in many ways the insufficiency of an analytic expressed in the mystification of the commodity form. In other words, all reactionary posture amounts to a relational mode of the commodity form, but no commodity stripping and destruction can guide through a path that can exit the total transcendence of Capital towards life of the Gemeinwesen. We are left with refractory communities of belonging that find their necessary compensation in supplementary forms that allow for a distance to the fundamental question of exodus.
Out of the many sequences of the correspondence the one dealing with the incapacities of poetry is of special interest. In one letter Camatte tells Guigou that he feels that poetry no longer is able to filter a moving tonality in the world, recalling how the end of the age of the poets (not a term expressly deployed by Camatte) has been understood by Amadeo Bordiga in a short text of 1953 that noted that the ancient power could sing in a voice of the community, whereas the modern poet in his solitude only amounts to the author of his work (Guigou 24). The correspondence exemplifies this by recalling Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, where the poetic is not personal lyricism, but rather a tone that runs through the whole dispensation of the community in its errancy (Guigou 30). And one wonders immediately after reading this moment in the letter, where the very work of late Camatte is not disinhibited of the poetic tonality; or, on the contrary, this poetic tonality insofar as it is a pure voice can only remain opaque and absence from the scene of writing and public reflection. The challenge in this question is to be able to balance the problem beyond judgement, which always hides a form of pathetic condemnation.
In these pages concerning poetry and the philosophical aspiration of the poem, other names are invited into the scene: Giorgio Cesarano, Domenico Ferla, and Andrea Zanzotto. These are three figures where the challenge of poetry was taken only to be radically abandoned (perhaps less so in Zanzotto where the trace of the voice is already embedded in the poetic form, and thus there was not a need to execute the radical gesture of fleeing from poetry). Although one is also surprised that the question of poetry is not extended as a problem of thought and existence, which would allow for the collapse of the very separation of poetic form and the life of the community, perhaps because the voice that is carried in poetry is more originary dwelling of human existence than the human community, because ultimately the human community (Gemeinwesen) is refractory of an irremediable loss that is recasted as original. And Gianni Carchia saw in his “Glossa sull’umanismo” (1977), Camatte’s insistence on the original community and its negation through the anthropomorphosis of Capitalist revolution will necessarily result in an inverted or transfigured humanism; or, at least, a humanism that is always longing for the image of an originary community that can only be posited with an assertive knowledge that we do not know possess except as contaminated subjectivity. But perhaps the solicitation of originary community will always fail because it will be a displacement from abyss of non-belonging that we already inhabit – what Carchia called in the same text as “uscir fuori” – into the site of proper belonging of the human species fails to account for the impropriety that always marks the experience of errancy of life. As Endnotes has noted in their recent essay “Time is an invention of men incapable of love”, Camatte was aware of the Jewish form of life as a concrete experience “seeking a solution outside this world”. But this means that it is not enough to counterpose the community and state form (Jewish form of life precisely is not exhausted in community belonging, or in the memory of a community), but something other than the closure of the community if one wants to go beyond the eternal metabolic stasis of human belonging. Ultimately, as Camatte tells Guigou at the end of the correspondence, only Capital claims immortality in its universalist extension (Guigou 68).
Perhaps this is a task that requires another modality of thought, perhaps a non-philosophical practice beyond community and humanity, but suspicious of the claims to immortality of the capitalist revolution. In a letter from 2016, Camatte citing François Julien, confronts philosophical thinking with a notion of wisdom that retracts from hostility and agonistic dispute, because it retreats into serenity of a peaceful sage (Guigou 65). I take this to mean something akin to Kojeve’s ‘voyou désœuvré’, the sage that in the Sunday of history harbors a passion of life where happiness is received not as a consequence of actions, but as a supreme grace of the unexpected. It does seem that this was also Camatte’s longing in life that although wanting to abandon this world, refused to abandon the interlocution with others; touching as if it were, an unbreachable state of wisdom.
How to think through the stasis as a figure of thought in an epoch of transition and decline? This is the task of the historian – perhaps also of the philosopher and the critic – at the threshold, according to Miguel Valderrama in his book Guerra y Democracia: Retrato, Stasis, Anonimia (Palinodia, 2025), where stasis is extended beyond its categorial inscription in the grammar of political thought in order to capture its oscillatory movement. Dispersion is a word at the heart of Valderrama’s scene of writing; a scattering of sense that radicalizes the enterprise of the historian’s task that cannot remain alien to the problem of language. In fact, it is at the conjunction where Valderrama wants to situate the problem of stasis. As he writes early on in the book: “Pasión en la dispersión, sí, sí con esta frase se nombre en secreto lo que en la errancia del vocablo stasis evoca una escena traumatizante, una herida, una punzada la escenificación de un acontecimiento y el orificio de su representación, la memoria de una stasis y de la anonimia que le es más propia, impropia” (Valderrama 15).
For Valderrama the Greek term – which holds on to definitions of civil war but also conflict and internal stabilization – now welcomed in theoretical discussions, comes to name the errancy and wound of the endurance of war in the modern political project of representation and legibility. As a thinker of the local scene (and its counter-scenes), Valderrama perceives that in recent years the Chilean contemporary critical discussion, especially in the wake of the Chilean revolt of October 2019, has introduced the pulsating grammar of stasis to think this fissure in representation. Valderrama cites the essays by Rodrigo Karmy, and Alejandra Castillo, Juan Pablo Arancibia, Willy Thayer; but also publications like Escrituras Americanas and the now defunct Revista Disenseo, and the novelist Nona Fernández (Valderrama 31). Obviously, the list is not exhaustive. In the Chilean contemporary scene, stasis is removed from its hellenistic origins, in order to name the unmediated irruption of images, inscriptions, and languages as fragments in the interior of history (Valderrama 50). In post-dictatorship Chile these fragments gravitate around the impossible image of La Monada bombed in 1973, which is juxtaposed to the anonymous images of the revolt in Santiago in October 2019, where some are more monumental than others.
One of the novelties in Valderrama’s Guerra y Democracia (2025) is precisely the insistence to think the problem of stasis as radially bound to the regime of visibility and legibility that organize the artifact of political representation. In fact, and following the canonical studies of the Leviathan’s frontispiece and its relation to modern optics, we know that modern political representation has relied consistently on material technologies where representation and the homogeneity of the social body coincide (Valderrama 79). From Thomas Hobbes at the birth of political liberalism to Carl Schmitt’s political theology in Weimar, the visual artefact has been the infrastructure in the making of political authority and the unity of civil society. The repressed containment of stasis at the heart of the modern liberal state is granted only if the regime of public legibility has been constructed. In this sense, all modern politics is necessarily heliotropic, revolving around the sun of sovereignty that will later transform into the electric and atomic form of energy reserves.
By the same token, following Valderrama, we can then say that what stasis names is precisely the breakdown of the helitropic movement in an epoch of absolute exposure and blinding transparency. More than a century ago, in 1913 Malevich could speak of the “Victory over the Sun”, but this can only make sense if such victory can allow for a regime of nocturnal seeing and generic anonymity, which is always on the ‘other side’ of political dominium (be it techno-capitalism or communal administration) where all identifications fails, because there is no longer a common body or a name as energy reserve for social organization. It is because of this rupture that there cannot be a stasis within the social, but also against the closure of the spatial arraignment of the Social understood as the site that requires energy (production) in order to produce a certain degree of comprehensive idealization. Of course, Valderrama is not oblivious to this, as he writes in one of his most programmatic definition of the stasis:
“La revuelta, la stasis, se define contra esta dieta y contra este régimen de luz. Al bertillonismo que define los límites y la lógica del espacio público, la revuelta opone la multiplicación de máscaras, la suspensión del retrato, la proliferación de lo anónimo. El régimen diurno del aparecer opone la noche, las sombras y el humo de los enfrentamientos de cuerpos liberados del rostro y del retrato, de la ficha policial. La revuelta pone en movimiento una anonimia, un juego de máscaras que desata anónimos, pseudónimos, alonomios, sobrenombres, para nombres, antenombres….La anónimo guarda un secreto en la imagen, lo guarda como lagrima y caída de la imagen” (Valderrama 109-110).
But is it just a festive game of defacement and creative destruction that would resemble the spirit of carnival festivities, in which masks evoke, in an exceptional time of inversion, the supernatural powers and the dead as studied by Karl Meuli? Is not the carnival a compensatory act of the logistics of expenditure and realignment for any community of social exchange? If true, then the notion of stasis would need to break from the polarity of social identification and instance of mask, in the same way that already in the classical period the stasis emerged as a zone of indistinction between domestic and public spaces, an unbreachable black hole between the oikos and the polis that is well beyond the exception (Valderrama 119). In other words, stasis needs to be rethought as something other than an interruption in temporality, which is still the negative duration that feeds negatively into the course of temporal order of social domination and its ‘economy of violence’. Valderrama reminds that for the poet Armando Uribe, this economy of violence names the very engine of historical development. And poets tend to be better than political analysts at imagining other worlds.
Towards the end of Guerra y Democracia: Retrato, Stasis, Anonimia (2025), Valderrama briefly glosses Armando Uribe’s 2000 lecture “El fantasma Pinochet” in order to introduce not only the problem of violence, but also language; a language that he calls uncanny, “une inquietante étrangeté” (Valderrama 120). These words are glossing Uribe who is also commenting a speech by former President Eduardo Frei, but that can also be used to thematize the central problem that Guerra y Democracia introduces in its scene: how to traverse a destitution of language if stasis is the capacity to traverse the moribund language that metaphoric and cataphoric politics speaks, without any possibility of saying anything at all? As an initial promise of the book, Valderrama had called for ‘another lexis’ (“otra lexis”) against narrativity and the hallucination of language towards a ‘language as such’, which is the language of naming approaching the coasts of physis. It is tempting to say that the revolt only appears liberating when understood as a problem of inventing and making space for this other language that ceases to be a metaphor of this world.
Plato’s Laws remains one of the least read and explored dialogues in the platonic corpus. This is a fact that might be worth pondering upon in the course of a systematic reading of the dialogue. According to André Laks in his book Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws (Princeton U Press, 2022), the very last dialogue of Plato is a substantial rewriting of the core arguments of The Republic in terms of its grounding of politics and the organization of the polis, but also not just in terms of the political question. Laks speaks of a “structural paradox” in Laws regarding the nature of politics that takes an “unusual” (aesthesteron) path “beyond legislation” that constitute the very essence of the nomoi (Laks 2024, 142). We are interesting in exploring this ‘beyond legislation’ that is also a “before legislation” that speaks, either directly or indirectly, to the notions of the chôra and the theological foundation of the legislative enterprise itself, and ultimately to language as it pertains to preambles and argumentation (kalliston kai ariston prooimion). These are difficult questions that also exceed any philological exploration of Plato’s philosophical horizon, and that land on our own preoccupations regarding political metabolism.
So, this “beyond legislation” will be a guiding thread (one of the several) in a systematic reading of Plato’s Laws. In an important and rare observation, Monica Ferrando in Un anno con Platone (Neri Pozza, 2024) has noted that the notion of “chôra” appears more than thirty times in the Laws with all sorts of operative injunctions that speak to space and sensation, distance and cosmos, beauty and music, as well as the dwelling place for life to flourish without unlimited predatory force. How is one to understand the notion of “chôra” as a mediating distance that precedes the ground of politics? What is the relation between chôra and space in light of the isonomic arrangement of the polis? In what sense is having a handle on the notion of the chôra a precondition for a beautiful city, what Socrates calls the kallipolis in The Republic that is also the city of pigs? Is the chôra irreducible to eidos as it enters the polyphony of the Laws? And how does the chôra escape the political field and law’s authority as it appears in Laws? One of the angular goals of a systematic reading of Plato’s Laws is to make some progress in the understanding of the notion of the chôra that has been percolating in many recent discussions.
The fact that Laws has remained on the sidelines or in opacity in the canon of Western political philosophy might speak to its relevance, and to the fact that it has yet to be a text to be confronted and reckoned with. Of course, this does not mean that at stake is an effort to recalibrate its political task to amend the history of political thought; it is perhaps more interesting to approach it from the external perspective of canonical tradition that modern categories project to the past. In his posthumous book on the Laws, Leo Strauss noticed that this dialogue, unlike all the rest in the Platonic corpus, begins and ends with an appeal to “god” (theon). For us today this could mean: what is the status of the gods after the death of god and the end of politics? A systematic reading of Plato’s Laws has the depth to reopen these difficult questions in the present state of our discussions.
One has to begin by saluting Massimiliano Cappello’s Lo specchio e la lama: Giorgio Cesarano tra poesia e critica radicale (Quodlibet, 2026) for being the first book on the Italian thinker that takes an obvious point of departure that for too long it has been ignored: the well known fact that first and foremost Cesarano was a poet. At the heart of Cappello’s argument in his short monograph, however, is the thesis of continuity between his later philosophical thought, located under what has become known as ‘critica radicale’ of Italian 1970s, and that of his poetic laboratory. A poetic laboratory that Cappello magnificently documents in its genesis with post-war Italian poets and critics. The young Cesarano of the late fifties and early sixties was an avid interlocutor with figures such as Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto and Eugenio Montale, and of course Franco Fortini, who introduced his first poetry collection L’erba bianca (1959).
In the milieu thematized by Cappello first chapters, it is evident that Cesarano the poet was a bit of an outsider, not really the man of letters of Italian postwar culture, as he was already looking for something like a renewal of a sensible experience that was becoming increasingly commodified and dead (Cappello 29). Albeit the mannerist tropology of the early L’erba bianca, Cappello notes that already in subsequent books, Cesarano’s preoccupation was that of mirroring of language in world that was oriented towards the highest stage of human alienation and emptiness. For Cesarano the history of human civilization was the successive stages of the reification of the human towards “survival”; a wound that was overtly present in the very texture of language. And poetic language as no exception; remaining oblivious to this totalization could only make the poet an harlequin among ruins of his present, always hungry for fictitious meaning and illusory transcendence.
Cappello tells us that already L’erba bianca staged the originary trauma of the impossibility of poetry, which shed lights unto his later transition into the prose of the ‘critica radicale’ – and in fact, one could only wish that Cappello would have said more about the transition between poetry and prose, which is also at the center of this intense autobiographical experience. In any case, the repression of the trauma starts to become more palpable in books such as La pura verità (1963) La tartaruga di Jastov (1966), and Romanzi naturali (1980), where the moribund plane of factical life not only becomes “apparent”, but it is situated at the very level of the fictitious appearance (some of the language is truly dreadful, and one can understand why Cesarano at some point could not longer follow that route without stepping into a vulgar expressionism, or, to that effect, the Lukacsian ‘naturalism’).
Cappello tells us that for Cesarano the evil of the experience of National Socialism and fascism, was not just a political system that took place at the heart of Europe; it was a phenomenon that extended into the totality of culture and life under total capital (Cappello 75). This is a bit like Pasolini’s position, except that for Cesarano there was no medium from which one could stay afloat and find an exit. Cappello cites these verses from La pura verità (1963): “…divorati dalla terre per / dal verme / che’sera / dal verme che s’era ricominciare” (Cappello 77). It does not come to a surprise, since for anyone that has read Cesarano & Camatte already in the stage of ‘critica radicale’ and ‘Invariance’, the only chance for the liberation of the generic human community (Gemeinwesen) was to start all over again, that is, from the point of view of the prehistoric inversion [1]. In the milieu of Italian literary culture, one has to agree with Cappello’s assessment: to start all over again means to start “dopo Fortini”, to leave behind the function of the critic and the writer, two beautiful soul functionaries (but functionaries nonetheless) mediating between the spheres of culture and politics in the public life. But to start again means to recoil to a hole in the temporality where the becoming of that social totality is no longer possible; even at the risk of losing the lyricism of modern poetry from Virgil to the present. This is most difficult task in a sense, because to “start all over again” seems to depart from somewhere else than language, but fundamentally we know that language is the event of every commencement. This is perhaps the aporia that runs through Cesarano’s own impossibility to effectively “finding a way out”, except a catastrophic one that we know all too well.
Can there be another resource in the face of the mounting pressure of the Spectacle and what Cesarano later called the “un-essence” (inessenza) of the Capitalist international and nihilism? In La tartaruga di Jastov (1966), Cesarano opts to still name this nothing through a giant turtle that Cappello tells us that it is a symbol of gigantomachy very much like Melville’s white whale. It is a very intelligent parallel that needs to be unpacked. Of course, Melville’s Moby Dick is the monster of the new American dominance over land and water; the monster of the incipient industrial division of labour through the whales’ oil business that sedimented United States’ nineteenth century economic growth. In contrast, Cesarano’s enormous turtle is the symbol of what takes place at the end of formal capitalist subsumption, once surplusvalue colonizes the totality of human temporality. A seamonster slowly creeps into the land signifying absolutely nothing, and yet dominating every directive of sensible reality. In the formless time of the turtle, there is no epic to be written nor a lyricism capable of offering emancipation from its images – as Cappello tells us, there is a state of infancy and innate failure (Cappello 101) . And if poetics is anything it stands alone in documenting that failure, the irreducible site of the nascent fragment, as in Schlegel’s dictum. Cappello reminds us that Cesano thought it was be infinitely worse: poetry had become a game and a publicist “operation” (Cappello 110). The autonomy of lyrical poetry could not deliver to the highest task; that is, to “recover another sensibility with the world at the heart of the epoch”, as Cappello puts it towards the end of the book (Cappello 115).
The interior of the world of un-essence (inessenza) for Cesarano will revolve around two competing figures of radical evil: the hitman (sicario) and the collector (entomologo). The first is the paid assassin that sees a price in anyone’s head, whereas the collector will be the administrator of corpses and moribund passing of beauty to be consumed. It is a world without possible evasion, because both living and dying have been rendered indistinguishable, and perhaps also unthinkable and unsingable (Cappello 127). This is Cesarano’s most extreme indictment to the late modern epoch, in which the hallucination of fictitious languages will still provide the illusion of actual living human beings. In this hellish world, it is not up for the poet to prepare a fresh start, and yet language still remains. Cappello concludes where our task begins: “Che il reale attenda una lingua non alienata per potersi esprimere compiutamente, può anche darsi. Questa lingua non sembra essere, in ogni caso, quella della poesia” (Cappello 138). And it might be the failure of language what awaits and invites the possibility of a different beginning.
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Note
1. On the notion of “inversion” in Giorgio Cesrano in relation to Jacques Camatte’s thinking on the prehistoric, see my conversation with the thinker in my book Pensamiento insumiso: Coloquio con la teoría italiana (Irrupción Ediciones, 2024).
Perhaps there has never been about a point of arrival nor departure from a place, but rather a question of attunement, and specifically one of tone. To disentangle attunement from tone is a gigantic task; arguably one of the sites where the distinction between philosophy and poetry comes nearest only to depart and open their differences without ever vacating their aspiration in music, as David Monromakes clear in The modes of Ancient Greek Music (1894). Why does tone matter, and can it be defined? We know a tone when we hear it, almost as if the singing of a bird, and yet it is not just a matter of frequency or intensity, since it gathers fundamental language in the elemental. The tone is the internal cut or pause in expression, but this does not say much, does it?
Wallace Stevens once offered a definition of tone, concretely poetic tone, as the “perfection emerging from the known” in the poem “On the Way to the Bus”: “A way of pronouncing the word inside of one’s tongue under the wintry trees of the terrace” [1]. We can take this to be a metaphoric definition of the vocative and that would be a sound explanation. And yet, it remains insufficient in respect to tone, since the tone is not just the mere articulatory phonetics, but an internal arrangement; what Steveson refers as “the word inside’s one tongue under the wintry tree”. It is a formulation that delivers a landscape as a third space that is neither in language nor in the world.
Hence, speaking more or less is of little help; in our present day it has become evident that machines are replacing the art of speaking and communicating at an unprecedented pace. It has become evident that the ultimate revolution is the revolution of the autonomization of language, something that Stevens was also aware in the postwar years. In fact, if “tone” means anything for Stevens it is precisely what bears witness to the experiment of language that mirrors that of life. An experience that was shrinking, becoming a sort of “pastime proper for Nero’s children’s children” [2]. The new concept of tradition. Wallace Stevens could not have imagined the fact that today heads of families and pedagogues are minor Neros feeding future generations a pseudolanguage that can no longer be the covenant for any opening to an experiment. Much like Stevens we have been fully aware that the erosion of language at the end of metaphysical dispensation entails the loss of tone. And the loss of tone entails the erasure of the distance between language and our dispensation or tonality. Our epoch is not only too violent to be “congenial to the experiment of language”, but is completely barbaric in its annihilation of distances. This is Stevens in 1948:
“Our present experience of life is too violent to be conditional to experiment in either sense. This is also the consideration that the present time succeeds as a time of experiment. Theoretically a period of attempts at a world revolution should destroy or endanger all stationary poetic subjects and words and be favorable in the highest degree to the recording of fresh experience. But the vivification of reality has not yet occurred in spite of the excitement. Only the excitement has occurred” [3].
The excitement around world revolutions – and perhaps today it is already occurring with the centrality of revolts – has confused everything and has dried up the possibility of the experiment in tone, which is the path available for a “fresh conception of the world” (these are Stevens’ terms). Because the world is only possible through an “overall tone”, nourished by tonality; it is the only thing that matters, as Cézanne once remarked [4]. Pity those that have lost the musical transcendence of the tone, and are left only to hear the rustle of politics and the high pitch of language.
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Notes
1. Wallace Stevens. “On the Way to the Bus”, in Collected Poetry & Prose (The Library of America, 1997), 472.
2. Wallace Stevens. “The State of American Writing, 1948: Seven Questions”, in Collected Poetry & Prose (The Library of America, 1997), 823.
3. Ibid., 823-824.
4. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 42.
Paz López’s Pánico y Ternura (2026) opens with an analogy between life and school that immediately places us in attention to her writing: “Entramos a la vida como entra un niño a la escuela: mirando hacia atrás, con los ojos llorosos buscando la mano de quien hace un rato nos había variado el pelo, la nariz, las rodillas heridas, los diminutos labios” (López 14). Although the synecdoche (“la mano”) does not reveal to whom it belongs, in a way the mother is spectrally present, a figure overtly present in Paz’s writing. We enter life in the wake of separation and caesura, and that is the site of the original wound that will lead to all sorts of civilizational and mimetic compulsions that unfortunately we know too well. And yet, López does not say we enter the “law” (although this is also presupposed of course), but rather we enter school. Our civilization has slandered and tainted the notion of “schooling” and “school” to such an extent that we have entirely forgotten the fact that school is schola; that is, time of rest and interruption, “free time”, a lagging duration of contemplation of language and being, and of being in language. And if the notion of “school” is under ruthless attack in our present by an infantry of pedagogues and technicians, it is mainly due to the fact that what is being threatened is the very possibility of a form of life. Of course, our epoch is one in which the chatter of “life” is continuous and intoxicating, but the form of life is something altogether different: it entails to inhabit a space of a convergent and planar movement between language and world.
This is one of the regions that opens in López’s book; one out of many, allow me to follow it. As López says toward the end of the essay: “…cada vez que hay un corte tenemos la posibilidad de inventar una nueva lengua, de poner de movimiento el mundo” (López 128). It would be too convenient to follow up this claim and say that this is precisely what Paz López does in her writing; clearing language in order for a tonos or a vibration of the voice to unearth tropes that have been traced almost at the level of the flesh. This is something to this autographic practice that moves gently without fetishing the body and its materiality. Ultimately, a body is always more than surface. I want to retain from López’s scene of writing a responsive form of thought that in its inconspicuous relation to writing it refrains from the certitude of both philosophy and the letter. López’s search could perhaps be one of “tanteo”, a beautiful Spanish verb that refers to the hand that seeks and reaches out for something in space, and in my memory it immediately recalls some short stories of Carmen Martín Gaite’s fiction where this gesture figures in a cinematic fashion. Hence, for López ‘tanteo’ is to refuse the hell of a world of acrimonious security and confirmations that discards the inexorable presence of doubts and fissures (López 39). But the hand that seeks is also not a pure gesture in the void; it is one that asymptotically discloses an erotic mediation with the passing world without ever abandoning it; yet unequivocally assertive in the lamentation of the state of the world (López 56).
In other words, because we can seek (here López is enrolled in the school of Hölderlin), there is no end to the world now configured as a fragile fishing net of relations, unsaid words, glances, and incommensurable distances that make up, without exhausting it, the spectacle of life. Not “this life”, of course. For López, the brutality of our times (I am less prudent and I will say ‘onto-theology’) is precisely the general concerted opinion that we are all owners of our own little and mediocre lives, the last avatar of a self-serving will to power. Rather, for López life is always elsewhere, and this is why the “escape” or “exile” from oneself is not a place of arrival or destiny, but precisely the disposition that is always traversing every relation and every touch between bodies and souls (López 65). We are creatures of the outside, and by extension, only the cohabitation of the outside, can redeem the pain of the original laceration, as in the first image of the infant walking his path to school with his eyes turned. This is not a messianic or monastic retreat, it does not depend on the parousia, but rather one of poetic dwelling in the spaces that are both familiar and strange. It is only in them (through them) that we can only cultivate through the garden of our language. López’s anti-messianic orientation, devoid of the fiction of future time and its anxieties, is proportionally a prose of hanging spaces, of curvatures of language that affects the reader deeply without ever renouncing to the beauty that thinking that defies being brutalized through the crushing weight of technical terms or philosophical concepts.
In this sense, López’s writing is already an autographic writing at the threshold of onto-theology convinced that only style through the resources of the voice is the path that mitigates between poetry and philosophy, painting and memory, experiences and the unlived. López’s prose, if anything, is a lot about “gathering” through the tenderness; a contact where image and eros become the medium of life: “No es eso también la ternura, una forma de “recortar nuevos espacios en el vacío informa del exterior y conquistarlos a la medida de la vida (Claudio Magris)?” (López 94). To gather and to cut through the spaces: this is the highest task of the ethics of a form of life that requires a new theology of the sensible. Theology can be taken as a strange word in López’s lexicon, and I do not think that it appears even once in Pánico y Ternura. And yet, López’s proposal is completely theological if we take the theos as the highest and most beautiful light that can nominally allow for depth through the analogy of things in the net of the world. Hence, the importance of the sighting to the inner most depth in some moments of López’s writing, such as when she ponders on the fact that every time that she plunges eyes on a minuscule element or figure of the world, she senses that “se revela el elemento bestial que se enceuntra en el centro de nuestro mundo, como si la mirada fuera un cordon umbilical….amarrados todavia al vientre brumoso del origen” (López 121). And theology is not just the highest, but also the science of the first things: through the piercing expression of our senses, we elevate ourselves not with some revealed transcendence, but with the proximity with the things that have found us.
And yet we have been automatized – this is the sensible devastation that Pánico y Ternura is responding to without ever taking a political stance, because politics is thoroughly insufficient – to see every-thing, and every being at all times; all entities realized in the feast of interchangeability and availability. The heliotropic force of modernity now truly blinds and burns our skin, which means that no access to the solar totality of social existence can guarantee anything except continuous conflagration and commanded muteness. We cannot but feel “panic” in this current predicament López is completely right. Thus, we must find the flickering light and flames elsewhere, such as in the lamp of a dark night that can illuminate the page of a book that keeps us in attention without any real purpose. Nabokov’s suggestion comes to mind: in the lamp of our study, we reject the nihilist demands of the cacophonous social world. Paz López has given us a delicious essay to read under this tenuous light. It is a present memory of an abode that keeps the secret of secrets, a resting place of the soul where still some melody is heard.
First published in the Chilean publishing house Mundana back in 2016 and long out of print, Victoria Cirlot’s Imágenes Negativas: las nubes en la tradición mística y en la modernidad (2026) finally appears in a new and upgraded edition from Siruela Ediciones. This short essay, initially a conference delivered at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, is another contribution to Cirlot’s important work on European mystical tradition of European early modernity, but like other of Circlot’s book its value also resides in its prudential contribution to contemporary thought. In this sense, Cirlot’s visual exploration of the cloud allows us to raise the question without much hesitation: what is a cloud in a field of vision, anyways? In Kurt Badt’s John Constable’s Clouds (1950), a book that is curiously missing from Cirlot’s commentary and bibliography, the cloud is merely a modern phenomenon in painting; a specular effect of the rise of meteorology in post-Enlightenment England that paved the way for a new construction of the modern landscape painting.
If Cirlot does not need to follow Badt’s insights, it is due to the fact that she wants to take a step back, even if her point of departure is Von Dillis’ drawings from the nineteenth century that she encountered in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. These are relatively small works, and more profusely unfinished than Constable’s cloud exercises in oil painting. I seriously wonder if Cirlot’s would have taken another direction in her analysis if she had confronted another series of cloud paintings of the modern tradition. Perhaps not. Following Gombrich’s dictum that clouds are accidental forms reserved in the mind and extended to the pictorial space, Cirlot immediately goes on to document the long mystical tradition where the cloud stands for theosgnophos, or the incandescent light that descend from the divinity right into the human’s heart (Cirlot 18). In the mystical tradition the cloud of the story of Moses, later deployed as a trope by Pseudo-Dionysus and Gregory of Nyssa, the cloud refuses to be an accident of substance; it is rather the image of substance itself: the impossibility of knowing and having access to the divine, and thus the need for the recollection of the light of ignorance.
If mysticism and painting go hand in hand it is because what the divine cannot be said in language, but it be disclosed through the spectacular persuasion of an image that is carved in the veil of theology. In this way, the cloud is a bit like a dress in a painting, both conceptually and figuratively: Cirlot does not fail to note that in Medieval representations one can grasp the figure of God swerving in a cloud before a horned Moses, but it is also the turbulence in the depth of the picture that allows for the ascension of the gaze that fails to establish a horizon and the linear perspective. Although Cirlot does not put it in this way – she is obviously more refined and attentive to her historical sources – one could easily find an opposition between clouds (and perhaps clouding of the background of a picture, an activity) and horizon of pictorial representation. It is in this sense that Cirlot defines the “via negativa” that clouds appeal to the impossible knowledge of God (in my translation): “The images of ascension and clouds are modes of making visible the negative way of the proximity with God…the fact that the experience of god takes place through the mode of negative images is something that persist from Pseudo-Dionysus to Mechthild of Magdeburg, and San Juan de la Cruz” (Cirlot 23-25).
In other words, the cloud is the non-human figure of a mode of cohabitation in God – Cirlot goes as far as quoting that it is the medium, “el entre”, the incommensurable distance between the sensible being and god (Cirlot 27). This is why the cloud, in virtue of what it discloses in its non-disclosure, is a bit like a hole in the picture, and we fail to account for its potency to stabilize its mystery through the categories of the autonomy of the work of art. This is why it is very fruitful when Cirlot tells the reader that the cloud defies vision in its very appearance, since through its clearing and light, it can only “sense through the inner soul” (Cirlot 30). This was also present, at least residually in Badt’s Constable Clouds, when referring to the externalization of the clouds as the spiritual organ of the living. But it is precisely this exteriority that defies the epistemological grounds of meteorological knowledge that would facilitate the technical ability to condense the cloud into force and energy, whose ultimate expression is crowned in a work such as Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963). A fallen cloud from the sky that can only be experienced in the abstraction degrees and measurements of its objective “data”.
There is an intimate and communicate vessel between painting and clouds that can be derived from Imágenes Negativas (2026), and that can be sound in the state of imperturbable contemplation where life and thought convergence without the energy of struggle that would define modern artistic creation and its fall into autonomization (Cirlot 33). If painting is to release and live as a mode folded in God; the modern sensibility would require the energy of creation in order to open the passage between worlds. Following Puech’s important work on Gnosticism, Cirlot sees that the nebular trope of the cloud persists in modernity well beyond San Juan de la Cruz: one can sense in the attempts to “escape this world” – from Piranesi’s ladders to Thomas De Quincety’s prose, and of course, Charles Bauderlaire – a hymnal longing for the clouds that depends on the energy of the reversibility of the modern seen as a form of confinement (and from the pictorial space, I would argue also as the triumph of flatness in modern painting) (Cirlot 44). The cloud becomes a window for gnostic imagination, although this could very well be a sort of self-serving pleonasm, given that the “possible” of the gnostic remnant in the work of art only appears as momentary reversibility; a temporality that necessarily subsists without transforming the plane of sensibility. These are wonderful experiments in poetry, painting, photography; and yet, the negative, I take it, cannot be refused its place in the historical wealth of historical capture of exteriority. Both Hölderlin and Baudealire’s clouding of poetry is already the document of the impossible attempt to live the serene life in god. Thus, any attempt at a full-fleshed exodus via negativa, runs into catastrophe and possibly madness in the wake of disenchantment.
In her final and short essay of the volume, titled “La estrella y la nube”, Cirlot speaks of the return of the cloud in modern photography, concrete the work of André Kertész, as ‘laceration in the sky” (“agujerear el cielo”), or a tear in the heavens (Cirlot 60). The passage here appeals to an inverse tonality, where lamentation becomes an inexorable dimension of affection in the world now organized through massification and urbanization of all spaces. Disenchantment is ultimately spatial enclosure. But this tear in the sky is a remnant of a memory of the divine, as well as the absence of the divine in the world; the failure of establishing a transcendence with the unknown and the inapparent. But it is thanks to Victoria Cirlot’s pictorial explorations that we can raise these questions, which are also more than mere questions pertinent to theology and art.
