Unelevated politics. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a fragment from 1919 entitled “World and Time”, written around the time of the elaboration of the essay on the question of violence, Walter Benjamin offers his most succinct definition of politics: “My definition of politics: the fulfillment of unelevated [ungesteigerten] humanness” [1]. The ontological reduction is compact, and the three terms in it are carefully chosen: fulfillment, unelevation, and humanness, which indicates a ‘preparation for a profane politics’ at the threshold of secularization and its negation in a new “spiritual ornamentation”, as he would claim in the notes of “Capitalism and Religion”. The stress on the refusal of “elevation” (gesteigerten), however, does bring to bear that Benjamin’s refusal of a political ontology constrained in subjective and objective representation, which is why in the same fragment he connects the abutting of politics to a “living-corporality” [Leiblichkeit] of the human species. To retract from the cycle of civilizational violence, politics had to be reformed from the groundlessness of the energy of the living.

Hence, for Benjamin there is a metapolitical condition or archipolitics that plays out in refusing “elevated humanity”, which for him was at the source of the romantic response to the impasse of the critical enlightenment, placing the subject of knowledge and its self-reflective faculty at the center of the developing self-rationalization of the spiritual transcendence of the world in this new critical religion: “…the ideal of humanity by rising up to…that very law which, joined to earlier laws, assures an approximation to the eternal ideal of humanity” [2]. Hence, neither trascendental representation nor spiritualized immanence of order could, but unelevation of the “human possibilities” (Menschhaftigkeit). But such possibilities could only be disclosed beyond the pretensions of spiritual elevations of a unified consciousness, as Erich Unger had proposed in his Politics and Metaphysics (1921) around the same time to enact a “politics of exodus” for a common psychosocial regeneration.

Benjamin’s proximity and distance from Unger’s position could perhaps inform why instead of writing a promised book that was going to be entitled True Politics (Die Wahre Politik) – allegedly containing two chapters “The destitution of power” and “Teleology without ultimate goal” – evolved into the landmark essay “Towards the critique of violence”, in which the frame of domination and the ontology of politics was recasted as a mediation about the folding of secularized annihilating violence, substance intrinsic to the philosophy of history and indestructible life of the soul (“annihilating only in a relative sense…never absolute with regard to the soul of the living”) [3]. Thus, one could say that accounting for the groundwork of “politics” meant accepting the constitutive verticality cosigned to modern philosophy of history, and its bipolar schematism between moral principles and sacrificial production. If Peter Fenves’ assumption is correct, Benjamin was not only inscribing a distance from Unger, but, more importantly, from Kant’s Toward Eternal Peace who defined his “true politics” as dependent on moral determination: “The true politics can therefore not take a step without having already paid homage to morality, and although politics by itself is a difficult art, its union with morality is no art all, for as soon as the two struggle against each other, morality into two cuts the knot that politics cannot dissolve – The right of human beings must be held sacred [heilig], however great a sacrifice this may yet the dominant power” [4].

The Kantian liquidation of politics to morality is hyperbolic to the modern epoch and its crisis – the crisis and enmity against the concept of the political, Carl Schmitt would claim in Political Theology (1922) – rendering modern politics and legitimacy hollow; something that Benjamin had understood well he saw to retract from the question of “politics” to that of a critico-metaphysical exploration waged on morality “as nothing other than the refraction of action in knowability, something from the region of knowledge…Morality is not ethos” [5]. Elevation could only have meant the production of a subject of knowledge and the specific (technical) arrangement of knowledges for subjection. On the contrary, the ethos was the necessary condition no longer for any “coming politics”, but rather for the disclosure of “the coming world” [die kommende Welt] itself. This means that working through the redemption of the world solicits a reversal from morality to ethics only to later transform the conditions of politics.

Let us return to the definition of politics as “unelevated [ungesteigerten] humanness”. What defines “unelevation”? From the ethical point of view it conjoins with the notion of “inclination” [Neigung] that Benjamin favors because of its unconditional valance that disarms the cycle of violence of the human community and its willful hostilities. The inclination rejects the paradigm of force because it an erotic mediation, that is, an affection of donation and love beyond exchange [6]. But inclination is only possible through language, as Benjamin had expressed in his “concept of politics” in a letter to Martin Buber from 1916: “I understand the concept of politics in its broadest sense…in this sense, therefore, language is only one means of more or less suggestively laying the groundwork for the motives that determine the person’s actions in his heart of hearts. Only the intensive aiming of words into the core of intrinsic silence is truly effective action” [7].

Thus, the suspended elevation of the subject and higher order meant that its persuasive purity allows the inception of the “divine” as a «teleology without a goal» validated by the suspension of judgement of appearance. The intensification of the unelevation opens life to an ethical demand of a “living corporality” that roams the world’s crust beyond depredation where the force of autonomy of social practices does not risks the world of life forms and the soul. Indeed, at this point Benjamin does join Unger’s cardinal thesis: “Overcoming capitalism through wandering”. Or as he wrote even earlier about Hölderlin’s poetics: “[In the world of Hölderlin], the living are always stretching of space, the plane spread out within which destiny extends itself…it already comprehends the fulfillment of destiny” [8]. A politics oriented pending dowards to “unelevation”, inhabits the ground level of co-existence and cultivation dismissing the ontological derivatives or principles (archein) of ‘politics’ in order to conquer every possible destiny in the lawless fulfillment of the world.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin. “World and Time”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 74.

2. Walter Benjamin. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 138.

3. Walter Benjamin. “Toward the Critique of Violence”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 58.

4. Peter Fenves. “Introduction”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 18-19.

5. Walter Benjamin. “Ethics, Applied to History”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 74.

6. Walter Benjamin. “On Kantian Ethics”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 71.

7. Walter Benjamin. “Letter to Martin Buber” (1916), in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 79-80.

8. Walter Benjamin. “Two Poems by Fredrich Hölderlin”, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 26.

authority civilization cybernetics Empire end of language ethics expression fiction Hugo von Hofmannsthal imagination Karl Kraus language modernity Nihilism sense Simone Weil Theology violence Walter Benjamin war world

The instrument stripped bare. On Adan Kovacsics’ Guerra y lenguaje (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Endless war and infinite strife is always preceded by the erosion and the putrid decomposition of language. Such is the thesis of Adan Kovacsics’ idiosyncratic and historically situated Guerra y lenguaje (Acantilado, 2025), which sets a specific date for the moment of such linguistic rot into consciousness in European modernity: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Lord Chandos Letter” of 1902 in which civilizational decline signaled the total detachment of expression, making language flourish in the form of opinions resembling rotten mushrooms. For Hofmannsthal this event was neither accidental nor a temporary malady, but a tonality of existence that soon enough broadened like a “spreading rust” (Kovacsics 11). Just a few years later in his posthumous Persuasion and Rhetoric, Michelstaedter will describe this rusting of language as the triumph of “darkening ornaments” (kallopismata orphnes) of the epoch, liberating the destiny of language as a mere transactional exchange between “technical terms” mastered by everyone regardless of their idioms (it surprises the reader that the thinker of Gorizia is absent from Kovacsics’ Austro-Hungarian constellation on the crisis of language).

The decline of an empire shimmering with languages and dialects across its territory began to suffer the malady of miscommunication that resulted in making language uninhabitable, throbbing in its empty chatter. Thus, the attempt to initiate an exodus from language began to appear everywhere according to Kovacsics: Fritz Mauthner drafts an encyclopedic treatise on the venereal misapprehension of language, Gustav Landauver battles in the trenches of linguistic scepticism and the mystical tradition in the name of revolution, while others like Hugo Ball attempts to flee from language altogether through the liberation of sounds and words, from the Dada avant-garde to his later Byzantine Christian asceticism. For his part, Karl Kraus in The last days of Mankind prefers to expose the surface of language as it becomes a regime regulated by opinion for bureaucratic administration over facts of reality. The nihilism that colors politics at the turn of the century is accompanied by the instrumentalization of language as the primordial technical apparatus that allows the flows of information through the acceleration of the autonomization of the linguistic mediation; as consequence, language began to arouse constant disbelief and doubt over the very essence of the sayable (Kovacsics 31). This throws light on contemporary debates about “misinformation” that, precisely because they are caught up on the epistemological determination proper to the linguistic crisis, it comes short to putting into perspective the range and depth of language over the problem of appearance now deprived of the expressive mediation between the speaking animal and phenomena, reducing experience to rhetorical commonalities or inter-social allocation of commands.

Kovacsics’s Guerra y Lenguaje (2025) brings to bear – without totally exhausting the crushing weight of its archive and set of problems for thought – the immense significance of the first decade of the twentieth century at outset of the waning of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which has always been understood historically as the condition for the last configuration of European nationalism and its war-economies, but rarely in light of its functionalization of language. If read against the backdrop of Simone Weil’s “Are we heading for the proletarian revolution?” (1933) intervention about the “functional” dimension of the state form in the first decades of the twentieth century, Kovacsic’s essay ultimately helps us to define the concrete nature of functionality as the index of mobilization of ‘worlding’ through the commanding force of language. To deliver this point home, Kovacsics tells how language itself severed enunciation from action:

“La transformación que se produjo y que la ha alejado, como si un tablón se hubiese desprendido del muelle y se hubiera adentrado en el mar, no se debe a que otras gentes se impusieron en su día en Grecia, sino a un cambio radical en el uso concreto de la palabra. Es en la Gran Guerra cuando esa corriente inicial de la utilización del lenguaje como herramienta se consolida de manera definitiva. Es entonces cuando la palabra pasa a ser plenamente funcional y su papel se reduce a aportar argumentos para la acción o incluso a “parirla” mediante el tópico. Hemos visto hasta qué punto el silencio de Karl Kraus al comienzo de la contienda se debía a la percepción de este vínculo entre palabra y acción, al que no quería ni podía sumarse de ningún modo” (Kovacsics 76-77).

Language does not disappear as much as it transforms itself into two vectors of social enforcement towards communication: functionality and rhetorical enthymemes. In this way, language is able to colonize reality and stabilize for the concrete order, or what Walter Benjamin called during those years the “bourgeois conception of language” hindering on causality and objectivity accelerating the collapse of its vocation to naming the exteriority of the world (Kovacsics 81). The totalization of this new rhetorical social structure becomes the main stage for the production of justification and competing regimes of fiction. But this implies no general theory or systematization of a linguistic science, but rather how language coincides with life in the form of an ethics. This is at the heart of the different attempts to retract language in the eclipse of empire and the new interstate fragmentation – which also entails grammatical and functional unifigies of national language – as a problem that concerns the limits of ethics. Ethics here cannot coincide with the general condition of ‘knowability’ that makes morality possible; rather, the problem of ethics can only reveal in turn the senseless of wanting to go beyond the facts of the world and allows us to dwell in one without completion. The withdrawal from the language of propaganda and objectivity demanded an ethics of the sayable beyond the commodification and intentionality of words promoted by “war” and “ware” (commodity) that the West had continued to endure; a total communication of ends that decades later evolved into cybernetics as the warping of world into informational encoded relation.

Kovacsics reminds us that there is a story here of extreme violence and creative destruction, only comparable to nuclear fusion and the flaying of a human being, only that this time, unlike the myth of Marsyas, without ever reaching transcendence of redemption through the proximity of language to myth (Kovacsics 129). Underneath there is the body of language, stripped of its capacity for truth and reduced to functions of survival and needs oriented towards the homogeneity of the future. Towards the end of Guerra y lenguaje (2025), and glossing Hobbes’ notion of political authority that legitimated the modern interstate system to neutralize truth contents and the stasis over words, one cannot help but think that the date 1902 as a. arcana was an effective culmination rather than genesis of the modern, which means that the foul scent of the twentieth century was destined for decomposition since it had already stripped bared one of the most beautiful lacunae of the human species: being in language and the event of appearance became integrated into the worldly utopia of the machine.

As captured in Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare”, the obsolescence of language over time evolved into a candid instrument of social functions of proportional exchange, coordinated fortuitous relations, and increasing moral indictment that purported parodies of contested realities. Thus, the sickness is always unto language – a basic assumption that reveals the need for infrapolitical analysis before there is any political practice and categorial reinvention. The overexposure of language as an avatar of metaphoric communication for ends and needs of humankind brought itself bare and all encompassing in its appropriative force, but only at the expense of darkening and losing the world forever.

accumulation arcana imperii chora colonization Darwish divine election domination Earth ecology exodus form of life Gaza imagination irreductible martyrs nakba Nihilism Palestine paradigm Poetry soul space subject Victor Segalen

Of the destruction of worlds. On Mauricio Amar Díaz’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

What does it take to destroy a world? It would seem that the question itself is too metaphoric and impertinent; perhaps also hyperbolic and presumptuous against the flight of the infinite embodied in worldling. But this is the question that we should direct ourselves to according to Mauricio Amar’s short and highly accessible book El Paradigma Palestina: Sionismo, Colonización, Resistencias (DobleaEditores, 2024), which is written in the wake of the ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza in order lay bare the paradigmatic abyss of social death in which humanity finds itself at the peak of its civilizational dominance. Amar does not use the term “paradigm” lightly, and nor is he interested, as recasted recently by none other than Steven Bannon citing Thomas Kuhn’s work about scientific revolutions, in posting a central conflict towards transformation; rather, one must situate this strategic conceptual deployment in light of the Chilean philosopher’s own work on imagination and use, which provides an irreducible and sensible texture to every emergence of a paradigm [1]. This means that if Palestine is, indeed, the paradigm of our epoch is precisely because it has no-space in the world – it is what can be infinitely be destroyed, as Maurce Blanchot famously said commenting Antelme’s work – and what illuminates the core and extension of the “integrated” planetary humanity oriented towards the administrative governmentality of contemporary Western democracies, and its corollary geopolitics of the total artificial spaces, as Bruno Maçaes has recently called it. Reading Amar one senses that under the name “Palestine” he is registering a limit to the Humanist force, where an existential claim reveals the maelstrom of an epoch that has resorted to a grotesque parody of the ancient homeric standards of domination and submission. It is the outlook that Simone Weil described as the paradigm of transforming the world into nonliving things.

If understood as a paradigm, Palestine reminds us that the homeric energy towards the aristocracy of equality through force and death among the human race never truly ceased, but only changed forms and cloaks throughout the ages. The post-mythic West seemed to have constructed itself through the repeated revolutions that accommodate justifications for usurpation and containment, self-deification and legibility of the territory at the service of a fictive ethnos. The belated nationalism of modern Zionism has had the paradoxical quality of being both a project of territorial usurpation after its illegalization in International Law (The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928); while, at the same time, a politico-theological configuration that, as Monica Ferrando has shown in L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), clings upon the manipulation of the theological election of “a People” in order to deploy the coterminous binding between community and territory justified through divine narration. The interdependence of the spiritual goal of Zion is only possible through the construction of a settler state, at the same time that the occupying state’s only legitimacy based on ‘one God, one People’ relies on the restitution of an instrumentalized form of the theological election. This is why for Amar the Zionist state building project is a the paradigm of a specific type of colonial governance whose end is not just to capture errant people into social subjects, but more fundamentally a translatio imperii that folds the Earth into a territorial nomoi of distinct multilevel functions: checkpoints, walls, vigilante control of movements, constructions and erasure of surfaces, administration of critical infrastructures, development of extractive resources, and finally the hunting down of humans that necessarily blurs the line between civil population and battlefield combatants. When Amar reminds us of Israel’s predominance in planetary security and warfare technology, one can immediately recall Emile Benveniste’s suggestion that “measurement” (med*-) and the proportional addition to produce objectivity, entails an efficacy of permanent dominance and governability whose main enterprise is the management of populations through the regime of accumulation. As Andreas Malm reminds us of the current cartography of Palestine: “The genocide is unfolding at a time when the state of Israel is more deeply integrated in the primitive accumulation of fossil capital than ever…This is the political economy of normalization: a sacralization of busines as usual that destroys first Palestine and then the earth” [2]. The ongoing devastation of Gaza is a window into the project as a whole: the necessary destruction of the worlds and the total artificiality of the life-worlds, always at the service of maintaining the needs of anthropological symbolizations.

For Amar this points to an epochal scenario of a people without world; and, following the lead of Sari Hanafi, he will claim that the paradigmatic mirroring of Palestine is also an spatial-cide, in which the living are deprived of a sense of inhabiting and roaming that brings to bear that the nakba is not something that has taken place in history once and for all, it is a catastrophic event that has not ceased from repeat itself, and whose ultimate intention is to suture the world and existence, the soul and the spirituality of the open atmosphere that is needed to sustain life. Reading Amar between the lines – who towards the end of the book finds distant interlocutors in Darwish’s poetry, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as well as in the glosses of Walter Benjamin on history and the prose of Edward Said – one learns that the true arcana of Palestinian resistance is also a secret promise for our apocalyptic times: to hold on to the world, so that we can all passionately land on the Earth and freely breath in its surroundings. The nexus of the Palestinian question and the intrusion of Gaia, although underdeveloped in Amar’s analysis, obliquely runs through a text that is also very much about the central question of ethics that never abandons thought: how to name what escapes without taking the world as such into an object to be possessed, destroyed, and remade anew as a hostile secular imago dei. The vindictive hyper-consciousness of the contemporary unmediated arcana imperii now reveals, as Amar says towards the end of he book, a mirror through which we can observe our own increasing domestication, in which the metropolis is just the luminescent and self-protected hub, but whole ultimate darkening shadow is the Gaza’s pile of rubbles resembling an open air necropolis (Amar 108-109). Through different arrangements of organized destruction, both the metropolis and the necropolis converge in their preeminent ‘struggle against space’ and its form of life for the sake of familiar pieties of enslaved survival of unworldly anomie (Amar 116).

Does this mean that we are all “Palestinians”? Mauricio Amar’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024) rejects the all too well expected craft of solidarity and subjective identifications that can only work on the payroll of the gravediggers of the current civilizational project. On the contrary, if Palestine is our paradigm, and it remains so, it is because it can only refuse measurement and recognition in order to dwell in the only possible exteriority as embodied to Darwish’s poetry that Amar quotes towards to the end book: “Do not trust the poem / absent child / it is the throbbing of the abyss” (Amar 140). From the abyss we nourish the soul as the return to land on Earth prepares itself in order to no longer conquer a territory, an ancient tradition, or a “People” (ethnos), but to dwell on the nearness of a place that is an excess to every location or community of belonging (this is the false exit of the kibbutzim). We do not have political grammar to articulate what this integral freedom could mean, except that it is an exotic relation in Victor Segalen’s sense: a creation of a world alien from the compatible and petty one that currently drains us into its ongoing desperate destruction and passive enslavement [3]. Finally, like all authentic paradigms, it is worth noting that Paradigma Palestina (2024) teaches and preaches nothing; it only invites us into the swirling sensation that crosses over the imagination and the singing voice, from the world of the last remaining lives to the isles of the dead martyrs, and back.

Notes

1. Mauricio Amar. Ética de la imaginación: averroísmo, uso y orden de las cosas (Malamadre, 2018).

2. Andreas Malm. The Destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth (Verso, 2025), 53.

3. Victor Segalen. Essay on Exoticism (Duke University Press, 2002), 24.

Americanism body Catholicism civilization Community conspiratio conspiration Empire Erik Peterson escathology ethics fraternity Good Samaritan Ivan Illich language Liberalism migratioj migration nationalism order ordo amoris political theology Pope Francis Theology war

Osculum pacis. by Gerardo Muñoz

It has taken Pope Francis’s public letter addressed to the Bishops of the United States to put in perspective how late American imperial politics in matters of immigration and probably other spheres of social life is not only at odds with the Christian vocation, but even waging war against the very dogma of Christian revelation. The reminder does not come completely out of context, since as we know, the marching band of intellectuals that for a long time have defended a “Christian postliberal” transformation – some of which not long ago offered theological justifications for the Church as the universal ark for migrants – given the current hegemonic configuration find themselves as mere scribes of whatever is enacted by unilateral executive command. The impossibility of enacting a transitional political theology evidences the emptying of politics into a technical mobilization of apocalyptical overtones, as clearly defended by Peter Thiel. The attempts to pilotage a planetary gnosis to his own image in the last stage of imperial stagnation, definitely supports Francis’ assertion politics today is built “on the basis of force, and not on the truth about equal dignity….begins badly and will end badly”. But in a way, this “end” has already taken place through the revocation of the ethical tenor of the Christian mystery.

It comes to no surprise, then, that if the erosion of an ethics is at stake, that Pope Francis would allude to the parable of the Good Samaritan and fraternity, something that he has explored previously in the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” [1]. It is also important to note that Francis is not opposing the Good Samaritan to the ordo amoris; rather the operation is more subtle: for any community to be organized around ordo amoris, there needs to be a space for the infinite discovery that the Good Samaritan parable solicits of every Christian’s responsability. According to Francis: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”. In other words, and implicitly taking distance from the Calvinist dependency on community of salvation, the Pontifex is disclosing the memory of an ethical vocation that cannot end in social norms or national unity without exteriority. The communitarian ordo at times could also amount to oppressive familiarity, as it appears in Corrado Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte: “Village life seemed to him a strange invention, a protective agreement between people who were afraid”. Thus, what the Samaritan teaches human beings is that there are no ethical standards for which we can respond, since every encounter opens up a ‘decision of existence’ before an absolute other beyond the sacramental duty of “I ought”.

Who is this “other human being” that now becomes your brother? As we know, in Ivan Illich’s late work the ethical inflection of the Good Samaritan illuminates the true character of our poetic relationality and creative act: “You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds….and create the supreme form of relatedness which his not given by creation but created by you. Any attempt to explain this “ought” as corresponding to a norm takes away the mysterious greatness from this act” [2]. Indeed, Illich goes further in telling us that the suppression of the ethical decision of encountering the Samaritan can only leave us with a “liberal fantasy…where bombing our neighbor for his own good” [3]. Just like today the moral justifications of “ordo amoris” or the administrative allocation of a substantive “common good” can produce justifications for mass deportation of immigrants and dividing the social space between citizens and noncitizens (removing the foundation of ius soli) can become the strange patent of a monstrous theological manipulation.

The ethical mystery exemplified by the parable of the Good Samaritan introduced into history a new conception of “brotherhood” that was not conditioned by national, political, or family affiliations, but by a common vocation expressed upon acting through mercy and charity. Belonging to the “human fraternity” allows me to decide who is my brother through the osculum pacis – a conspiratorial mouth-to-mouth kiss that creates proportionality and peace through the encounter that yields mutual creation. Before the Samaritan we give everything without waiting for anything in return, as required by any true ethical disposition. As the scholar of Ancient Christianity, Christine Mohrman once noted, the osculum pacis was a universal relationship of the human species through their voices coming together to assert external political peace as well as interior health of the soul [4]. If the predatory programs of mass deportations and intensification of hostilities between nations have come to forefront in our days, this is due to the fact that the overall end is not to piecemeal ordo amoris coordinated by state social policies, but rather a permanent assault against the association of the free souls constitutive of the osculum pacis.

In light of the theological drama of Christianity, nationalism can only be taken as a symptom of brute force and inequity (radical evil). As Erik Peterson reminded in his essay “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum” (1951), the cult and strife between nations and imagined communities, at least for the Chirstian vocation, do not have any traction, since the warring angels of nationalities have been overcome by the event of resurrection [4]. The ‘strange career’ of American political Catholicism is precisely that through a technocratic administration of social pain and spectacular delirium, it can only offer an noncorporeal ideal of ordo amoris “in the service of a single nation which seeks to establish its supremacy, by identify its own interest with that of humankind”, as Peterson observed in the wake of European nationalism, but that it applies today to the letter with little variations [6].

In vain should we attempt to pin down the osculum pacis as professionalization of care or the hospitalization of pain that have become practices of a “corrupted core of a very clear and powerful ideal of democracy”. In the disjointed time that characterizes the end of political theology and its warring nomoi, the osculum pacis will be not be found in those that attempt to conjure a “Christian civilization”, but only in those that dwell in the state of adelphos, faithful to the scandal of peace and the endless conspiracy of speech.

Notes

1. Pope Francis. “Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), 2020: “By his actions, the Good Samaritan showed that “the existence of each and every individual is deeply tied to that of others: life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html

2. Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future (Anansi, 2005), 207.

3. Ibid., 208.

4. Christine Mohrmann. “Quelques traits caractéristiques du latin des chrétiens”, in Études sur le latin des chrétien (Edizione Di Storia E Letteratura, 1961) , 29-30.

5. Erik Peterson. “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum”, Theologische Zeitschrift, 7, 1951, 81-91.

6. Erik Peterson. “Die Frage nach dem Menschen”, in Offenbarung des Johannes und Politisch-theologische Texte (Echter Verlag, 2004), 250.

caves clandestine speech collapse Cormac McCarthy cybernetics engineering Ernest Fenollosa ethos Hobbes imperialism language nationalism poetics politics rhetoric Social social contract soul world

The last stage of embalmed decay. by Gerardo Muñoz

The techno-administrative organization of the world that is showing off its force these days is only possible thanks to a previous devastation of the opacity of language, which ultimately connects human beings and the world. It is also the mysterious vortex of the breaking point of humanity into being, of which today there is only remembrance and scholastic teaching but seldomly authentic expression. When politicians, engineers, and social functionaries stubbornly distract us with open attempts to decimate secondary languages, prohibiting the annunciation of words through the legal enforcement of “place and manner” norms, and elevate abhorrent structures of linguistic commands and information as units of social interaction, it is obvious that the collapse has already happened. It also means that in terms of “Social” planning humanity has ceased to exist under the shadow of speech, to use an expression from Helene Lubienska. Hence, it is all the more absurd to confront this transformation with a strategy of multiplication of rhetorical codified languages that merely deepen the schism between the expressivity of language and their worlds. It suffices to say that any recognition of a para-official language of social interaction plays into the fictitious polarity of homogeneous globality and reified nationalism – the constitution of print nationalism being the historical destruction of minor and dispersed languages of remote places and villages for the sake of the organization of a productive fictitious historical subject.

We must ponder what it means that the current imperial world order is one that does not offer a language, let alone the flourishing of minor or ‘vulgar’ languages as in the Latin Middle Ages, but rather an exit from language, which is the cybernetic project of codifying flows of information and looping inputs in which asymptotically humanity surrenders their languages. In past imperial adventures, language was either a tool to subordinate the world of the colonized, or it was a lingua franca of elites (administrators and the clergy) that allowed for the real existing languages in the territories integrated precisely by their exclusion or subalternity to the civilizing regime guided by literacy. The sharp contrast with today it is striking, since it is all too clear that the project of cybernetics, and its most recent avatar “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), is fundamentally an Empire that does not even require to rule and neutralize the “civil war over words” that Thomas Hobbes repudiated in the European confessional state, since its ultimate goal is not political statecraft, but the regulation of unworldly bodies of social reproduction.

This is why some contemporary engineers have said that AI requires “a reconfiguration of the social contract”, with the caveat that it would necessarily be a “social contract beyond language and thus without politics”. The last social dispensation at the hands of engineers is the human soul, as it has been said. For this conception of language, it matters to only understand it as a semiotic reduction of the expressive human being to naked animality as the general form of the posthistorical being in the present. It is noteworthy that a great North American writer, Cormac McCarthy, while working on this problem of language at the Santa Fe Institute scientific research program (a central hub of American developments for artificial science and the unification of the sciences), reached the conclusion that language must be understood in relation to a virus: “a virus nicely machined. Offer it up, Turn it sligh, Push it in, Click. Nice Fit. But the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit…The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that” [1]. The “unruly nature” of language, precisely because it does not fit into the biological pattern of virological model, must be mastered into an accompanying narrative of the social world, taking the copula and grammar as the final functionalization of the fictitious community. The artificiality of language is a civilizational decay that takes place not as heteronomic cooptation by technological advancement, but within its own internal abdication of its voice and mystery.

It is precisely this internal threat that the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa sought to expose in the most polemical moment of his posthumous tract The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Stanley Nott, 1936) – an essay that was restituted, let us not forget, by Ezra Pound precisely to confront the pauperization of ‘Basic English’ as the standard of linguistic use – in which he writes the following observation about the extreme filing of words: “Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary” [2]. Fenollosa could not have foreseen that the posthistorical epoch – an epoch of the most furious abandonment of thinking – there was nothing else to file in terms of the expressivity and poetic soil of speech. The course of American artificial humanity is not a human with a pocket-dictionary; it is something way more grotesque: an animal that can repeat and chatter sounds and symbols severed of its proximity with any linguistic inherence and the sensorial worlds. And it goes without saying that the engineering plan against the poetic soil of speech, as North American poet understood well, means that this war is waged against the last reserve; that is, the ethos understood as ‘the cave of everyone’s inner being’.

Notes

1. Cormac McCarthy. “The Kekulé Problem”, Nautilus, April 2017: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

2. Ernest Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character, edited by Ezra Pound (Stanley Nott, 1936), 28.

Aristotle Blumenberg Carlo Michelstaedter ethics experience force Giorgio Agamben Gorgias kallos language logos machination Nihilism persuasion Plato polis prayer pseudos rhetoric science secularization sense Technology theos Use world

Kallopismata orphnes: the eclipse of language. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his most decisive confrontation with the scientific method and the legitimacy of science through objective knowledge, Carlo Michelstaedter introduces a rather loosely expression from Plato’s Gorgias to lever his position against the sufficiency of the scientific experiment: the “kallopismata” (καλλωπίσματα), which can be rendered as “embellishments” or “ornaments” that is constituted in figures such as matter, law, the final cause, or ruling principles (archein) that align the conditions for calculative and sufficient reasoning [1]. For Michelstaedter, the world of objectivation and scientific neutrality proceeds through figures of rhetorical ornamentation, kallopismata, which allows conquering the future; that is, what remains completely foreign and inaccessible to the domain of calculative reason waged upon a series of expressed goods.

It could be said that kallopismata is the artifice that allows the absorption of those goods to the historicity of civilization as they undergo their own ‘corruptio optimi pessima’ a process of functional realization of their entelechy: the desert becomes a cloister, the banquet an academic, the artist’s studio a school of beaux artists…imitative technique assumes the name of art; any virtuosity assumes the name of virtue [2]. In a language similar to that of Heidegger’s, Michelstaedter speaks of the constitution of an “exceptional machine”, which positions the organization of the world through rhetorical deployment (and it was not by coincide that Heidegger referred to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness with one another”), and hence the fundamental metalinguistics of any social economy. The exceptional machination not only deploys generic meaning from the irreducibility of things, but also organizes the mediations between the subjective plane and the objective reality. In this way, the rise of the hegemony of science in the hands of the ‘pioneers of civilization’ and a “community of the wicked”, as Michelstaedter calls the endeavor of modern scientists, can violate nature offering security and comfort to the totality of mankind. This will explain their civilizational endurance and the recursive positionality for historical self-amendment and renewed adaptation.

How can this community of the wicked achieve absolute consent and domination through their practice? The domination over nature is not exclusively an anthropological process extended outwardly; it posits a nexus between interiority and exteriority where the question of language itself is entirely redefined. This is why the most stealth invention of the practice of scientists for Michelstaedter is to “infiltrate life with certain words….on which meaning unknowingly prop themselves for their daily needs, without acknowledging them they pass them on as they were received” [3]. The ultimate experiment of the techno-scientific understanding of the world amounts to the elaboration of cybernetics (a term that Michelstaedter never uses but that obviously colors the effect of his general scheme of civilizational nihilism); that is, the unification between the phenomena of the world and the human’s sayable language. To this end, Michelstadter will emphasize this proximity: “Technical terms give men a certain uniformity of language. In vain do the proponents of internally created international languages dream. The international language will be language of technical terms; of kallopismata orphnes, ‘ornaments of the darkness’ [4]. Whereas darkness denotes the harboring of language and its limit – and one can recall Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris – its slow decay in darkness, kallopismata orphnes, outlives itself by the artificial luminosity that tears all mediation from the sensible world, now realized as fully alien to the appearance of truth and the truth of appearance. As Giorgio Agamben has noted, in what could be read as an esoteric gloss on the triumph of the kallopismata orphnes in our times, the technical question in the scientific paradigm is not merely a problem of the modes of techniques and instrumentalization, but more concretely a process that brings to an end the use of language as a sensible experience with the world [5]. And insofar as “sense” is only an idea of the sayable, it might as well be senselessness has been fully integrated into the infinite production of “informational differences” (“data run”), a final hypertrophied form of an unworldly logoi.

It would not have passed Michelstaedter that the context in which the degraded notion of kallopismata (embellishment, ornament, decoration as adjectives do the work, but one should also register the kallos, a central tonality in Plato’s musical thought) happens in a rebuttal of Callicles to Socrates’ critique of force and personal interest as requirement for a conception of Justice. In 492c of the Gorgias Callicles will reply to Scorates stating the following: “No, in good truth, Socrates—which you claim to be seeking—the fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness, and the rest of these embellishments (kallōpismata)—the unnatural covenants of mankind—are all mere stuff and nonsense” [6]. In other words, for Callicles anything that does not have the force of principle or justification has already fallen to the level of “stuff” and “nonsense”, even though that nonsense is itself the use of language in its contact with the “thereness” of appearances. It is no coincidence that in his lecture of ethics, Wittgestein will press upon the nonsensical expressions of language in order to elude the escaping and impossible essence of language every time that it seeks to move beyond the world” [7]. In other words, if Callicles is the hyperbolic figure of the rhetorician-scientist, what is at stake in the inception of kallōpismata as veil of language is nothing else than the effective liquidation of its ethical dimension, which in turn transforms the use of language into a mere coding instrument at the altar of philopsychia, or, in the words of Callicles, of empty “unnatural covenants” (para physin synthēmata), depleting language to exclusive semantic and and metaphoric correspondence [8]. In other words, the ascendancy of the nonlanguage of the kallopismata will now entail abandoning the imperative mode in which language and life can enter a secret relation as defined by its use [9].

Can one even speak of human life after the ascension of the kallopismata orphnes as the civilizational matrix of the world? A life without the use of language, under the veil of kallōpismata, represents an unprecedented milestone and perhaps something beyond the rhetorical enthymemes. Perhaps one could elucidate this point in this way: according to Hans Blumenberg, the most important rhetorical form ever invented was that of the prayer because through its practice one is ultimately trying to persuade a God. In contrast, in the complete darkness prefigured by kallōpismata orphnes that dwells in a civilization eclipse – the rise and fall of modern secularization and political idolatry – the gods can no longer be posited as exteriority towards the taming of the gnosis for the anthropological need of self-affirmation [10]. Because the process of fictitious anthropomorphism has reached its own limit to the point of becoming itself an “exceptional machine” (macchina eccezionale), the mystery of the senselessness of language has lost the world not necessarily by becoming mute and silent, but by enslaving itself to the endless chatter and infinite consensus by the moral equilibrium of the social age that for Michelstaedter ultimately meant “the machinery of dispersing interests, where the paths of existence are no longer clearly traced, but become confused and disappear; hence it is up to every existence to create the luminous path among the universal chaos; as if were, an art of practical life” [11]. It is that existential path granted by the nonsense of language (soul to soul) that grants beauty in the event of appearance, that cuts through and overcomes the civilizational allure of linguistic kallopismasta whose radiant heliotropism can only result in the most spectacular of blindness.

Notes

1. Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric (Yale University Press, 2004), 98.

2. Ibid., 96.

3. Ibid., 98.

4. Ibid., 98.

5. Giorgio Agamben writes in “Sul dicibile e l’idea”, Che cos’è la filosofia? (Quodlibet, 2016): “Technics is not an “application of science”: it is the fundamental production of a science that no longer wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends to replace its hypothesis with reality, to “realize” them. The transformation of the experiments – which now takes place through machines there so complex that they do have anything to do with real conditions, but purport to force them – eloquently shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake. As science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question through ideas, in language, loses its necessary connection with the sensible world”, 115. The attempt to escape appearance and experience to turn the world into a mimetic illusion administered by the aesthetic dominance of the pseudos was also elaborated by Gianni Carchia in his analysis of Plato’s aesthetics in L’estetica antica (Editori Laterza, 1999), 89-100.

6. Plato. Gorgias (Loeb, 1967), 413.

7. Ludwig Wittgstein. Lecture on Ethics (Wiley & Sons, 2014), 50-51.

8. Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric (Yale University Press, 2004), 97.

9. Carlo Michelstaedter “Appendici I: Modi Della Significazione Sufficiente”, in La persuasione e la rettorica (Adelphi Edizioni, 1995), 142.

10. Hans Blumenberg. “Una aproximación antropológica a la actualidad de la retórica”, in La realida en que vivimos (Ediciones Paidós, 1999), 133. Philippe Theophanidis recently suggested in a discussion that we should read kallopismata orphnes in mind with the formulation “God help me”—because I haven’t the courage to help myself” that Michelstaedter introduces in the chapter “Rhetoric”, 69. “Notes on The Constitution of Rhetoric”, unpublished, February 2025.

11. Carlo Michelstaedter. Epistolario (Adelphi Edizioni, 1983), 159.

Americanism ark Charles Olson devastation Earth Empire equivalence extraction Gestell Herrad of Landsberg Melville myth Nihilism piracy salvation species Theology whaling

Americanism and whaling. by Gerardo Muñoz

“What is the genealogical figure that best recalls this form of enmity in late American imperialism? The pirate.” This was written by Rodrigo Karmy, who sets up the ground for a timely inquiry. In fact, it is necessary to understand the accelerated processes that are currently underway as a civilizational choreography that only now finds an intense vortex of legibility. In what sense, then, can we speak of an order of pirates that have taken hostage the fleet of imperial politics and the empire of politics? At this point I would like to recall a brilliant and forgotten book by Charles Olson titled Call Me Ishmael (1947), which offers a perceptive interpretation of the essence and orientation of Americanism as an unbounded planetary civilization. Unlike many others interpretations – Max Weber on Calvinism and communitarian deification; Marxists on the Fordist mode of production and passive revolution; and even those that recast the economy of the spectacle and the psyche of mass culture – for Olson, who takes a necessary stepback, the civilization deployed by Americanism is essentially a production regime that first rose from the extraction of whale oil in the 19th century [1]. And as some economic historians have reminded us, before the first oil wells were found in Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century, oil was embedded in the species of the sea, that is, in the fishing and cutting up of the mythic sea creature [2].

The veiled settlement of expansionism to which Daniel Immerwahr has drawn attention recently can only be understood if we start from the premise that the arcana imperii of Americanism is a maritime enterprise that takes the world itself hostage. This means that unlike the English trading companies of early liberal capitalist modernity, Americanism is no longer concerned with the neutralisation of a common space for the exchange of goods and values, but rather with something more terribly vast: the domination and total extraction of the sea and its species. Whoever rules the seas rules the earth; in other words, whoever is able to guide the threshold of the earth has been able to do so because he has already crossed every possible limit in the land surveying (agrimensura meant precisely the measurement of the land) art of territorial appropriation and separation.

The civilizational differential of such achievement should now be evident: this production regime does not have a territory or a specific mode of production as its objective, and this is precisely Olson’s thesis, but its sole purpose is to release an effective domination of the world. And only the world can be its most coveted object. Hence, it is worth remembering, that for Herman Melville – as he puts in the mouths of some of his characters – the enterprise of Americanism embodies in the secularized time of modernity something truly monstrous: nothing less than the consummation of the presence of evil; that is, the mystery of inequity (mysterium iniquitatis) in suspense and processed through the wager of the strongest whaler. How is humanity introduced and lodged in the courtyard of the mystery of inequity? Well, not only by fishing for each other, but by calling into question the very existence of the world. The religious imagination surrounding the fisherman as a prophetic symbol of salvation of the human species, as illustrated in a well-known plate from Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus Deliciarum (1167), reappears in Americanism as an unbearable parody of all living things on earth. As one of the characters in the late novel Pierre (1852) says: “I hate this world.” And one could say that the inner belief in hatred is the fundamental stimmung of Americanism.

Thus, it is no longer just that we are hostages on the San Dominick, thrown into the groundless instance of the decision; it is something more sinister, lethal, and inconspicuous. The whaler is ultimately not the politician, he is the common man, a hollow-crowned qualunque, whose fate is shipwreck and whose tongue is commanding force. In the existential struggle between Ahab and the whale the only destiny is to caress the sea floor, as Olson says, will amount to something “all scattered in the bottom of the sea”. The post-mythic historicity of the flood reaches its definitive realization in Americanism as the genesis of a devastated world without an ark – propagated by the extinction of all species and all worlds and all presences, putting an end to the soft and untimely music of redemption.

A redemption that, not by chance, Melville only managed to find in the possible restitution of the original garden in the lands and landscape of Palestine: “Looks pearly as the blossoming / And youth and nature fond accord / wins Eden back…”, we read from the verses of Clarel (1876) [3]. Being able to preserve this acoustic garden besieged by the metaphysical force of the whalers may be the only ark left for us to land somewhere on Earth.

Notes

1. Charles Olson. Call me Ishmael (Grove Press, Inc, 1947), 18-19.

2. David Moment. “The Business of Whaling in America in the 1850s”, The Business History Review, 1957, 281.

3. Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1991), 87.

Americanism apocalypse chora destruction DH Lawrence dispair Earth Erich Unger interrengum language Maritain Nihilism nocturnal knowledge pain politics poverty social bond soul

The bruised souls. by Gerardo Muñoz

Whenever a professional politician today evokes the ‘soul’ one must be immediately suspicious, as it tends to be an automatic lullaby for “national unity” or a dormant metaphor in a flowing stream of empty chatter. What could the soul mean to anyone – say, those millions that have now for the second time voted fairly and squarely Donald J. Trump to the Executive branch of the national government – only capable of giving attention to a series of onomatopoeic pop-words that are now ingrained in the linguistic acoustics of the American lexicon (“Bitcoin”, “Tiktok”, “Woke”, “Prime”, and the list could go on). The ongoing catastrophe is first and foremost within the texture of language, which is ultimately why it is also an ethical decomposition in which all other spheres of practical action (first and foremost, politics) amount to business as usual with its corresponding rhetorical bravura.

Suggesting continuity might perhaps be an understatement: it is now a business that does not need any sumptuous or veiled mediation; refracted upon its own absorption of its hyperproduction of fiction, the defeat of the communitarian salvation of Calvinism can only be expressed as a self-serving an ongoing destruction and self-annihilation. True, it could be claimed that ‘Americanism’ has always been this; the only difference is that today, already well into the century, it moves in a vector that directly rejects the world while making a full fledged program of its own making. Only a Society that has become fully moribund can celebrate its own death and decomposition; while the emancipated and well scripted villains of the act now have no shame but to reveal how the ultimate object of their conspiracy was the obliteration of the Earth.

“It is the time of the assassins”, TJ Clark writes echoing Henry Miller’s unjustly forgotten book on Rimbaud and the legitimation of the social bond, in which the homo homini lupi discloses itself from any all possible contact in the metropolis solely dependent on ad hoc hyperproduction of justifications required to fully commit to the illusion of legitimate action. Only that now the time of the assassins is perhaps an uncanny dark night of those without souls, as in the deranged characters of a McCarthy’ novel: they are willing to kill and be killed; they are beyond any contact with language, and “what do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? I’ve thought about it a great deal” [1]. And indeed, there is nothing to say and nothing to face: in the soulless dark night there are only hunters and those that are hunted; there is integration or pulverization; there is killing and there is humiliation before an ever increasing legal nexus coordinating the acquiescence of force. But perhaps this is the real arcana of the American soul that is only shimmering through in all of its glory.

Someone like D.H. Lawreence definitely thought so when writing about the novels of Finimore Cooper: “[The white american] lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth…All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the flooring into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” [2]. But in our days it has begun to melt, to fragment, and decompose in a heavy storm of pain and despair. And it continues to stand in the long winter of American civilization (the castle of Frozen is the allegory of the epoch) that now finds itself at the epochal threshold of the end of growth, only left with rampant nationalist impulses of self-affirmation that can only deepen the nihilist tonality of anguish and self-destruction, and the emergence of the bizarre as Jamie Merchant notes in his recent Endgame (2024).

In his Reflections on America (1958), Jacques Maritain maintained that the spiritual patrimony of Americanism is that of being “bruised souls”, a community that came into being by double exclusion (hunted by their religion and rejected within a national polity), which in turn allowed to be compassionate to human suffering, and thus the hidden meaning of the wound was to be seeing in the “role played by immigration and poverty suffered in the Old World” [3]. Hence, for Maritain the condition for the healing soul of America resides in its opening to ongoing suffering of migrants, the dispossessed, and those in exodus from the psychic pressure of a social metabolism gone sour in every subject of civilizational decay as Erich Unger had proposed in his Politics and Metaphysics (1921).

It comes to no one’s surprise, thus, that the decomposition of the American soul departs from the overt opposition to migration, as a figure of the grazing over the Earth, that must be vanquished and condemned by a planetary gnosticism undergoing in front our eyes. The Chrisitian modern state enters in this way into a concrete and visible process of artificial desecularization showing that “the Christian relation to the State…is in mad hostility to all of them, having in the end, to the destruction of them all. […]. And it is, simply, suicide. Suicide individual and en masse” [4].

The stakes are extremely clear: it is for the bruised and the brute (some have called it the barbarians, proprietors of strange tongues, keepers of the clandestine lacunae of language) to retreat from the fictive proliferation of appearances, the artificialization of reason that can promise success as the ultimate pinnacle of self-destruction. Inclined beneath the shadow of archaic Penia, the bruised and incurable souls might not find redemption in the American wasteland, but they will land somewhere between language and world. Not a program but a moving conviction.

Notes

1. Cormac McCarthy. No Country For Old Man (Vintage, 2005), 8.

2. D.H.Lawrence. “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels”, in Studies in Classic American Literature (Thomas Seltzer, 1923), 92.

3. Jacques Maritain. Reflections on America (Scribners, 1958), 84-85.

4. D.H. Lawrence. Apocalypse (Penguin Books, 1995), 148.

antropología Capital chora cibernética critica radicale domesticación eros especie humana Gestell Giorgio Cesarano gnosis lenguaje Mundo Nihilismo objetivación pasión pensamiento sensibilidad sujeto supervivencia técnica

Pasiones de Giorgio Cesarano: introducción a un dossier. por Gerardo Muñoz

¿Es posible seguir insistiendo en la apertura del pensamiento contra el cierre de la época incrustada en la elipsis infernal de la supervivencia ventilada en las sombras del desierto nihílico y entregada a los aparatos de la reproducción social? Escribiendo en la convulsa década de los setenta – y que algunos pensadores han llamado, no sin razón, el “big bang” de la transformación geoeconómica del mundo donde la revolución queda finalmente liquidada – la apuesta de Giorgio Cesarano en Manuale di sopravvivenza (1974) -y su antecesor Apocalisse e rivoluzione (1973) co-escrito con Gianni Collu – sigue constituyendo un esfuerzo desmesurado y singular por encontrar una bifurcación por fuera de las anquilosadas formas de la antropomorfización capital que entonces ya aparecía como como el destino catastrófico de la especie humana reducido a la compulsiva maquinación de las totalidades ficticias [1].

En efecto, como observa Cesarano con un gran poder de síntesis: el triunfo revanchista de la fuerza de la subsunción real, en realidad, confirma que el verdadero y único objetivo del principio de equivalencia no tiene otro blanco que la usurpación de un mundo domesticado y desprovisto de acontecimientos. Un mundo hecho a la medida de las necesidades de sus inmates, tal y cómo lo había previsto John Cowper Powys en una de sus brillantes pesadillas literarias [2]. Pero este es el mundo que hemos heredado y que seguimos atravesando, aunque algunas décadas nos separen de la provocación que a la altura de 1974 Cesarano alzaba ante las herraduras dialécticas de la época. En realidad, era una provocación asumida desde la posibilidad de la afirmación de una gnosis – algo que, como sabemos había aprendido gracias al diálogo sostenido con algunos representantes de la corriente bordiguista de la cultura radical del pensamiento italiano y de su estrato poético, como lo confirma en La casa di Arimane (1979) de Domenico Ferla – aunque sin abandonar la posibilidad de un movimiento en retroceso de éxodo, capaz de integrar un nuevo programa de emancipación de la comunidad real de la especie (Gemeinwesen) contra todas las celdas de la objetualidad y sus satisfacciones reguladas.

Un arduo primer paso: la retracción como rechazo de la hostilidad generalizada contra la presencia. Así, en un momento de Manual Cesarano podía escribía: “Ahora tener origen como fin es un programa perfectamente realista” [3]. Un realismo que optaba por abandonar el produccionismo apocalíptico al interior de la filosofía de la historia del capital en la metástasis de sus representaciones sociales. O bien, como escribe en uno de los momentos más emblemáticos contra la reificación del sujeto del saber y de la conciencia en Manual de supervivencia: “…el decrépito-infante Yo se tambalea….Se desvanecerá, morirá finalmente, lo mataremos cualquiera sea la máscara que lleve en ese instante. Porque el fin es el origen, el nacimiento de una comunidad-especie realizada, el nacimiento continuo de la presencia coherencia, la afirmación del ser inobjetivo….El fin del Yo marcará el principio de la presencia” [4]. Volver a la prehistoria, entonces, para desembotar el dominio cibernético de la optimización biopolítica administrativa de la vida que domicilia a la especie humana en el armazón de la producción de lo ficticio. Así, el vaciamiento paulatino de la vida tendrá en cada ápice de la simbolización el sol irradiante de la justificación y de la expansión del verosímil retórico de una comunidad abstracta. Por lo tanto, para Cesarano, la embestida contra la reificación del “Yo” debe su destitución a la intempestividad de la pasión del pensamiento como contraofensiva ante el ascenso depredador de la fuerza de la objetivación. Justo en este umbral Cesarano inscribe la partida para la época del agotamiento del reino de las formas y de la crisis de la legitimación política: “No es una clase de lo social, entonces, la que realizará la abolición de las clases emancipándose, sino que la negación de lo “social” y de sus clases, efectuada por el cuerpo proletarizado de la especie, emancipará a la especie de la “sociedad” como comunidad ficticia, prehumana” [5]. Apostar por particiones de valor social (el infinito juego de la hegemonía without end) solo podía perpetuar el espesor de la más rampante agonía.

De la misma manera que la crisis histórica validada por la astucia negativa del proceso infinito de acumulación apela a nuevas artes de estabilización y optimización de la abstracción Social (el paradigma de la unificación cibernética que Cesarano logra identificar en un momento de reestructuración de los propios mecanismos de la gobernabilidad del liberalismo tardío y de la consumación de la mediatización de los entes) de su propia incesante reproducción; para Cesarano toda “critica radicale” – que debe ser asumida como crítica en suspenso, más allá de todo sujeto posicional y posicionado en la estructura del movimiento humanista de la negatividad dialéctica – ya no se caracteriza por funcionamientos programáticos preelaborados mediante el rigor epistémico de la vanguardia militante o justificados en la divisa de la objetividad metodológica; se trata, en última instancia, de constituir espacios sensibles que despejen la desficcionalización absoluta de un movimiento existencial y de estilo cuyo único programa histórico se constataba mediante la inalienabilidad de la comunidad de la especie humana: la irreductibilidad de la pasión [6].

Si la modernidad consistió en la domesticación de las pasiones con el fin de impulsar el rendimiento objetivo y alienado de la diversificación de los intereses diagramados en el valor, ahora se trata de afirmar la liberación del yo como fractal de la no-objetualidad de mis pasiones sin que ésta sea entendida como una mera compensación traducida a la autonomía postromántica del arte [7]. La pasión del pensamiento en Cesarano es condición hiperbólica de una erótica que desoculta la chôra de lo inconmensurable; esto es, la distancia que marca el encuentro entre los restos del mundo natural y el uso vocativo de la lengua: “….ese paso de acercamiento, es abrazo de amor y de lucha, parece tanto más absurdo cuanto más lo cotidiano parece desierto. Es en este movimiento que cada uno podrá, encontrándose en la persistencia del deseo resistente a la aniquilación objetual, descubrir en sí mismo la presencia de ese programa histórico que es la pasión y sentirse listo” [8]. La autoafirmación de la génesis inconclusa de la pasión descentra el nudo gordiano de el terror de una vida sometida al proceso de adaptación en el que la máquina y la humanidad se cierran sobre si mismas.

Pero la pasión es el recurso que valida el recorrido ético de la apropiación de mi existencia; esto es, no es ni condición antropológica ni forma en la que puedo orientar mi relación con lo inefable del mundo. Y dado que nunca sabemos realmente qué constituye el objeto de la pasión – al menos que este dispuestos a abdicar la pasión a la matriz recursiva de lo objetual – la existencia sólo puede darse en la disponibilidad de la vida misma cuando ésta coexiste con la laguna de la pasión y del asombro en el mundo. Dicho en otras palabras, de nada vale “vivir por una pasión” como suele decir el automatismo retórico del contrabando de las pasiones y de la propaganda de agitación social; el valor absoluto radica allí donde la pasión se deja vivir en el movimiento finito de una vida que no puede ser otra, y que solo se mide con respeto a las propias conquistas o encuentros que marcan el ritmo de un destino. En este sentido, como escribe Cesarano en la glosa “Erotismo y Barbarie” (1974) que incluimos en este dossier: “La pasión es el sentido de lo sagrado que se demuestra como tal” [9]. La tonalidad sagrada de la pasión es aquello que no puede ser verbalizado como imperativo o veneración externa para la promoción servil de los hombres-masas orientados a la infinita idolatría sacrificial que, en el curso de la secularización cristiana, implicó el triunfo ficticio del ordenamiento del principio civil [10]. Para Cesarano, las pasiones de la especie es el no-lugar – de ahí que sea una chôra, un lugar de contacto imaginal con la expresión que solicita siempre en cada caso el umbral del afuera – mediante el cual la vida encuentra formas contra la supervivencia y la agobiante auto-aniquilación que el logos descarga sobre cada exigencia vital.

Sin muchos más rodeos podemos decir que el programa de la pasión sigue abierto en una época, la nuestra, cuyo régimen cibernético-administrativo sobre todos los ámbitos del viviente ha conseguido intensificarse con mayor ferocidad en el punto más álgido de nuestra civilización. Como si se tratase de un don fortuito, la excelente y cuidada traducción en castellano del mítico libro de Giorgio Cesarano por Emilio Sadier publicada en La Cebra y Kaxilda finalmente nos facilita una conversación que, a pesar de haber sido postergada durante tanto tiempo, regresa con la intensidad y el brillo de una voz entonada desde las catacumbas para confirmarnos que no todo ha quedado obliterado. Sobre esos restos se arremolina la ascesis singular de la pasión común de los hombres póstumos tras un mundo que se eclipsa. Y de este modo regresa la conquista singular de los encuentros, la despotencialización del ego, y el recogimiento de una morada en la insondable piel de las estrías del mundo. El dossier que presentamos a continuación sobre el pensamiento y la poética de Cesarano no pretende constituir otro gesto que aquel que contribuye, a su manera, a la continua “comunicación entre almas” al interior de una época que continúa encandilada en la fuerza de la objetivación y la producción de la impaciencia [11]. Y cómo intuía Cesarano en unos versos de su temprano L’erba bianca (1959): “…la buena canción tardó demasiado, pero había que esperar en el vacío para dejar resonar al corazón. Ahora lo sabes, hoy toda fortuna se ha disipado” [12]. ¿Nos hemos disipado también nosotros? Allí donde las pasiones toman la palabra y los tintes del alma dilatan su expresión las dudas para semejante interrogación disminuye y se disipa. Así, atravesados por el timbre de la pasión, moramos en la inesencia, pero sin realmente pertenecer a ella.

*Esta es la introducción al dossier sobre el pensamiento de Giorgio Cesarano que preparé a raiz se la publicación en castellano de Manual de supervivencia (Kaxilda, La Cebra 2024), y de próxima aparición en la revista chilena Escrituras americana en la primavera de 2025.

Notas

1. Willy Thayer. ‘”Fin del trabajo intelectual y fin idealista/capitalista de la historia en la ‘era de la subsunción real del capital’”, en El fragmento repetido: escritos en estado de excepción (ediciones metales pesados, 2008).

2. John Cowper Powys. The Inmates (Macdonald, 1952).

3. Giorgio Cesarano. Manual de supervivencia (La Cebra, Kaxilda 2023), 112.

4. Ibid., 49-50.

5. Ibid., 130.

6. Furio di Paola. “Dopo la dialettica”, Aut Aut, N.165-166, 1978, 63-103.

7. Para la elaboración de este argumento, ver el ensayo de Gianni Carchia, “Modernità anti-romantica”, en Pharmakos: Il mito trasfigurato (Ernani Stampatore, 1984), 9-13.

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

9. Giorgio Cesarano. “Erotismo o Barbarie (1974)”, incluido en traducción al castellano en este dossier.

10. Carlo Levi. Paura della libertà (Neri Pozza, 2018), 120.

11. Gianni Carchia. “Tragedia y persuasion: nota sobre Carlo Michelstaedter”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Editorial Tecnos, 1994), 35.

12. Giorgio Cesarano. “A un amico”: “So che per te di troppo tardarono / il bacio dell’amata e la buona canzone / ma bisognava saper asperttare / e lungamente e a vuoto lasciar risuonare il cuore. / Ora lo sai, chiusa ogni ventura.”, en L’erba bianca (Schwarz Editore, 1959), 39.

Blok charitas Church destruction divine gnosis Invisible Kingdom Monica Ferrando mysterium iniquitatis Mystery mysticism Newman Revolution Theology tradition truth Vladimir Lossky Von Balthasar world

Vladimir Lossky’s third way. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his war diary Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (2012), which recounts his itinerant vicissitudes in occupied France, the Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky makes an explicit case for the emergence of a third way beyond conservation and destruction, and its modern ideological avatars that led astray into the modern catastrophe; that is, the social revolution and conservative reaction cloaked under “traditionalism”. As it has been recently glossed, Lossky was not the only person from the East to be preoccupied with putting a halt to the eternal dialectical movement of destruction and conservation only fueling historical abstraction. Indeed, immediately in wake of the Russian Revolution, the poet Alexander Blok, in an epistolary exchange with Vladimir Mayakovsky, and anticipating the bewildering enthusiasm of the revolutionary energy, also demanded an effective exit from servitude so that “a third thing appears, equally dissimilar to construction and destruction” [1]. It matters little whether Lossky knew about Blok’s “third figure”, although it is at the same time impossible not to have it in mind when reading his own annotation in the June 16th entry of his diary, which does seem to offer a answer to Blok’s proposal:

“Nonetheless, revolutionaries are always in the wrong since, in their juvenile fervour for everything new, in their hopes for a better and a way of life built on justice they always base themselves on theories that are abstract and artificial, making a clean sweep of living tradition, which is after all, founded on the experience of centuries. Conservatives are always wrong, too…for in their desire to preservice ancient institutions that have withstood the test of time, they destroy the necessity of renewal and man’s yearning for a better way of life. Is there, then, a third way? Another destiny for society than of always being subject to the threat of revolutions which destroy life, or reactionary attitudes which mummify it? Or is this the inevitable fate of all terrestrial cities, the nature of their existence? In fact, only in the Church can we find both a Tradition that knows no revolution and at the same time, the impetus towards a new life that has no end. Which is why she is in possession of those infinite resources upon which may draw all who are called to govern the perishable cities of this world” [2].

It is no surprise that for both Blok and Lossky, the fundamental tension in the amphibology between conservation and rupture rests on the problem of “tradition”; given that, as Blok had also eloquently written in his letter to his fellow poet: “a breach with traditions is a tradition”. This is something that an artist like Kazimir Malevich understood well in his programmatic text about museums in the wake of the revolution (“On the Museum”, 1919): the turn into ashes of all the works of art altered their aura, but it left in place the topological frame and it still produced an image; in order words, the destructive artworks still demanded a museological space for storage, thus enacting new principles of the triumphant revolution. Understood in this sense, tradition is merely the retroactive accumulation of practices by the archē that orients its development retroactively from the point of view of the present with provisions towards the administration of the future. But, how did Lossky understand by the notion of “Tradition”? Rereading the fragment of his war diary entry, it would seem that this notion merely rests on the dogmatic transformations within the Church, and in this sense, a conceptual elucidation similar to the doctrinal exegesis not very different from John Henry Newman’s An essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845). However, in his important essay “Tradition and Traditions”, Lossky attempts at defining the site and tension of the tradition, which he notes that in the language of theology it has been a term left vague and repeatedly undefined [3]. Lossky writes with sharp precision: “Tradition sometimes receives that of a teaching kept secret, not divulged, lest the mystery be profaned by the uninitiate” [4]. Thus, Tradition is the positive and textual scripture that registers the Word, but it is not exhausted in the positive scriptural authority.

At the heart of Lossky’s argumentation about the theological meaning of Tradition, is the fact that it exceeds both textual sources and narrative mastery and transmission. In fact, the theology garment of Tradition belongs to the mystery of revelation shared in conspiracy, rumors or whispers [5]. And although, in his essay Lossky reaffirms himself that Tradition is the invisible intertwined with the Church – what keeps the “critical spirit of the institution” for the incorporation of new dogmatic definitions – it is nonetheless important to note that for the theologian, Tradition as “opposed to the reality of the word, it would be necessary to say that Tradition is Silence” [6]. In this sense, Tradition is that which is created and transmitted but that no one has the right nor the authority to speak through its incommunicable name. Is Tradition transmitted at all? If it is not through the written word, how can there be any continuity? This is the ultimate lacuna of the theological underpinning of Tradition for Lossky: Tradition can only be properly understood as the crafting of a “unique mode of receiving truth”; in order words, it names the contact between revelation and the witness who receives its ‘fullness of knowledge’, which far from mastering the totality, it points to “the external limit…the narrow door which leads to the knowledge of Truth” [7]. As Monica Ferrando has recently glossed from Plato’s philosophical corpus, any robust conception of Tradition should be understood as that which maintains an absolute inseparability between wonder and salvation, as well as bridging invention and received grace (charîs) [8]. One step at a time, we invent traditions whenever we are thinking through the abyss that separates our language from the inheritance bestowed upon us. Tradition moves in every ethical position of thought overcoming the pseudo-authorization of alienated and metaphorical knowledge of the past.

But if the Church is no longer the institutional site for the keeping of the impossibility of the transmission and renewal of Tradition and revealed Truth – subsumed to the mysterium iniquitatis that works against the possibility of the rendition of the eternal life of a permanent vita nova – it entails that one can still hold on to Lossky’s assertion that the task is to be attentive to the ossified expressions and reified appearances of Truth against the “living Spirit of Truth”. Hence, to insist on the restitution of the Church in our current predicament, would place us on the side of instrumentalized and subject-oriented salvation that turns away from the active kingdom that is the only passage from the world of the living to that of the dead. The traditionalists or integralists are incompetent representatives of the Tradition in this sense: as Von Balthasar once argued, they lack the humor and contact with the invisible to apprehend the mystery that arrives without solicitation, as pure depotentialization [9]. In a godless world of the secularized gnosis of political force – that is, after the fleeing of the gods – perhaps theology could only be understood as the path of Tradition of uncountable wonders and the event of speech that produces an unworldly sensation within this world. Tradition brings the world beyond its shape and legibility. In this sense, we are always participants of Truth that the world cannot retain, and thus keepers of an enduring secret that will ineluctably outlive us.

Notes

1. Philippe Theophanidis. “Alexander Blok: ‘A breach with traditions is a tradition'”, October 13, 2024: https://aphelis.net/breach-with-traditions-alexander-blok/

2. Vladimir Lossky. Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 54.

3. Vladimir Lossky. “Tradition and Traditions”, in In the image and likeness of God (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 141.

4. Ibid., 144-145.

5. Ibid., 146.

6. Ibid., 150.

7. Ibid., 162.

8. Monica Ferrando. “La libera grazie della tradizione”, in Un anno con Platone (Neri Pozza, 2024), 424.

9. Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The Office of Peter And the Structure of the Church (Ignatius Press, 2013), 403.

Infrapolitical Reflections

Author: infrapoliticalreflections

Unelevated politics. by Gerardo Muñoz

The instrument stripped bare. On Adan Kovacsics’ Guerra y lenguaje (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Of the destruction of worlds. On Mauricio Amar Díaz’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

Osculum pacis. by Gerardo Muñoz

Kallopismata orphnes: the eclipse of language. by Gerardo Muñoz

Americanism and whaling. by Gerardo Muñoz

Pasiones de Giorgio Cesarano: introducción a un dossier. por Gerardo Muñoz

Vladimir Lossky’s third way. by Gerardo Muñoz