Two observations on the Non Kongress bulletins. by Gerardo Muñoz

I have read with genuine interest the five bulletins put out by the organizers of the Non-Kongress meeting, and it is only fair that I put some preliminary comments with no other purpose than to highlight a few points (I take it that other will have theirs, and I am looking forward to this discussion). To start somewhere, I will first say that I am fond of the open balance sheet format that puts on the table hot-button issues without exhausting all them. The starting point is broad and clear: our current predicament is one marked by the collapse of the ground of politics and the total absorption of politics into a social-moral designs. These days I also come from drafting a preliminary – an in a way a bit autobiographical – balance sheet of the last decade of (failed) debates in contemporary Spanish leftist politics (2014-2024), which allows for reflection of a contemporary sequence, draw a few conclusions, and move on. If we do this something has already change, and we have avoided the anxiety of feeling that everything must be said. The momentary arousal provided by rhetorical completion pays the price of immobility and confiscates the truly important thing: what will never be thoroughly said, or stated only indirectly, is the condition for any true communication of thought to have a chance even if it rarely happens. This aspiration is sincere and from its inception it already puts university discourse (and its experts in the intellectual division of labor) in trance. And this trance opens a region that allows for something to emerge in a new light sin sanata.

The five-installment bulletin seems to provide two general movements: an analytical sketch of current domination and several conditions for “refusal” or “exodus” under the generic designation of “destitution”. On the first level (the analytics of domination) the bulletin suggests that the configuration of power is organized as an imbrication between the scientific medical apparatus, the expansion of infrastructures and digitalization, and an administration of morality as stratification of values in social optimization that were effectively accelerated in the wake of the Covid19 policy directives. And it is also obvious that what also binds these three different strategies and domains is the administration of the hollow and the fictitious subject as the last subject of nihilism (nothingness as unconstrained force) for ecological catastrophe. Now it is utterly clear that – in aftermath of the gran designs of productive modernization and formal labor productivity – the true and ultimate objective of capital is the world; and, more concretely, the human species’ exposure to worldly phenomena. Hence, there is an implicit, not totally fleshed out, latency in the bulletins which one could situate under the turn towards territoriality, location, place, and fragmentation of the earth. Of course, there is ample risk here to assume that locality (communes, community, autonomous zone) is just an exception to planetary unification that labors negatively for the ongoing destruction; a sort of ‘partisan’ Benedictine community under the shadow of Empire. This is why it is important that Hugh Farrell reminds that any territorial program can no longer be unliteral and must be opened to the contamination of the experiences must incorporate play and openness to its outside [1].

This is touching the limit of the defunct strategy of occupation in which the spatial unity accomplishes the self-police work through the veiling of the good conscious subjective militancy, as I recently also saw in the Pro-Palestinian university encampments in the US [2]. More than a decade ago, Alberto Moreiras warned about the ontotheological determination of locationality as a fold of identity, and he called for a “dirty atopianism” against the allure of compensatory critical regionalisms, and which we can connect (with all the caveats necessary) to the form of countercommunity and the difficult problem of the non-site of the khorā that marks an unbreachable limit to the totalization of the ground of the polis and the political [3]. Life or existence at the end of the day is not “this body” or “this thought”; it is how this inclination connects to the surround of the world. And here is yet another problem, which is delicate as it is difficult to untangle: the need to for a reinvention of a concept after the destruction of its civilization diffuse uses in the Western tradition: “freedom”. We do not need Shelley to tell us, but it is always useful to recall it again: “…the state of probation in which we now reside is merely a preparatory stage in which….to fit us for a more exalted state of existence, is not the deprivation of liberty the deepest, the severest of injuries?” [4].

It is only now that we can understand that liberty of the subject – and the political subject of liberty – was a ragged garment when compared to the freedom of the surround — think paintings of Cézanne as a gesture of gathering to “declare the essence of the world to be existing together, a mutual self-supporting and carrying of things”, states an eminent art historian [5]. Political language, or the intensification of language through the lexicon of politics is too vulgar to do the work and the heavy lifting; we have to be capable, I think, to look elsewhere (say, painting) for claims of a transfigurative sense of what it means to grasp this notion of liberty that takes us to the very beginning. It is a difficult problem, no doubt, but against immediacy, the sensorial must be expanded beyond its commonplace allocation into the latent or full-fledged central conflict. Those images are also too poor of world; even if we know that the world “can have no temporal view of things…the world pass into nothing in the very multiplicity of its instancing” [6].

The fifth bulletin calls for an “ethical ground”, but immediately passes to claim a “politics of destitution”, which is overtly anchored in the recent cycle of “experiential revolts” as stable instances of this passing world that does not succumb to conclusion. I guess it all depends how much weight – or how deep down – one is willing to exert on this figure. Or how extensive the figure is — for someone like Rodrigo Karmy, the revolt is the turbulence of imagination itself. But the question remains as well: does not revolt, as prefiguration of a politics to come, or as a politics of destitution, run the risk of assuming a general central framework of entering into the world? If the precondition for the accumulation of freedom of the surround is given by the belligerent loss of fear of solitude, then this could mean, among other things, that the revolt does not stand as the exclusive theater of opposition or refusal [7]. The freeing of the instancing of the world means that there are multiple ways in which existence deals with the increasing pain at the end of social cohesion. The end of the Social bond entails the intensification of pain as the fundamental stimmung of our times.

Notes

1.Hugh Ferrell. “The Strategy of Composition”, Ill Will, January 2023: https://illwill.com/composition

2. Gerardo Muñoz. “Reporte desde Columbia: Gaza contra el encierro”, Revista Disenso 2024: https://revistadisenso.com/reporte-desde-columbia/

3. Alberto Moreiras. The Exhaustion of Difference (Duke U Press, 2001) 23.

4. Percy Shelley. “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things” (1811): https://poeticalessay.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

5. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965).

6. Cormac McCarthy. The Crossing (1995), 154.

7. Moses Dobruska. “How it All Began: The Strasbourg Theses”, Ill Will 2023: https://illwill.com/how-it-all-began

Boris Pasternak Community creation destiny destruction Earth experience form of life friendship Fritz Saxl immortality language Poetry sensible soul symbol tradition

Pasternak’s symbolism and immortality. by Gerardo Muñoz

“Symbolism and immortality”, was the title of a talk that a very young Boris Pasternak gave in 1913 to a group of students, although the paper was finalized around 1917. It has been known that the integral version was destroyed or misplaced, and only a synthesis was preserved in the author’s papers, which provides access to the thicket of the argument, which concerned ultimately the immortality of artistic creation and the transhistorical participation of the human species in the enduring process. Pasternak himself inscribes this lecture at the heights of his ars poetica: “My main purpose was to put forward the proposal that perhaps this maximally subjective and universally human corner or lot of the soul was art’s immemorial area of activity and its chief content. And, further, that although the artist is of course mortal like everybody else, the happiness of existence which he has felt is immortal and can be felt through his works by others centuries after him” [1]. Unlike the contentious positions about the creative genius and the orientation of the poet (dichter als Führer) that soon enough will inform the thick aura of European modernism in the age of dissonance, for Pasternak in the 1910s (the same decade as the early Lukacs and the youthful Michelstaedter), creation concerned a gathering of experience outside subjectivity; it was fundamentally the experience of the outside beyond the subject, which could only be cultivated by the poetic sensibility’s relation to that outside. It is not clear where there was a figural specificity to the notion of “poet” that Pasternak advances; but, what is essential, is that the poetic task was only possible through a spiritual formation and deployment of symbolization, that is, of the transfigurative use of language.

Pasternak does not distinguish between vulgar and crafted poetic language; rather he uses the term symbolism to account for the sensible immortal reservoir that is transmitted in the stratification of the genesis of the human race. It is not of minor importance that Pasternak is writing in the dawn of a concrete materialist revolution, in which possession is only registered, counted, and even “destroyed” as mere “stuff”, thus incapable of solving the crisis of the transmission of tradition and blind to the problem of sense. Indeed, perhaps the revolution can only deepen the epochal crisis of symbolization. Pastnark will write affirmatively: “Immortality takes possession of the contents of the soul…in pure form this is what symbolism teaches” [2]. In a conception that is strikingly similar to Warburg & Saxl’s conception of the symbol (and history now designed as a study of the coagulation of symbologies) as a surplus discharged of energy as the reservoir of human sensation and formulas of imagination (the pathos formulae); the attunement towards symbolization never amounts to an accumulation of meaning and narration, but rather it is what preserves the earliest and purest stages of human expression, as argued by Saxl [3].

This is why there is no immortality except in the beginning: the real process of the anthrogenesis is only accessible in those moments of passion and experience while “being observant and drawing from nature”, Pasternak will claim in his talk. The immortality to be retained, it seems now clear, is not that of a future and postponed soteriological communal “life”; it is rather a life that clings to the ordinary and intuitive symbolism that resists the monstrous numbing of fictitious life commanded by the blackmail of the reality principle required by orderability. In this light, perhaps Alfred Metraux is right in that going beyond the neolithic age marked a catastrophic wandering for human beings. (And is not the poetic instantiation a painful reminder of this?)

The stratification of symbolism was of a higher reality; a playful dance between the figure and the non-figural, between the visible and the invisible, between the countable and the non-countable. Pasternak situates this tendency under the sign of “theos“, a religious character in which the texture of the soul is able to find some breathing space as condition of possibility for the opening of symbolism. Modernity is many things at once, but for Pasternak what was being “withered away” at the altar of morality and politics, Church and State (his terms verbatim) was precisely the historical draught of the symbolic man: “The communion of mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic, because it is full of meaning” [4]. This means that there is no community of salvation that serves as the general economy transport between the two kingdoms; if there is a Kingdom it is only of the symbolization of the irreducibility of souls, that can only enjoy immortality in the renunciation of what the materialist and survivalist life is capable of offering in detriment of the experiential possibilities of creation and language when grasping the sense of deathlessness.

In the life of civil society you will live organized only unto death, without any experience of immortal death of any other, given that death has become mere transaction, a burdensome logistical ritual, a common spectacle. And this is why Pasternak, unlike the Cold War pawn that sometimes he was forced to embody, gradually became convinced that poetic existence could only take place outside the Social with no role or mission to subscribe to: “Do not reserve a poet’s position: it is a dangerous, if not empty” [5]. What was at stake was not a “new life” but a second birth (title of his own poetry collection, Vtoroe Roshdenie from 1934) to plunge into the depth of symbolization. The task is not to invent anything “new” (that modern fetishism), but to regain the life of the soul where the origin commences: “…and here art stops, And earth and fate breath in your face” [6]. It is a mysterious and impossible portrait of a face that reckons with the passing of the symbol and its absolute mystery. The very texture of expressivity that, against all odds, lingers on.

Notes

1. Boris Pasternak. An essay in Autobiography (Collins and Harvill Press, 1919), 69.

2. Boris Pasternak. “Symbolism and immortality”, in The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writing on Inspiration and Creation (2008), 40-41.

3. Fritz Saxl. “The expressive gestures of Fine Arts”, in Lectures V1-V2 (Warburg Institute, 1957).

4. Boris Pasternak. “Foreword”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 14.

5. Boris Pasternak. “To a Friend”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 100.

6. Boris Pasternak. “Second Birth”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 109.

Andrew Marvell Borrell Community creation Cuniberto Dante Empire European Union existence gaze Henry Miller interregnum landscape Nihilism nomos passivity Petrarch Poetry political legitimacy Theology thought world

The Empire’s garden. by Gerardo Muñoz

The European Union elections this spring restate what otherwise is already felt almost everywhere; mainly, that the destiny of politics has ceased to mean anything historically, and that political representation stands as a compensatory preamble and veneer to planetary conflagration, in which Europe has become a minoritarian and bystander actor. This also means that the histrionic reaction to this reality can only bring out its counters more sharply: both pro-nationalist sovereignty political platforms, and abstract administrative pro-union coalitions are junior partners of the current geopolitical planetary regime, and they merely differ in mild policy nuances, social spending allocations, and rhetorical probing that can also be as flexible as needed (such is the case of Italy’s Giorgia Miloni who one morning can be in a Vox Party Congress in Madrid, and later in the afternoon receive orders from Ursula von der Leyen and the White House).

The passage of destiny politics to the gigantism of geopolitics entails not just the erasure of the modern boundaries of enmity recognition, but also the introduction of an administrative plasticity that responds to ad hoc organizational and infrastructural planning, as symptomatic of the collapse of the subject of history into the dominance of the objective. The final stage of the “disenchantment of the world” that characterizes bureaucratic legibility finally appears as the reign of objectivity and the objective. And the concrescence of objecthood as the last avatar of the colonization of forms of life allows us to see how the compensatory constructions of ‘community’ – both the “European Union” and the multiple sovereign communities as reactions to it – repeatedly oscillate between communities of fictive identitarian belonging, and formal political communities devoid of constituent authority. Regardless of their contrasting designs and contrasts, both defenders of national sovereignty and the supra-national EU share the same allure of communitarian integralism: a community for the living, that is, for those integrated into the social apparatus of a well lighted and funded administered world. Respectively, we can see that the debate that took place in the late 1980s about negative community in Europe among philosophers (Jean Luc-Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben) has not lost any of its poignant relevance, as the compensatory communitarian options multiply and spread without ever retreating from the summoned shadow of politica arcana. In a certain sense, the confabulation of communities of belonging and communities of faith are dispensable painkillers to the effective disintegration of the immanence of the social bond. This explains why “people” can only assent to them.

Both community form and political empire are united by a legislative political principle that today remains chattered in the final stage of intrahistorical collapse. There is no communitarian option today that does not end up living negatively on the hinterlands of the nexus of Empire; an exception to the nomic organization of the globe incapable of taking into account the inmates of community form. What is at stake is access to the world; an excess beyond communitarian identification and the administration of the waning politics of Empire.

One can, I think, read Josep Borrell’s words in a speech given at the European Diplomatic Academy in 2020 in this direction, where he calls Europe a well cultivated garden [1]. Obviously if we read it in a political key, Borrell’s address maintains the perennial framework of civilization and barbarism, and in his head the role of the ‘gardener’ is only a metaphoric deployment to exalt the morality of the squalid and humiliated European diplomats on the global stage. However, we know that there is much more to the earthly garden, which retreats already at the moment it is enunciated, since it is a mythic-poetic trope that colors the sensibility of concordia rather than elevating itself as a sociological category of political orientation.

As Italian historian Flavio Cuniberto notes in his beautiful book Viaggio in Italia (2020), for a poet like Dante the meridional Mediterranean region was the garden of empire (“che’l giardin de lo imperio sia diserto”) which attunes itself to the measureless relation between earth, landscape, and life. Is not this what is preparatory – that is, what must be posited in sensibility and in imagination through style – before any reduction of life into community and political mediation? Have not we felt this dissolving transport before a landscape in the outskirts of Tuscany or Orvieto? And is not this what political ecology (Green New Deals) are after in their effort to foreclose the world? The garden unworks empirical objecthood through its very refusal to be integral to devastation, usurpation and destruction of loci. This is why for Henry Miller the only “ideal community” would have the garden as its evanescent topoi, a “god filled place” even for those that have no gods:

“Even if it lasts for only a few moments, the privilege of looking at the world as a spectacle of unending life and not a repository of persons, creatures and objects to be impressed in our service, is something never to be forgotten. The ideal community, in a sense, would be loose fluid aggregation of an individual whole elected to be alone and detached to be at one with themselves and all that lives and breathes. It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believe in (a) God. It would be a paradise, even though the word had long disappeared from our vocabulary” [2].

Looking at the world as a spectacle – of course, this brings to mind Petrarch’s specular heights at Mount Ventoux, in which the possibility of seeing, for once, has the upper hand against the mastering the worldly phenomena at our “service” and proportionality. There is no utopia without this attempt to grasp the spectacle in its taking place, infinitely exceeding the rationality that vests reality into amorphous abstraction. Perhaps the garden is a figure of this necessity of irreducible outlook, which in Marvell’s language touches the ungraspable as it is inwardly felt: “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade” [3]. The promise of a new life takes resource in the abode of that green shade.

Notes

1. Josep Borrell. “Les jardiniers européens doivent aller “dans la jungle”, Le Grand Continent, October 2022: https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2022/10/16/les-jardiniers-europeens-doivent-aller-dans-la-jungle/

2. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronomys Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34.

3. Andrew Marvell. “The Garden”, Selected Poems (Routledge, 2002), 60.

Adorno Anatole France camp civilization domestication end of metaphysics equivalent Giorgio Cesarano hunger materialism Nihilism polis prehistory reproduction Robert Antelme sense Social survival utopia vitalism world

Hunger and gluttony after civilization. by Gerardo Muñoz

It could easily be argued that one of the central immaterial characters of Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947) is the constant state of hunger. It is the more telling that Antelme – and it is also surprising that most of his relevant critics have been unattentive to this problem – does not reflect explicitly about the nature of hunger in his account, as if already hunger as “facticity” of the destruction of human experience in the camp was enough to show how the crisis of effective symbolization with the world means, ultimately, the struggle for the maintenance of the nutritional condition for survival [1]. It is a particular state of nutritional privation that colors not just every community or social relation in L’espèce humaine, but also every thought, passive meandering, and even moral clarity of the deportee life in the camp. The pathetic struggles over pieces of bread or scoops of putrid soup while deposing the human race from the world brings them back, at the level of consciousness, to the raw origins of its anthropological self-affirmation. And this means that every bite of food and every bit of protein digested by the human being is only the antecedent of the future need to meet the elemental nutritional gain for survival. The ‘consciousness towards hunger’ colored in the camp becomes the mirror image of the incessant eating disorder of hypermodern social adaptation as two forms of predatory struggle over the exchange goods of the world.

Excessive eating and nutritional deficiency are, in this sense, two pothistorical temporal circuit of human beings as a species of hunger and gluttony. About a decade ago a book entitled Hunger: the oldest problem (2014), written by Martín Caparrós, stood out as a proof of a materialist conception at a planetary scale, which for the novelist could easily be solved by drafting the legibility of material inequality and charting the regional disproportionate asymmetries between the “good eaters” (and good feeders), and those in permanent hunger, malnutrition, localized famine, and potential starvation. For Caparros, given the height of our “civilizational progress”, hunger revealed the “original plague of humanity….which now can be solved through a political decision” [2]. The substance of the “political decision” for hunger of the human race was as empty as the very nauseating fatigue of real starvation, although as a rhetorical ploy it does contribute, even against its own presuppositions, to the civilizational paradigm that structures the poles of gluttony and hunger that sustains the domestication of the human species in conformity – under the terror imposed by the glacial tonality of nihilism – with a ‘good enough life’, as an American cultural scholar univocally upheld it [3]. A deconstructed Michelin rated restaurant is as much of the ‘good enough life’ as the oversized pots of soup delivered by World Central Kitchen in any of the ongoing war zones.

A ‘good enough life’, always marching towards the absolute postponement of an absolute hunger in any part of the planet, whose most recent avatar (not the final by any means) is the well wrapped brown bag of “food app delivery” that is silently placed in front of your house door. The food delivery package, very much like the breadcrumbs of the concentration camp described in L’espèce humaine, enter full circle even if the arrangement of symbolic reality says otherwise. It does not matter that there are human hand struggles for dregs in the camp while in civil society there is a seemingly untouched brown bag; what makes them equivalent is how the autonomization of hunger and gluttony have been deprived of everything except its own functionalization. In other words, the absolutization of gluttony and hunger as abstract nexus of social reproduction entails the complete devastation of commensality, and all features of experiential sharing that in the ancient tradition is gathered in the banquet or in wine festivities [4].

This absolute autonomization turns its back to the world, which has now been transformed as a mere reserve and container. This is why the analogies with the wild cornucopia of the elastic worlds of Gargantua or Pantagruel, or even the mythical land of Cockaigne fall short, and can only contribute to fetichize the problem of the “true hunger” of the human species beyond nutritional and biological arrangement. The dialectical movement at work in the alleged returned to the primal anthropological condition comes at a price: the sensible and meaningful relation, which is no longer to be invented but rather to be renounced in the elaborate thickening of a social space organized through depredation and adaptation. In his Manuale di sopravvivenza, Giorigo Cesarano noted that the problem of hunger exceeded the political and biological determinations, since hunger was first and foremost the problem of the completion of nihilism – the only hunger was that of the wandering of the human species reveals the hunger of meaning as a the true double negation:

“At the end of prehistoric times, the most ancient problem signals the return of the negative instinct: hunger. But this time is about the hunger of meaning that exceeds, while bringing it to synthesis, the anxiety of survival as merely an animal and its false resolution as a life that transcendentals the idealist forms of the human “ideal”. …both the negative instinct and the rational separation, having conquered some coherence in its praxis, from a possible totality seeks to insert being in a real university in order to be known truly as such” [5].

In this dense moment of his book, Cesarano seems to be arriving at an important inflection point: that is, the primal instinct of hunger, precisely as fealt and maximized in the new existential poverty of the human experience, is already compensatory to the concrete realization of an absolute hunger of meaning that emerges in both the privative stage of hunger, and in the consummation of any imaginable and desirable meal. Hence, the return to the facticity of the prehistoric stage of instinct negativity is ultimately the final exclusive dish: the nothingness of nihilism to retain the illusion of, in the words of Antelme’s poem “The soup”, going to far (or as far as it needs to be that the “world doesn’t end” [6]. The anthropophagic energies are the last tools of self-burial of the bicameral man in the wake of intramundane extinction [7].

But the dialectical vengeance in the epoch of real subsumption is hereby expressed in its uttermost kernel: the material world can only take the image of a predatory park of hunters and preys, of eating and being eaten. In the privation of death, the fictitious life of being is already a form of expropriating death as ongoing struggle for survival and self-conquest of life’s own organic illness, as it appears in Anatole France’s fragment: “No, I would rather think that organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet. It would be intolerable to believe that throughout the infinite universe there was nothing but eating and being eaten” [8]. The poverty of a restricted vitalist self-reflection can only described the organization of the world as a civilization that resembles a Pac-Man maze of the circulation of the equivalent. It is not difficult agree with Adorno that this is a perfect image of the integral society without any residue – as it continues to be in any point of the planet – is the last possible well administered utopia.

Notes

1. See the essays in the volume On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries (The Malboro Press, 2003), 55-203.

2. Martín Caparrós. Hunger: The Oldest Problem (Melville House, 2020).

3. Avram Alpert. The Good-Enough Life (Princeton University Press, 2022).

4. Albert Hirschman. “Melding the public and private spheres: taking commensality seriously”, in Crossing Boundaries: Selected Essays (Zone Books, 1998), 11-28.

5. Giorgio Cesarano. Manuale di sopravvivenza (Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 70.

6. Robert Antelme. “The Soup”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries (The Malboro Press, 2003), 36.

7. Julian Jayne. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Msriner Book, 2000).

8. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2020), 83-84.

Bresson cinema Common Intellect creation Cristina Campo Etruscan history imagination infancy Mystery Nihilism sacred sensible soul spectacle symbol world

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

alienation Blanchot camp chora description destruction Duras equivalence Freedom inhumanity language novel pain representation Robert Antelme sayable sense separation Social soul Theodor Adorno Theology world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

3. Ibid., 289.

4.Ibid., 290.

5. Ibid., 135.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

administration Communism conatus essendi dialectics Elio Vittorini force Franco Fortini Freedom Gianni Carchia happiness humanism interregnum life militancy negation philosophy of history sacrifice Social survival thought tonality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

6. Ibid., 13.

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

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

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

10. Ibid., 196.

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

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

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

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

boredom Dionys Mascolo Duras ethos life narrative passion peitho polis political form sensation Theology thought trascendence vitalism writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

4. Ibid., 114.

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

adventure civilization Dionys Mascolo Elio Vittorini existence Freedom infancy irreductible militancy Mystery Nihilism sensation tonality world

Elio Vittorini on the time of existence. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

charitas Common Good demon Enlightenment Etruscans form of life happiness image Lezama Lima Mystery Poetry sensible world

The Etruscan bona lux in Paradiso. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infrapolitical Reflections

Author: infrapoliticalreflections

Two observations on the Non Kongress bulletins. by Gerardo Muñoz

Pasternak’s symbolism and immortality. by Gerardo Muñoz

The Empire’s garden. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

Elio Vittorini on the time of existence. by Gerardo Muñoz

The Etruscan bona lux in Paradiso. by Gerardo Muñoz