Casa Bayona’s pensive slave. by Gerardo Muñoz
In the Church Santa María del Rosario of Havana there is a pendentive cycle completed in the 1770s painted by the baroque artist José Nicolás de Escalera – whom according to Guy Pérez Cisneros, was truly the first professional Cuban painter of the tradition – that includes a black slave in a pensive pose seating…
The idea of a world state. by Gerardo Muñoz
As a theme for his 1949 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, an American scholar, Robert Hutchins, decided to titled his conference “St. Thomas and the World State”. It is obvious that Hutchins had fresh in his mind the fact that the long European Civil War of the twentieth century, which included two World Wars, was…
The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz
The central question that “The Aleph” raises is as banal as difficult to answer: who is Beatriz Viterbo? For one, she is dead. Borges’ Leibnizian experiment with the infinite point of the universe is that even assuming that we account for all the possible predicates of this person we still cannot exhaust who lurks behind…
The love of painting. by Gerardo Muñoz
There might very well be an internal affinity between painting and love that at some point it becomes indistinguishable. A painterly picture can become love unquenched for that which remains persistently fixed and unrealizable. In one of the short essay books of his Big Sur period, Henry Miller asked this very question of painting. For…
Gethsemane as experience. by Gerardo Muñoz
There is a panel in the Museo del Prado titled “Agony in the Garden”, attributed to the French painter Colart de Laon (1377) whose religious work barely survives (this panel is, in fact, one piece from an original triptych). The scene portrays the well known stay of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsamane on the…
Verónica Jaffé’s translation of the “Andenken”. by Gerardo Muñoz
Verónica Jaffé’s most recent Poesía, traduccion, libertad (2024), which gathers some of the translations already contained in Fredrich Hölderlin: Cantos Hespéricos (La Laguna de Campona, 2016), features an introductory essay where she reflects on translating Hölderlin’s poetry from the German into her own creative visual renderings of Spanish. Reflecting on the difficult task, if not…
Enamoured psyche. On Pablo Oyarzun’s Hölderlin, el recuerdo (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz
The concluding verses of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Rembrance” or “Memoria”), “Yet what remains, the poets found” stands as one of the preeminent testaments of modern poetry, and in Heidegger’s famous characterization, as a declaration of the task of the poet. At least since the time of Stefan George and Max Kommerell, the figure of poet or…
Zoning and the inalienable. By Gerardo Muñoz
The notion of “zoning” in American public law refers to the compartmentalization of land use (residential, governmental, industrial, among others), as well as the “zones” of the administrative framework that dispenses its delegated power. It is a common fact that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which includes the “Taking Clause”, states that…
En apertura. Respuesta a comentarios sobre La fisura (2025) en Ñuñoa. Por Gerardo Muñoz
Lo que sigue a continuación es una síntesis escrita de mi réplica en la presentación de La fisura posthegemónica (Doblea Editores, 2025), en la que intervinieron Mauricio Amar, Ángel Octavio Álvarez, Miguel Ángel Hermosilla, y Lieta Vivaldi el 3 de octubre en Ñuñoa, Santiago de Chile. Esos comentarios aparecerán en el próximo número de la…
Intervención para la presentación de Escritos desde la tierra baldía (2025) de Idris Robinson, UMCE, Santiago de Chile. Por Gerardo Muñoz
Ya no me toca decir mucho más sobre Escritos desde la tierra baldía (Irrupción Ediciones, 2025) de Idris Robinson, que se adelanta a la publicación de finales del este año de la versión en inglés publicada por Semiotexte, bajo otro título, The revolt eclipses whatever the world has to offer. El título en inglés en…
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