A painting that knows no evil. by Gerardo Muñoz
In several places of his Lectures of Aesthetics, Hegel refers to Dutch painting as a way to thematize the concept of completion that fulfills being in the world. For a moment his commentary brings to bear a state of the mundane while avoiding the vulgarity of the overachieving surface that would define the general tendency…
Pascal against the empire of opinion. by Gerardo Muñoz
In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the…
The strain of waiting in the desert. by Gerardo Muñoz
How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the…
Aladdin’s lamp and world domination. by Gerardo Muñoz
In his 1982 novel Aladdin’s Problem (1982), Ernst Jünger defined planetary domination through the actualization of the trope of Aladdin’s lamp. Whenever a symbol of this sort is used, we know that it always carries weight of ambivalence more than that of synthesis. The mythic lamp is a trope for magic and enduring power; of…
The vanishing horse. On Federico Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz
Federico Galende’s most recent essay El mínimo animal (ediciones metales pesados, 2025) is freestyle mediation on the singular animal that is the horse. When we say ‘horse’ we immediately dispense a bulky package: it is Pech Merle cave paintings and Franz Marc; it is Kafka’s parable of the racing red Indian, the agonizing horse in…
Quod natis exitus. by Gerardo Muñoz
In Book V of his Latin Language, and immediately after commenting the duality of Earth and Sky, Varro writes an enduring and yet enigmatic gloss of worldly life. In Roland Kent’s translation from 1938 we read: “Inasmuch as the separation of life and body is the exitus, ‘way out’ for all creates born, from that…
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…
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Infrapolitical Reflections 