You are the task. by Gerardo Muñoz
Out of all of the Zürau aphorisms of Kafka there is one that reads as follows: “You are the task. No pupil far and wide (Du bist die Aufgabe. kein Schüler weit und breit) [1]. It resonates profoundly in our days as the idea of “education” and its inherited traditions are liquidated by the essence…
Excess and solitude. by Gerardo Muñoz
It is a commonplace to think that populations feel ‘lonely’ and ‘alienated’ from society, but perhaps this diagnosis is more of a prefigured talking point than the description of the state of things. In our present, solitude and retreat is a scarce good, as the chatter of automatized languages and images revolve without a moment…
The last tzaddik. by Gerardo Muñoz
According to the Talmudic tradition there is a certain number of just persons, called the tzaddikim, that exist in every generation. Their divine and singular existence is known only to God, and according to the tradition if the world continues to exist it is only for their sake. They live in the desert of the…
Peregrinus ubique. On Eduardo Prieto’s Los lugares de Petrarca (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz
Eduardo Prieto’s slim book Los lugares de Petrarca: Sobre naturaleza y soledad (Acantilado, 2026) counts not just as a book on the great Italian lyricist, but also as a coherent reflection on what it means to write and create from concrete places and in the mood of the genius loci. Before the world became infatuated…
Language as a garbage heap. by Gerardo Muñoz
There is an extraordinary description in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes el memorioso” that depicts his state of absolute nominalism as literally a landfill, a pile of trash. We read the following: “Y también hacia el alba: mi memoria, señor, es como un vaciadero de basuras”, which James Irby translates as “My memory, sir, is like…
Technology and thinking. A reply to Samuel Contreras. by Gerardo Muñoz
The recent response to Nelly Richard’s stance against infrapolitics, has prompted an ongoing conversation although not always public. However , there has been a public reaction in a column by Samuel Toro Contreras, “El poder ya no está donde creemos” published in El Mostrador. I do not think that this reply is necessarily critical of Contreras’…
Panza de burro. by Gerardo Muñoz
There is always something deeply unnerving and mysterious about the end of summer, which is not a mystery of time, but of place and its relation to where we stand or lack standing. George Oppen has a couple of verses that capture this sensation, even though he was far removed from the summer in this…
Sentence and prose. by Gerardo Muñoz
After more than ten years, I have recently reread several works of contemporary novelist Alan Pauls, and only now I have come to understand the precision of his language; a perfect combination of the rhythmic movement of a swimmer combined with a dry stroke of a brush on a canvas. This precision is not holistic,…
Only a miracle can save us. by Gerardo Muñoz
Joseph Roth’s last novella Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939) places the salvation of the human being through the event of a miracle. More than once, the narrator of The Legend of the Holy Drinker tells us that homeless Andreas had “indeed experienced the miracle of faith” [1]. The…
On American language. by Gerardo Muñoz
Towards the fourth part of “A language of New York” included in This in Which (1965), George Oppen registers something like the ultimate struggle of the poet with its nemesis: language itself. Fully aware of the erosion of language of his time, Oppen writes in these verses both a warning and a strategy: “Possible to…
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Infrapolitical Reflections 