Constitutionalism and sense. Text for “Legal Crisis in Chile” Session, Red May Forum, 2023. by Gerardo Muñoz
It has been said repeatedly – in the best hyperbolic spirit, no doubt – that Chile always stands, regardless of the angle from which we are looking, for what is to come in our epoch. The Chilean laboratory prefigures the coming mutations and solidifies the effective tendencies of public powers. The 2019-2023 political cycle is…
Treasure of the earth: on Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic voice: Poetry and Natural History (2022). by Gerardo Muñoz
Written at a time when the sciences of biological life were becoming fully integrated to technological and procedural social experimentation, Elizabeth Sewell’s 1960 The Orphic voice (nyrb, 2022) dared to pose the question of poetic myth as the mirror of scientific transformation of the modern world. Given that myth reopens the question of poetry and…
The melody of the soul: on Guy de Pourtalès’ Nietzsche in Italy (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz
Nietzsche in Italy (Pushkin Press, 2023) by Guy de Pourtalès, originally published in 1929, has a particular texture that makes it inadequate to consider it a standard intellectual biography. Pourtalès does not follow the contours of the psychological and chronological construction; rather he is more interested in sketching out the telluric effects on the transformative…
Lezama Lima and the Etruscan way. by Gerardo Muñoz
Towards the end of his life, poet José Lezama Lima will mysteriously begin to sign the letters to his friends and family as “the Trocadero Etruscan”, a “member of the Etruscan religiosity”, and even the “man who lives in the Etruscan village” [1]. Why call himself an “Etruscan” in this particular moment of his life,…
Virgil in contemporary America. by Gerardo Muñoz
The well-established American Liberal historian of ideas, Mark Lilla, writes in his recent essay “The Once and the Now” an outlandish thesis: “the ideologies of modern fascism are all heirs to the Aeneid.” Any reasonable reaction should start not by disputing the content of such superficial assertion, but rather by raising the central question: what…
Planetary subsidiarity: an observation on Luigi Ferrajoli. by Gerardo Muñoz
I recently attended a conversation around Luigi Ferrajoli’s most recent book translated into Spanish, Por una Constitución de la Tierra (Trotta, 2022), where the eminent Italian legal positivist defends the construction of a world constitution. The proposal is meant to be taken at face value; that is, unlike world constitutionalism and constituent revolutions models, Ferrajoli…
On clemency. by Gerardo Muñoz
The last mail that I received from my friend, the philosopher Emilio Ichikawa (1962-2021) before passing away stated the following: “Eres clemente, creo que esa palabra ya ni se usa”. Being clement (or ser clemente) has fallen in disuse, both in English and Spanish. One can only guess the reason as to why being clement…
Bonnard (1910): painting and dissonance. by Gerardo Muñoz
Here is a little masterpiece by Pierre Bonnard at the Phillips Collection, “Interior with boy” (1910). Its simplicity does not shy away from the fact that it is a picture struggling with the problem of sensation as the highest task of painting. Bonnard is most definitely working on the threshold of Pissarro for whom the…
Hölderlin’s song. Provisional annotations. by Gerardo Muñoz
There is a moment in Hölderlin’s late hymn “Friedensfeier” (1801) where communication is strictly defined as becoming a song. The verses in question are about midway into the poem, and we read read the following: “Viel hat von Morgen an, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander, Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber…
The metapolitical collapse. by Gerardo Muñoz
We had a very rich and productive conversation this week with Josep Rafanell i Orra around the new and updated edition of his book En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique (éditions météores, 2022). But here I just want to entertain an early moment in the book that has some importance for some ongoing discussions. In…
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Infrapolitical Reflections 