Contemporary thought

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 a garbage heap”. The absolutization of memory without oblivion and forgetting renders all the possible and imaginable names as already present, but also useless to the point that they cannot be voiced, let alone retained at a distance. The world of Funes is analogous to that of the advanced world of technology that we are currently experiencing at an accelerated pace: the so called Artificial Intelligence remembers every name and all entities as if it were picking up items from a landfill container. It does not really matter if the names picked are correctly or falsified; it is precisely that naming as such no longer has any enchantment that is only granted by the divinity of the voice. As language becomes contained as a “heap of garbage” any relation between remembrance and the human voice that for centuries had been the source of affection is eliminated. 

Exactly two decades after the publication of Ficciones (1944) in his Seminar of Le Thor, Heidegger will also take note of Heraclitus’ Fragment 124 in relation to a heap of garbage as a definition of the cosmos: “…in its complete appearing as fire, “the most beautiful ordering of all is surely comparable to a heap of randomly spilled garbage. This means that the innaparent joining together is superior to every visible ordering, even if it is the most beautiful possible (fragment 54)” [2]. The emphasis is placed on the order of the random that in its inappearance discloses appearance as order (κόσμος). Immediately Heidegger notes that the archaic notion of “world” in Heraclitus, his “heap of trash”, is radically different from the standard of the world today that secures all possible predictions and calculation, where there is room for everything insofar as every-thing is taken as an extension of energy. 

This garbage heap realizes itself through the force of “speaking” in the name of technological orderability, efficiency, and promises of economic growth. The new order of the world as trash is proportional to the slow erosion of language that in its accelerating caducity loses its capacity to remember and forget. It goes without saying that in our present, and especially in the United States, the educational and academic institutions have been at the helm in the process of facilitating this compulsive destruction of language and memory, which evidences the intimate liaison of the technician and the pedagogue in the configuration of the immonde. 

Borges’ Funes will ultimately die from a pulmonary congestion, which is a testament of death in spite of the horror of a language incapable of naming and letting go. And in his lecture, according to the transcription of one of his students, Heidegger concluded with this recommendation: “What remains essential is to continue along the same path without having concern for any of the publicness around us”. A hidden and conjured language would be the only last standing order, a keeper of truth and beauty, because unlike the machine it voices the names while also exposing itself to the possibility of forgetting them.

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Notes 

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “Funes el memorioso”, in Ficciones (Emecé, 1958), 76.

2. Martin Heidegger. “Seminar in Le Thor 1966”, in Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2012), 8. 

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 particular poem: “the self is no mystery / the mystery is that there is something for us to stand on”. And where exactly do we stand in the passing of summer? How do we voice this passage? This surely not a geographical location or territory, but the most primordial place that humans have to stand on: the habitation in language. So, the clear and opening of summer is a specific type of relationship that brings us closer to its voice. This is beautifully treated in Andrea Abreu’s novel Panza de Burro (2025), where read moments such as these: 

“Y volvía pa detrás y pesaba de nuevo con el dudo ven vive una aventura agamos 1000 lokuras voy aserte caricias ke no san inventario. Y entonces miraba a Isora  pensaba que a lo mejor, como no era capaz de carcarila como se acariaban o se abrazaban otras niñas podía hacerle caricias ke no san inventao y pasarle la mano por la parte de atrás de las rodillas o deslizar los dedos por encima de las costra de sus ûnas de los pies o rozar los revoltillos de carne que le salían por encima de las bragas” [1]. 

If on the surface Panza de burro is about the bodily proximity with her friend Isora, what the climatological phenomenon of the “panza de burro” (literally translates as the belly of the donkey that refers to the insular descent of humid clouds into the landscape) brings to bear is the experience of the idiom. In this sense, the dialectical rhythm of Canarian Spanish of Panza de burro is a decisive reflection to free language as an experience of proximity in the wake of this inexorable climate condition of summer. In the English language – curiously not so in Spanish – the expression “dog days of summer” is the idiom that refers to the boredom experienced by the end of summer.

This is a one of a kind of boredom that is fully immersive, lagging in a time that is both dead and not yet alive; a time of stagnation or decay, which is why in Swedish language it is referred as rötmånaden or time of the rot. The panza de burro of dog days of summer cannot longer be conceived as the dies caniculares that guides one’s destiny as in the frescos of Villa Farnesina. On the contrary, these days of suspended action and boredom is an attunement to the interiority of language and how language can be felt similarly to those clouds that cut through the mountains in the Canary islands leaving behind a spectacle of grey and formlessness. 

In Abreu’s Panza de burro, this phenomenon is explored at the most visceral and somatic level, that of the skin. And yet, a more precise way to see these transformations in the coming and turning of language into the spiritual region of the world. It is this experience in language that automatic machines will not be able to translate, as it lacks the abode of that “perpetual holiday” in the words of Cesare Pavese, and that we feel as the fleeting eternity of summer. 

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Notes 

1. Andrea Abreu. Panza de burro (Barrett, 2025), 81. 

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, but found in every sentence of his prose. Aside from the content of his intuitions about literature or the almost microscopic development of frozen time of his characters, what Pauls ultimately teaches is that the unit of prose is the sentence, both its cadence and its ability to be severed and be brought to an end. This is precisely the meaning of the “period” (periodos) as the internal unit of the sentence: periodos is afterall, the circular moment of something that has a beginning and an end. The achievement of a good prose is the articulation of periods that can launch and make a sentence retire. 

For a novelist who is also a self-reflective essayist, it is puzzling that Pauls has not implicitly thematized the unity of the sentence in the craftsmanship of prose (although he has considered accentuation in an essay) [1]. But it is wholly absent in El factor Borges (2004), and his most recent collection of musings and glosses on reading and writing in a volume titled Trance (2014). It is perhaps too easy to overstate the fact that there cannot ever be a general theory of the sentence, because both tone and periodos are expressions of style. The construction zone of a well crafted prose can only be analyzed in the movement of the sentence. In a fabulous moment of his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the sixteenth century grammarian and poet Abrabham Fraunce writes the following regarding the sentence: 

“The beginning and the end of a poemt must not be the beginning or ending of prose. For the beginning, a little consideration will suffice, for the middle, less; but in the end the chief care is to be had, for it is most examine, and the longest in memory. It must therefore be sweetly contruied, that it seem not hasty and abrupt: it must also be varied and changed often time…if the same foot should in the end be continualed repeated.” [1]. 

In his treatise of rhetoric, Fraunce connects the end of the sentence, the coming to the periodos to the work of memory and sweetness. Perhaps because the cadence embedded in the sentence is the instance that allows us to connect past and present without hesitation or interruption; not the moment of suspension and surprise, but of landing in language, so that something, once again, can commence. This is also why a novelist in Spanish like Alan Pauls has not ceased to be fascinated by the idea of the past, especially in El pasado (2003), but also in his historical trilogy about his coming of age in the seventies. In other words, it is not enough to write the past in mere prose; the most important solicitation is to lodge its memory in the nest of the sentence. It is only here where memory arrives at a region called “home”.

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Notes

1. Alan Pauls. “Elogio del acento”, in Temas lentos (Random House, 2022), 52.

2. Abraham Fraunce. The Arcadian Rhetorike (Oxford University Press, 1950), 34.

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 fact that this “miracle” is intertwined with the magical reappearance of money alerts to the fact that omnis credit, the belief in all things, might be at the center of the mystery of the adventurous last days of Andreas Kartak, a homeless migrant that one day is given a sum amount of money by a generous stranger with the only condition that he repays it at some point to the sanctuary of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in a local parish [2]. 

The very essence of the miraculous money is connected to charity as existential expenditure, that allows Andreas to defer from ever repaying to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux at the Batignolles Church, thus tearing apart the modern notion of credit that binds investment and anticipation of the future. And Andreas is never able to repay the debt to the Saint, it is because the miracle is not in abundance, but in the permanent state of poverty that in turns confirms the sanctification of the holy drinker. In all rigor, Roth’s final message, a few days before his own death, seems clear to us: only a miracle can save us from the futurist religion of abundance and capital. 

But first, what is a miracle? This is the notion at the heart of Roth’s secret testament in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939). It is obvious that a miracle is always an exception to the ordinary and the predictable; an exceptional occurrence that not only resists to follow a rational causation and calculation, but it is something that betrays it. This is why at times miracles have been displaced to the irrational sphere of a natural occurrence. It has been said that in modernity, capitalist value form is both first nature and rationality where the human shuts himself in and God is expelled out. If there is a humorous or parodic element in The Legend of the Holy Drinker, it is precisely that this nexus is inverted and loosen; in other words, when miracle replaces the naturalization of value it is no longer conditioned by human labour and surplus value, but through the mystery of charity that does not aggregate abundance of goods. This is a charity of absolute poverty and continuous stagnation. 

Andreas’ miraculous charity incarnates the holy life of the saint insofar as he can only experience himself towards the appropriation of his own character, and ultimately his death. According to Esther Steinmann in her important study on Roth, the figural symbolism of the holy drinker was based after the Byzantine model of the sainthood; those madmen followers of God that can only experience the world from outside the world as if were, because they are only concerned with a preparation of towards death, which also speaks to Roth’s Catholicism infused with Hasidic undercurrents [3]. And this can be confirmed by the novella’s last lines: “May God grant such a good and easy death” [4]. 

Why should death be delivered “good and easy”? Here it can be argued how for Roth, the “common good” was not a political project of a distributionist state, but rather a state of being and a form of life that is enmeshed to both death and the dead. This is way that Roth’s solicitation of a resurrection of the Austro-Hungarian empire must be properly understood: not as a political form to save civilization from itself, but rather as a defense a world that, because it is oriented towards decline and expansive exteriority or internal exile – a roaming land of errant beings – it maintains a relation to the humus of the dead [5]. If there is hope for rebirth it is because there are miracles that cut through both history and nature, and in doing so they make apparent the charity of the infancy of humanity, very much like the little girl Thérèse, a transfigured saint, that appears in the final pages: “…about living and dying; and the girl called Thérèse, she too accompanies them”. 

Notes 

1. Joseph Roth. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022), 11.

2. Gerardo Muñoz. “Charity and Faith”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/16/charity-and-faith-by-gerardo-munoz/ 

3. Berta Ares Yáñez. La leyenda del santo bebedor: legado y testamento de Joseph Roth (Acantilado, 2022), 178.

4. Joseph Roth. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022), 99.

5. Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, letter from July 1935: “I only care for God and the Earth, and what I feel as my terrestrial obligation: contributing to the coming of a Catholic Empire”, in Ser amigo mío es funesto: Correspondencia (1927-1938) (Acantilado, 2014), 56.

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 use / Words provided one treats them / As enemies. Not enemies – Ghosts Which have run mad / In the subways / And of course the institutions and the banks. If one captures them / one by one proceeding / Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense” [1]. The polemic against the darkening automation of language, the public consolidation of kallopismata orphne, is resolved through a possibility of use that is redirected elsewhere, at least away from the nihilism of vicarious denomination and exchange. 

This “possible use” is perhaps nothing else than the treatment that language receives in the voice, which becomes its ultimate speaking experience. If language is always outside and beyond itself, always exceeding its meaning and place, it is because its trembling tonality cuts through both meaning and sense. The construction of the concluding verse cannot be dismissed: “Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense”. Oppen fails to place hope as action towards a higher entity (meaning and sense); rather he sends the poetic voice to meaning and sense. The redemptive quality of language is to be found in this fall and trembling of the voice that, because it has interrupted both meaning and sense, it can inhabit a state of bliss or perpetual hope. In other words, hope is not just an affective state of human being, but a possible turn, a necessary one, in which language is appropriated in all of its impropriety. If words had to be treated as enemies it is precisely to be redirected to the swirling vocative current that divides meaning and sense as the ultimate region of the poetic being where there is no longer a struggle. 

The catastrophe of Americanism is not just a political or economic reality, one that runs through being in language insofar it is understood as the vision of the use of the voice. Oppen was fully aware of this calamity when writing to William Carlos Williams that “there will be no poetry in America only insofar as that lesson is learned. People who are afraid to talk will not produce much poetry” [2]. It goes without saying that Oppen was not thinking of a new renaissance of poetry and literary producers, but just of the poetic being as one that subsists in the chiasmatic relation of language and voice. 

And if American subjectivity today has given up entirely on the use of its language – a use that is increasingly delegated to machines and telematic automation  – it is precisely, because already historically they ceased moving into “hoping to meaning and sense”. This does not mean that we Americanism strives in absolute muteness; on the contrary, running away from sense means the plugging of meaning into sense and of sense into meaning, which is the definition of the construction of argumentation. And argumentation is the delivery of force in the interiority of language. When Adorno & Horkheimer once defined the United States as “the country of argument” they touched something profound [3]. It is only when language is ripped from argumentation that poetic possibilities are restored, and perhaps also redeemed.

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Notes 

1. George Oppen. This in Which (New Directions, 1965), 25.

2. George Oppen. The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), 39.

3. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), 51.

The life of a sage. On Jacques Guigou’s Capital et Devenir Humain: Correspondance avec Jacques Camatte (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Roughly extending a little over fifteen years (2000-2016), the epistolary exchange between Jacques Guigou and Jacques Camatte is made available in a short book entitled Capital et Devenir Humain: Correspondance avec Jacques Camatte (L’Harmattan, 2026). Truth to be told it is an uneven correspondence at times, where the sustained conversation in time seems to be interrupted around some specific years, and in other moments there is an abundance of certain editorial requests (the publication and translation of books by Giorgio Cesarano primarily) that interfere from a more thorough substantive correspondence. Be as it might, this correspondence does bring to bear the reflexive consistence of the thinker behind Invariance in his last phase of his work, most specifically in the wake of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, which was already read by Camatte as symptomatic of the internal hostility of the human specifies embedded in the stasis of struggle as the central “engine of development of capital” (Guigou 20). 

Both autonomous capital and its regimes of representation (Politics) will only be sustained and driven by internal strife whose apocalyptic destiny has now become all too apparent; even more so than during the years when the Camatte & Guigou exchange was taking place. These historical mediations, however, are a bit of a misnomer, since the correspondence does show that Camatte’s undertaking of Hegel’s cunning of capital as the realization of the effective movement of historical accumulation was already part of the theoretical discoveries of the seventies in Invariance. The “effective end of Capital” seen through the mirror of Hegelianism meant that political reaction and its negation turned the essence of politics reactionary at its core. Later in the correspondence, in fact, we get a glimpse of the essence of “reactionary thinking” when Camatte tells his interlocutor that reaction can be understood as the continuation of a dynamic duality that is expressed in the very movement of autonomous Capital (Guigou 65-66). This is why Camatte’s horizon of reflection differed from the Debord’s situationism; it is not just because of a disbelief in the presumption of a remnant of the autonomy of art in their practices, but rather because their very dyad between art and life, public and private, contingency and necessity, language and the image expressed in many ways the insufficiency of an analytic expressed in the mystification of the commodity form. In other words, all reactionary posture amounts to a relational mode of the commodity form, but no commodity stripping and destruction can guide through a path that can exit the total transcendence of Capital towards life of the Gemeinwesen. We are left with refractory communities of belonging that find their necessary compensation in supplementary forms that allow for a distance to the fundamental question of exodus. 

Out of the many sequences of the correspondence the one dealing with the incapacities of poetry is of special interest. In one letter Camatte tells Guigou that he feels that poetry no longer is able to filter a moving tonality in the world, recalling how the end of the age of the poets (not a term expressly deployed by Camatte) has been understood by Amadeo Bordiga in a short text of 1953 that noted that the ancient power could sing in a voice of the community, whereas the modern poet in his solitude only amounts to the author of his work (Guigou 24). The correspondence exemplifies this by recalling Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, where the poetic is not personal lyricism, but rather a tone that runs through the whole dispensation of the community in its errancy (Guigou 30). And one wonders immediately after reading this moment in the letter, where the very work of late Camatte is not disinhibited of the poetic tonality; or, on the contrary, this poetic tonality insofar as it is a pure voice can only remain opaque and absence from the scene of writing and public reflection. The challenge in this question is to be able to balance the problem beyond judgement, which always hides a form of pathetic condemnation. 

In these pages concerning poetry and the philosophical aspiration of the poem, other names are invited into the scene: Giorgio Cesarano, Domenico Ferla, and Andrea Zanzotto. These are three figures where the challenge of poetry was taken only to be radically abandoned (perhaps less so in Zanzotto where the trace of the voice is already embedded in the poetic form, and thus there was not a need to execute the radical gesture of fleeing from poetry). Although one is also surprised that the question of poetry is not extended as a problem of thought and existence, which would allow for the collapse of the very separation of poetic form and the life of the community, perhaps because the voice that is carried in poetry is more originary dwelling of human existence than the human community, because ultimately the human community (Gemeinwesen) is refractory of an irremediable loss that is recasted as original. And Gianni Carchia saw in his “Glossa sull’umanismo” (1977), Camatte’s insistence on the original community and its negation through the anthropomorphosis of Capitalist revolution will necessarily result in an inverted or transfigured humanism; or, at least, a humanism that is always longing for the image of an originary community that can only be posited with an assertive knowledge that we do not know possess except as contaminated subjectivity. But perhaps the solicitation of originary community will always fail because it will be a displacement from abyss of non-belonging that we already inhabit – what Carchia called in the same text as “uscir fuori” – into the site of proper belonging of the human species fails to account for the impropriety that always marks the experience of errancy of life. As Endnotes has noted in their recent essay “Time is an invention of men incapable of love”, Camatte was aware of the Jewish form of life as a concrete experience “seeking a solution outside this world”. But this means that it is not enough to counterpose the community and state form (Jewish form of life precisely is not exhausted in community belonging, or in the memory of a community), but something other than the closure of the community if one wants to go beyond the eternal metabolic stasis of human belonging. Ultimately, as Camatte tells Guigou at the end of the correspondence, only Capital claims immortality in its universalist extension (Guigou 68). 

Perhaps this is a task that requires another modality of thought, perhaps a non-philosophical practice beyond community and humanity, but suspicious of the claims to immortality of the capitalist revolution. In a letter from 2016, Camatte citing François Julien, confronts philosophical thinking with a notion of wisdom that retracts from hostility and agonistic dispute, because it retreats into serenity of a peaceful sage (Guigou 65). I take this to mean something akin to Kojeve’s ‘voyou désœuvré’, the sage that in the Sunday of history harbors a passion of life where happiness is received not as a consequence of actions, but as a supreme grace of the unexpected. It does seem that this was also Camatte’s longing in life that although wanting to abandon this world, refused to abandon the interlocution with others; touching as if it were, an unbreachable state of wisdom.

Starting all over again. On Massimiliano Cappello’s Lo specchio e la lama: Giorgio Cesarano tra poesia e critica radicale (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

One has to begin by saluting Massimiliano Cappello’s Lo specchio e la lama: Giorgio Cesarano tra poesia e critica radicale (Quodlibet, 2026) for being the first book on the Italian thinker that takes an obvious point of departure that for too long it has been ignored: the well known fact that first and foremost Cesarano was a poet. At the heart of Cappello’s argument in his short monograph, however, is the thesis of continuity between his later philosophical thought, located under what has become known as ‘critica radicale’ of Italian 1970s, and that of his poetic laboratory. A poetic laboratory that Cappello magnificently documents in its genesis with post-war Italian poets and critics. The young Cesarano of the late fifties and early sixties was an avid interlocutor with figures such as Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto and Eugenio Montale, and of course Franco Fortini, who introduced his first poetry collection L’erba bianca (1959).

 In the milieu thematized by Cappello first chapters, it is evident that Cesarano the poet was a bit of an outsider, not really the man of letters of Italian postwar culture, as he was already looking for something like a renewal of a sensible experience that was becoming increasingly commodified and dead (Cappello 29). Albeit the mannerist tropology of the early L’erba bianca, Cappello notes that already in subsequent books, Cesarano’s preoccupation was that of mirroring of language in world that was oriented towards the highest stage of human alienation and emptiness. For Cesarano the history of human civilization was the successive stages of the reification of the human towards “survival”; a wound that was overtly present in the very texture of language. And poetic language as no exception; remaining oblivious to this totalization could only make the poet an harlequin among ruins of his present, always hungry for fictitious meaning and illusory transcendence. 

Cappello tells us that already L’erba bianca staged the originary trauma of the impossibility of poetry, which shed lights unto his later transition into the prose of the ‘critica radicale’ – and in fact, one could only wish that Cappello would have said more about the transition between poetry and prose, which is also at the center of this intense autobiographical experience. In any case, the repression of the trauma starts to become more palpable in books such as La pura verità (1963) La tartaruga di Jastov (1966), and Romanzi naturali (1980), where the moribund plane of factical life not only becomes “apparent”, but it is situated at the very level of the fictitious appearance (some of the language is truly dreadful, and one can understand why Cesarano at some point could not longer follow that route without stepping into a vulgar expressionism, or, to that effect, the Lukacsian ‘naturalism’).

Cappello tells us that for Cesarano the evil of the experience of National Socialism and fascism, was not just a political system that took place at the heart of Europe; it was a phenomenon that extended into the totality of culture and life under total capital (Cappello 75). This is a bit like Pasolini’s position, except that for Cesarano there was no medium from which one could stay afloat and find an exit. Cappello cites these verses from La pura verità (1963): “…divorati dalla terre per / dal verme / che’sera / dal verme che s’era ricominciare” (Cappello 77). It does not come to a surprise, since for anyone that has read Cesarano & Camatte already in the stage of ‘critica radicale’ and ‘Invariance’, the only chance for the liberation of the generic human community (Gemeinwesen) was to start all over again, that is, from the point of view of the prehistoric inversion [1]. In the milieu of Italian literary culture, one has to agree with Cappello’s assessment: to start all over again means to start “dopo Fortini”, to leave behind the function of the critic and the writer, two beautiful soul functionaries (but functionaries nonetheless) mediating between the spheres of culture and politics in the public life. But to start again means to recoil to a hole in the temporality where the becoming of that social totality is no longer possible; even at the risk of losing the lyricism of modern poetry from Virgil to the present. This is most difficult task in a sense, because to “start all over again” seems to depart from somewhere else than language, but fundamentally we know that language is the event of every commencement. This is perhaps the aporia that runs through Cesarano’s own impossibility to effectively “finding a way out”, except a catastrophic one that we know all too well. 

Can there be another resource in the face of the mounting pressure of the Spectacle and what Cesarano later called the “un-essence” (inessenza) of the Capitalist international and nihilism? In La tartaruga di Jastov (1966), Cesarano opts to still name this nothing through a giant turtle that Cappello tells us that it is a symbol of gigantomachy very much like Melville’s white whale. It is a very intelligent parallel that needs to be unpacked. Of course, Melville’s Moby Dick is the monster of the new American dominance over land and water; the monster of the incipient industrial division of labour through the whales’ oil business that sedimented United States’ nineteenth century economic growth. In contrast, Cesarano’s enormous turtle is the symbol of what takes place at the end of formal capitalist subsumption, once surplusvalue colonizes the totality of human temporality. A seamonster slowly creeps into the land signifying absolutely nothing, and yet dominating every directive of sensible reality. In the formless time of the turtle, there is no epic to be written nor a lyricism capable of offering emancipation from its images – as Cappello tells us, there is a state of infancy and innate failure (Cappello 101) . And if poetics is anything it stands alone in documenting that failure, the irreducible site of the nascent fragment, as in Schlegel’s dictum. Cappello reminds us that Cesano thought it was be infinitely worse: poetry had become a game and a publicist “operation” (Cappello 110). The autonomy of lyrical poetry could not deliver to the highest task; that is, to “recover another sensibility with the world at the heart of the epoch”, as Cappello puts it towards the end of the book (Cappello 115). 

The interior of the world of un-essence (inessenza) for Cesarano will revolve around two competing figures of radical evil: the hitman (sicario) and the collector (entomologo). The first is the paid assassin that sees a price in anyone’s head, whereas the collector will be the administrator of corpses and moribund passing of beauty to be consumed. It is a world without possible evasion, because both living and dying have been rendered indistinguishable, and perhaps also unthinkable and unsingable (Cappello 127). This is Cesarano’s most extreme indictment to the late modern epoch, in which the hallucination of fictitious languages will still provide the illusion of actual living human beings. In this hellish world, it is not up for the poet to prepare a fresh start, and yet language still remains. Cappello concludes where our task begins: “Che il reale attenda una lingua non alienata per potersi esprimere compiutamente, può anche darsi. Questa lingua non sembra essere, in ogni caso, quella della poesia” (Cappello 138). And it might be the failure of language what awaits and invites the possibility of a different beginning. 

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Note 

1. On the notion of “inversion” in Giorgio Cesrano in relation to Jacques Camatte’s thinking on the prehistoric, see my conversation with the thinker in my book Pensamiento insumiso: Coloquio con la teoría italiana (Irrupción Ediciones, 2024).

On overall tone. by Gerardo Muñoz

Perhaps there has never been about a point of arrival nor departure from a place, but rather a question of attunement, and specifically one of tone. To disentangle attunement from tone is a gigantic task; arguably one of the sites where the distinction between philosophy and poetry comes nearest only to depart and open their differences without ever vacating their aspiration in music, as David Monro makes clear in The modes of Ancient Greek Music (1894). Why does tone matter, and can it be defined? We know a tone when we hear it, almost as if the singing of a bird, and yet it is not just a matter of frequency or intensity, since it gathers fundamental language in the elemental. The tone is the internal cut or pause in expression, but this does not say much, does it? 

Wallace Stevens once offered a definition of tone, concretely poetic tone, as the “perfection emerging from the known” in the poem “On the Way to the Bus”: “A way of pronouncing the word inside of one’s tongue under the wintry trees of the terrace” [1]. We can take this to be a metaphoric definition of the vocative and that would be a sound explanation. And yet, it remains insufficient in respect to tone, since the tone is not just the mere articulatory phonetics, but an internal arrangement; what Steveson refers as “the word inside’s one tongue under the wintry tree”. It is a formulation that delivers a landscape as a third space that is neither in language nor in the world. 

Hence, speaking more or less is of little help; in our present day it has become evident that machines are replacing the art of speaking and communicating at an unprecedented pace. It has become evident that the ultimate revolution is the revolution of the autonomization of language, something that Stevens was also aware in the postwar years. In fact, if “tone” means anything for Stevens it is precisely what bears witness to the experiment of language that mirrors that of life. An experience that was shrinking, becoming a sort of “pastime proper for Nero’s children’s children” [2]. The new concept of tradition. Wallace Stevens could not have imagined the fact that today heads of families and pedagogues are minor Neros feeding future generations a pseudolanguage that can no longer be the covenant for any opening to an experiment. Much like Stevens we have been fully aware that the erosion of language at the end of metaphysical dispensation entails the loss of tone. And the loss of tone entails the erasure of the distance between language and our dispensation or tonality.  Our epoch is not only too violent to be “congenial to the experiment of language”,  but is completely barbaric in its annihilation of distances. This is Stevens in 1948: 

“Our present experience of life is too violent to be conditional to experiment in either sense. This is also the consideration that the present time succeeds as a time of experiment. Theoretically a period of attempts at a world revolution should destroy or endanger all stationary poetic subjects and words and be favorable in the highest degree to the recording of fresh experience. But the vivification of reality has not yet occurred in spite of the excitement. Only the excitement has occurred” [3]. 

The excitement around world revolutions – and perhaps today it is already occurring with the centrality of revolts – has confused everything and has dried up the possibility of the experiment in tone, which is the path available for a “fresh conception of the world” (these are Stevens’ terms). Because the world is only possible through an “overall tone”, nourished by tonality; it is the only thing that matters, as Cézanne once remarked [4]. Pity those that have lost the musical transcendence of the tone, and are left only to hear the rustle of politics and the high pitch of language. 

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Notes 

1. Wallace Stevens. “On the Way to the Bus”, in Collected Poetry & Prose (The Library of America, 1997), 472.

2. Wallace Stevens. “The State of American Writing, 1948: Seven Questions”, in Collected Poetry & Prose (The Library of America, 1997), 823.

3. Ibid., 823-824.

4. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 42.

Those wonderful clouds. On Victoria Cirlot’s Imágenes Negativas (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

First published in the Chilean publishing house Mundana back in 2016 and long out of print, Victoria Cirlot’s Imágenes Negativas: las nubes en la tradición mística y en la modernidad (2026) finally appears in a new and upgraded edition from Siruela Ediciones. This short essay, initially a conference delivered at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, is another contribution to Cirlot’s important work on European mystical tradition of European early modernity, but like other of Circlot’s book its value also resides in its prudential contribution to contemporary thought. In this sense, Cirlot’s visual exploration of the cloud allows us to raise the question without much hesitation: what is a cloud in a field of vision, anyways? In Kurt Badt’s John Constable’s Clouds (1950), a book that is curiously missing from Cirlot’s commentary and bibliography, the cloud is merely a modern phenomenon in painting; a specular effect of the rise of meteorology in post-Enlightenment England that paved the way for a new construction of the modern landscape painting.

If Cirlot does not need to follow Badt’s insights, it is due to the fact that she wants to take a step back, even if her point of departure is Von Dillis’ drawings from the nineteenth century that she encountered in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. These are relatively small works, and more profusely unfinished than Constable’s cloud exercises in oil painting. I seriously wonder if Cirlot’s would have taken another direction in her analysis if she had confronted another series of cloud paintings of the modern tradition. Perhaps not. Following Gombrich’s dictum that clouds are accidental forms reserved in the mind and extended to the pictorial space, Cirlot immediately goes on to document the long mystical tradition where the cloud stands for theos gnophos, or the incandescent light that descend from the divinity right into the human’s heart (Cirlot 18). In the mystical tradition the cloud of the story of Moses, later deployed as a trope by Pseudo-Dionysus and Gregory of Nyssa, the cloud refuses to be an accident of substance; it is rather the image of substance itself: the impossibility of knowing and having access to the divine, and thus the need for the recollection of the light of ignorance. 

If mysticism and painting go hand in hand it is because what the divine cannot be said in language, but it be disclosed through the spectacular persuasion of an image that is carved in the veil of theology. In this way, the cloud is a bit like a dress in a painting, both conceptually and figuratively: Cirlot does not fail to note that in Medieval representations one can grasp the figure of God swerving in a cloud before a horned Moses, but it is also the turbulence in the depth of the picture that allows for the ascension of the gaze that fails to establish a horizon and the linear perspective. Although Cirlot does not put it in this way – she is obviously more refined and attentive to her historical sources – one could easily find an opposition between clouds (and perhaps clouding of the background of a picture, an activity) and horizon of pictorial representation. It is in this sense that Cirlot defines the “via negativa” that clouds appeal to the impossible knowledge of God (in my translation): “The images of ascension and clouds are modes of making visible the negative way of the proximity with God…the fact that the experience of god takes place through the mode of negative images is something that persist from Pseudo-Dionysus to Mechthild of Magdeburg, and San Juan de la Cruz” (Cirlot 23-25).

In other words, the cloud is the non-human figure of a mode of cohabitation in God – Cirlot goes as far as quoting that it is the medium, “el entre”, the incommensurable distance between the sensible being and god (Cirlot 27). This is why the cloud, in virtue of what it discloses in its non-disclosure, is a bit like a hole in the picture, and we fail to account for its potency to stabilize its mystery through the categories of the autonomy of the work of art. This is why it is very fruitful when Cirlot tells the reader that the cloud defies vision in its very appearance, since through its clearing and light, it can only “sense through the inner soul” (Cirlot 30). This was also present, at least residually in Badt’s Constable Clouds, when referring to the externalization of the clouds as the spiritual organ of the living. But it is precisely this exteriority that defies the epistemological grounds of meteorological knowledge that would facilitate the technical ability to condense the cloud into force and energy, whose ultimate expression is crowned in a work such as Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963). A fallen cloud from the sky that can only be experienced in the abstraction degrees and measurements of its objective “data”. 

There is an intimate and communicate vessel between painting and clouds that can be derived from Imágenes Negativas (2026), and that can be sound in the state of imperturbable contemplation where life and thought convergence without the energy of struggle that would define modern artistic creation and its fall into autonomization (Cirlot 33). If painting is to release and live as a mode folded in God; the modern sensibility would require the energy of creation in order to open the passage between worlds. Following Puech’s important work on Gnosticism, Cirlot sees that the nebular trope of the cloud persists in modernity well beyond San Juan de la Cruz: one can sense in the attempts to “escape this world” – from Piranesi’s ladders to Thomas De Quincety’s prose, and of course, Charles Bauderlaire – a hymnal longing for the clouds that depends on the energy of the reversibility of the modern seen as a form of confinement (and from the pictorial space, I would argue also as the triumph of flatness in modern painting) (Cirlot 44). The cloud becomes a window for gnostic imagination, although this could very well be a sort of self-serving pleonasm, given that the “possible” of the gnostic remnant in the work of art only appears as momentary reversibility; a temporality that necessarily subsists without transforming the plane of sensibility. These are wonderful experiments in poetry, painting, photography; and yet, the negative, I take it, cannot be refused its place in the historical wealth of  historical capture of exteriority. Both Hölderlin and Baudealire’s clouding of poetry is already the document of the impossible attempt to live the serene life in god. Thus, any attempt at a full-fleshed exodus via negativa, runs into catastrophe and possibly madness in the wake of disenchantment. 

In her final and short essay of the volume, titled “La estrella y la nube”, Cirlot speaks of the return of the cloud in modern photography, concrete the work of André Kertész, as ‘laceration in the sky” (“agujerear el cielo”), or a tear in the heavens (Cirlot 60). The passage here appeals to an inverse tonality, where lamentation becomes an inexorable dimension of affection in the world now organized through massification and urbanization of all spaces. Disenchantment is ultimately spatial enclosure. But this tear in the sky is a remnant of a memory of the divine, as well as the absence of the divine in the world; the failure of establishing a transcendence with the unknown and the inapparent. But it is thanks to Victoria Cirlot’s pictorial explorations that we can raise these questions, which are also more than mere questions pertinent to theology and art.  

At the threshold. By Gerardo Muñoz

Just a few days ago there was an esoteric exchange between Giorgio Agamben and Alberto Moreiras on the difficulty of the ‘other beginning’ and the ‘via di uscita’, a propos of a recent meeting on desecularization and theology that took place in Granada, Spain. The notion has been in the air for some time now, since two years ago this was the central problem in a 2024 meeting in Berlin. That the exchange was esoteric is not in question, since it presupposes undertaking the conditions of the conversation and papers of the meeting as well as multiple books from both Moreiras and Agamben, and I do not think that the nuances have been taken into consideration. But it must be noted that there is an exoteric dimension to the contention as well: Giorgio Agamben has favored the ‘via di usicita’ in different figures (mainly Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin; and we know that Agamben’s overbeckian urgeschichte is a clear cut rejection of an epochal beginning); and, from his end, Alberto Moreiras has also thematized the other beginning of thought and aleotropic excess in his most recent Tiempo Roto (2025), which cuts through Heidegger’s thought, and thus not limited to what is understood as heideggerianism. I want to reject the idea that these two notions – ‘via di uscita and other beginning – are just two forking paths in postheideggerianism, as complicated as it is to go beyond Heidegger’s end of Western metaphysics. And I think – and in fact I am convinced- that both Agamben and Moreiras are soliciting something that radically escapes Heidegger’s thought even when it emanates from it; a bit like what Derrida says that the chôra escapes the categorial order of Plato even though it emerges from the Timeus.

There is no doubt that at stake is a breakthrough in thought. Of course, stating this puts a finger into something fundamental; but, alas, the devil is always in the details. I am in no position to unravel the implications of the two options – new beginning and via of exodus – and to that extent I am still taken by Moreiras’ interpellation in the first day of the meeting about my own position regarding the new beginning, which I am in no way ready to respond. Of course, Nicolas Poussin comes to mind (I cite from memory his epistolary words to Chantelou): “I am in the profession of mute things”. A claim of silence that in no way refrains from language and writing. Yes, I am no painter, although I am interested in painting and what painting can offer and donate to thought and philosophy. And we live in an epoch at the end of painting, and yet painting outlives everything as in a metaphysical remnant, as Kurt Badt reminds us in his great work on Cézanne.

Giorgio Agamben notes in his little Il tempo del pensiero (2023) how Heideger declared his Le Thor seminared that he always thought that Cézanne was the other figure of the tradition that resembled his own path. It is a curious analogy to a painter and the painterly praxis in the age of technological subsumption. Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, since I am working on a small book on the communication between painting and thought, and I want to understand what painting has to offer.

As a preliminary response to the difficulty that emerged in the ‘new beginning’, I am left wondering if the threshold is an intermediary space to arrest the jump beyond nihilism, which is ultimately what is at stake. This has been my way- I am all for changing that – of reading Agamben’s work: to remain at the threshold in order not to force the overcoming of nihilism, even if that anti-nihilism takes the force of antiphilosophy or thought of the unthinkable (Moreiras). Can thought breathe from the rest and imperturable dwelling in the threshold, if understood as mediated by the hand and the eye at a distance? This is for me the problem of painting as the last activity at the end of metaphysics – a theological remnant that intercepts the reduction of a historical cosmos. A duration that escapes the regime of the ontic but that does not dare to point to transcendence nor does it accept the inevitability of anthropological struggle. Yet, duration is the condition of breathing in a landscape: if we face it, is there even the need to begin or retreat?