Contemporary thought

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 “Beatriz Viterbo”. In a way, Beatriz remains encrypted in a house soon to be demolished, remaining unattainable and mysterious in the passing of the world. As we know, there have been critics that have taken up the detective task to understand the significance of the name Beatriz Viterbo by probing the story’s dedication to Estela Canto, who later became the rightful owner of the original manuscript, and that connects to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of its cantiche structure as well as the figure of Beatrice [1]. However, as Giorgio Agamben once said regarding the Italian poet, it is utterly senseless to attempt to identify a subject behind Beatrice, since what is at stake in Dante’s poetics, perhaps of all poetics, is the experiment of language as an experience of love [2]. What the name Beatriz Viterbo enacts is no different. 

Indeed, in Borges’ Beatriz Viterbo this experience of love is one that fundamentally lacks images and predicates of this world; which means that love, if to be held as an intensity of the living, in the name harbors the region between life and death, between memory and forgetting. These distinctions are not oppositional, but rather an angular index that defines erotic intensity; and, as we know, the name is the supreme vehicle of the impropriety of oneself because it precedes it. As Borges writes in “The theologians” also included in The Aleph: “There are some that look for love in a woman in order to forget her; in order to cease thinking about her” [3]. The fundamental formlessness of love does not depend on neither images nor acts, but on the enduring vocative or song (canto) that shines forth in the open secret of the name. 

This is why the portrait of the deceased is insufficient for the narrator of the story. In a moment that is the clearest parallelism to the concatenation of “things seen” in the aleph, the name appears four times in repetition: “Beaitriz, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre…” [4]. If Osip Mandelstam once remarked that the “eye is an instrument of thought”, one could say that the the voice of the name is the instance where language and thought coincide without remainder; a convergence of Heaven and Earth, of the dead and the living in the grain of the voice. There are no static images of Viterbo because her mysterious life, the unlived life with the narrator, is precisely the missing image guarded by the name. In the basement, facing upwards to peek into the aleph, we are told that he, Borges, will be able to “establish a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz” (“podrás entablar un diálogo con todas la imágenes de Beatriz”). But what the aleph cannot yield is the missing image that is only the event of his irreducible linguistic contact proper to his memory. Once again Maldelstam: “The word, the name, is a psyche…does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten” [5]. But what is not forgotten is not that quality or that image of a person, but the enduring rustling of a name that recalls the oldest human experience: the mystery of the voice.

It might also be for this reason that Beatriz Viterbo recalls not just Dante’s divine and eternal Muse, but the world of the dead; the vetus in ‘Viterbo’, that is, the oldest or ‘most ancient’ life that dwells in the underworld, because its direct provenance is the archaic Etruscan civilization [6]. If Beatrice, as the trope of transcendence beyond the Earth has been a repeated object of literary interpretation, Viterbo as the vetus burial has rarely generated any interest (if the house of Viterbo is being demolished, this also means that in her proper name is the burial site at the end of remembrance). 

In the cadence of the name “Beatriz Viterbo” we can hear the transit between the living and the dead, the invisible and the present, the possible predications as well as the defaced; a work of oblivion in virtue of its own caducity. “Me trabajó otra vez el olvido”, writes Borges towards the end evoking the erosion of forgetting in the void of nonpresence: the working of eros pushes to the end, towards absolute oblivion through the very accruing of remembrance. Life is this immemorial that is encrypted, as if were, in a handful of names. 

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Notes 

1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges : A Literary Biography (Paragon House, 1988), 414.

2. Giorgio Agamben. “No amanece el cantor”, in En torno a la obra de José Ángel Valente (Alianza Editorial, 1996), 49.

3. Jorge Luis Borges. “Los teólogos”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 50.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El Aleph”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 189. 

5. Osip Mandelstam. “The Word and Culture” (1921), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1975, 531.

6. Adolfo Zavaroni. Etymological Dictionary of Etruscan Words (2024), 310.

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 Mount of Olives, where solitude and abandonment prepares the interval for the moment of transfiguration. If anything, Gethsamane is an experience of inwardness outside itself, which the painter has marvelously captured in the figure of Jesus raising his hands in supplication to the starry skies and god. Or so we think. The crisp blue tone of the sky immediately reminds the view of the vault of the Villa Farnesina that Fritz Saxl has interpreted as the transmission of a previous pagan astrological faith in the pictorial composition. The intense blue tone coupled with the emphatic stars arrest our imagination, but also that of the humane and worldly Christ.

What kind of experience is to look up into the firmament from man’s place on Earth and the cosmos? And what are we to make of the inability of the civilized human being to look into the blue depth not as a mirror of Nature, but of the non-totalizable and irreducible experience of solitude? It must be said that in a post-mythical world, the increasing loss of the opening of the sky goes hand in hand with the boundless loss of the Earth. And this is why we are tempted to read Colart de Laon’s picture as a gesture that renders legible the passage of the same movement: the Jesus that raises his hands outwards to the sky; and, simultaneously, the dozing Jesus that inhabits the contemplative state at the center bottom of the picture. To live in the world is defined neither by the experience of the time of arrival of the sky nor by the inward experience of the soul, but by the ability of transiting from one state to the other. And only there the worldly divine can be disclosed beyond the sclerosis of form.

This might also explain why Søren Kierkegaard following the German hymnist Gerhard Tersteegen could write in a gloss of his diaries that Jesus arises from the love feat into the path of Gethsemane: “It is always this way: Gethsemane lies closest to the highest bliss” [1]. The highest place is not the moment of absolute transcendence through faith; it is the secret that for Tersteegen expresses a kenotic hymn that empties life in the direction of poverty and death. In other words, the “highest bliss” is the experience of expropriation of every life; making life and death become indistinguishable in the vacillating night. A night beyond time and without god.  

Perhaps not just the “religious experience”, but all experience has as its central paradigm, the highest bliss in the face of death in which language can only account for it in its muteness and reverence. This is not an experience of vital teleology of humanity, but of a furtive relation. “Hacía sobre ella la experiencia”, as a Chilean writer once put it in the imperfect tense. But this can only mean to do an experience on the dissolution of oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. Journals and Notebooks V.7 (Princeton University Press, 2014), 368.

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 utterly impossible, of translating “Andenken” (in Spanish she opts for “Recuerdo” and not “Memoria”), Jaffé departs from an important observation that we must take into account here: the fact that this late hymn has been catalogued as a proemial composition. What does it mean that “Andenken” is to be read as a proem? As we know from the Ancient sources, the proem is an oratory prelude to the topic deployed in a text; in other words, it is the persuasive caesura of language before any argumentative exposition. Hence, the composition of the proem is something like the pure mirroring of language. This could explain why Hölderlin’s “Andenken” while prima facie about memory and thinking does not have a guiding thread to restrain it; it unfolds the enactment of its own recollection through the sayable.

If “Andenken” is a long proem – the space where the poem and proem absolutely coincide – then this means any translation must keep the poetic possibilities of oration in preamble, in path of preparation. Jaffé offers two distinct trans-creations of the famous poem’s last lines. The first reads thus: “Un mar que guarda los recuerdos / que da amores, que los toma / para que solo queden después / como tesoros / en quienes recuerden y en quienes escriban” [1]. In the second version, even more elaborate and idiosyncratic, Jaffé writes: “de pensar con todos / mis amores, es decir / pensar fijando / papel y lápiz / sobre tela / en memoria de todos mis muertos” [2]. It is noteworthy that the famous literal last lines of the “Andenken”, suspended in an enjambment, appeals to a canvas that is splattered with the memory of the dead. It seems of all the dead of the human race. What does it mean that the act of remembrance is the recollection of all the dead? Poetic imagination, if a testamentary document, appeals to the archaic where the living and the dead inhabit the world through image [3]. For Jaffé – but this also an intuition that Hölderlin shared in his pindaric translations – the beginning is not a previous stage, but in media res of the event of language. 

The recollection of language within proem attests to the exilic dimension of language; the site where no one truly ever belongs to: “…la lengua en mi país que no me pertenece”, writes Jaffé [4]. This means that the authentic remembrance of language is not a national language, but always ex patria lingua, or a language outside the telluric fabric of the national community. Because we are always walking strangers in our own language, the contact with the dead repeatedly reemerges in the memorial grain of the voice. 

As C.M. Bowra has noted, Pindar’s allusion to Memory takes place in the context of the Muses: “[the poet] invokes Memory because she embodies the accumulated wisdom of the past, and the Muses because they pass on this wisdom to him. What he asks from them is the ability to deal properly with what they give….men are blind if they do not pursue wisdom with the help of the Muses” [5]. If the “Andenken” should be read as a proem, this is because recollection is always fixed in the irreducible experience of our voice that recalls language from its beyond.

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Notes 

1. Verónica Jaffé. Poesía, traducción, libertad (Editorial Blanca Pantin, 2024), 38.

2. Ibid., 40. 

3. Ibid., 40.

4. Ibid., 51.

5. C.M. Bowra, Pindar (Oxford, 1964), 33.

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 Dichter, a hyperbolic figure of illumination and guidance caught in the net of poetry and philosophy, was already dependent on Hölderlin’s mysterious words. What remains in what the poet remembers and clears for foundation? What is the relationship between remembrance and what is ‘found’ or ‘established’? “Andenken / Remembrance” is a hymn from the late period, which means that it must be read in consistency with Höderlin’s poetological framework as it reaches its maximum degree of intensity in its declaration and deliverance. Pablo Oyarzun’s most recent Hölderlin, el recuerdo (Mudana ediciones, 2025) is a powerful and subtle contribution to the understanding of this poem that measures up to the task in its attention to lexicon and structure, metaphysical condensation, and the vortex of ‘memory’ that discloses the poem. One of the merits of Oyarzun’s philosophical hermeneutics, if we can call it that, resides in its refusal to incorporate philosophical doctrines to inform the major questions of the hymn; rather, he favors the very unfolding of the poem ramping its internal structure for possibilities (Oyarzun 18-19). Rereading “Remembrance” opens a path between philosophy and poetry in the dawn of the realization of metaphysics, whose price was paid by crushing the possible and the voice of the poem. 

For Oyarzun the poet’s remembrance is that of appropriation of what is proper, and thus inappropriable, and to which the hymn can only ‘thank’ in the way of thinking as figure in the face of the unfathomable. Following Heidegger’s reading to a point, to give thanks is also to welcome and greet that lets humans and things be in their truth; since greeting always assumes otherness as foreign into presence (Oyarzun 29-30). And in presence life acquires texture, depth, singularization, but also conversation; a reminder that will control the rhythm of Hölderlin’s hymn. What is brought to presence, then, is neither a possession nor a legible inheritance, but the non-synthetizable modulation of what is proper in virtue of being absolutely alien (Oyarzun 34). What is recalled in this poem that remembers and thinks the unthinkable? Is it just a stage for Hölderlin to poetically transfigure his well known travels in Bordeaux? Oyarzun tells us that even if that is to be taken into account, the foreigner path is only essential as a way of homecoming, making the site (and song) into the hymn (Oyarzun 42). There is relation to the absolute other, but only as transitory to becoming and divine destiny in the world: “…el espíritu ama, porque precisamente así, ensa autoalienación puede transitar a lo otro que lo otro, es decir, apropiarse de lo propio […] el pensamiento del Ereignis está condicionado estructuralmente poesía ex-propiación, por ese retraimiento, distracción o retiro (Entzug), solo puede el cual se da lo propio (Oyarzun 54-55). Höderlin’s poem sings from the lacuna of its own expropriation of the abode. And that abode is ultimately the unworking of remembrance and memory that is defaced in being absolutely intimate and irreducible.

In order to elucidate the contours of this memory and its oblivion, Oyarzun follows Dieter Heinrich observation that: “este movimiento [of remembrance as transcendence] conocedor de su propio curso y a la vez desviado del mismo, aspirando a un conocimiento en que algo perdurable (lasting), con gratitud, reine aún en la superación – esto es remembranza” (Oyarzun 61). What is remembrance if not what unweaves time? It is not an actual faculty of human psychology, nor a spectral incorporation of a missing object; rather, it is the non-syntheizable partition between language and the wound of existence; a separation that is only redeemed in the way of remembrance that deposes an ideal recollection of missing facts in preparation for recomposition. Oyarzun’s reading will depend on clearing the notion of severability as a condition for remembering and forgetting as it makes an entry into the poem’s final verse about the “fixating eyes of love” (den Blick heften). Helena Cortés Gabaudán translates it as “y el amor también fija aplicadamente los ojos” [1]. “Y también”, “but also”, a conjunction of persistence that Oyarzun reads as an inexorable attachment to memory and separation, and the memory of separation (Oyarzun 68). Because there is no sliding towards remembrance without departure, coming into the presence welcomes the memory that, in that very moment, has transformed our souls. 

Ultimately, for Oyarzun the vortex of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” is love understood as the supreme citation that enacts the place of both thanking and remembering: “Amar es recordar, frecuentar con el recuerdo (el pensamiento), lo amado, incluso allí donde lo amado está presente, porque así lo resguarda de la mera posesión y agradece su presencia. Amar es pensar-en, un modo, tal vez el más entrañable, de Andenken, amor” (Oyarzun 73-74). And this means that what remains and endures, as Adorno observed in his well known essay on parataxis in Hölderlin’s late poetry, is neither of the logical nor of the temporal indexes, but the event of language as originary creation and donation without contestation (Oyarzun 77). This is the instance where Hölderlin’s strange case of the divinization of the word – and this is the particularity of the hymn form, an element that is never teased out by Oyarzun – becomes absolute and intransigent. It is Höderlin’s absolute proximity with the classical world, but also its radical separation in the post-mythical world of dissenchantment. It can be said that that what endures ‘thanks’ the love of remembrance in its persistence of the word that does not allow history and the crisis of tradition: “en nombre de la cosa que queda, en la fragilidad de su tiempo, que es ese mismo quedar” (Oyarzun 79). 

The poem becomes the verbal and sayable site where the poetizing resides, as well as the greeting and farewell of departure, just like the spectral sailors of the poem. What endures intimately can be called love as a form of the immemorial (Oyarzun 80). And that is because in inscribing, or holding on to the irreducible origin, poetics becomes the supreme form of love – the love in separation – of an expropriated language that welcomes us home in conversation with friends. This attests to the spirit of Hölderlin’s well known letter to his friend Böhlendorff in 1802: “A los artistas les hace falta la psyche entre amigos, el nacimiento del pensamiento en la conversación y la carta. De lo contrario, no gozamos de nada de esto para nosotros mismos” [2]. And this intoxicated love in language that departs from separation situates Hölderlin as radically different from the Chirstian agape and its bond of perfect unity for securing salvation (Colossians 3:14). A salvation that Hölderlin overcame in the drama of Empedocles, enacting the impossible incorporation of the aorgic physis through the writing of the tragic myth. 

Now we are also able to understand why Hölderlin transited to the hymn as the supreme form of the poem; not because because it is the origin or its last stage, but a suspension of language retrieved is gathered in the two moments of salutation and farewell, celebration and lamentation [3]. The hymnal dimension of the poem becomes language as such, which Oyarzun calls the immemorial without ever alluding to the notion of hymn. Indeed, the love of remembrance only becomes possible as a disjointed factum of experience anchored in its abyssal noncorrespondence  (Oyarzun 84). Thus, to remember is to love the caducity of life – “este ya no es la signatura indeleble del amor”, as beautifully expressed by Oyarzun – in a world in which the testament of language awaits no resurrection. 

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Notes 

1. Friedrich Hölderlin. Poesía esencial (La Oficina, 2017), Trad. Helena Cortés, 129. 

2. Friedrich Hölderlin. Correspondencia completa (Ediciones Hiperión, 1990), trads. Helena Cortés & Arturo Leyte, 554. 

3. Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce: Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022), 246-247.

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 revista Escrituras Americanas.

Agradezco enormemente las intervenciones de mis amigos Ángel, Miguel Ángel, Lieta, Mauricio, porque en última instancia un libro no es nada sin la posibilidad de ser encarado y llevado fuera de sus límites. Mauricio Amar preguntaba por la apuesta general del libro, y quizás pueda decir algo sobre esto. Este libro se inspira en lo que me gustaría llamar la escritura del adiós o del farewell. Siempre me ha llamado la atención que, al comienzo de este siglo, dos pensadores que admiro profundamente escribieron por separado dos libros de farewell: me refiero a Farewell to an Idea (Yale U Press, 1999) de T.J. Clark, y The Exhaustion of Difference (Duke U Press, 2000) de Alberto Moreiras. Respectivamente, adiós al modernismo pictórico, y a la suma metareflexiva sobre América Latina. Al menos para mi La fisura es una forma de decirle adiós a cierta reflexión política contemporánea. Y decir adiós supone atravesar el problema; por eso mismo, el hilo del libro es un problema de hegemonía que ha dominado el horizonte reflexivo y práctico del pensamiento teórico.

Ya aludimos al colapso de las formas de mediación, y se nos suele olvidar que forma es política, y la política es sólo posible mediante una forma. Si queremos pensar contra la dominación, a espaldas del vector retórico de la hegemonía, debemos tomar muy en serio cómo la forma hoy solo cumple la tarea de la dominación sobre la existencia y la palabra. La insistencia compulsiva que las formas ofrecen desembocan en su cierre letal (en la jerga de Alex Karp) sobre cada uno de nosotros. Ángel Octavio veía que el problema se nos presentaba como salida a otra parte. ¿Pero, qué salida? 

Toda salida remite a una trascendencia menor: podemos salir al cielo como interioridad espiritualizada; o bien, podemos salir a un espacio demónico nocturno, un hacer noche, como versa el título del nuevo libro de Constanza Michelson. No deja de ser un síntoma de época que algunos hoy insistan en el vector de la espiritualización como vuelta a la tierra, aunque ésta sea el desierto en free fall que produce el declive (stagnation). El último Tronti, con el que tuve la suerte de intercambiar, lo recogía: el único combate hoy pasa por la interioridad (xeniteia). Pero el problema aquí es que el mundo no coincide con la Tierra. Y lo que interesa, entonces, ese justamente esa no-coincidencia, esa fisura, con respecto al mundo del viviente que hoy aparece como búsqueda de región. Y la región está en su acontecer fuera del mundo más que en el fuero interno. 

O podríamos decir que está en la apertura del paisaje. No hay salida a un lugar sometido a la viabilidad ecológica. O no puede terminar ahí. Al final de cuentas, como vio un pensador en su momento, la revolución industrial fue la segunda revolución, puesto que la primera había sido la relativa a la agricultura entendida como asentamiento en el terreno. En apertura entronizamos con el cielo; o, en la bellísima definición de Kurt Badt comentando la obra pictórica de Constable: “el cielo es el órgano de los sentimientos”. El cielo aquí no es el espejo mítico que habilita la autoafirmación que conduce al humanismo catastrófico; más bien, es el punto de fuga que no se dirime en las particiones del suelo. Es curioso que la dominación en curso ya está operando como el diseño geoespacial del cielo. Esto es lo que comparte la figura del palantir de la Inteligencia, así como la Tianxia, doctrina “Todo bajo el Cielo” del emergente imperio chino. En apertura mantenemos las intermediaciones entre cielo y suelo en el fin de nuestro tiempo. 

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 realidad tiene una afinidad chilena implícita, pues remite a una expresión de una conversación que tuve con Idris en los meses tras la revuelta de George Floyd, y que fue publicada en la ahora inexistente Revista Disenso. Estamos hablando de la primavera del 2021, lo que quiere decir que ya casi cinco años nos separan de ese momento. Creo que ambos estamos muy agradecidos no solo por la acogida en el catálogo de Irrupciones Ediciones, sino también por una colaboración de pensamiento real, que hace que todo sea un poco más llevadero y fecundo. En este comentario simplemente quiero registrar tres planos que pudieran contribuir en torno a la escena de escritura de Idris para luego conversar. 

En primer lugar, creo que como podrá ver el lector que se asome a la páginas del libro, lo que llama la atención de inmediato es una pulsión en el lenguaje que pudiéramos caracterizar de inmediatez y caída. Pongo el énfasis en este nudo, porque no se ha reparado lo suficiente, me parece, en la relación entre el acontecimiento de la revuelta y el lugar de la lengua. Creo recordar que Willy Thayer lo tematizó con cierto énfasis en una discusión sobre la “constitución menor” en un número de Papel Máquina de 2021. Idris es un pensador de escritura escasa, contenida, tenue; y, sin embargo, en esos meses del llamado “American hot summer” del 2020 su voz desbordó a la letra con regularidad. Un desborde que no tiene nada que ver con el reportaje de los hechos – no es un John Reed con nuevos días que conmovieron al mundo desde Minneapolis – aunque también los incluya desde luego, sino con la posibilidad misma de “decir” al calor de una instancia temporal que trastoca y anima. Si hay momentos de “golpes a la lengua”, ¿no es el acontecimiento de la revuelta la instancia donde la lengua hace presencia pura?

Ya que hablamos de presencia, en Escritos hay un timbre zigzagueante que pasa por dar lugar a la presencia de la existencia afroamericana; dejarla actuar en el teatro de su entorno. ¿Qué significa esto? Yo recuerdo que hace algunos años, el tren regional de New Jersey, el NJTransit, tuvo muchos problemas técnicos, y entonces durante un final de mes se habilitó montarse en tren sin pagar. Y durante esos días, los que tomamos el tren vimos de repente algo sorprendente e inédito: tribus de jóvenes afroamericanos – algunos tan jóvenes como de la junior high  – en pura algarabía y con sus rostros de absoluta felicidad se montaban al tren de Trenton a Manhattan por vez primera. La “muerte social” contra la existencia afroamericana de la cual Floyd es sólo su expresión extrema, no es reducible al momento de un siniestro, sino que es contra todo el mundo de circulación de lo social. En ese momento en el que el precio se ponía en suspenso, se abolía la cruda violencia que subyace la atadura entre la tarifa y el salario. Cuento esto porque me parece que la escritura de Idris tiene una operatividad que busca descomprimir esa violencia social contra la presencia indexando una textura experiencial, desfigurada. Y esta es su diferencia con las otras dos tendencias del pensamiento negro en Estados Unidos: el activismo político democrático (BLM), y el afropesimismo, que es una metateoría disolvente, aunque ciertamente muy comprometida con zonas autográficas o experienciales de escritura. Me parece que leer a Idris con esto en mente nos ayuda a afinar sus diferencias ante esas otras dos opciones del pensamiento crítico contemporáneo. 

Y finalmente, la elección del título relativo a la tierra baldía obviamente remite al famoso long poem The Wasteland de T.S. Eliot, que Idris recoge en varios momentos de sus escritos, aunque sin remitir al poeta. La wasteland para Eliot, como sabemos, constituía el horizonte en marcha de la modernidad protestante y maquínica ante la que él reaccionaba desde su catolicismo reaccionario; en Idris, en cambio, la wasteland es lo que ya habitamos, el espacio tortuoso y siniestro de la interconectividad, de las infraestructuras metropolitanas, de la exposición social regulada. Por banal que parezca creo que es muy atractivo haber puesto el énfasis en la tierra baldía, porque parte del colapso epocal en curso tiene que ver con la conquista del espacio; ya no el espacio de los astros donde Musk y los otros personajes de Silicon Valley quieren instalar sus fundos, sino la tierra misma que pisamos, y que ahora sentimos como lugar inmundo carente de sentido de ‘región’. La tierra traducida a superficie para ingenieros o world builders, por decirlo con Bruno Maçaes.  

Pensar hoy supone pensar sobre y en el espacio, haciendo espacio para abrir el no-espacio que le devuelve su dignidad contra toda reducción de lo intercambiable. La modernidad fue la época de la temporalidad, de la filosofía de la historia y del mesianismo; hoy, de la mano de Idris, podemos abrir la pregunta por el pensamiento en región, que tiene prioridad con respecto a la organización y a la economía política. Escritos desde la tierra baldía nos da paso a esto y a más. Muchas gracias.

Seeleenlärm or soul noise. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a letter written in 1969 to her friend Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt provides a striking description of the solitary condition of thought in language: “The silent dialogue of thought goes on between me and myself, but not between two selves. In thought, you are self-less – without age, without psychological attributes, not all as you say “really are” [1]. Thinking, she goes on to claim, puts into crisis all identity and nonsense, so that the inward searching can fold “outwardly” into the world. Arendt immediately notes that the passage from interiority to the outwardness does not express a fixed purpose; it is rather a motion through which “words become part of the world”. Thought can be said to express the coming into relation between language and world.

Further exploring the depth of the language that characterizes the “inner life” of thought, the philosopher immediately emphasizes its acoustic or tonal qualities, that is, “an inevitable noise of our apparatus, which Broch called Seeleenlärm, soul-noise. It is what makes us tick”. To be in thought, or in a way to thinking, means allowing the soul noise to buzz from beneath the skin. The Seeleenlärm does not coincide with language as concept or signification; it is rather the tear that allows for the emergence of language as imagination and thinking. 

This operation is nothing more than the relation of language to its own impossibility or muteness in the region of the Seeleenlärm, and what artificial models of language cannot replicate. And although Arendt compares the soul noise to other functional organs of biological existence, it is only obvious that the harmony of the soul lacks a physical compartment, and can only be expressed in the possibilities that language bestows to thinking. The notion of Seeleenlärm, if we are to call it that, appears not in philosophical context, but in a literary one; that is, in Hermann Broch’s “Zerline’s Tale”, in which the soul voice is understood as the lacuna of sensation, having nothing special in terms of intellectual faculty or knowledge collectiom, it is the sensation that fill people’s empty and boring lives” [2]. Seeleenlärm determines thought, but it is not thinking as such; it is more like the suspension of temporalization and judgement in every living being. This is why it is not even coterminous with the passions, let alone love. Perhaps the Seeleenlärm can be said to occupy a third component (tertium comparationis) through which the human being structures the mystery of his spirit [3]. Is this third component that dissolves the self for the place for ethics? In Broch’s modernist aspirations, attuning to the noise of the soul meant the aesthetic reduction of a symbol to mediate “understanding from one person to another”.

But it should be obvious that the  transition of Seeleenlärm to metaphoric understanding flattens the void into a conglomerate of selves that come into being by setting aside thought through the communication or artistic repression. In the reverse, one could imagine then that there is only thought when the suspension of any conglomerate or community ceases to communicate by resting on proximity to the hole of the soul voice in expression. The communication between souls – beyond the transport of the symbol, beyond separation ordered by discourse – can only be understood as the incommensurable in language. This is the instance where thinking takes flight because the invisible seeleenlärm transpires from its depths. 

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Notes 

1. Hannah Arendt. Between Friends The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, 1995), 242-243.

2. Hermann Broch. “Zerline’s Tale”, in Selected Short Writings (Bloomsbury, 2006), 103.

3. Hermann Broch. “Some comments on the philosophy and technique of translating”, in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age (Counterpoint, 2002), 122.

Pindar’s Fragment 180. by Gerardo Muñoz

Understanding what the ancient Greeks thought of sayability in language is no easy task, but in Pindar’s Fragment 180 we can confirm that the use of language must come to terms with the internal lacuna of silence. Pindar says as a way of recommendation: “Do not break out useless speech in front of everybody; there are times when the path of silence is most trustworthy, but lofty discourse holds the sting of domination” [1]. Although this fragment has been read as a form of “prudential speech”, it might be more interesting to read it as a form of the inception of the sublime in language, which Longinus, although not referring directly to the same fragment, inscribed it under the idea of being ‘tongueless’ or aglossīa, which like Ajax’s silence says significantly more in its restrain than from saying something directly. Language becomes useless – that is, it ceases to have any use with itself – if it becomes a tactic to diminish any given rhetorical order. It is no surprise that in our time the predominant use of language takes the form of a transaction through technical terms that has no use of its own. 

It has been shown that Pindar’s conception of language was not about representation, but rather about the voice or kompos that takes place whenever there is vibration or harmony in the collision or contact between two objects [2]. Of course, the truly originary collision in language is between the voice and the idea, where the cradle of language opens to its own poetic and ethical possibilities. Hence, if there is restraint and silence as constituent of language, it is because there is a rhythmic movement that accommodates without the intromission of an external force. Here, it is the well known definition of poetic creation that Pindar lays out in “Olympian 6”: “Upon my tongue I have the sensation of a clear-sounding whetstone, which I welcome as it comes over me with lovely streams of breath” [3]. What carries those streams of sounds?

The poet is not an independent creator with higher access to language; the poetic instance is only accessible to those who, in contact with inspiration, can sharpen their tongues to the use of one’s language. We are in language when we find ourselves in the direction of a “path of words” [4]. Thus, the contact of language is not with objects or entelechies of the visible world, it is first and foremost with the receiving movement of the voice as a “lovely streams of breath”. In this way, Pindar’s plea for silence is not to be understood as an active negation of “saying”, but of an internal lapse or suspension of language that allows the emergence of the truth of the voice. The absence of kompos turns language into an instrument that can only prepare and foment conflict and domination, seeking to overcome something that is ultimately captive of the common ground of an uninspired language. And this means that language without inspiration is not only a voice that has run astray from its rhythm, it is also a language that will only find war in its path. 

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Notes 

1. Píndaro. “Fragmento 180”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 410. 

2. Helga Kriegler. Untersuchungen zu den optischen und akustischen Daten der bacchylideischen Dichtung (Verlag Notring, 1969), 90.

3. Píndaro. “Olympian 6”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 90. 

4. Píndaro. “Olympian 1”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 90. 

The hypnotism of patriotism. by Gerardo Muñoz

We owe an untimely intuition about the enduring seduction of patriotism and nationalism to Leo Tolstoy’ essay “Patriotism and Government” (1900), in which he captured a paradoxical phenomenon: mainly, that at the same time that the integration of humanity and its historical consciousness reached its civilizational peak, patriotism instead of disappearing became increasingly more destructive and fierce. Looking at the outset of the First World War in Europe and its nascent total mobilization of industries, the Russian novelist claimed that, from that moment, government organization will depend on patriotism as a source to conduct total war within the human species. But what surprised Tolstoy – which has clear contemporary overtones in the impolitical movements that dominate Western societies – was the degree that this lethal patriotism infiltrated the very worldview and orientation of the Christian vocation. Tolstoy writes in the most most potent passage of the essay:

“All the peoples of the so-called Christian world have been reduced by patriotism to such a state of brutality, that not only those who are obliged to kill or be killed desire slaughter and rejoice in murder, but all the people of Europe and America, living peaceably in their homes exposed to no danger, are, at each war – thanks to easy means of communication and to the press – in the position of the spectators in a Roman circus, and, like them, delight in the slaughter, and raise the bloodthirsty cry, ‘Pollice verso.’ [1]. 

This should suffice to note that for Tolstoy patriotism is neither a political ideology nor a formal principle of community; patriotism is rather a social liturgy born of the absolute sacrazalization of human life and whose hyperbolic figure will be that of the war-slave trained to endure “the act” (especially the slave that participates in the carnage through his words and attention). And just like in a theater play or in the Catholic liturgy where there are “acts” (and the service can only subsist through its enactment), the unleashed force of patriotism becomes a form of destruction as the essence of government organization.

This is why for Tolstoy the inception of total war recalibrates the grotesque spectacle through the “hypnotism of patriotism”, positing a fictional belonging of salvation – that is nontheological because it is unredeemable – through the destruction of another community of the human species. True, the end of politics always results in war; although Tolstoy introduces a nuance to this axiom: war is able to subsist thanks to the self-affirmation of patriotism as the triumph of a wordless inhumanity.

It is no coincidence that Tolstoy observed the rise of patriotic strife in tandem with modern science as conquest over Nature and the reality of human experience [2]. Thus, government patriotism and instrumental sciences are two interconnected regimes of the organization inhumanity that speak the rhetoric of growth and prosperity as stagnation deepens. In our days, this social cohesion, as Tolstoy warned with precision more than a century ago, has entered a new phase of domination that some called a “lethal form” integrating technology and war without any reminder [3]. 

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Notes 

1. Leo Tolstoy. “Patriotism and Government” (1900), in Last Steps: The Late Writings (Penguin Books, 2009), 318. 

2. Leo Tolstoy. “Modern Science” (1898), Last Steps: The Late Writings (Penguin Books, 2009), 252. 

3. Alexander Karp. The Technological Republic (Crown Currency, 2025), 154.

De Certeau’s untold night. by Gerardo Muñoz

The highest poetic moment in Michel De Certeau’s La culture au pluriel (1974) appears in the concluding pages where the historian resorts to a hunting image: “Culture is an untold night in which the revolutions of earlier times are dormant, invisible, folded into practices – but fireflies, and sometimes great nocturnal birds, cutting through it – as thrusts and creations that trace the promise of another day to come” [1]. This is De Certeau’s trope that stands for culture as opening of possibilities, the shoreline where administrators and technicians (his own terms) do not dare to cross and will probably never adventure. This is the site (the night, la noche oscura, which has a ringtone of the mystical tradition that the author knew perfectly well) where De Certeau wants to posit the possibilities of new struggles of cultural alterities [2]. A book in 1974 means many things, but for De Certeau it is an incursion into the collapse of his historical present, already showing full fledged signs of the crisis of legitimation, erosion of institutional trust, and the decomposition of social forms across Western symbolic realities. It is the nascent confirmation of the ascent of real subsumption, a term that does not appear in De Certeau’s book, although it informs it, even if negatively (the Italian Fiat wildstrikes makes a surprising cameo in the last paragraphs). Where to look, then?  

De Certeau’s answer read today does bring much naivete: cultural alterity. But this notion, which is reworked and contested in concrete fields of human activities (the university and schools, the new technological society and communication, social practices intertwined in popular and elite culture, power relations and post-statist configurations) do not appeal to the identitarian cosmopolitan horizon prima facie anchored in the diversity administration of a well integrated, albeit exploited planetary humanity. One senses that for De Certeau the nineteenth century “Social Question” has become the “cultural question” as the unit of the national sovereign state wanes and reacts. With the crisis of legitimation as backdrop, De Certeau sees the rise of a new subjectivity that he calls the new “militants without a cause”, a battalion of “exiles” that will only tacitly accept credible cultural imprints [3]. He wants to work with “culture” because at bottom De Certeau is both a historian and a realist. This new erosion of civil society-State relations entails a “new exile is in the works” [4]. And for De Certeau the exile, since biblical times, is seeking a new Earth where to “land”. 

In 1974, De Certeau’s invitation was to create the conditions for pluralist cultural landings that will foster, in the night of waiting, a new politics. But, could the same be said today even assuming concrete situations and the infuriating image of migration as a token for the workings of hegemonic politics? Does Gaia not alert us that we must “land” somewhere else on Earth? The anger and dissatisfaction that De Certeau cautiously predicated head on is already here in the form of what some of us have theorized as ongoing social stasis that is integrated in every social mediation. In the global metastasis of the 1970s De Certeau could claim that “behind anger there is the desire to create a polis and a politics; there is a desire to organize the conditions of life….” [5].

We are far removed from this desire, and even the most prominent cycle of revolts of the decade have refused in the solicitation of a new politics or a political horizon; and, even if, almost like weeds in cracks of piled urban ruins, we see again and again the last residues of the desire for hegemonic representation of the totality (the People, the Movement, the Class). In this light – now it is our own epoche – culture can only be compensatory, and still very much a symptom of the closure of exteriority. “Where there is no longer an imaginable outside we lose the possibility of an inside”, Moreiras wrote at the turn of the century against every form of culturalism [6]. Of course, De Certeau was well aware of it, which is why his proposal to cultural alterity retains zones of hermeneutical ambiguity many decades later [7]. For instance, he writes when commenting on neo-nationalist regional movements (Quebec, Catalonia, Occitania) that “cultural claims appear to be a reminder and a compensation” [8]. 

And recent events have proven De Certeau correct: what is Catalan nationalism – whether left or right, although ideological division is not a substantive difference – if not a compensatory rhetorical ruse to mobilize regional political elites to feed off the stagnant resources of a waning state form? The rhetoric of “political foundation” in the Catalan case created an “cultural alterity” that depended on the high illusion of hegemonic politics; a politics solely based on the “bad faith” of escalating and superposing values (“Spanish” v. “Catalan”) as the combustion of a fractured political social contract that ultimately deepens its fragmentation. De Certeau noted – cited with the long Augustunian tradition of political liberalism – that politics cannot bring happiness, but only create its conditions. However, today even this liberal ideal fails to account for its true source: our metapolitical collapse at the twilight of secularization means that the revival of the “social bond” is not to be found in the demand of new political principles, however narrowly or broadly defined. De Certeau in 1974 aspired at giving politics one more chance pulling it to the facticial heterogeneity of culture: “a politics that discovers in the diversity of the sky a generical….linked to the ambition of beginning over again, that is, of living” [9].

And indeed, we must begin all over again, but is really the only possibility? I believe that there are symptoms elsewhere in La culture au pluriel, and these concern language. In the second chapter, referring to the crisis of speech, De Certeau refers to the “denaturing act” of speech, as communication enters the regimen of commercial language and new computational masteries (what Jaime Semprún called neo-language) [10]. The crisis of language in the ascent of a new expressivity renders communication obsolete and obtuse; parasitic, or mushroom-like, as Hugo Von Hofmenthal had already noted in his Letter to Lord Chandos. Speech becomes a new form of blasphemy, something confirmed in recent years in the United States, which takes itself also as the homeland of “Free Speech” is increasingly under heavy surveillance by constitutionalism of codified parameters of “time, place, and manner”.

De Certeau shows himself highly consternated about blasphemous language, which is also conspiratorial language; the language that dwells on the reverse of social normativity and legal codification. But this perhaps the only language today can properly speak of pain without recurring to the transactions of violence; especially of the numbing violence of a neo-language that can communicate “everything” insofar as it ceases to communicate to no one. Could the “untold night”, that is also the night of the “unthought”, be the site of the preservation of another use of language, of nurturing language, descending into the hymnic sources of the sayable – thus, inverting the denaturing of historical severability – a language embedded in silence, in the protofigure of the mystic, assuming “the immediacy of nature and experience, to contact of things, one by one, in their primal disorder”? [11]. Ultimately, whatever the night will tell will only be possible through and in language. 

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Notes 

1. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 138.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. Ibid., 7.

4. Ibid., 8.

5. Ibid., 11.

6.  Alberto Moreiras. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Duke U Press, 2001), 21. 

7. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78.

8. Ibid., 70. 

9. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100.

10. Jaime Semprún. Defensa e ilustración de la neolengua (Ediciones El Salmón, 2018). 

11. Nicola Chiaromonte. “An Age of Bad Faith”, in The Paradox of History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 148. On the hymnic dimension of human speech, see the study undertaken by Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022).