In the late summer of last year, the painter Baruj Salinas (1935-2024) passed away at age 89. I was saddened to learn about his death many months after, and only because I had meant to write to him about a future encounter. For over fifteen years, I had contact with this extraordinary painter, and looking back into the past, my first visit to his studio in sunny South Florida when I was only a college student has become quite vivid and unforgettable. It was a rather small and unpretentious atelier filled with some cans and areca palms, and canvases everywhere. I remember that during my first visit he showed me an illustrated commemorative Torah on the five hundredth mark of the expulsion of the Jewish from Spain, of which only a few handmade copies were made (one of them was gifted to late Pope Francis). He was a painter that carried with him, very much like Edmond Jabès, a sort of clandestine culture of the sacred Book.
In fact, the last letter that he wrote to me in April of 2022, Baruj candidly recalled his early collaboration with the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente in Tres lecciones de tinibles (La Gaya Ciencia, 1981), for which he illustrated the pages with splattered Hebrew letters in magenta. I open one of the pages to “Guimel”: “El movimiento: exilio: regreso: vertigo: el solo movimiento es la quietud” writes the poet as if describing the pictorial gesture of Baruj. A life in double exile, Baruj’s painting oscillates between movement and repose, discharge and emptiness, figuration and the uttermost disintegration of the line.
If Baruj was arrested by the clandestine culture of the Book it was also due to his interest in the possibilities of language. This is a challenge whenever we confront a picture by Baruj: how can we assert in language what the picture is enacting without falling into the allure of ornamentation or the prescription of images in Jewish art? When I wrote about his work back in 2011 this ecstatic tension seemed attractive, but now I can only see it too emphatically invested. The truth is that language betrays what the movement of his painting resists time and again. And there is no such a thing as “Jewish Art”; in fact, whenever the topic came up (during those years I had taken a course on this tradition), the painter remained unaltered and quiet, keeping silence regarding its meaning, but insisting on the expressivity of his pictures.
Baruj’s abstraction befriends the persistence of everything living and thinking. The foam-like shapes levitate towards concrete forms of withdrawal and clearing of the pictorial space. This is why his friend María Zambrano, who wrote about his work, had suggested that in Baruj’s paintings emancipate “un pensar que se hace, como se hace aqui vida en su modalidad propia que es la pintura”. In Baruj, painting is an event that coincides with an image of thought, while the image of thought, stubbornly withdrawn from mimetic representation, materializes a proximity that only painting gives the world.
It is almost as if painting allows thought to breathe – and, in breathing, becoming extension, and thus a corpus in the world. This could perhaps explain why Baruj’s recurrent pictorial obsession was the landscape seen from high above, encircled by the aura of a clouded space. As Kurt Badt observed regarding the pictures of Constable, in painting the sky is the organ of sentiment; transcending the earthy attachment of our heavy footed existence. Before language, the light of painting circumvents the invisible space where all forms will fall into place accordingly. The hand of Baruj Salinas teaches us to orient ourselves in the divinity of appearance that is only eternal because it manages to be invisible between us.
A good place to start on Tetsuro Watsuji’s Climate (1935) is by considering how the very notion of the Japanese fudo as it appears defined in the first pages of the text, as a “structural element of human existence”. Augustin Berque has proposed a slightly different translation: the “structural moment” that speaks semantically to the prefix *-med, that also recalls mediality, metaxy, and also the French ‘milieu’. In any case, “fudo” discloses an expressive instance of existence, but it is not overtly determined cultural or historical teleologies; rather fudo like Heidegger’s fourfold (das Geviert), brings into gathering wind and earth in which existence can only appear to exist in between as exteriority. Watsuji writes: “The structure of “ex-sistence” is, thus, something rather than to exist in the reality of the cold; it is rather to exist within other persons. To designate this reality we prefer the technical relation of intentional reality, used by phenomenologists, the Japanese expression term aidagara (interpersonal)” (†27).
Unless we know the language, we can only take Watsuji at his word when it comes to the Japanese, but all things considered it is at least obvious to say that fudo is not strictly a descriptive objective reality, but a relation of Being. Watsuji calls it a few pages later a “movement of negativity”: “…this is a ‘movement of negativity’. This is how the spatial-temporal structure of human existence comes to being like that of the climate and that of historicity” (33). The notion of existential transcendence that Watsuji wants to hold on to dwells between reality and existence, generating kimochi, or tonality / stimmung (38). The first question here is what to make of Watsuji’s typology of regional climate setting if these are not to be taken geographically or culturally as expressing locational structures for specific kimochi?
There are three types of climate regions for Watsuji: monsoon, desert, and meadow. One could imagine that these three ideal types as environmental arrangements in the disclosure of kimochi. Each region has its surroundings. For instance, the monsoon is defined by its humidity (47). For Watsuji each of the climatic regions will fundamentally generate different forms of social organization, and it is from this perspective that he interprets the civilizational rise of the West beginning in Ancient Greece. The emergence of the polis is understood as a direct relation with harvesting and later to a social bond determined by production and struggle (war). In the most clear elaboration of his interpretation of the polis, Watsuji writes: “With a slave system as through-point as this, the small number of people who comprised the polis were freed from the labours of the herdsman-farmer. […]. With the building of the polis one may begin to use the word ‘Greece’. If this be correct, Greece began with the conversion of the farmer-herdsman gained freedom from the restraints of nature” (82, 113). This restraint of nature is not just productive in the practical sense (attachment to agricultural life), but it is also of the order of the sensible: this is why Watsuji claims that the Greek classical culture possessed a commitment to a visuality of clearing that is ingrained in their architecture and temples in the open (115). And being in the cleared visual spaces demands the question of technique: “The life of the polis has at its center the artificial-technique in order to dominate the Mediterranean. The emergence of this form of life was the powerful instance that determined the destiny of the “West” (116). In this line, modern science is nothing but a consequential reduction of technique for the Greeks (117).
There is definitely some ambiguity here, since later on and following Komei, Watsuji claims that the emergence of machines in the West was only possible as a retreat from cold weather in the North, and thus a product of interiority (130). Could this mean that the all-clearing established in classical Greece – with its vantage point and all too visible sculptures without oblique point of view – contributed to the later historical production of reserved interiority? Watsuji seems to contrast the clearing in classical Greece with the opaque and gloomy clime of the Germanic lands. In fact, Watsuji says later that only in the shrouds of Germany could pure music be created, where light is not so keenly embodied (141, 111). Returning to the question of existential tonality, or the kimochi, I wonder if Watsuji’s subtle yet recurrent positioning of Western destiny has to do with an originary ethical deficit that is maintained from the depths of fudo as within and outside the clearing of nature. There might be a clue about this in “America’s National Character” (1943): “The true hidden reserves are in ethical strength and not in the power of quantity” [‡]. Is living proportionally in the fudo the ability to master this ethical orientation?
Session 2 (continued)
Having laid out his climate interpretation of the West, I think it is fairly easy to grasp the orientation in Watsuji’s monsoon specificity as a sharp contrast to the condition of its “structural moments”. In particular, the political contrast is implicitly established – and I say implicit because Watsuji never confronts it as the guiding principle of differentiation, although it bends that way. It caught my attention that, following the scholar Kateke Fumio, Watsuji will note at the outset that Chinese (Asian) subjectivity refuses any positing of the legitimacy of the state, and especially the fiscal state (we know from Schumpeter that the modern European state is the fiscal state), and they can only flee from such submission, although they are submissive in other ways, to force (shoguns, for instance) (157). The monsoon structure, hence, has primacy over the political sphere projecting a sort of permanent stagnation for historical development. The notion of akirame or “no bearing, nothing we can do”, a sense of overwhelming resignation, becomes the social tonality of the monsoon surrounding, which ultimately (Watsuji does not say it like this, but perhaps we can push the text in this direct) entails enduring stagnation. This perhaps highlights, quite convincingly, of a certain caducity in Watsuji’s monsoon type in our present epoch.
In the order of the political register, one could read Watsuji’s emphasis on the Japanese home in this direction; that is, the monsoon resignation leads to permanent homecoming. The monsoon region is the region where the oikos triumphed over the polis (180-181). If in the Greek world, legibility and the transparency of the grasping logos made the domestic space an exception to the social life, for Watsuji the Japanese dwelling space is not just a space of familiar gathering, it is also a cosmology and an ecology: “The Japanese consciousness took shape in the totality of the home” (184). (As a side note, I cannot but read this in light of Xi Jinping’s notion of the ‘ecological civilization’ as the master key for the planetary relevance of the CCP). Elevated to the rank of cosmology, the monsoon retreat into the home, does not become an all too easy path towards natural domestication?
In the Japanese home there is no separation – there are no locks and keys – says Watsuji, which introduces as a paradigm for a different form of sociality that differs from Western individuality around appropriation, assignation, and separability (201). This is true to some extent if we think about a spatial figure of Western civilization and enclosure, such as the castle. This is fundamentally different from the tokonama. For Watsuji, the structural moments of ambiance and surrounding generates specific mentis types, and thus concrete organizations of said space. I derive from Watsuji’s second part of the book that Western civilization revolved around the movement of total legibility and clearing (Greeks) that unfolded to separation and thus control over nature, resulting in a machine utopia as Adolf Caspary rightly called it. What about the monsoon specificity? There is retreat and resignation over the surrounding, which allows another mediation or in-betweenness with the natural world and exteriority, although this will entail stagnation in world historical terms.
The contrast between the West and China was already well established during the Enlightenment in the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other luminaires according to Federico Chabod. In fact, Chabod claims that the civilizational divide between the West and China is crucial to understanding both [‡ ‡ ‡ ]. Asking why an ancient civilization like the Chinese had made such little progress in two centuries (XVII-XVIII), Montesquieu for instance claims that an explanation is to be found in the sacred respect of this civilizational mentis for the transmission of its tradition. It is easily inferred from Watsuji that the monsoon ambient allows for a civilization of “Wisdom” in the deep sense that it “thanks” all the elements of the tradition that it receives. This is also a form of “resignation” proper to mezuru, a form of wonder and surprise that adds nothing new. When Kojeve referred to the end of history in the form of American animality and Japanese snobbism, I think he was crediting this inner Wisdom in the wake of stagnation and released resignation. Of course, we also wonder what Watsuji will say about the “ecological civilization” driven by China’s modernizing planetary project that, if we are to believe Adam Tooze, possesses the master key for world transformation in the notion of “development”. If true, this can only entail the triumph of Western machination through the labor of its others.
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Notes
† All pages are referring to the Spanish edition, Tetsuro Watsuji, Antropología del paisaje: climas, culturas, y religiones (Ediciones Sígueme, 2016). All English translations rendered are mine.
If the modern age is characterized by the triumphant claim to legitimacy thanks to some major forgetting, then there is much to learn from Chaim Bialik’s 1917 enduring essay on Jewish Law, Halakhah e Aggadah: Sulla Legge ebraica (Quodlibet, 2025), which has just been republished in a very timely fashion in Italian. Bialik in 1917 means being in good company of many other names: Franz Kafka and Gustav Landauer, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber, Ahad Ha’am and Carlo Michelstaedter, and many other names that surely have been eroded by the dust of historical time. This very erosion is at the center of Bialik’s essay that in the thunderstorm of the First Great War, the imperial consolidation of political Zionism, and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where many Jewish marranos dwelled, decides to take a step back from the modern acceleration and ask about the two poles of Ancient Judaic Law: the Haggadah and Halakhah. Immediately taking distance from the modern scheme of positive law and natural law, norms and principles, Bialik reminds us that Haggadah and Halakhah are two faces of the divine dispensation of Judaic law, in which temporal continuity and the statute, the heart and the shelter appear to communicate each and every time through the life of a people (5).
As someone writing in the waning of Halakhah due to modern secularism, Bialik’s essay is first and foremost invested in preserving the Halakhah as a living tradition, “an art of concrete life” that allows for the form of life of human beings in the world (7). It is from Bialik’s essay where Walter Benjamin in the 1934 Kafka essay would later incorporate the notion that Judaic law as void of content, open to the pure means of its own transmissibility. But perhaps in Benjamin’s materialist rendition Bialik’s central notion of the Hallakah is also blurred, since for the Jewish theologian what is central is the spiritual formation of the soul, a sort of subterranean facticity that is passed throughout the ages, just like that Chrisitan masons built major Medieval cathedrals across the centuries (11) (the metaphor is indeed his). The Halakhah insofar as it inspires the soul is an endless formation, although it is also “the imagination of becoming a living soul, with a body and a sense of beauty” (13). The Halakhah is a region of de-autonomized sublime that Bialik compares to a crossgenerational Shabbat in which a people are observant to a way of living in its own becoming (14). In other words, the Halakhah is not a moral principle for personal virtue as arete as in the ancient metaphysical ethics; it is the absorption of the life of the community into the “voice of the heart” that can regenerate forms of sensible wisdom (16). It is wisdom without a master or priest that teaches the law, since it is not a knowledge that must be interrupted through mental capacities. According to Bialik’s theory, once the Jewish people are thrown into a temporality of dilation, what appears to shine in a powerful light is the cultivation of a life against the abuse and corruption of historical obsolescence. As Bialik writes in one of the most striking passages of his essay:
“Che questi «vasi di vita» siano rimasti da parte per qualche tempo non significa che siano inutili. È una grande legge: ogni forma di vita durante la sua creazione, finché dura questo periodo, rappresenta a sua volta un contenuto nello spirito del suo creatore. Appena la sua creazione è compiuta, essa si separa, si confonde con le altre, e ormai priva di essenza propria decade a strumento: chiunque vi trova quel che vi mette ogni volta che la usa. Essa deve tutto all’uomo e allo spirito dell’uomo a cui tocca in sorte come un bene abbandonato. Se egli vi mette oro, troverà oro; se polvere, polvere. Se non sa cosa mettervi, può anche lasciare che questo strumento arrugginisca. Ma quell’uomo non deve dire: lo strumento è inservibile, da buttare; deve dire invece: io sono povero!” (19).
This means that for Bialik the theological conception of “creation” does not stand for a mythical origin unconcealed by some authority; rather, it is a “vase of life” that allows life to be attuned to the the spirit of the creator, and for the creator to be rendered unfinished because the texture of the form of life is always to be written. At bottom, this modal structure of theological interdependency is at the heart of Bialik’s underappreciated theory of the letter and spirit of law that still resonates in our days. It is not that there is unwritten tradition and then it becomes a written norm to adjudicate the force of law (as in the current American jurisprudential debates about the “History and Tradition” test); on the contrary, Bialik’s legal contribution, well beyond the confines of Ancient Judaic Law, is that there is an abyss in the soul in every enigmatic life because the legal force cannot yet (and cannot for a long time) adjudicate a resolute execution of judgment (23). Counterintuitively, we can thus say that to really “live in the Law” cannot be expressively taken to be to defend court orders and police powers, but rather to allow life to live concretely as enigmatic life that is deprived of temporary ad hoc fictions suited to social domination. That is to say, to live according to the law means coherently with the Hakkhalah entails to an awareness that the law remains fully unknown, in this way incapable of becoming a part of social and penal organization that in our days it has thoroughly transformed the legal systems of the West (37).
This is why Bialik also includes a strong warning towards the end of Halakkah e Aggadah: the rise of substantive qualifications of Judaic culture (Jewish art, education, work, nationalism, theology) bending towards identitarian abstractions amount to what he called “ethereal love” (38). This ethereal love not only dissolves into the solution of modern humanism, but betrays the enigmatic form of Jewish life in the time of dilated waiting. A time of dilation (Aufschub) that does not mean that there is nothing to do – consummated boredom and alienated experience – it is rather the opening to a whole field of possibilities and relations, of worlds and the attunement of the imagination in its exposure. This non-closure of the theological experience provided by the fine attunement of the heart cannot be properly called political; which is why Bialik understood the land of Palestine as a vitam nomoi and not one of nationalist settlement validated by the institutional authority of the modern state.
As Andrea Cavalletti records in his illuminating Postface Bialik telling Hannah Arendt: “La mia convinzione politica, se ve n’è una, è anarchica” (64). Like in Oskar Goldberg’s theology, what is at stake in Bialik is an anarchic Hebraism that allows the presence of God in the world to deter the emergence of poisonous deifications (the individual and the state). Far away instrumentally infused pseudo-messianic overtones of an “elected People” for historical assertion and depredation, Bialik understood that only in the free relation between Halakhah and Haggadah, could the gordian knot of life and law be considered if we are to avoid the slippage into the seductions of the ethereal forces.
The common Spanish verb “desvivirse” resists obvious translations. Could one translate “desvivirse” as “unliving”, “constructing by destroying”, or “fulfilled life”? It seems that none of them capture the full meaning of an expression that is anchored in practical use. It is important to note that when the term emerged in the intellectual discourse of Spanish twentieth century, its depth was intimately connected to its meaning (life, living, vocation) that it immediately took the life of a concept for cultural milieu and national character. In his lecture “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, Manuel García Morente suggested that “vivir desviviendose” was the singular form of life of Hispanic being that attained eternity while on the terrestrial world:
“Porque lo típico del hombre hispánico es, por decirlo así, su modo singular de vivir, que consiste en “vivir no viviendo”, o, dicho de otro modo, en “vivir desviviéndose”, en vivir la vida como si no fuera vida temporal, sino eternidad. El hombre hispánico no considera la vida eterna. O la salvación del alma como el remate, término y fin de la vida terrestre, sino como remate, término y fin de cada uno de los instantes y de los actos de la vida terrestre. La salvación eterna no es para él solamente un objeto de contemplación; ni tampoco solamente una norma de conducta, sino que es, ante todo y sobre todo, lo que da sentido y finalidad concreta a cada uno de los actos en que se descompone la vida terrestre” [1]”.
For García Morente, the specific meaning of “desvivirse” entails a tension between interiority and exteriority; and, by extension, between life and death, and in fact of death in life that leads to resurrection and a new life. He writes: “La vida del alma hispánica es un constante morir y resucitar para volver a morir; hasta que la última resurrección” [2]. “Desvivirse”, quite literally, happens at the level of the soul when life continuous through finitude and concrete death. This is why the notion of “desvivirse” has a clear theological underpenning that one can pair with the divine apocatastasis in intramundane life. “Desvivirse” is never about personal salvation and the economy of election, which is why Americo Castro would emphasize that this vocation does not align well with modern individualism, because the “vivir desvivido” experiences its own ruin like a joyous and exuberant Saturnalia” [3].
As in the indication by García Morente, for Castro “desvivirse” entails something like an external perspective in which life can ultimately only take place from its transcendence with a relation to what’s outside ofitself. This outside is neither determined by politics nor rhetoric [4]. To live “desviviéndose” entails an intensity that persists not just as an interior affirmation of self-preservation, but as an erotic relation with what is most desired and venerated (many Spanish thesaurus of the nineteenth century would define desvivirse as “to love or desire with eagerness”, “amar con ansia”). If extracted from the cultural and identitarian historical context, “desvivirse” appeals to the object of passion that overflows the senses of human life.
This overflow is embedded in the word itself. The great Spanish scholar of Benedictine monasticism, García Colombás, in his book El monje y el Misterio Pascual (1984), made a simple, and yet remarkable lexicographical observation about the word “desvivirse”. Colombás noted that while in most of monastic literature the prefix “-des” donates privation and deficiency, the function of this prefix in “desvivirse” suffered a complete inversion, since now it entails to love intensively and thoroughly, as in “se desvive por complacer a todo el mundo” [5]. As a theologian, it should not have passed Colombás that the term in question is a triad of three linguistic units: -des/vivir/-se. This means that it is not just that the prefix exerts the meaning of privation of “life”, but also makes room for the reflexive “se”. It is curious that in in Spanish grammar “vivirse” is often used in relation to location (i.e. “el va a vivirse al campo”), and never as a conventional reflexive action (i.e. “él quiere vivirse solo”, “el se vive solo” = this would be incorrect). Taking this cue, one could perhaps say that the inversion so keenly perceived by Colombás acts upon the living so that they can repeatedly making space for the unfolding of life, rendering possible the soul’s crossing the inside and outside in every form of life.
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Notes
1. Manuel García Morente. “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, in Idea de la Hispanidad (Espasa-Calpe, 1947), 215.
2. Ibid., 216.
3. Américo Castro. España en su Historia: Cristianos, Moros, y Judíos (Editorial Losada, 1948), 45.
4. Ibid., 279.
5. García M. Colombás. El monje y el Misterio Pascual (Ediciones Monte Casino, 1984), 132.
Anyone somewhat familiar with the writing of Josep Rafanell i Orra knows that we are in the company of a wanderer and itinerant in an infinite pursuit of what the experiences of worlds might offer [1]. A mad endeavor for a groundless epoch oriented towards planetary reduction and confinement, so obsessed with infrastructure and security, most recently through the reiteration of the politico-theological program of national sovereignty, one more desperate reaction to unrestrained planetary decline. We can say with Hölderlin that we are vagabonds in a destitute time, a poet who figures prominently at the entrance of Josep’s Traité. In our posthistorical epoch we are confronted with the thicket over the dominion of life, which means that the question of exteriority becomes pressing as existence enacts a path beyond the endless rubble of representation bestowed upon the human species in every point of the globe.
The book that the Spanish reader now holds in his hands thanks to Luciole Ediciones will immediately let in a dimming light of a singular style or maniera that dislocates the modernist assumptions of political thought into what one could what I am willing to name an analytics of sensible hybridizations between languages and thought. This analytic of the sensible refuses immediately Social normativity as well as the melancholic hangovers of the modern revolutionary tradition (always caught up between constituent and constituted power, representation and humanism, growth and production). This is why Josep will redefine communism as the nonprogramatic event that irrupts through hybridization of surrounds and regions capable of overcoming the ontotheological adequation of subject and object that has led an entire civilization astray (33). The project of the critique of metaphysics finds in Josep’s Traité a powerful schematic cartography that raises questions precisely in those spaces where the rationality of the science of political economy has never dared to enter.
If the critical projects of High Modernity were fundamentally temporal (including that of Messianism and its overemphasized trance towards absolute immanentization), Josep’s writing also has the virtue of displacing the focus to the spatial formation and the thinking of the creation of spaces understood as dwelling, once populated by the gods of the events and which modern ontotheology obliterated through integrated objectivation and technological positionality. We know that the greatest nearness of the last god eventuates only when the event is elevated into refusal, especially when it manages to become too near [2]. As a shorthand, this drift towards objectification in the liquidation of modern politics is domination of the Social totality; ultimately, it is through the plasticity of the social bond that the reproduction of biopolitical life is temporalized, legally ordered, and rhetorically subsumused into an apparatus of predatory accumulation. It is the Social (not the State, or this or that concept of the modern grammar of political thought, or even fascism) that we must refuse. The collapse of the modern secular state and its moral guarantees, is the beginning of an autonomized social bond that now coincides with the total administration of world forms. The hegemony of the Social reduction is what allows Josep to claim that the opposition is no longer between Society and the State; but rather between community as a process and praxis against the static formation of the Social. Thinking today drifts from social domination to communities of encounters, heteronomic relations, communication, and interdependence in a web that characterizes the exotic movement of the imaginative possibilities of exteriority for manifold worlds.
The notion of community in Josep’s thinking is neither about ecstatic groups or “little platoons” of identitarian belonging (as once famously defined by Edmund Burke); nor referring to filiation and propriety reductions that can subsist quite nicely under the heatwaves of the ongoing conflagrations of Empire. For Josep communities insofar as they are exposed to their excess (ubermass) are processes of external contact between souls as rites of passages. The community is formless, and in this sense it ceases to be a problem of Chistological stereology in order to become one in the order of ethics and language (50). In this sense, very much like the late Mario Tronti looking at the collapse of the modern revolutionary experiment; for Josep the ruinous fragmentation of the worlds has a silver lining: that all human, and non-human, souls are dwelling on the outside world calling for worldiness, and thus potentially sharing a sense of intimacy that re-enchants the appearance and knowability of the world through the invisible attunement to the outside (un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro) [3].
Beyond the subject and the narcissism of the Ego, the light of a “spark of the soul”, in the words of Meister Eckhart’s memorable sermon, a new animism returns not because there is a transcendental revelation to be asserted, but because the encounter between souls brings forth the concatenation of worlds that are entangled with other worlds (68). If Jünger described the epoch of planetary machination as “soul murder” (seleenmord) it was because there was no longer any contact with the unfathomable opacity between the soul and any possible worlds [4]. Josep with an elegant mannerist style enhances this intuition: “We are no longer exiles on Earth, as the romantic moment freighted by the loss of world. We ended up forcing the Earth into exile after so many deadly abstractions (108). The modern age has not ceased accumulating abstractions against the human species until becoming a whirlwind of soul murdering that has extended into the current ecocide of the worlds.
It does not come as a surprise that throughout Petit traité de cosmoanarchisme (2023) Josep appears more than skeptical about political critique (and to say skeptical might be an understanding). There is a clear imperative that is mobilized in the book and that it should not be taken for granted: political critique should evolve into the negation and abandonment of politics, which also includes the always anachronistic anarchist politics. We know that ever since the Greek polis the autonomy of politics partition and distribution was waged against the incommensurable topos of the chora, the ungovernable and infrapolitical hinterland of the new substantive community of rights and obligations posited by the logistics of representation [5]. As we know, this is what forced Heraclitus to resolutely remain playing knucklebones in the temple of Artemis: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the polis?” [6]. The knucklebones of the ancient anecdote of the presocratic philosopher is symbolic to what Josep demands of existence: the liberation of environments and surrounds for multiplicities of experiences. The experience of gaming always starts in the middle, expressing the ineffable ethics of how I become what I am already on my way of becoming (142). The maximization of politics into the very thicket of life (this is biopolitical administration) have increasingly defaced the experiential practice of existence that now extends over the course of the historical dispensation of civilization. This is the vortex of the struggle against the realist validations in the interregnum.
Against and beyond the force of abstraction and the prison of individuality, Josep situates the stakes: “It is there, where the fierce struggle we can lead today: to find the intimacy of our soul in the welcome of other souls to hear their silences and their voices. To participate in the animation of the world is to perceive the outside. And gently find the inside of the outside” (145). And between the process of the community and the soul there is no longer struggle or enmity, but only solvent philia; the influx of creation that, insofar was enmeshed in solitude, allows pain to speak in the time of transition, in the skirmishes between worlds. Ultimately, the experience of the itinerant is not that of learning to live in places; rather, it is the one that intensively yearns the presence of encounters. This remains the only ethopoetic imperative [7]. As Carlo Diano observed in an erudite study on the notion of the chora, the attunement of the soul with the world is not a conceptual entelechy; it runs materially through the sensorium of this body as it traverses the world towards its renewal [8]. To grasp this chiasmic region that dispenses the harmony of the soul as it flees the prison gates of an objective world, is the enduring letter and spirit that Petit traité grants to the ongoing task of thought.
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Notes
1. Gerardo Muñoz. “Escuchar las llamadas del mundo: diálogo con Josep Rafanell i Orra”, Disenso: Revista de Pensamiento Político, N.3, July 2020, 134-158.
2. Martin Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2012), 329.
3. Mario Tronti writes in “Disperate speranze” (2019): “È necessario trovare un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro. Io posso farlo nel solo modo in cui so farlo: tirando l’arco al punto che permette di cogliere il bersaglio più raggiungibile. Realistica visione.”. CRS, October 2019: https://centroriformastato.it/disperate-speranze/
4. Ernst Jünger. The Forest Passage (Telos Press, 2003), 93.
5. Julien Coupat. “Dialogo con i morti”, in Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019).
6. Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic (Bloomsbury, 2018).
7. Josep Rafanell i Orra. Fragmenter le monde (Divergences, 2020), 70.
8. Carlo Diano. “Il problema della materia in Platone: la chora del Timeo”, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, V.1, 1970, 335.
The essay “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, by Spanish poet and essayist José Bergamín, should be read as a wartime reflection on the historical impasse of the Spanish Civil War. First published in Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic journal Esprit in the 1937 April issue, the essay in its final version featured in Bergamín’s Mexican exile collection Detrás de la cruz: terrorismo y persecusión religiosa en España (Lucero, 1941). While on the surface Bergamín is responding to the struggle between secular political anarchism and traditionalist Spanish Catholicism intertwined at the heart of the civil war, the essay is also highly idiosyncratic in laying out the poet’s theological vision that permeates his entire body of work, and which can already be found, in nuce, in the fragments and aphorisms of his first book El cohete y la estrella (Índice, 1923). “Reality is the spirit, imagination, and thought…there is religiosity when it claims space positively”, he would write in the first pages of that book.
The 1937 essay, along with his defense of illiteracy in “Decadadencia del analfabetismo” (1933), Bergamín argues for a living theology of the Spanish people (pueblo) that is neither imperial nor clerical, but rather always an excess to the imperial political theology that dominated the long historical narrative of Spanish modernity since the Reconquista. It was thanks to Bergamín’s genius that Catholicism appears connected to a habitual form of life of everyday people, their shared language, symbols, and experiences; and, ultimately the common imagination that grants them access to the world through the mystery of living and dying. In fact, as in “Decadencia” (1933), it is important to highlight the centrality of the term “pueblo”, which although translated as “people”, it coincides neither with the “People” of the unity of civil society nor the common historical identity of the Nation. For Bergamín, these determinations, in fact, were corrupted notions of pueblo. The pueblo is always the event that remains from the abstraction of political theology, and always pueblo minoría, a ‘minor people’ that dwells in the house of God within and beyond the mundane. This is why Bergamín would claim in the text that the pueblo is always ancilla mundi. In this light, Bergamín thought that political anarchism incapable of a revelation to the divine, and an imperial Church in charge of the administration of the “nothingness”, were two poles of the same vectorial force of modern nihilism. That was the color of his corruptio optimi pessima with clear echoes of Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris.
In “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, Bergamín’s theological position emerges as a third way to exit this historical poverty of relating to the theos. As Giorgio Agamben observes in a 1973 entry of Quaderni (Quodlibet, I, 2024, 46-47), for Bergamín the divine entails a corporeal cohabitation of a demon and an angel that expresses appearance of life, and thus the sensible and poetic mediation with the world of forms. In this sense, Bergamín’s theology differs fundamentally from the rational and canonical traditions, fostering the sensorial path of dramatic and divine beauty. This goes to the kernel of the 1937 essay: the rise of the Totalizing State (historical Fascism), was a corrupting form of theos insofar as it aimed at regulating the “nothingness” against the possibility of appearance and truth. But the word of God and the angelic hymns linger in the time of wreckage and devastation in its impatient drift towards anger in the world, which is still very much our own. Ultimately, Bergamín was convinced that the pueblo’s mute voice, resurfacing from the depths of pain, could dodge the abysmal fall into the tribulations of radical evil always too congenial with the survival of ‘this world’.
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* This gloss was written to accompany the English translation of Bergamín’s “Por nada del mundo” forthcoming at New Personalism, summer 2025.
Michael Lobel’s new monograph on Van Gogh’s work, Van Gogh and the End of Nature (Yale University Press, 2024) undertakes a systematic effort, brilliantly argued and researched, at showing the redeeming visual capacities of the nineteenth century painter towards the natural world. If we call it redeeming it is because in more than one way, Van Gogh, in the last three decades of the modernizing century, was painting at the threshold of nature that soon enough was assaulted by the copious designs of modern industrialization, energy production, and the application of its effective scientific techniques over all spheres of life. It is the final culmination of the disenchantment of the world, and so also the moment of great temptations, such as standing up against it through the metaphorization of the imago naturae in one last desperate attempt at salvation through a reified ideal representation. Lobel’s art historical work shows us along the way that Van Gogh’s situation was far more complex, and that a French critic’s quip that he merely “captured nature with a soul” in his pictures requires specification and analytical comprehension within the context of the century of steam (Lobel 2).
In other words, Van Gogh is not a painter of a return to the conscience of the “Beautiful Soul” that has interiorized the exhaustion of artistic imagination; implicitly throughout Lobel’s monograph is the well grounded intuition that Van Gogh was an artist of the depth of vision without necessarily translation their specular commitment to the efficacy of realism. Immersed in his age as every artist obviously is, Van Gogh’s vision is mediated and conditioned by the effects of modernization that will severely affect the act of looking and gazing. This is not exclusively reduced to the new subject of labour production of the industrial age, although certainly there in his mining drawings, but also ecological transformations such as pollution, gaslight, geographical sites, the new chemistry of color pigments, and the tonality of human expressivity (the hues of a human face) in its new surroundings. Although there is no ambition in offering (or modifying) a theory of modernity in Lobel’s account of Van Gogh, one is reminded in the historical documentation the total and integral dimension of modernity in terms of its spatial totality: the essence of modernity was a revolution in the immanence of forms and perceptions that transcended the mere mechanization of the atmospheric designs.
Thus, when Van Gogh gazed at a peasant field and saw the isolated and orderly harvest he was simultaneously preferring the composition of the color palette of a painter that is now conscious of the material elements of his process of production (Lobel 9). But the colors return to the field, and this already provides us with a symptom of Van Gogh’s pictorial signature – which again runs implicitly throughout the book without ever coming to the forefront – about retaining the outlook towards nature and the natural world, which for the painter it becomes the enduring task to be resolved in manifold ways. But there is one way in which Van Gogh tries to tackle this drift to the infinite vanishing of nature: the capacity to move visually through space. To this end, Lobel does well to remind us that Van Gogh, perhaps more than any other artist of his time, was able to travel places thanks to the new rail system efficiently connecting regions and cities that made his work possible (Lobel 28). But besides the autobiographical standpoint, what is noteworthy is how Van Gogh trained his vision to capture industrial air pollution, trainlines, malformations of the land the end of Parisian Montmartre, and of course, the starry skies of Arles transformed by the new coal driven modern gas lamps. In all of these figural vistas, Van Gogh is always situated somewhere above the territory looking outwards, and in this way, attentive to the transformation of the exterior world; insisting whether there is any exteriority out there in the world at all (it does seem he thought there were).
Van Gogh prefigures as a painter of the eclipse of the world because it is a world in which the very notion of horizon (and thus of landscape) enters into a terminal crisis. Lobel brings to our attention Avenue de la Gare with Plane (1888) that captures this problem: here is a picture where the line of the horizon in the foreground mutates into the main PLM train line from Arles to Marseille (Lobel 33). The rail line cuts through the horizon becoming the new transcendental vector of progress; the axis of movement that carries the world forward. And yet there is something visually “earthly” in Van Gogh’s pictorial works that drives our gaze downwards; it is a symptom of its grounded vision, but also, for Lobel, of his tense relation with the temporal mobilization of modernity, as if seeking rest and detention (Lobel 43). What are the sources of this tension? Does it mean that it is never resolved? These are questions that are poorly tackled in Lobel’s book, and that remain attached strictly to art historical documentation and archival sources. But these are nonetheless fundamental questions de ayer y hoy, as the Spanish saying goes.
One could linger in the question of visual grounding in Van Gogh’s work – a perspective (although not just an optical question) that permeates his work, even when there is no outside field as a visual referent, such as the well known The Night Café (1888), where the billiard table seems to slide down towards the spectator, making the true and ultimate actor of the painting the intense and palpable wooden floor (Lobel 90). But the same could apply to the perspective of the Roi Canal or the starry skies over the Rhône, the examples abound. Is there something about vision and grounding that offers a point of entry into Van Gogh’s proposal to look into the cage of modernity one last time in order to find some non-space solace of the resting gaze? Could one argue that this “tension” – between horizontal closure and downwards grounding – his personal response to what T.J. Clark called when analyzing Pissarro, the “ongoing vileness of our epoch of transition”? [1]. It is hard to tell because, unlike Pissarro, Lobel tells us nothing about Van Gogh’s political views.
However, we do know that at a young age Van Gogh wanted to pursue theological studies that he soon gave up for visual arts (Lobel 74). Could it be that his insistence towards the ground is resolutely theological, as if he wanted to retain the god of place (theos aisthetos) as the ungraspable region for extraction and production, the new axiological order of the industrial age? Lobel’s does well to cite Victor Hugo at the beginning of the second chapter “Earth” about the outskirts quarries and sewages of Montmartre: “a variety of those misshapen fungi from the underside of civilization” (Lobel 68). It all seems that even when he was not attending to capture the limits of Montmartre, the fields of Arles, or the domestic spaces, Van Gogh’s provokes a downward descension into the ground that invites any participating space. Looking at the vanishing world one last time needs a ground from which to stand and retain a sensible distance; that very distance that the nascent bourgeois world will effectively dissolve giving up on the cohabitation between life and nature into generic and massive alienation.
The question of the ground perspective is also corroborated by Van Gogh’s interest in strong and emphatic hues for his picture, learning from the previous generation of artists that “all the colors that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable” (Lobel 149). In other words, the effect of color for the Impressionists, including Seurat and Pissarro, is too dialectical, which means that the tension evolving from the ground is immediately resolved between color and form, the orderly and the interdependence of the composition for stable appearance. This allows us to consider that one of Van Gogh’s key signatures – his almost bombastic and expressive use of colors – have something intimate, and perhaps also secret, to the spatial-temporal closure of modernity and its contingencies. I do accept Lobel’s suggestion that Van Gogh seized the opportunity of new industrial non-natural hues in order to mitigate the coming lackluster world oriented towards production, extraction, and human survival. For Van Gogh color becomes the barrister to gaze firmly upon the fleeting temporization of the highly visible and transparent world of disenchantment and total organization.
But to say color is also an artifice or short for the insistence on light, which is not the light of the new immanent world, but certainly a painterly light that transcends immanence by insisting on the irrevocable character of places, arrangements, inhabitation, and contingency of phenomena. This is painting at its best against the vile epoch of transition, that has extended itself as the transition of the end of the modern epoch into our present. The ruins of Van Gogh’s industrial materials allow Michael Lobel to come full circle about Van Gogh’s inscription in the modern age (Lobel 153). But we should not let go of the idea that while materials do decompose and rot, the painter’s ultimate material utensil is nothing but light, and this means “a thinking of light, an image that is aware of the relation that light has with things. This matter is equally concrete”, as Monica Ferrando has recently advised [2]. Is not the descending lux the sensorial condition for disclosing the gradual proximity between vision and ground? It is with this exterior lighting as pictorial praxis that Van Gogh stood as a madman and a witness to the endless night of our disappearing our world.
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Notes
1. T.J. Clark. “We Field-Women”, Farewell to an idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999), 109.
2. Monica Ferrando. “From History to Anarchy: The Painting of Louis Comtois in the Thought of Reiner Schürmann”, Philosophy Today, Vol.68, Fall 2024, 875.
In his old book The Art of Cézanne (1965), the German art historian Kurt Badt makes a remarkable affirmation in dialogue with Hans Sedlmayr’s indictment about the crisis of modern art: “In him [Cézanne], in fact, painting ‘emerges as the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism – Nietzsche’s view of the great art of his time in general” [1]. Badt’s affirmation must be first understood contextually as a response to Sedlmayr’s thesis laid out in Verlust der Mitte (1951) that argues that the post-impressionist painter was the last attempt at visual order within the convoluted modern crisis of art, still committed to “represent what pure vision can discover in the visible world…without adulteration” [2]. The subtlety of Badt’s disagreement with Sedlmayr is notable, since for him Cézanne does not stand for a painter of chaos and subjectivity; on the contrary, the painter unequivocally enters in relation to nihilism. At that instance painting and nihilism are positioned polemically face to face. So, what could painting as the last metaphysical activity mean after all? Why is it that painting obstructs or stuns the total exposure of nihilism? Instead of retracting painting to an ‘origin’, what if we understand its ontological contour as an excess within and beyond nihilism?
In his recent book Tiempo roto (2024), Alberto Moreiras returns to Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor Seminar of 1969 to emphasize how in the epoch subsumed by the Gestell, and thus nihilism, the fundamental opening that exceeds the frame is an übermass, or overabundance of presence [3]. This might be a productive way to think about ‘painting as the last metaphysical activity’ in the era of Gestell, because it inscribes a relation to the visible always in relation to the appropriation of its excess. In the Zähringen seminar (1973) Heidegger will call this relation a phenomenology of the inapparent, which one could very well extend to the praxis of painting as the relation between unconcealment and concealment in the way that Daniel Aresse discusses it in the pictorial world of Vermeer (a polarity that in Cézanne no longer pertains to play of optic illusions but of the disclosure of the world). This cojoining of the inapparent is more beautiful than any possible world visible ordering, because it exceeds the frame of the visible [4]. In this way, Cézanne is not just a painter that exchanges roles with the thinker (as in the relationship between dichter and gedanke) it is rather that he remains the most faithful exponent of painting as the ontic region of the phenomenology of the inapparent or übermass.
In a session of the Zollikon Seminars (May 1965), Heidegger introduces Cézanne’s landscape as a counterpoint of the hermeneutical circle of perception and calculative intuition. Heidegger writes quite succinctly: “For instance, a painting by Cézanne of Mont St. Victoire cannot be comprehended [erfassen] by calculation. Certainly, one could also conduct chemical research on such a picture. But if one would like to comprehend it as a work of art, one does not calculate, but sees it intuitively. Is the painting, therefore, something psychological, since we have just heard that the psychological is what can be comprehended intuitively? No, the painting is not something psychological. Obviously, the above-mentioned “simple principle” for distinguishing psyche and soma is not simple at all” [5]. This is so because for Heidegger the figure of the mountain (a figure among others) in Cézanne’s work is not the cause of the decision of painting; it is rather the ground (Grund) that orients a certain disposition towards the opening of any given form. One could say that the motif of the mountain is the ground that dispenses the relation to the excess or the inapparent while being entirely visible.
As such, the activity of painting is not just a capacity or disposition that allows representation; on the contrary, the pictorial praxis qua praxis remains attached to the notion of truth as unconcealment and concealment in the hegemonic structure of Gestell and the objective sciences for which there is none. This allows to throw light into the rather underworked suggestion advanced by Badt that painting remains the last metaphysical activity of the arts, which does not presuppose understanding the “painterly” as a quality or autonomous sphere of human action, but rather an original gesture of presencing the non-presence, and in this way to remain in what I am willing to call the imperturbable.
It has been registered that at one point during the sessions at Le Thor, Heidegger also made the curious assertion that only Cézanne had taken a path towards thinking (in painting) similar to his own turning away from Western ontotheological dispensation into another beginning [6]. This might be because painting is neither the archaic residue of the human hand, nor the pictorial index of image; its fulfillment lies in the excessive proximity to truth that eternally reveals the permanence of the invisible.
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Notes
1. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cezanne (University of California Press, 1965), 181.
2. Hans Sedlmayr. Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (Transaction Publishers, 2007), 131.
3. Alberto Moreiras. Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024), 113.
4. Martin Heidegger. Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2003), 8.
5. Martin Heidegger. Zollikon Seminars (Northwestern University Press, 1987), 79.
6. Giorgio Agamben. Il tempo del pensiero (Giometti & Antonello, 2022), 57-60.
*Image: Mont Sainte-Victoire, by Paul Cézanne. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph from personal archive.
The sudden and uninvited intrusion of Gaia in our world is something rather strange, and yet consistent with the closure of the metaphysical tradition. The call of the outside takes place at the threshold of our reflexive capacities, habits, and mental propositions in our relation with the world, which demands everything to be thought from scratch. The historical imbalance in groundlessness now requires a new task for thinking – the imperative that runs through Alberto Moreiras’ most recent book Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024). The theoretical constellation deployed over the course of a decade now comes to the forefront with extreme urgency – I am referring to marranismo, posthegemony, aprincipial anarchy, and of course, infrapolitics. Tiempo roto (2024) is not a systematic culmination of Moreiras’ philosophical (or antiphilosophical) project of thought, but it is definitely a mature elaboration insofar as the field of problematization enters a hitherto unexplored thematics of late heideggerianism. All things considered, the emerge of the anthropocene as an explicit planetary endgame and the new beginning necessarily move pass the conditions of both political and scientific praxis, which today can only effectively adequate itself into positionality (the so-called Gestell) and objectivity of a world that slowly seems coming to its end.
It might be worth remembering that the notion of “other beginning” (“otro comienzo”) in the wake of civilizational decline was already proposed in the book Sosiego siniestro (2020), but it was far from being thoroughly explained [1]. Following Heidegger’s philosophical scene, representational thought in the tradition of adequatio of the Thomist gnoseology coincides with technological administration of every living entity (Moreiras 14). But Heidegger’s suggestion in the Parmenides that calculative representation fails as grasping the essence of the polis might also have its own limitations, insofar Gaia appeals to an excess beyond or below the politics. As Jacques Camatte also understood it, the civilizational invariant of revolutionary breakthrough departing from the historical subject of the working class can seldomly do the work except as an article of faith in the myth of the autonomy of the proletariat within real subsumption. This means that we are in the terrain of infrapolitics or the chora, which point to ontic regions of thought towards a new beginning at the end of principial metaphysics. But the other beginning can only emerge within conditions of transforming existence against the closure of political technicity.
I do not desire to reconstruct here all the refined analytical movements that lay out the transformation of existence in Tiempo roto (2025), but there is a maxim from Pindar’s Third Pythian Ode that stands out as an emblem for the appropriation of the non-humanity of the world. Moreiras cites Pindar’s “me, phila psycha, bion athanato speude, tan d’emprakton, antlie makanan”, which can roughly be translated as “do not seek, dear soul, immortal life, but do try to carry out the fullest the use of the possible” (Moreiras 61). Moreiras correctly notes that the ultimate difficulty lies in the “emprakton makanan”, or the use of the possible, which metaphysical Humanism and effective general equivalent can only exacerbate towards the planetary production and extractive valorization. The corruption of the use of the possible is the realization of hybris, and in this sense all representational humanism is always already a form of self-deification and induced hallucination, even when it tries to claim to engage in the opposite in relation to nature (Moreiras 65). Moreiras suggests that the pindaric maxim discloses a second relation of the “use of possibles” that does constitute a lacuna in the metaphysical tradition, and that is understanding a praxis tied to sophrosyne or phronesis that abides to the prudent inclination of the non-human (“es una actividad sometida a la vergüenza de lo in-humano”) (Moreiras 65). Giorgio Agamben’s defense an ontology of possibility against the hegemony of metaphysical realization and representation also comes to mind, although Moreiras might not feel at ease at explicitly calling for a positive ontology nourished in the waters of a transfigured metaphysics of the tradition of scholastic Averroism [2]. Although both Moreiras and Agamben come at their closest proximity in terms of the notion of the chora – and more directly the space of the chora against the primacy of the polis – which serves the ontic condition for the non-spatial surfacing of the abode or region that is necessarily infrapolitical, because it’s never determined by distributionist political isonomia or meson (Moreiras 73).
There are important nuances here to say the least: whereas for Agamben the notion of chora appeals to the gods of place (theos aisthetos), and thus a dejointed form of divinization decoupled from the legitimacy of every politico-theological archein; for Moreiras, the chora is a praxis of thought towards desecularization that lacks theology, and thus capable of exceeding the onto-theological reduction (Moreiras 74). But Moreiras says about the tendency towards nihilism of “possibility” in the historical dispensation of positionality (Gestell) could also be said about ‘de-secularization’, as the ultimate consequence of the decay of political legitimation in Ernst Bockenforde’s famous formulation. This might not be the space nor the moment to reach a verdict between Moreiras and Agamben’s position regarding the very complicated problem of the Platonic site of the sensible, since what is presented to the reader as a ‘phenomenology of excess’ or the inapparent (something merely alluded in the Zahringer seminar), might be the condition of an atopic mediation that prepares – or that has always prepared since the times of Orphic myths – the tonality of a coming philosophy under the sign of transformative thought (Moreiras 110) [3].
The dispensation of the Gestell open up and also step back (a folded movement that does not have a declension into a synthesis) into the genesis of the beginning (Moreiras 115). And the anthropocentric epochal dispensation, says Moreiras, is no longer the site of the polis, but “the planet as a the historical site of humanity, although we are still unaware of it (“aunque sigamos desconociéndolo”) (Moreiras 116). This uncanny phenomenology of the primary, traversed by the discharge of the entstehung, is the infrapolitical site par excellence, because it is in the atopic region where destiny is both affirmed and displaced. This is why, as Moreiras recalls Heidegger saying, the dialogue with Parmenides never exhausts itself, and yet it prepares a destiny (Moreiras 134). I take this to mean that there is an experience of the transfiguration of language for the emergence of an “ethics” (ethos), but this might be beyond Moreiras preliminary conditions for an existential breakthrough; that is, something possible further along the path.
Tiempo roto (2024) closes with a couple of undeveloped pages that take Massimo Cacciari’s old essay “Confrontation with Heidegger” (1977), in which the Italian philosopher makes a plea for a direct confrontation with Heidegger and Nietzsche’s teachings on nihilism and the closure of metaphysics if there would still be any hope for the composition of the working class during the stage of anthropomorphized dimension of capital defined by Jacques Camatte also during those years. But much has changed since the hot Italian summer of 1977 and the formulaic conjunction of “left Heideggerianism” might not do the work anymore, as if the totality of materialist political economy could be amended by a radicalization of the historical question and the ontological difference. Political economy plus metaphysical critique is still relying on a conception of the political as a technique, which today has transformed into what some have called the “new regime of ecological accumulation” as mere stabilization of green ecological spheres of life [4].
But there is a second register to Cacciari’s programmatic thesis that remains open. And these might be Moreiras’ most important words in the concluding part of the book: “Espero haber mostrado que Hiedegger señala la posibilidad de dejar atrás la explotación y el consumo en la era del Antropoceno a través de una comprensión alotrópica de nuestra relación con el mundo. Por lo tanto, vivir en el Antropoceno debe basarse en el abandono o desplazamiento de la metafísica como modo dominante de aprehensión del mundo en la actualidad” (Moreiras 151-152). Marx’s materialist dialectic through the critique of political economy – even as a destitution of political economy through its own vectorization – might be insufficient to face the unprogrammed presence posed by planetary anthropocene.
Perhaps we can still repeat Dionys Mascolo’s words that the coming communism will owe more to Hölderlin than than Marx, not because of an idealist dispute over concepts, but rather because of what Cacciari called in his essay, also citing the German poet, the historical “affinity of conditions” [5]. And in the age of the Anthropocene and positionality, those conditions are kept in the pattern of economic decline or stagnation in which the law of rate of profit encounters its own limit, folded unto the ongoing destruction of the life forms in the world. The allotropic praxis endorsed by Moreiras finds traction in Hölderlin’s poetic dwelling in language at the heart of decline so that something other might emerge within and beyond life, from Gaia to Ctonia. This is the most difficult task to depart from, but it is also the path that saves from the current inhabitable passage of the Earth.
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Notes
1. Alberto Moreiras, Sosiego siniestro (Guillermo Escolar, 2020), 24.
2. Giorgio Agamben. L’irrealizzabile: Per una politica dell’ontologia (Einaudi, 2022), 112-146. Kindle Edition.
3. For more on orphism and the limits of the site of the Greek polis, see Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019), epilogue by Julien Coupat.
It is too often that we hear a common critique raised against the theoretical skepticism of the primacy of politics in the form of an alleged prefigured “mysticism”, as if the destructive operation against sufficient political reason would entail an ineffable silence. It is a striking claim because there is some truth to it. But we must also question its assumption: can the proponents of political primacy ascertain a ground that can escape the mystical position that it seeks to avoid? The task of intellectual history is infinite and rewarding, but that does not mean this enterprise can positively mobilize a breakthrough within the epochal collapse of modern politics. If this is true, then it would follow that everyone is, more or less, a defaced mystic, insofar mysticism is the condition that runs against the limits of language and the current of the negative. In the same way an American judge famously said that ‘we are all [legal] originalists now’, one could very well say that ‘we are all mystics now’. It all depends where we put the emphasis and the tone.
If we are to reject the totality of political administration and intraworldly legitimacy, this does not necessarily mean that we can immediately sketch what a coming politics would look like. According to Karl Barth in his Ethics, the position of mysticism always denotes a weak “us” that emerges from disobedience with respect to the world; concretely, against the system of planning and delegated orders (schools and the police). So mysticism is an archirealist position because it traverses the world, but only to depose the transcendental closure of its authority. In this way, the skepticism against the mystical position, perhaps unconsciously, is also an indirect skepticism against anti-social stance that is deficient from the vantage point of advantageous political realism. But the insistence of political realism is only anti-mystical on the surface, because it depends on an article of faith on the social reproduction and the overall general political economy between subjects and objects, value and the administration of life.
The mystic cannot be confused with a guru, a magnetic theologian, nor a priest in robes. On the contrary, the mystic is a sibling to the pícaro, a figure of the Spanish Golden Age, that made his life unarrating the social protocols of the emergent social space, revealing and subverting the “autoridades postizas” (fictional authorities) of his epoch, according to the beautiful formulation of Santa Teresa de Ávila. Whoever has read any of the Spanish picarescas will immediately recall that the pícaro does not endorse static or monastic life of interiority, he upholds a temporality of life that coincides with the events of a world that becomes unfixed and betrayed. And the pícaro lives and outlives himself in this gestaltic confrontation. This vital mysticism in how he uses the world is more practical than any political justification for consensual common action.
It is worth noting that Carlo Michelstaedter in a gloss on courage and the persuaded life, divided the world – and his world was that of the Austro-Hungarian interregnum, a transitional epoch of decline filled with specters and monstrosities, very much like ours – between mystics and the dishonest or tricksters, but only the first could be named “heroes” because only them knew the secret of their unique persuasion unto death, renouncing to petty morality, self-interest, and social orders [1]. The mystic inhabits not just the silence that arrests the truth for which he cannot speak; more fundamentally, he also exerts, in every act, the task of freedom as embedded in thought and contemplation of the soul, that according to Michelsteadter is a personal struggle that bends to the real gnosis, “because to know oneself is ultimately to know the universe and to name it…only there is life” [2].
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Notes
1. Carlo Michelstaedter. La melodía del joven divino (Sexto Piso, 2009), 43.
Infrapolitical Reflections 