Contemporary thought

The Empire’s garden. by Gerardo Muñoz

The European Union elections this spring restate what otherwise is already felt almost everywhere; mainly, that the destiny of politics has ceased to mean anything historically, and that political representation stands as a compensatory preamble and veneer to planetary conflagration, in which Europe has become a minoritarian and bystander actor. This also means that the histrionic reaction to this reality can only bring out its counters more sharply: both pro-nationalist sovereignty political platforms, and abstract administrative pro-union coalitions are junior partners of the current geopolitical planetary regime, and they merely differ in mild policy nuances, social spending allocations, and rhetorical probing that can also be as flexible as needed  (such is the case of Italy’s Giorgia Miloni who one morning can be in a Vox Party Congress in Madrid, and later in the afternoon receive orders from Ursula von der Leyen and the White House). 

The passage of destiny politics to the gigantism of geopolitics entails not just the erasure of the modern boundaries of enmity recognition, but also the introduction of an administrative plasticity that responds to ad hoc organizational and infrastructural planning, as symptomatic of the collapse of the subject of history into the dominance of the objective. The final stage of the “disenchantment of the world” that characterizes bureaucratic legibility finally appears as the reign of objectivity and the objective. And the concrescence of objecthood as the last avatar of the colonization of forms of life allows us to see how the compensatory constructions of ‘community’ – both the “European Union” and the multiple sovereign communities as reactions to it – repeatedly oscillate between communities of fictive identitarian belonging, and formal political communities devoid of constituent authority. Regardless of their contrasting designs and contrasts, both defenders of national sovereignty and the supra-national EU share the same allure of communitarian integralism: a community for the living, that is, for those integrated into the social apparatus of a well lighted and funded administered world. Respectively, we can see that the debate that took place in the late 1980s about negative community in Europe among philosophers (Jean Luc-Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben) has not lost any of its poignant relevance, as the compensatory communitarian options multiply and spread without ever retreating from the summoned shadow of politica arcana. In a certain sense, the confabulation of communities of belonging and communities of faith are dispensable painkillers to the effective disintegration of the immanence of the social bond. This explains why “people” can only assent to them.

Both community form and political empire are united by a legislative political principle that today remains chattered in the final stage of intrahistorical collapse. There is no communitarian option today that does not end up living negatively on the hinterlands of the nexus of Empire; an exception to the nomic organization of the globe incapable of taking into account the inmates of community form. What is at stake is access to the world; an excess beyond communitarian identification and the administration of the waning politics of Empire.

One can, I think, read Josep Borrell’s words in a speech given at the European Diplomatic Academy in 2020 in this direction, where he calls Europe a well cultivated garden [1]. Obviously if we read it in a political key, Borrell’s address maintains the perennial framework of civilization and barbarism, and in his head the role of the ‘gardener’ is only a metaphoric deployment to exalt the morality of the squalid and humiliated European diplomats on the global stage. However, we know that there is much more to the earthly garden, which retreats already at the moment it is enunciated, since it is a mythic-poetic trope that colors the sensibility of concordia rather than elevating itself as a sociological category of political orientation. 

As Italian historian Flavio Cuniberto notes in his beautiful book Viaggio in Italia (2020), for a poet like Dante the meridional Mediterranean region was the garden of empire (“che’l giardin de lo imperio sia diserto”) which attunes itself to the measureless relation between earth, landscape, and life. Is not this what is preparatory – that is, what must be posited in sensibility and in imagination through style – before any reduction of life into community and political mediation? Have not we felt this dissolving transport before a landscape in the outskirts of Tuscany or Orvieto? And is not this what political ecology (Green New Deals) are after in their effort to foreclose the world? The garden unworks empirical objecthood through its very refusal to be integral to devastation, usurpation and destruction of loci. This is why for Henry Miller the only “ideal community” would have the garden as its evanescent topoi, a “god filled place” even for those that have no gods: 

“Even if it lasts for only a few moments, the privilege of looking at the world as a spectacle of unending life and not a repository of persons, creatures and objects to be impressed in our service, is something never to be forgotten. The ideal community, in a sense, would be loose fluid aggregation of an individual whole elected to be alone and detached to be at one with themselves and all that lives and breathes. It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believe in (a) God. It would be a paradise, even though the word had long disappeared from our vocabulary” [2]. 

Looking at the world as a spectacle – of course, this brings to mind Petrarch’s specular heights at Mount Ventoux, in which the possibility of seeing, for once, has the upper hand against the mastering the worldly phenomena at our “service” and proportionality. There is no utopia without this attempt to grasp the spectacle in its taking place, infinitely exceeding the rationality that vests reality into amorphous abstraction. Perhaps the garden is a figure of this necessity of irreducible outlook, which in Marvell’s language touches the ungraspable as it is inwardly felt: “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade” [3]. The promise of a new life takes resource in the abode of that green shade.

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Notes

1. Josep Borrell. “Les jardiniers européens doivent aller “dans la jungle”, Le Grand Continent, October 2022: https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2022/10/16/les-jardiniers-europeens-doivent-aller-dans-la-jungle/ 

2. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronomys Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34. 

3. Andrew Marvell. “The Garden”, Selected Poems (Routledge, 2002), 60.

The soul of things. On Alice Rohrwacher’s Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption.  In a certain sense,  Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of  immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In  the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the  moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.  

Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema  (2023), she admits that  any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles –  presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33). 

As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema. 

The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the  cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye. 

No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.

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Notes 

1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.

2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.

The irreducible in language: a note on Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947). by Gerardo Muñoz

At the outset of L’espéce humaine (1947), Robert Antelme discloses the difficulty between language and experience that lays at the heart of the book, and which is never thoroughly assumed at the level of form in the novel. L’espèce humaine (1947) is ultimately not an account about the impossibility of describing what took place in the camps; from the banal physical violence to the desperate hunger, from the microaggressions to the slightest movements and carnage of bodies in space; from the joyful smiles in the most miserable of scenario where the ultimate goal was for the human life to slowly rot; the sequence of actions engage in no struggle to bring to a crisis the level of representation. And Antelme goes into painstaking efforts to give us a full picture of what took place, only to never talk about it again in writing or in personal conversations as Marguerite Duras tells us [1]. So, what to make of Antelme’s initial affirmation in the “Forword” where he states that: “…during the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive and we felt a frantic desire to describe it as such as it had been…[..]. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be checking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” [2]. The unimaginable for Antelme is a sort of threshold of language; a limit for the unrestricted, that is, for what could allow for an experiment of language after the catastrophe, or in the wake of the civilizational catastrophe that is consummated in the camp. 

This delirium and anxiety over language – to tell it now and how it happened and to tell “the world”, only to immediately acknowledge the impossible task of doing so – does not take place at the order of the narrative; it is first and foremost something that we get a glimpse of at the end of the book as the liberating soldiers enter the rubbled towns only to encounter the incontinence of the survivors “talk and talk, and pretty soon he isn’t listening anymore” [3]. At that moment, the face to face between human beings will follow “to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge”, Antelme tells us [4]. But what type of untransmittable and nocturnal knowledge is Antelme referring to here? It is not about some ethical exigency of the defacement of experience through linguistic construction; it is rather the torrential and densely weight of description and events, that numbs and deposes language in the very mediation of its effective sayability. The experience of human suffering and domination is untransmittable not because there is a deficit in language or the effacement of representation; but, on the contrary, precisely because there an excess of language that flattens irreducible suffering to an anaphoric socialization of speech that tacitly accepts inhumanity at face value. And that socialized distribution of speech underserves suffering, in virtue of equalizing an expansive chatter that neutralizes in survival the inherent pain of the irreducible human species within the imposible ordeal of total annihilation. 

Antelme’s L’espéce humaine  is stubbornly nominalistic in its thick descriptions of things and events, and it wants to avoid metaphoric transports. He prefers to call things as he sees it and get to the thicket of things in the most nauseating of repetitions. In a way, the hellish atmosphere of the concentration camp resides in the slow moving degradation of human life deprived of the world. However, there is one moment where Antelme resorts to calling a situation ‘hell’; that is, precisely, to an account of the transparent use of language, the raw incontinence and commanding force towards exteriority, as if there is no longer a caesura or separation between being and language once enunciation has been homogenized as commanding force. This is a language without a secret or unsaid, moving against the outside of consciousness in the same depretatory form as the same administrative machinery that has lifeless bodies as its target. In this way, language being turned into the force of speech will not only foreclose itself to the world, but it will signal the very intangibility by virtue of the flattening of verbal communication as an immediate and furious call to an annihilation of appearance. Antelme writes in this admirable moment – one of those instances where description of the state of things is incepted by the negation of the very conditions that allow for the narrative order: 

“Degradation, and flabbiness of language. Mouths whence nothing any longer ever came that was ordered, or strong enough to last. A weakly woven cloth fraying to bits. Stencens succeeded one another, contradicted one another, expressed a kind of belched up wrtnessness; a bile of words. They were all jumbled together: the son of a bitch who’d done it, the wife left on her own, food, drink, the old lady’s tear, the fuck in the ass, and so on; the same mouth could say it all, one thing after the other. It came forth all by itself; it would be empty. It only stopped at night. Hell must be like that, a place where everything that’s said, everythat’s expressed, comes forth equalized with everything else, homogenized, like a drunkard’s puke” [5]. 

The incontinence of language at the limit of what can be said is a secondary hell; that is, the last contortion that the inhumanity of the human can offer outwards in order to outlive in a moment of minimal pleasure, since the absolute pain of a glacial existence has been deprived of any real contact with the world and things. It is a linguistic hell – the looping language of the camp, will only mirror also the linguistic codification that around the same years will be elevated to the paradigm of cybernetics and the regime of information theory – will now appear as a unified block of application, enforcement and extraction. Hence, we should take Antelme at his word: language has become “flabby”, and it is a “puke”. It is circulation without sense, as in the looping mechanics of the furnaces charted by the Nazi engineers that appears in the recent sequence of the film Zone of interest (2023). It is not that sayability loses it claim to the autonomy of its form before an event; it is also that by virtue of its own degradation against the erasure of events, it can only be unified, packed, homogenized and rendered into equivalence in the wake of the absolute triumph of the historical project of alienation and external objectivity.  

The passage of the old hymnal texture of language as solace and lamentation could only entail the conservation of communication, which for Theodor Adorno writing during the same years as Antelme (1946-1947) will deduce as the “techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere whose shelter he can thrive” [6]. That the experience of the camp for Antelme ultimately meant that the “executioner can kill a man but cannot change him into something else”, must be placed in tension with the epochal transformation of a hellish experience of language at the service of the nihilistic service of equivalence that unveils its purest semblance at the camp [7]. The unitary reduction between the “socialized Man” and the “deportee” enters into a proper focus that Antelme was able to grasp with uttermost honesty: “…that there is no inherent difference between the “normal” system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a shepherd image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live” [8]. At the risk of an overtly mannerist claim, it seems to me that the kernel of Antelme’s intellectual effort is to withdraw from the condition of hell that is condensed in the block of ice fixated in the ruinous material of language [9]. Memory, experience, friendship, truth, writing, the soul – these are all tools to chip against the brute reification of the glacial subjection at the price of ultimate solitude. Is there anything else worth a shot? In the last pages of L’espéce humaine, Antelme returns to the question of “freedom”, only to claim that “to be free” implies to “say no to everything” – and could we also refuse the language as it declines into flabbiness, equivalence, and its putrid decline, as overflowing mountain of trash that covers up the ongoing pain of the human species? [10].  

Sure thing, the hölderlinean enduring and difficult task of the “free use of one’s own” appears here with some urgency as the requirement of traversing the attunement to pain. Antelme seems to have wanted to offer a negative theology to “forever starting anew”, in which the irreducible of human sayability is posited as the condition of the “only transcendence between beings” [11]. “To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience;  a prefix that for us designates distance and separation” [12]. Aren’t distance and separation two conditional criteria for grounding the irreducible? The habitation of the speaking being can harbor the contours of the unfathomable expression on the reverse of social tribulations, which is always the primal nomos of equivalence. Allowing the expansion of the irreducible as a the site of an ordinary accumulation of freedom preserves a sensible region for what takes place (“whatever happens” — and is not this taking place the opening of the non-site of the chorá?) in a language attuned to the relentless event that has forever touched us. This is already the site of the unimaginable beyond and away from the language of survival that permeates everything in both times of peace and of war. 

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Notes 

1. Marguerite Duras. El dolor (Alianza editorial, 2019 ), 71.

2. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 3.

3. Ibid., 289.

4.Ibid., 290.

5.  Ibid., 135. 

6.  Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the damaged life (Verso, 2020), 33

7. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 220.

8. Robert Antelme. “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 22. Dionys Mascolo makes more or less the same claim in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) when speaking about the stratification of species in the camps and the division of classes in society: “l’intuition aveuglante de tous les survivants est celle d’avoir fait quant à eux, sous une forme extrême, cette expérience: que l’organisation de la société en classes telle que nous la vivons est déjà une image de la division de cette société en espèces, comme dans les camps”, 87.

9. Robert Antelme. “Revenge?”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 15.

10.  Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 291..

11. Robert Antelme. “The Smiling Angel: Rheims Cathedral”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 10. 

12. Maurice Blanchot. “The Indestructible”, in The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 

Humanity’s way out: antinomies of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945). by Gerardo Muñoz

In an early review of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), Renato Poggioli noted that one of the important merits of the novel was that in spite of the authort’s political commitment, the narrative was “neither partisan nor ideological. I dare to say it is not political; the author even apologizes for this at the end of the volume” [1]. Poggioli, of course, is referring to Vittorini’s Postscript where he states, favoring a thin notion of the autonomy of art, that the end of art is to “seek in art the trace progress of humanity is altogether different from fighting for it upon the political and social terrain” [2]. This is enough evidence to bring to bear Vittorini’s humanist project grounded in a faith in the “progress of the human species” that he wrestled with throughout his life, and that he never really abandoned according to Franco Fortini [3]. Of course, Vittorini’s ‘progressivism’ is not bounded to ironclad guidelines of political economy and the science of a materialist history, rather his position is the attempt to flee from it, to undertake a different path in which humanity and inhumanity could enter into an improper and inconspicuous relationship towards presence. 

Here we can part ways with Poggioli’s suggestion that Uomini e no (1945) is not “sufficiently political” because the characters do not dare to make political slogans or identify themselves with a concrete political party line (the Communist Party that Vittorini himself identified with in spite of having written a non-political novel) during the underground resistance during the years of fascist domination in Milan during the interwar years. If Uomini e no (1945) drifts aways from engaging in a formal political identification to mobilize the narrative persuasion it is because for Vittorini there is an original struggle for “life” that necessarily precedes subjection and political action: it is the struggle of human species to confront the difficulty of its own inhuman threshold, which becomes necessary to account for in any materialist conception. The whole tension of the novel hinges on the unnerving formal composition of the narrative with the asphyxiating dread and angst of the character that embodies the existential the practice of an incarnated struggle beyond survival. 

However, what is beyond survival? What comes after the desert of a world that soon enough – in the words of Theodor Adorno at the height of the mid century – will turn human life into “mere functions within a monstrous social machine in which “life does not longer lives”…in which what grows is the scope of socialization and its functions. What I want to say is that liberty has become a mere pretext to enhance the ways of domination” [4]. If politics is the religion of modernity (political theology suturing the void with authority), the accumulation of liberty can only be understood as the moment of expansion and reproduction of effective domination. In a way, the metropolitan scenario in Uomini e no (1945) foreshadows the evolving historical epoch of this ‘monstrous socialization’ as a civil war or stasis, in which the mere survival of political struggle is proportional to the dispensation of death of humanity as the last dialectical movement of humanity against itself; that is, towards the concrete extinction of the human. For Vittorini the swerving black sun of fascism and political militancy (in its idealized version invested in the paradigm of sacrificial structure of history) can only amount to the realization of epochal nihilism and the fertilization of the expansive desert in the novel at the expense of sacrificing the erotic mediation with the world, which entails the liquidation of the sensibility external to human: “Love, in those deserts, is at its most squalid; it is not that life is absent from but the life it has is not alive. You are thirsty and have a chance to drink; there is water. You are hungry, you have a chance to eat; there’s bread. There is a spring and alms around, just the one you are looking for. But it  is only a mirage, it is not the thing itself” [5]. The fundamental question posed by Vittorini is never truly resolved by Uomini e no (1945): crossing the desert to achieve something like an erotic distance with the thing itself as ultimately the confirmation of one’s irreductible destiny. No doubt, there are moments where this emerges in strange ways, at the limit of narration and as a linguistic declaration. This is scripted through the exchange with the old lady Selva on happiness: “We work in order that men be happy. Isn’t that what we are working for?…Men need to be happy. Would there be any point to our clandestine newspapers? To our conspiracies?” [6]. 

Is happiness a subterfuge to return to the world, or is happiness, authentic non-compensatory happiness, the stimmung of life as it retreats from the delegated representations of civil society? The suspended dialectical closure at the level of form in Uomini e no (1945) provides a preliminary resolution to the question of happiness amidst wreckage; a collapse that speaks to Vittorini’s impossibility to bring into synthesis political action and existential authenticity. The narrative texture of Uomini e no (1945) is a preparatory exploration – showing the false exists in the meantime – towards the possible liberation of man’s passions, even against the premises of a reconciled ‘Humanity’ capable of leaving behind the antinomies of humanism and antihumanism at the service of the ‘communist way’. And we know that for Vittorini the commitment to ‘Communism’ was inscribed not in the idea or the organizational tactics but in the notion of the “way” (una via), capable of opening possibilities to counter the coercive efficacy of the administrative social apparatuses that turn historical progress into a totalizing desert [7].  How to do so – is there any legible index to the “via comunista”? As a novel Uomini e no is preparatory towards this retreat from the confusion of the inhumanity of the human on the one hand, and the total humanization of the world to deface the possibility of happiness and experience with the world itself. 

In this sense, Fortini is right in describing the lyricism of the novel as attuned to a funeral oration or song (“canto funebre”), which is also a prolonged farewell to the ideals of Vittorini himself as a moral humanist; that is, as someone committed to the ideals and abstraction of redemptive self-sacrificial christology and the self-serving autonomous action of the pardon as man’s last hope to absorb the inhuman kernel into the vita nova of a redeemed universal Humanity. And in fact, these are two “endings”’ of Uomini e no (1945): the self-immolation and sacrifice of the protagonist N2 waiting to confront the Nazi official Cane Nero, and the final sequence of the worker that refuses to murder a German soldier because he looked “sad” even when standing on occupied soil, even when he occupies the role of the protectorate of the nomos of the earth [8]. These are the novel two preparatory distinct actions in the dense fog of the interregnum: the Christological path of sacrifice of N2  – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, which according to René Girard’s defines the advent of the Christian sacrificial  practice- seeks a last action of resistance holding on to “humanity’s internal weakness”, which carries the elevation of secularized mythic discharge of subjective martyrdom [9]. On the other, the milanese worker offers redemption as a form of secret forgiveness (without a justification and without a why) to the occupier, and in this way integrate the inhuman into the human species as the solution to the repeated rumination over the movement of struggle and resistance: “Why, without being in any way forced to do so, had they entered this duel to the death, and why did they continue to wage it?” [10]. 

In his early reading of Uomini e no (1945) Franco Fortini offered a thesis that I am tempted to call the domestication of the wolf argument; an inversion of Hobbesian anthropology and the Christian felix culpa in which struggle’s optimism will ultimately transfigure the internal wolf unto the human’s heart [11]. But we know that the homo homini lupi depends on a thick notion of anthropology, of the human’s unfathomable deficiency in relation to ‘object reality’ so that any domestication of the wolf within humanity is also an anthropological quest; perhaps the last “route” of negating humanism through substantive acts (sacrificial sacrifice and forgiveness) in the attempt to reconcile the wolf with man. But this is the very enterprise of civilizational techniques of adaptation proper to the tooling of political anthropology – that is, the domestication of the savage wolf entails its conversion to the passive dog. Could there be a way out to the final verdict of dialectical form beyond struggle, and the reconciliation of humanity with its negation? Perhaps this is only registered as the unthought in Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945); an experience that prepares a return to the world through the conatus essendi, or  the preservation of each thing’s being as their are. This is registered in only instances of the novel in the backdrop of a landscape; indeed, outside the subject of self-reflection, and beyond the premises of radical evil proper to moral platitudes. And the moment reads like this in chapter CXXX: “The long dusty road, the drowsiness, the hay, the stitches where the cicadas were: everything that was, and that, along with everyone who is lost, still wants to be. And the sky filled with kites? The sky that was filled with kites” [12]. The perseverance of the conatus essendi puts to rest what the delegated forms that politics and morality have to offer as temporal substitutes for dragging the historical promise of humanism within epochal nihilism. 

In this suspended imagery of an arid landscape, Vittorini descends to the preservation of things as they open to their manifestation of another sense of freedom – no longer tied to the paradigm of historical liberation nor to the assumption of synthetic anthropological determinations to sooth pain – comes upwards, always silently, through the order of description outside the human. And is not in this description what Gianni Carchia would call “the non-human…a gesture of farewell to the idealist movement; a farewell to the exaltation of the human up to the highpoint of its explosion. The refusal to substitute the dead god for a human that in the depredatory scope of totality crosses every limit, every transcendence, and infinity” [13]? This transposition of this  proximity with this “other-than-humanity” ( what Humanity can no longer hold on to) is the secret to Vittorini’s infrapolitical impasse in Uomini e no (1945) that holds the key to his insistence on a notion of “freedom” against the subject incapable of overcoming itself in the face of the abstraction (morality) or ideological  reassurance (militancy) [14]. One could assume that the worker’s last line in Uomini e no (1945) – which also coincides with Vittorini’s mimetic repetition in his “Postscript” – in the form of a promise (‘I’ll learn better’) registers the final attempt to grasp what remains on the exterior fog of humanity: a notion of freedom that, in seeking ‘a way out’, insists in the possibilities of establishing contact with the world. Thus, the program of historical liberation can only be achieved against historical and civilizational fixation; traversing the polarity of humanity and inhumanity, and thus deposing the sublimated sentiment of pain that social domination can administer as an unending process of degenerated and moribound humanity as mere continuation of the fictive life.

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Notes 

1. Renato Poggioli. “Review of Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini”, Books Abroad, Vol.20, N.4, 1946, 393.

2. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 199.

3. Franco Fortini. “Ma esisteva Vittorini?”, L’Expresso, 4, 2 febbraio 1986, 86.

4. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. “El mundo administrado o la crisis del individuo”, Pensamiento al margen: revista digital de ideas políticas, N.19, 2023, 200.

5. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 34.

6. Ibid., 13. 

7. Elio Vittorini. “El comunismo como vía”, in Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 279.

8.  Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 50.

9. René Girard. Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 65. 

10. Ibid.,  196.

11. Franco Fortini. “Che cosa può l’uomo: Uomini e no” (1945), in Saggi italiani (1987), 253.

12. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985),190. 

13. Gianni Carchia. “Glosa sull’umanismo”, L’erba voglio, N.29-30, 1977, 9.

15. Elio Vittorini. “La libertad es difícil” (1956), en Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 382.

A certain life. A note on Marguerite Duras’ La vie tranquille (1944). by Gerardo Muñoz


Let us imagine a person that in a short period of time finds himself haunted by successive deaths, abandonments, missed encounters, displacements, and lost possibilities – the list could go on. All of this amounts to a loss of world. This is obviously the narration of anyone’s life, and every moment of it would seem to imply an internal necessity of its unfolding as felt in the weight of its coming together in remembrance. Obviously factical life will continue on – and it always goes on – but the ultimate question will reside in the relationship between existence and the narrative order of that past. All of Duras’ narrative world is almost entirely a direct wrestling with the possibility of going against this specific weight of narrativization, because to narrate means to forget oneself from the experience of being in the world here and now. The demand of recollection imposes rhetorical limitations to the unfathomable present. Remembrance is the courtyard of historical and religious necessity where self-transformation takes a secondary role in a massive and alienated narrative of causes and reasons.

Duras’ first novel La vie tranquille (1944) reacts strongly against the burden of memory in the name of forgetting: “Once you lose the ability to forget you are deprived for a certain life” [1]. But what could a “certain life” amount to? Obviously, this forgetting here does not mean a neutralization of conflict in life (as in the status of a civil war in a political community); rather, it entails a sort of rebirth, in which the density of life refuses the crushing force of fictitious acceptance dispensed by the order of the past. That loosely defined “certain life” does not qualify nor situates “life” to the survival of “this life”; on the contrary, it seeks to open life to its open and self-evolving possibilities. In other words, there is “only one life” because there are only irruptions of the tragic possibilities that will always elicit a vita nova. The “certain life” that is always lacking allows the infinite possibilities of rebirth in the face of the eruption of the tragedy. And tragedy requires affirmation and exposition to the world in a strong sense. This could very well be the ultimate tone and color of the adventure for Duras.

Dionys Mascolo once wrote that Marguerite Duras’ literary and cinematic work is a transfigurative elaboration of the the tragic, and for this very reason the active undoing of the civilizational narrative at least since the humans of the neolithic that had resulted in the production of justifications and reasons to live “our life” [2]. And in a way the irruption of the tragic is the confirmation that civilization does not have the last word of absolute moral order. But life  – and this is the “mystery” coloring a good part of Duras’ imagination – is always about keep afloat the possibility of the certain life without the threats of self-absorption and destruction in the wake of nihilism and abstract political equality between beings in the world. A “certain life” (our certain life without qualifications other than being attuned to the object of our passions) is always elsewhere, and for this very same reason as a transfigured revelation outside of what appears as the enclosed necessities of ‘this life’. “A certain life” is a higher indented form of the theos unto life, whose transcendence is not regulated by an article of faith or the anthropological deficiency of sin (this is at bottom the difference between Christ and Saint Paul). In other words, the tranquil life that many readers have generally understood as wilful irony wrapping Duras’ narrative bears the truth to that life – the only one worth affirming as destiny – must always be outside itself. As the character of La vie tranquille (1944) confesses in one of the peak moments of the monologue in the second part of the novel:

“I’ve existed for twenty-five years. I was very little, then I grew and reached my size, the size I am now and that I’ll be forever. I could have died in one of the thousand ways people die, and yet I managed to cover twenty-five years of life, I am still alive, not yet dead. I breathe. From my nostrils emanates real breath, wet and warm. Without trying, I managed to die of nothing. It advances stubbornly, what seems halted, in this moment: my life. …My life: a fruit I must have eaten without tasting it, without realizing it, distractedly. I am not responsible for this age or for this image…” [3]. 

The bite into the fruit in this monologue differs from the metaphoric self-confession that ascertains the theological irreversibility of  original sin and felix culpa; it signals the passage of the narrative of life into denarrativization. Here a “certain life” might open against the fluvial current of the order of necessity that will make the subject into a bundle of legible and memorable infortunios. The passage to the tranquil or serene life, however, is not just grounded in the description of a trembling account of onself. In Duras, it has a proper name: thought. In fact, as we will find in the last part of the novel: “You must advance with the last of your powers;…with the power of thought” [4]. And following Mascolo to the letter, one could say that this ‘power’ is misplaced – it is not a power of the subject to force a will to do or act – it is rather a passion of thought (“la passion de la pensée”) that elevates itself against necessity and actualization through a “refusal” of any given historical order. 

This is to say, the breakthrough to the ‘certain life’ or the ‘serene life does not presuppose a counterpolitical strategy, as much as the movement of thought enacted in refusal as condition for any democratic requirement that no one can ultimately possess, as Duras a decade later will go on to write in the third issue of Le 14 Juillet [5]. The serene life is only possible as an infinite movement of denarrativization. The inhabitation of the world in La vie tranquille (1944) was already preparatory for the gesture of ‘refusal’ where a certain life follows a retreat from the hypsipolis apolis (superpolitical apolitical) into the existential xenikos of a contemplative life that is irreducible to both the principles of humanity and the normative regulations of social interaction. The serene life is only achieved when the separation of thought and life enters into the  incommunicable sense of persuasion (the ancient peitho) capable of decompressing the vector of force that has only produced a generic humanity of political depredation, acceptance, and excruciating tonality of boredom. Duras’ writing – at its best moments – is an intense search of this kind; a search does not end in neither politics nor literature, but on what remains outside of them.

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Notes 

1. Marguerite Duras. The Easy Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 90.

2. Dionys Mascolo. “Naissance de la tragédie”, in A la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (fourbis, 1993), 397.

3. Marguerite Duras. The Easy Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 96-97.

4. Ibid., 114.

5. Marguerite Duras. “Responses à l’enquête auprès d’intelectuels français”, Le 14 Juillet, N.3., 1959, 5-6.

Elio Vittorini on the time of existence. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Elio Vittorini’s short travel book Sardegna come un’infanzia (1957), entirely composed of painterly vignettes of his visit in the thirties, there is one of them that immediately jumps out at the reader, because it is the only moment where the radiance of the image and the possibilities of thought touch each other without any reservation. It is almost the moment in which the senses of what is felt and seen mysteriously touches a region that is not entirely political, even though it figures as the highest ‘political moment’ in Vittorini’s chronicle.

Vittorini is observing the ordinary lives of the common people in Sardinia when all the sudden he writes the following: “Now, and in spite of everything, those sitting down, almost drowsy and without much to do, are in life. The others in the struggle are not, especially if they fall into consciousness by the struggle and the movement, without understanding any other pleasure than that of the full warehouse. The secret is to struggle for existence, but without being colonized by the struggle’s idealism…in this way, there will be true life in the very roaming path. I have always understood activism for activism’s sake as the business of flies that, once they have taken off, they begin to scratch their head or sharpen their legs” [1]. It is almost as if written the parable of the fly is written for our times, where so many are blinded by the secularization of a Jesuit figure of the militant. The activity of fly, just like that of the political militant, falls into the pretense, thanks to the allure of his self-consciousness, that something moves in spite of its complete paralysis. The fly only moves in the metaphysical abstraction from ideal projection to material outcome and preconceived ends that it knows beforehand. Nothing moves and nothing ever can amount to a discovery or an event. The fly will recurrently miss the world because it has become obsessed by the illusion of its movement, convincing itself that flying over fresh dung is something entirely different.

The political subject is primarily the subject of the accumulated freedom, but it can rarely grasp ‘a way out’, as Peter Red claims in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”. Vittorini’s roaming and inert path is the sentiment of true life (“the serene truth of life”, he will say in a few pages later), which is always on the predicated on the possibility of experience against the crust of ideological falsification – even when this process is narrated from the point of view of the proletariat as the motor of the dialectic of history of its self-overcoming to completion. The ‘secret is to struggle for existence’, which entails how to grasp life as utterly outside that can only be shaped by a contact with the world. Perhaps by “sensing” the world without ever becoming its master; rather, what’s involved is a task of a cultivation that must remain singular by virtue of its own irreductibility. 

And in a way, this was Vittorini’s own heterodox understanding of communism where there is according to him there was no “collective building of the soul, but rather the destitution of false differences so that once those regulated differences are abolished, new possibilities of absolute differences can flourish” [2]. This is why Vittorini could not find solace in the political militant or the engaged intellectual, except as figures already acting as smugglers of the planned obsolescence of a civilization overtly defended by those facilitating its own demise [3]. In the landscape of Sardinia – by the most passive of roles, he was merely a theōrós after all – Vittorini unravels the metapolitical blackmail of the epoch in order to conquer the most essential and inapparent: the time of existence in a minuscule world within worlds – and thus, always in a permanent state of infancy – that treasures something immense because it will be forever remain unknowable.

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Notes 

1. Elio Vittorini. Sardegna come un’infanzia (Mondadori, 1957), 64.

2. Dionys Mascolo & Edgard Morin. “Une interview d’Elio Vittorini”, Les Lettres françaises, 27 juin 1947: https://entetement.com/une-interview-delio-vittorini/ 

3. Elio Vittorini. “La civilización no es algo que defender” (1937), in Diario en público (Gadir, 2008), 86.

Politics as our passion? by Gerardo Muñoz

Philippe Theophanidis has recently brought to my attention an emphatic statement in Dionys Mascolo’s Lettre polonaise sur la misère intellectuelle en France (1957): “La politique est notre passion. Nous en parlons, ne faisons que cela, et tout l’ennui du monde est dans ces dialogues-disputes, dans cette démarche perpétuellement contentieuse qui donne envie de s’occuper de n’importe quoi d’autre, de plaisanter, de se taire, de s’en aller” [1]. These are intense words not entirely divorced from a deep sense of desperation entangled with a commitment to realism – minimally understood as bringing into thought how things looked at the time. In a recent collaborative introduction to the writing scene of this group (preliminary work towards an upcoming seminar) – which included Mascolo, but also Duras, Vittorini, Blanchot, and other continental friends – we took into consideration how the heterogeneous and internal tensions were brought into bear in the effort to connect the creative act to the existential texture of communication and concrete world events [2]. 

Mascolo’s statement must be read as historically marked and situated, as who today could claim that “politics”, however broadly or loosely understood, is the exclusive “object” of our passion? Mascolo seems to have been aware of the subordination of passion into politics, leading to dialogues and disputes where nothing could facilitate the clearing of a way out. When politics becomes the final object of one’s passion it could only mean that the reign of chatter has liquidated our experience with the world. And it is at this point where the ‘missing word’ that attunes the search for one’s passion can regress as nihilism; that is, as mere force to steer rhetorical valence and representational exchange within the expansive intramural rules of civil society. Restricting one’s passion to the determination of politics merely inverts the order of modern legitimacy (i.e. the repression of passions by the interests), compressing both terms as a higher principle of politics. 

If at the outset of modernity contractualism suppressed the passions in exchange for sovereign security from the fear of violent death; in the attempt to elevate the passion to the grammatical height of politics, what is rendered obsolete is precisely the possibility of securing an existential site of freedom outside and beyond politics, that is, in the the nonplace of the passion itself. Of course, one could also read Mascolo’s apothegm in light of his revolutionary politics, in which the name of “politics” solicited the revolutionary emancipation of the civilizational alienation of the human species towards a transformative sequence beyond the scarcity of needs. But the problem of the category of revolution is that it remains tied to the very development of the legitimacy of the political and its erosion (for Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the configuration of the state is the crowning revolutionary event against disorderly barbarism), which the members of the Saint-Benoît Group were first hand witnesses in the postwar epoch.

I think this speaks to my suggestion that the assertion ‘politics is our passion’ was historically embedded; a sort of last breath of trying to hold onto the utopia that will soon crumble in every active paradigm of planetary order (postcolonial, Soviet state planning, European communism and social democracy). But at least – and this is what remains of interest, as I see it – the Rue Saint-Benoît friends had the courage to confront it in order to enact a farewell to the very assumption of ‘revolution’, which already in 1968 was clearly moot. In the words of Maurice Blanchot after the events of 1968: “…but from now on I will hold onto an exigency: to become fully conscious, and always anew, that we are at the end of history, so that most of our inherited notions, beginning with the one from the revolutionary tradition, must be revised and, as such, refuted. […]. Let us put everything into question, including our own certainties and verbal hopes. The revolution is behind us: it is already an object of consumption and, occasionally, of enjoyment. But what is before us, and it is terrible, does not have a name” [3]. Thus, to conflate “politics” as the passion could no longer offer solid ground in the intra-epochal interregnum of suspended historical time. Just a few years later, Duras will claim that politics had little to offer, since there is an “absolute equivalence between all political programs, and only right ideology seems to be able to do politics as such. We no longer believe in politics…there is only a burrow of hope. We must submit ourselves to the hard evidence of its total degradation” [4]. To dwell in a delimited burrow means a return to the rooting of place and new geographies beyond the temporal axis.

One can read both Duras and Blanchot’s elucidations of the collapse of modern politics and its negation (the ius revolutionis) as a corrective posture to move past Mascolo’s hope to make the unfathomable texture of one’s passion coincide with the object of a political project, even if understood as an archipolitics. But it is precisely in the abyss opened by a terrible and nameless epoch that a new light is casted on the free-standing and ungraspable nature of the passion; the irreducible law that establishes a contact between the ethical life and the world beyond objectivation as both excess and deficit of the tribulations of political order. Perhaps a modification to Mascolo’s thesis is now necessary: passion is what escapes every possible fall into the objective world, and for this very reason it is a ‘refusal’ of what the compensatory bond of politics can offer under the sermo humilis of stagnant artificial utopias. There is no political passion just like there is no political friend, since both friendship and one’s passion remains always objectless, only mediated by the overcoming of the preconditions of fear and of delegated life. In Manuale di sopravvivenza (1974), Giorgio Cesarano will claim that passion was the name of the coming historical program of a sensible presence resisting the “annihilating force of social objectivation” of the world [5]. And the Italian poet will define the passion as the sacred taking possession of the return to appearance. A transformation of politics could only emerge after one’s passion could finally prevail experientially against the terrible and nameless (and unnamed) world organized towards planned obsolescence and generalized humiliation. And it goes without saying that we are still very much our predicament. The caesura between passion and politics has now become spectacularly absolute and irreversible.

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Notes 

1.  Dionys Mascolo. Lettre polonaise sur la misère intellectuelle en France (Éditions de minuit, 1957).

2. Gerardo Muñoz & Philippe Theophanidis. “¿Por qué volver a la Rue Saint-Benoît? Conversación sobre un seminario, Ficción de la razón, February 2024: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2024/02/26/gerardo-munoz-y-philippe-theophanidis-por-que-volver-a-la-rue-saint-benoit-conversacion-sobre-un-seminario/ 

3. Maurice Blanchot. “On the Movement” (1968), in Political Writings 1953-1993 (Fordham University Press, 2010), 109. 

4. Marguerite Duras. “Entrevista en A Fondo” (1979): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmnVBenAoyw

5. Giorgio Cesarano. Manual de supervivencia (Kaxilda, La Cebra, 2023), 75. 

Tradition according to Wallace Stevens. by Gerardo Muñoz

The fact that there is a continuous and secret communication between painting and tradition is something that has been registered in the genesis of myth well into aesthetic autonomy of modernity and the artificious equivalence of difference that regulates the temporal caducity of the new [1]. In a specific sense, the crisis of tradition in the contingency of the modern has the activity of painting as a privileged site because it holds the outside together in a perpetual unveiling; as if the human species were permanently exiting the shadows of the cave every time a hand strokes an animated brush over a surface. Painting clears the site of the inaccessible so that true life can emerge without the crutches of incorporated scripts of social organization. But what could it mean to think of ‘tradition’ in a painterly manner? In a poem of 1945, unequivocally entitled “Tradition”, Wallace Stevens seems to offer a response and an outlook for our consideration. 

In a conversationalist style, Stevens thinks that tradition is an uncontrolled question insofar as it can only be assessed through poetic form. Of course, for Stevens the character of tradition could not be grasped neither in a compilation of well delineated forms nor detailed through “a set of laws…to identify it is not tradition” [2]. As it was for Hölderlin’s practice relation to Greek antiquity, tradition is something that is always missed or unfulfilled from its uttermost strangeness. It is, as he asks in the fifth stanza “an unfamiliar sum, a legend scrawled in a script we cannot read?” [3]. The illegible transcription of what is passed as tradition holds to the incommensurability between what remains unfamiliar and what is already familiar and perceptible. We must resist the attempt at disambiguation, since any relation to tradition must be anachronistic as Nicoletta Di Vita has suggested [4]. Thus, for Stevens “tradition is always near”, at hand. And the hand calls forth the mystery of painting. It keeps a world at the threshold of the verbal. The placement of nearness, however, will be on the side of formlessness that characterizes the genesis of one’s existence. In other words, the true task of approaching tradition is neither at the level of the construction of forms nor about the analogical pairing of historical evolution; it is the painterly relationship between life and the experience in the world that precedes and outlives the time of life. This is what Stevens will denote a “ascending the Humane”; meaning a life qualified by fulfilling the adventure of a destiny that is capable of addressing the outside. In the most emphatic verses of “Tradition”, Stevens shows his absolute nearness to what he has in mind: 

“Ascending the humane. This is the form 

Tradition wears, the clear, the single form,

The solid shape, Aenas seen, perhaps,

By Nicolas Poussin, yet nevertheless 

A tall figure upright in a giant’s air.” [5]. 

The use of “form” in the first verse is most definitely mischievous, but it is also the playful ambiguity that Stevens wants to bring to our attention. One way to read it is to circle back to the sense in which the painterly becomes the utile passage between life and world. After all, tradition “wears” the dress of nature, although this is only facilitated by the sensible activity of painting. Exactly a decade later in the essay “The Whole Man” (1955), and speaking directly to the rise of cybernetics and technico-political technicians that had consolidated their mastery over the events of the world, Stevens will suggest that “Modern art often seems to be an attempt to bridge the gap between facts and miracle…to succeed in doing this, if it can be done at all, seems to be exclusively the task of the specialist, that is to say, of the painter” [6]. Why the painter and not the poet? At a very general level, the two figures are interchangeable; however, if one takes the painterly mediation, it becomes possible to claim that painting has a more subtle expressive footing in showing the nearness of tradition.

Painting is the non-language that  gathers the formless tune of tradition: “The vigor of art perpetuates itself through generations of form. But if the vigor of art is itself formless, and since it is merely a principle it must be, its form comes from those in whom the principle is active, so that generations of form come from generations of men. The all-round man is certain to scrutinize form as he scrutinizes men, that is to say, in relation to all past forms” [7]. Thus, for Stevens the possible tradition is that which creates a space in which a new life can take place in the world attentive to the transmission of forms. Of course, not any world, but to “live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it” [8]. This is why Steevns will differentiate between two modalities of the task of poetry: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience; favoring the second because of how it folds our existence within the given order of space and time. 

Is not painting, precisely, a frozen instant in the spatial and temporal coherence that reveals, in turn, a hidden harmony that never fully coincides with nature nor stands in opposition to it? [9]. This is why “tradition wears” but it is also the transitory body of Aenas, which Stvevens inserts in the poem as a matter of ut pictura poesis in relation to Nicolas Poussin’s “Venus presenting arms to Aenas” (1639), which is ultimately the story of the persuasion unto one’s destiny. As it is well known, Poussin captures in a sequence Aenas being directed to his destiny invested in the arms of war. But where is destiny embodied for Stevens? Is it in the gesticulating figure of Aenas or in floating Venus that occupies the central sky of the landscape? It is almost as if Stevens acquired, as Walter Friedlander said of late Poussin, a “sublime vagueness” in visibility of the inner workings of imagination drifted from the physical imbalance of the activity of imitation [10]. 

After all, for Stevens Poussin stood precisely as the source of partition and the miniscule, confirming the primacy of “imagination” against the rhetorical compression that renders legible the modern abstraction [11]. Following André Gide who had had written on Poussin’s work, Stevens repeats without any elaboration that Poussin is to be taken “little by little” (peu à peu), so that only then its pictorial absorption can unfold against what at first sight appears as a theatrical and self-enclosed translucid stage. This is the distant ‘traditionalism’ that Stevens wanted to reject if the work of art was to endure, and still have the vigor to generate a tranquil and peaceful state of mind solicited by the late Poussin. Painting could only be expressed as a ‘mode’ — which for Poussin stood for moderation and restraint, but more importantly as the condition of a certain sensible order “by which the thing keeps itself in existence” both firmly and invisibly, that is, beyond enunciation [12]. Otherwise, as Gerald Cohen once claimed, tradition becomes the thing that you can only hold on to when it has relaxed its hold on you ceasing to color the genesis of life [13]. And while tradition cannot be fully absorbed by rules or forms of pictorial depiction, it does retain the “good that we have loved”, dispensing a noeud vital in which the divine (theos) disengages us from the compression of objective reality and into the nearness of the eternal. This is the integrity of painting that allows Stevens to proclaim the ascendance of the supreme human “good”: tradition is kept alive by the soul of an erotic deification. After all, “God and imagination are one” Stevens will suggest in the fragments of Adagia [14]. Against the edifice of sedimentation and rupture, repetition and originality, possession and abstraction; tradition will name the disembodied genesis of appearing between things in a “reflected seeming-so”. 

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. “Per un’estetica dellainvecchiato”, in Dario Lanzardo, Dame e cavalieri nel Balon di Torino (Mondadori, 1984).

2. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 595-596

3. Ibid., 595.

4. Nicoletta Di Vita. Il nome e la voce (Neri Pozza, 2022), 28.

5. Ibid., 596.

6. Wallace Stevens. “The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 874.

7. Ibid., 875. 

8. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 904. 

9. Monica Ferrando. “L’ultimo quadro di Poussin”, in L’oro e le ombre (Quodlibet, 2015), 82.

10. Walter Friedlander. Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (Harry Abrams, 1964), 82.

11. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 737.

12. Cited in Étienne Gilson’s Painting and Reality (Cluny Media, 2020), 173. 

13. G. A. Cohen. “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value”, in Finding oneself in the other (Princeton U Press, 2013), 155.

14. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 914. 

In search of an adventure. Commentary on Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953). by Gerardo Muñoz

It is not until the last third part of Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) when the reader encounters a mention to the Etruscan relic alluded by Jacques, one of the characters in the circle of friends that vacation in Italy, who passes the days drinking ‘bitter camparis’ and complaining about the nauseating and scorching presence of the summer heat. And if it were not for the title of the novel the reader could easily dismiss it as a contingent regional reference: “I looked at the map last night…After leaving Rome, I could stop at Tarquinia to see Ludi’s little Etruscan horses. After all the time he has been bending our ears about them” [1]. The ‘little horses’ are brought out a few pages before the end of the novel where Ludi, their Italian friend, goes back and forth whether to go and show them the horses figurines or not. It goes without saying that it would be an enormous distaste to press on the Etruscan reference for any deeper meaning, or to claim that Duras deployed the ancient piece as a tongue in cheek symbol for the bunch of friends roaming around the beach shores. It clarifies very little or too much as an generic reading hypothesis.

In any case, what is relevant is that their trip to encounter the horses of Tarquinia never takes place stressing the real lacuna of the narrative, which is not so much paying a visit to an ancient civilization, as much as underlying a possibility, an afterthought, a pulsating desire towards its displacement; or, in a way, the outside of life that part of the real texture of existence. A reminder that life (a happier life?) is always somewhere else, and definitely away from the excruciating heat of an Italian summer in which no compensatory activity (drinking campari, chatter among friends, having food, meeting new faces) can wrestle the desire for exodus. In The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) very little happens in terms of the organization of the narrative, and that is precisely because the domain of the possible might have been Duras’ central commitment when writing the novel: nothing will happen, not even the fleeting thought of paying the visit to the tombs of the Etruscans. Thus, the heavy weight of a narrative without events opens the incandescent proximity between life and nihilism in a strangely accommodating setting. It is summer after all, which means tranquil life of boredom, repetition, serene gazing, and the monotonous. Children catching lizards or sleeping through the night, and very little else.

According to Laure Adler, Duras’ sea novels (The Sea Wall, Gibraltar, Little Horses) wanted to persist “in search of an adventure. But afterwards everything comes together to form a whole” [2]. This holds true only at a very rudimentary and superficial level, but it does not hold to any serious scrutiny. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) is a novel in which the writing of adventure takes a very specific form: life detached from the event of the adventure. This is the reason why the adventure is not only missing from the sequence of contingent incidents, but rather it is alien to the character; as if the radical separation from character and destiny would be transplanted into a self-reflective consciousness arrested in time and space. The adventure at the closure of modern sensibility and its dialectical valence around a “worldview” is precisely that there is a coming to presence of the fact of this poverty of adventure has become its uttermost inexistence: “For a long time I had bright colored dreams of imaginary cities, where I could do what I liked, and look for adventure. But the dreams were not enough, and no I’ve turned a little mean” [3].

The end of the texture of adventure between world and existence marks the commencement of the self-autonomous subject that can narrativize the concrete order of his dreams precisely because he is convinced that they will never be accomplished in this world. After all, as Lukács claims in his Soul and Form, the adventure is no epic for epic’s sake, but a “communion of feeling, of experience, an infinitely powerful experience of the world’s many colored richness expressed in a varied series of endless adventures” [4]. In the adventure one freely becomes who one will be. Hence, the adventure named the freedom of sensible experience between language and world, coming to near convergence only so that its final separation could set to start the inconspicuous ethos of life. In this sense, the longing for adventure in Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia could be said to allegorize the chattering of experience, whose tiny pieces are ultimately picked up by the synthetic apprehension of the dialogue of chatter among friends. The empty chatter takes place once the path of language as transformative of a life becomes separated from the course of the human species. The extreme comedy of the rhetorical dialogue is that it functions as a cure for the abyss of its own separation from life.

Hence, the “dia-logos” ends up suturing that dregs of the fictitious waste required to translate the language of meaning (logos) into practical action at the expense of a life that begins to move, inadvertently, across a groundless world [5]. This is why the central character in The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) calls the boundless dialogue that they are engaged in as “a confusion of voices…from open windows, and was dissipated in the sunshine” [6]. It is not that there is never continuity between what is being said; rather, it is that dialogue is always a re-statement of either the case, the command or the subjective piety that in the suppression of real pain proper to a alienated life can only engage in the melodramatic gossip over the accessories of life. In other words, dialogic communication can only speak in the name of quotidian vulgarity. Language becomes, as Duras writes in one of the most memorable lines of the novel: “an endless chain of reciprocal waiting” [7]. It does not take much to apprehend at this point the signifier rotation in every dialogue. Waiting, but towards what? The waiting is eternal and illusionary, since the capture into the sedentary surplus of “dialogue” has already taken you to the final destination where everything is sufficient; what remains is the generalized effect of unhappy consciousness from the irrevocable sense of abstraction.

The expressivity of the dialogues of the French bourgeoisie of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) was already the indication that their wordlessness differs a whole lot from the musical infraworld of the Etruscans horses and tombs. Yes, something very precious was lost once civilization becomes entangled with the infinite realization of a schizophrenic subject that is the effect of endless chattering and utterly silence. In other words, the character of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) talk quite a lot – they never stop talking – but they are not towards a path of language in search for a missing word that marks every true adventure. And this is the adventure where thought and language bind with one another in search for the unfathomable exteriority that is always unknown. And we know that for Duras the encounter with exteriority is the imprint of intelligence, the coefficient of real and enduring thinking. As one of the characters says at one point: “Possibly it may be that there is nothing that cuts one off from the unknown so much as friendship” [8]. I take it that for Duras the Party form (and even the obligations of fictive intellectual communities and all forms of political dilettantism) was very much her preoccupation here: the militancy of friendship could very well stage the last character in the play of historical nihilism. At the expense of avoiding being “nobody” anyone could assume the faceless “friend”, as soon enough cybernetics will end up promoting in their contactless subjective networks. The agonizing sun of a vacation (exclusive in its temporality) is already foreshadowing artificial radiation and nuclear reserve as the sole container of life on earth. In this scenario visiting Tarquinia is an escape of sorts – downwards to the night but also to a vita nova – although, ultimately, it does not take place. And Duras seems to tells us: true experience falls catastrophically on the other side of writing, on the unlived.

Against the therapeutic community of friendship, one can juxtapose the unpredictability of encounter in which no friend will be crushed by the rhetorical compression of the dia-logos and its discomfort. In friendship I can embrace and release without obligations. And if friendship exists it is through a negative community that is never one with allocated leisure time; and; like love, it does not solicit holidays: “you have to live with it fully, boredom and all, there is no holiday from it” [9]. In such scenario “we would not want to change the world”, but perhaps begin inhabiting it away from the sun of exposure and recognition that clears a menacing landscape without horizon. And if according to Kurt Badt, the sky is the organ of sentiment, then one must come to the conclusion that the characters of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), as pathetic as they are, are congenital witnesses of this truth; even if they could only carry it for a moment in order to instantly betray it [10].

.

.

Notes

1. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Riverrun Press Inc, 1985), 54. 

2. Laure Adler. Marguerite Duras: A Life (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 187.

3. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 139.

4. Georgy Lukács, “Richness, Chaos, and Form”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 167.

5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Sobre el lugar del lenguaje”, in La palabra hendida (Ediciones del Serbal, 1990), 164. 

6. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 149.

7. Ibid., 87.

8. Ibid., 84.

9. Ibid., 213.

10. Kurt Badt.  John Constable’s Clouds (Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1950), 101.

Name and Liberty. by Gerardo Muñoz

Back in the fall of 2020, we discussed a book entitled Intifada: una topología de la imaginación popular (2020), written by Rodrigo Karmy, which considered the implications between the forms of contemporary revolts for the common imagination. It has been said with good reasons that the health-administrative controls deployed during the COVID-19 brought to a halt the high tides of revolts against the experiential discontent in the social fabric. The wearing out and domestication of experience has proved, at least for now, its stealth efficacy and unilateral success. However, what some of us did not see at the time was that this energy over protracted containment was also being waged at the very substance of language. This has now come forth in the wake of recent events at university campuses where administrative authorities, opinion writers, and legal analysts have suggested that a particular word, “intifada”, should be proscribed and effaced from campus life. One should not waste time considering the etymology, semantic reach, and political deployment of this term – for this there is already Karmy’s elegant and dense articulation of the term.

What has completely gone unnoticed in the current chatter about “intifada” is the fact that the full realization of a “rhetorical society” entails, necessarily, an ongoing preventive civil war over what is perceived as “sayable”. This means that containment does not only reach to the moment the realization of action (and its reason or justification of an act); but rather that it fully extends about what might be said potentially. The various calls – on the left and right, from the legal analysts to the pundits and some of the academic administrations – against “intifada” is not merely substantive (or at least it does not stop at this specific threshold); it is a preventive reaction against the very possibility of the name and naming. The act of naming is intimately related to the exterior events in the world; therefore, the proscription of naming is one more step in the domestication process in which the human specie is tore not only from establishing a contact with the world, but also incapable of accessing it through the specific density of naming.  

The paradoxical situation of this interregnum is that, on one hand, the collapse of modern political authority that founds the Liberal State (non veritas facit legem) as an overcoming of language and truths, has led straight into the rhetoric inflation where naming is sacrificed and language codified into a second order normativity that imposes arbitrary obligations on what is licit and illicit. This is why the First Amendment of the United States Constitution – and total constitutionalism writ large – becomes the construction zone that allows the contingent justification of “time, place, and manner” under the civil right of “freedom of speech”, which turns naming into an ominous and terrible shadow; an unwarranted apostrophe. The almost anecdotal proscription over “intifada” reveals the heteronomic dominion over interiority; that is, over the possibility of saying.

I can recall how Quentin Skinner told some of us at Princeton years ago that a fundamental characteristic of unfreedom, broadly considered, begins when you think twice about whether it is convenient or prudent to say what you think. Of course, I do not think he favored a position of imprudence and generalized cacophony. I take it that he meant that the end of liberty begins when the possibility of naming disappears: “Between the motion and the act falls the shadow”. Fixation and transparency is the evolving grammar of the day. Can language subsist in such an impoverished minimum overseen by the general governmental logistics? As a preamble, one can say that in the current moment any conception of liberty begins with the opaque exercise of naming.