History of metaphysics

Why is Nelly Richard afraid of infrapolitics? by Gerardo Muñoz

The dismissal of ‘infrapolitics’ as a notion to think the distance with respect to political subsumption and civil administration was there from its emergence. I remember that around 2015, Alberto Moreiras suggested that perhaps in ten years or so, given the total collapse of actual existing political frameworks in the West, there might emerge a sound moment for real and honest conversation. The wager was on the “might” at that moment. But it has already been a little more than a decade, and the apathy in many ways has only aggravated, almost in line with the increasing liquidation of politics everywhere and the undisputed swing to predatory nationalism that has made it impossible to say the big word from the previous political cycle: “populism”. In this scenario of paralysis we are a bit surprised by Nelly Richard’s strong words against ‘infrapolitics’ in her recent book Tiempos y modos (2014), in which she appears as a reasonable, at times enlightened intellectual mediator, against what she sees as the rampant philosophical “excesses” projected their categories to an otherwise expected horizon of social transformation announced by the Chilean revolt of October 2019. 

Against “infrapolitics” as a distance of thinking against political totalization, Richard claims that she wants to hold on politics and continues to call the futility of the notion: “me parece que no hay que regalarle esa palabra tan preciada a la política resevándose el prefijo infra. Me parece que es mejor preservar la política un tono que es en sí mismo el tono de una población que, eventualmente, como en el caso de lo que estamos tratando tiene, también sus continuados por otros medios, como la Convención Constitucional. En este aspecto no creo mucho en la infrapolítica. Veo en esas terminologías la paradoja de una grandilocuencia minotitaira, una especie de resta un poco suicida que complica el acceso y lacera los caminos dejando a los pobres afuera, por que no entiende bien de qué tratan esas palabras. Y entre restarse de una suma y sumarse a una resta, yo prefiero lo segundo” [1]. The overt populist intellectualism emanating from this assertion inadvertently results in the restitution of the Vanguard intellectual in full capacity to elucidate, transmit, and “accompany” the forward march of the People as a comprehensive moral totality. What today passes – and speaks in the name of – as “political realism” is short of twentieth century political pieties and belated fusionism (the Intellectual and the People), which is all too sad. 

Leaving aside for a moment the violence against the texture of language (its non-coincidence with communication), there is a deeper problem here, which is that that the contemporary affirmation of realist “politics” today is delivered with a side blackmail: the fear of remaining an outsider, of becoming an intruder, and thus, positing an “exteriority” is always inconvenient and necessarily despicable. It is antipolitical, and thus a mere abstraction of language. This is the gnostic position that must be suppressed in order for the mandarins of social articulation to stand another chance of reformulating the forms of the social contract as the telos of political reflection. In another moment of the text Richard is quite explicit of the necessity to reject ‘infrapolitics’ as merely parasitical to the “sophisticated and bibliophilic universitarian categories of contemporary theory” (she stopped short of saying of the “global north”): “Resulta más o menos obvio que no se puede abordar del mismo modo un registro de búsqueda intellectual (lo infrapolítico como ejercicio deconstructivo que puede darse el lujo de girar incesantemente sobre sí mismo en el régimen de la escritura y del pensamiento) que la formulación constitucional de un acuerdo de la comunidad sobre las formas políticas del contrato social” [2]. 

Is that all that contemporary thought can aspire, then? Another frozen and humorless, most definitely predictable instance of the social contract, the old faith in constitutionalism and normativity, inclusion and distributed abundance with its necessary communitarian anthropology and convinced that, alas, “this time” we will surely get it right? The noble ideal of Rousseauianism in Wallmapu for the twenty first century. In the declaration of updated political promises there always lurks an informant policeman that secures the any path of exit from the human park. And so we are obliged to play within the political vectors or be prepared to suffer in the isolation of the steppe. Across the aisle of the philosophers of the Social the blackmail is more or less the same. Politics or apocalypse, which remains completely oblivious to the deeply instrumentalized apocalyptic political ratio in the epoch of stagnation and polycrisis; always making demands on “lesser evils”, whether it is Mandamni in the metropolis, or the ecological transition in the EU. But we know that “politics is action, but action always invites the invention – the renewal – of a language…otherwise, it is the near-death of the left as voice, voice, provocation, unwelcome presence that remains the reality”, as a lucid art historian of our times has observed [3]. Infrapolitics is a modest step in that direction in an epoch in which the true illusion of a hegemonic politics suffices to submit and resist within social containment. 

The claims on behalf of absolute politicity explain the hatred against thought today, which is predicated on the introspective dogma that politics colors absolutely all aspects of life, and that life’s ultimate end is the stabilization of political community. Increasingly so, it is evident that the suppression of thought, in the strong sense of the word (thinking as noncalculation and poetizing), is rendered hostage to anthropological survival that does not see beyond domination and struggle, hostility and originary compensated violence, outsourcing social pressures to rhetorical inflation. In other words, on realist grounds, the assumption is that there is only politics because ultimately there has always been violence in the human experience. A hypothesis that fails to account for the interdependence of anthropological mutation for the abstract needs of social reproduction. 

This is why for the defenders of the closure of social mediations, there is no outside from it; indeed, there is literam no possibility of exodus at all, as Roberto Esposito claims in a recent book that resonates with Richard’s position: “From this point of view, human beings have no way out. Not because they run up against difficulties they cannot master but because any mastery is a subaltern expression of that which as always predominates. Thus. every avenue they take is barred by the very intention that moves them: ‘their not having a way out consists, instead, in the fact that they continually turn back on the path that they themselves have laid out; they get bogged down in their routes, get stuck in ruts, and by getting stuck they draw in the circle of their world’. Humanity cannot break the rifle of violence and find a way out – not due to the lack of strength because an outside, properly speaking, does not exist, given that violence occupies the entire field of existence” [4]. 

If violence occupies the entire “field of existence” for Esposito, for Richard it is politics what totalizes every relation into a cognizable order when it dares to speak in the name of the subaltern, the poor, or the slave under the shadow of the Master, masking its desire of inversion and thus becoming one itself. This is the narrative of constituent power and revolutionary dialectics at least since 1789. This is precisely what Christian Jambet & Guy Lardreau see in  L’Ange: Pour une cynégétique du semblant (1976); that is, the projected ideological revolution taking the manifold orienting principles of realist politicity (the historical proletariat, the People, Ecology, and even the revolution as the repetition of coming into semblance) that advances the plasticity of order [6]. Is a gnostic rupture possible against the realist discourses that hide their mastery? 

Infrapolitics has no programmatic blueprints or higher purposes in the interregnum, but at least it is committed with a certain stubbornness on the detachment of thinking and the irreducible ethics of language that is always more and always less than social domination; more originary and deeply existential than the scene of violence and its copious obsession with the readability of the public. Infrapolitics is always already in what we all do, and fugitivity is already under way on the other side of socialization. The “fear” that promotes its negation is, if anything, the symptomatic tenor that political forms take when what remains is a predictable rhetorical chatter. But on the side of opacity, we have already trespassed the blackmail of fear. It seems that we are already the outsiders: extranei a turbis aestimemur (Tertullian).

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.*Nota bene. Some Chilean friends have brought to my attention that the chapter where the mentions on infrapolitics unfolds, “Una pequeña y hermosa conjetura”: fragmentos de conversacion con Federico Galende”, is a dialogue between Richard and Federico Galende although at no moment does it become clear who is saying, asking or answering as one or the other. In a way, this chapter insofar as it is a flowing soliloquy of the two voices, authorship becomes a sort of third signature emerging as “Richard-Galende”. The ambiguity of the authorship in question, however, does not take away from the main premises of my response, which can be extended not only to Richard but also to Galende. At bottom, my response is not towards a specific intellectual project, it is registering a symptom of the contemporary philosopher emerging as a agent of the hegemonic closure of the Social.

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Notes 

1. Nelly Richard. Tiempos y modos (Paidós, 2024), 103.

2. Ibid., 99.

3. T. J. Clark. Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Thames&Hudson, 2025), 15.

4. Roberto Esposito. The Faces of the Adversary (Polity, 2026), 114-115.

Assimilation in exile. On Giorgio Agamben’s Il corpo della politica (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

One of the decisive lessons of Giorgio Agamben’s archeological examination of Western politics is that the imperative to confront the closure of representation, sooner or later it must also come to terms with the notion of the body (corpo) as a central metapolitical condition in the genesis of modernity. If L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) brought to its final stage the philosophical exploration of Western ontology of politics defined by efficacy and realization; in most recent opuscules, Agamben has shown how the fixation and regulation of the body is also embedded in the regions of language and sensation of human life as well.  In this sense, it is impossible not to read Il corpo della politica (Bollati Boringhieri, 2026) along with Il corpo della lingua (Einaudi, 2024), as two parallel commentaries on the defining stature of political representation. If a new beginning is one of the decisive questions of our times, then one of the pending tasks is precisely to think the body (corpo) against the ontotheological assumptions of calculative reason.

Similar to Il corpo della lingua (2024), Il corpo della politica (2026) starts with the treatment of the Copernican revolution of bodies in Hobbes and Newton, which in the face of the cosmological infinity inscribed a notion of two bodies in order to allow for representation within spatial coordinates. In other words, Hobbes’ artificial sovereign represented by the mortal god Leviathan (state normative authority) will have an autonomous colorary in the autonomy of the subject that will become “political” as long as it becomes coterminous with the civic body of the “People”. Thus, to speak of “bodies” is not just to rationalize physicality in space – although it is also this from a technical viewpoint that state legibility will soon demand of the incipient civil society – but more importantly, it entails the administration of energy and movement (in Agamben’s well known lexicon, the domestication of potency to the realization of purposeful ends). For Agamben, Spinoza’s conatus, which appears in the Baroque period in critical dialogue with Hobbesian and Newtonian frameworks should be read precisely a way to think past the body as substance, following the steps of the tradition of ancient Stoicism in which beings are corporeal insofar as they are in tension with the world, allowing the tonos or acoustics to animate being in its movement towards preservation and exposure (Agamben 20-21). 

If all beings are traversed by a tonos – a tension that crosses as its medium in virtue of its contact with the world – this means that they are no longer defined by a substance, but as intensity within a field of forces once thrown in the world. As Agamben writes in passing with explicit confrontation with Heidegger’s Being and Time: “…con la tesi perentoria ‘l’essenza dell’esserci giace (liegt) nell’esistenza’. L’esserci è stato “gettato” nel mondo, ma si direbbe che, una volta gettato, non cade in piedi, ma giace (liegen significa innanzitutto essere sdraiato). E questa concezione sub-stanziale dell’essere che il conatus mette radicalmente in questione” (Agamben 23). In an archeological gesture that is already signatura of his work, Agamben reminds us that Hobbes’ substantive and artificial division of the “two bodies” that anchors modern politics can be traced to the corpus mysticum and the theological debates concerning transubstantiation that will later be recasted in the intersecting works of both Ernst Kantorowicz and Carl Schmitt, in which the impolitical dimension of the multitude becomes political through the artifice of decision and representation of a unified and indivisible body (Agamben 25-26).

The catastrophe of modern politics takes place when the body, once reduced to a substance and computable object in space, ceases to be understood as an inteusum or intensity of an irreducible multitude that expressed a generic and universal human species, as it was for Dante: “La politico – il finis totius humanae civilitatis che Dante intende definirie nel suo trattato – è ancora una volta un campo di tensioni interne allo stesso genere umano e questa intensità ha la foram di una moltitudine” (Agamben 39). In other words, for Agamben following the implicit tonus present in Dante’s Monarchia, the political is neither action nor mediation, but what names the very site of the possible. Agamben calls the hypothesis of an “anarchic politics” (politica anarchica), which no longer defines itself in relation to a formal mediation of government and state, but rather as the intensity of the multitude through the generic being (Marx) or the universal humanity (Dante) that takes the form of sensible Empire devoid of principial politics mediated by constituent power (Agamben 47). 

Where does the multitude dwell outside the constituted representation of a community of belonging or the social mediation of the state? Already in 1990s Agamben had written a gloss on the politics of exile collected in Mezzi senza fine (1996), and the last part of Il corpo della politica (2026) he returns to philosophical and theological notion of the exile vis-a-vis the historical experience of the Jewish tradition as an errant or stateless people, as Erich Unger called it in 1922, whose existence has been defined by exile or galut (Agamben 48). It is a bit of a misnomer to call the exilic experience a “politics”, since for Agamben the authentic tradition of exile does not entail the right or duty fixed to a community of belonging; rather, what outlives the law is the only path capable of deposing it (in the manner of Paul, that is, as katargeo). In this way, justice is now understood not as a procedure in a normative system, but as a written tradition that can only be studied and reflected upon and ultimately experienced as a state of passivity.

Hence, the exilic experience is the caesura between language and world, in which we touch the exteriority with a renewed intimacy that unfolds the uncommunicative solitude that keeps the mystery of our use of language. Following the neoplatonic formulation “phygé monou pros monon” – understood by Erik Peterson as an expressive mystical relation of a “fuga di un solo presso un solo” – there is intimacy and authentic belonging whenever there is sensible separation in being (Agamben 55). Following Plutarch and Plato, for Agamben the exilic dimension is the very home of philosophy and thought, which confirms, against Crito’s suggestions at the end of Socrates’ life, that there life outside of the polis and the conglomerate of the demos, because life is outside itself once it is assimilated in the virtuality of a divine that nourishes its own potency.  In what stands as one of the most precise formulations of the pheugein (exile) condition as a figure of existence, Agamben writes of its precise ascesis: 

“La celebre definizione ascetica della fuga dal mondo come assimilazione a Dio andrà resa, pertanto, restituendo tutta la sua forza alla metafora politica: “l’assimilazione a Dio virtualmente un esilio” (kata ton dynaton significa qui, secondo il sense più proprio del termine dynatos, “virtualmente, secondo la potenza). L’affermazione e tanto piu significativa in quanto, con queste parole, Platone rompe con l’insegnamento socratico del Critone, secondo cui la possibilità di phygé offerta al condannato non potrà che essere rifiutata, perché non vi è vita possibile fuora dalla polis” (Agamben 57).

This region that precedes and exceeds politics – in the language of Sophocles, the well known ypsipolis apolis – is akin to the tone that runs to the forgetting of any substantive ontology of politics that seeks to subsumes life into the confinement of external forces. It is in this paradoxical situation of assimilation in exile, and a permanent exile that assimilates itself in God as shared thought that politics can be transfigured as an apodemia that refuses the closure of life into principles of government and dominium, and away from the community form of propriety and rooted belonging. Agamben recalls that in the history of Christianity, it is the time of the parish (paroikias) what allows the soul to live in earth as foreigner and exile, in proximity of the medium of the kingdom, and that only later with Saint Augustine it was transformed into a territorial institution for the communio and communal salvation (Agamben 60-61). In the paroikias, Agamben returns to the kingdom not as a retheologization of the politics, but as a figural parable in which a poetic dwelling is enacted in the measureless passivity of a form of life, a project consistent with the formulation of the singular whatever being articulated in La comunita che viene (1990).

The assimilation in the exile of the divine, which recalls the forgetting of oneself and the god announced by Hölderlin in“Note on the Oedipus”, is refined in the last essay of the book entitled “Il corpo dell’Europa”, which reproduces a lecture delivered in Venice in May 2024 about idea of Europe. As a sort of concluding reflection or apostilla, we are now able to say that for Agamben the only possibility of dwelling in the vestiges of the European tradition and memory is to rescue, from the wreckage of its history, the sediments of a texture of the phygén: to be exiled is not just a vitalist affirmation of this life, but more importantly, it also implies disclosing the possibilities buried in the past with the dead, that is, in contact not only with Gaia, but also in the downward movement to the domus of the infraworld (a figure that receives a novel treatment Agamben’s recent book La lingua che resta). Agamben exemplifies this exile with the dead with three poetic moments of high european modernism: Ezra Pound’ Cantos, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Eric Auerbach’s masterpiece Mimesis written from his exile in Turkey – and of course, we could also think here of Kafka’s parables and Joseph Roth’s narratives of Jewish errancy; as well as Alexandre Lerrnet Holenia’s phantasmatic crumbling of Empire in The Standard and Osip Mandelstam’s “The Fourth Prose”, where the end of the work leads to the human voice as the supreme poetic task in the face of nihilism and political totalitarianism. 

It should be clear, however, that the problem is not found a temporary refuge or a last stand in the fortress of modern literature, but of coming to terms with the phygé as a fundamental problem of language that, in virtue of its unique and irreplaceable experience, delivers a world nested in the affection of remembrance. As Agamben asks towards the end of the lecture: “Is there a sensibility and a form of life that we can call European?” (Agamben 82). This question can only be answered when we dwell and assimilate into the exile of thought that harbors the residues, figures, and voices that speak to us from the dead in a tradition because it is no longer transmitted, we can only access it poetically. In the only moment that the word anima (soul) appears in the text, in the very last sentences, it becomes clear that it is only in the intensity of thought that life accounts for the inseparability of the body and the soul that historical abstraction has rendered oblivious and alien from the tonos of presence. We are not yet ready to declare a return to the appearance between being and world, and for that very reason even the presence of the divine, as Agamben says following Isaac Luria, is itself exiled from the creation of the world until the advent of the tiqqun in the night of restitution. The exilic dwelling of life outside itself is marked by this sort of secret unfaithfulness in the absence of the god. In the meantime, the task of an ethical life is to passively reside in an exile where the reality of the soul returns what is possible and breathable to the appearance of the real.

Thinking without form. On Gianni Carchia’s Name and Image (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

At long last readers in the English speaking world will be able to read Gianni Carchia’s work in translation thanks to the publication of Name and image: an essay on Walter Benjamin (Seagull Books, 2025), which was the Italian philosopher very last book published posthumously in 2008. This is not a work of late style as such, since these four essays on Walter Benjamin serve as an oblique and angular entry point to the thinking form of Carchia’s own philosophical concerns on sensibility, the survival of the myth through aesthetic mediation, and the post-kantian elaboration of the appearance as the condition for experiencing the world. This is a project without systematic architecture that dates back to his first books of the late seventies such as Orfismo e tragedia (1979) and Estetica ed erotica (1981), both published in the Milanese publisher Celuc Libri. It must be noted that although this is a marvelous introduction to Carchia’s philosophical idiosyncrasies and recurring themes, it is perhaps not the best introduction to Walter Benjamin, who in these four essays is read against the grain of dominant hermeneutical frameworks; that is, beyond Frankfurt Critical Theory and dialectics of the image, and on the other hand, the theologico-political concerned with messianic temporality as a transformative philosophy of history. 

It does not mean that Carchia is oblivious to these constitutive elements in the corpus of the German thinker; but it does mean that the profile constructed is one that favors a critical project that has disinhibited affinity with the Platonist project of beauty as condition of the critical endeavor committed to truth. For Carchia it is at this vortex where one should locate the “brilliant degree of illumination” that awakens philosophy from its slumber, overturning the texture of thinking to an erotics of the lost detail and the enduring fragment. Citing the correspondences to Florens Rang and The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, we know that for Benjamin “without at least an intuitive grasp of the life of the detail in the structure all love of beauty is no more than empty daydreaming” (Carchia 33). The task of the critic is one capable of arresting the inexpressible, only because beauty lives in the world as a state of silence and expressed revelation (Carchia 38). And it must be said that platonism in Carchia never manages to crystallize into a doctrine of being, pivoting to persuasion as the route to an idea without form.

Carchia shows that for Benjamin the reinvention of the critical method cannot aspire to the totalization of origins and principles  – or even that of the status of the visible (Schau), as he brought to bear in his comment to Max Kommerell’s Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik (1928) – underpinning the emergence of the idea where the seeds of truth germinate to unfold the interstices of historical sedimentation (Carchia 62). Unapologetically, Carchia suggests that Benjamin’s critical method, if there is such a thing, must be read as a “philosophy of the infinitesimal aim to shatter the prejudice that attributes to totality predominance over phenomena…at the price of their insignificance” (Carchia 61-62). In turn, this means that “the smallest cell of visualized reality outweighs the rest of the world” (Carchia 63). The infinite cuts through the world as a remnant that must be redeemed precisely because of its incongruence in the face of the triumph of immanence and the distribution of forms. And this is yet another sign that Carchia’s Benjamin must read as a thinker of a platonism of the immanence that by folding forms it is able to escape modernity’s temporalization of the sensible reality and its lethargic material objectivity [1]. This hits a hight note about Benjamin’s philosophical thought as anointed in the ancient currents of Stocism, since as Pohlenz taught us, the material forms of this world are the hurdles that neutralize the inception of the divine in a reality governed by the necessity of kakia.

Hence the confrontation with language occupies the center of every critico-historical reflection, which means how to live the immemorial language that is neither an instrument nor the “medium of prophecy or domination” (Carchia 85). Carchia reminds us that for Benjamin Karl Kraus’ language is platonische sprachliebe, or platonic love of language, which means a voice that overcomes the separations of signification and symbol, object and subject, and the consolidation of exchange through the voice of gratitude and use: “thanking and dedication – for to thank is to put feelings under a name” (Carchia 85). The word as apophantic revelation places judgement under erasure, enacting not a return to Edenic pristine nature of divinization or virtuality that attests to the figure and repetition of appearances and the medium of the “spiritual verbalization that animates reality” (Carchia 92). The abdication of an original language survives as the mythic memory of a voice porously open to translation: “All higher language is a translation of lower one, until the ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language” (Carchia 92). If for Benjamin the problem of translation is coterminous with that of the mystery of language, it is because it reveals the fragments of a vessel that removes the ground of rhetoric through “variation and discontinuity” (Carchia 96).  

In fact, reading Carchia one can infer that rhetoric is to language what the destiny is to human existence in its becoming. Thus, the destitution of language, its internal rhetorical and objective liquidation, appeals to the possibility of the event of happiness and bliss that is the only well illuminated path for redemption, that is, for the flourishing of the “nexus of truth and beauty” of the liberty of the soul. We are painfully aware that modernity is many contradictory elements at once, but Carchia tells us following Simmel, it is ultimately the historical project of Entseelung or loss of soul of the world, and thus “the faculty of memory as particular gift of the soul” (Carchia 121). The historical time of progress, its formal assumption and increasing autonomization, means a ritual situation that “seizes control in exteriority – as as continuum of temporal unfolding – of that entertainment, flashing, discontinuous awareness of the irrevocability of the past held firm by the image-memory” (Carchia 121). Hence, the exercise of thought and memory through the redemption of appearance is the necessary struggle against the usurpation of caducity, and thus the only promise of salvation through the dead, the defeated, and the forgotten. There are clear echoes of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” here that Carchia formulates as the necessity of memory in the repeated dispensation for the clearing of appearance. As he writes in one of the most formidable moments of the book when discussing the self-offering of the memory that guards the catacombs of the dead: 

“…for Benjamin, aesthetic temporality, as temporality of the soul absorbed in the contemplation of the nexus of truth and beauty, is the very origin of temporality’s self-offering, of temporality tour court as the space of memory. The salvation of appearance and the dimension of memory are all one: here is rooted the connection between temporality and the aesthetic dimension. The appearance constitutive of the space of redemption, and the beauty whose sacrifice would sacrifice the space of truth itself, are nothing other than memory continuously rescuing them from the space of historical time. It is precisely this connection, between the sphere of appearance as the sphere of the irremediable caducity, and the counter-movement of memory in the involuntary image, that forms the nexus that some of the most subtle passages struggle to delineate as the world of the soul, or rather the world of the past” (Carchia 120). 

Thinking the fragment becomes indistinguishable from retaining the sensible participation of the soul. It is this arresting breath (Hauch) of the soul that clears a path on which appearance is saved from the crushing weight of historical self-sufficiency. This confirms, if anything, that Benjamin’s sensibility for Carchia does not end in the confines of postromantic critique, nor in the utopia of totality and abstraction imposed by the metaphysics realized in money form over the living and the dead. As Carchia asserts: “utopia is the end of the constructive and generative ideal of knowledge” at the base of human anthropology and material conditions of social existence, but a whole “redirection underpinning what we have called thinking the informal” (Carchia 127, 135). 

What does it mean to think the informal, and what accounts a thought of the informal where Carchia posits Benjamin’s most enduring and clandestine signature? Avoiding all false exists in neopaganism of worldly immanence, Carchia connects the formless dispensation of thought with a nirvana state of para-rūpa (a hypostasis of God that does not presuppose a form, but that it is transformational),  the instance of imagination without an image and place that speaks of a chôra as the last refuge of the living. A refuge that, like the platonic cave, does not entail the accumulation or wealth of signification, but that retreats from the perils of insignificance and unhappy consciousness of nihilism. This is one way to understand what Benjamin writes in one of the glosses in “Short Shadows”: “…an image that has already crossed the threshold of the image and property, and knows only the power of the name, from which the lover lives, transforms, ages…and imageless, is refuge of all images”. An existence devoid of a central and authorized image can only prepare for the idea of justice that, because it is experienced it can retreat from the aleatory predication of the world. This enacts a descent into “an anarchy of being in this side of form”, as Carchia would beautifully call it towards the end of book; an inward saturation that is also a reservoir of sensibility because it is able to take a breath. And because it is breathing, it can assent to the external penumbra that restores the appearance of every thinking being in its very image and name.

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Notes 

1. On the platonic immanence and the soul, the central reference is Gianni Carchia’s essay “Platonismo dell’immanenza: Fenomenologia e storia in Hans Blumenberg”, Hans Blumenberg: Mito, Metafora, Modernità (il Mulino, 1999), 215-26.

Pascal against the empire of opinion. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the Newtonian thematization of the limit afterall). In particular gloss 554 strikes a tenor for our current epoch: “Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes an opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say that there is nothing fine about it” [1]. In the world after the fall, the intramundane system of felix culpa, is already one of dual power.

In many respects, this image is stronger than that of nihilism as the oblivion of walking upwards gazing at the abyss, because it connects the social pressure of “opinion” to that of the common ground that makes out of blindness the legitimacy of vacuous enlightenment. In the very void that truth will carve out for authority, Pascal seems to imply that the imperium of opinion will reign as a dual power of administration and mediation with the world. This is why for Pascal, force without opinion is indocile; but opinion without force amounts to the persuasion of solitude of the last man in the earth. At the heart of the groundlessness of modern legitimacy there is the necessary organization of opinion or doxa that will regulate the community of the living and the dead because ultimately its end is to master the mystery of language in its inability to name. 

Of course, Pascal thought that language could overcome the fictive empire of opinion, which in its modern avatar of propaganda is meant to design apocalyptic tendencies towards self-destruction in the course of historical development. As a “properly speaking wholly animal”, the human can only dwell in a poetic region “entre-deux”, that is, between the abhorrent light and the infinite depth of darkness, where language endures through the symbol well beyond the experience of the fallen corruption of nature. As Lezama Lima reminds us in a short essay on the French thinker, the poetic region in Pascal is ultimately the experience of language as a mystery of creation that refuses to accept the post-mythic condition of nature and human boredom that will euthanize the use of linguistic creation [2]. Now it can be said that the intrusion of the infinite chatter of opinion takes place precisely in the logged forest of speech, which consolidates its rhetorical autonomy of language away from the possibility of distance and self-constrain of the sayable. The statecraft of rhetoric is the infrastructure of the reign of opinion, because here the draining of the depth of being is supplanted by alienated voluntary participation at the very ground of nothingness. Nihilism takes a decisive step forward when language can become any differential sign to communicate what has become impossible to be said outside the cubicle of the enthymeme.

Paraphrasing the ancient wisdom of Pindar’s famous opening verse in Fragment 169 (“Law, νόμος, the king of all”), Pascal assures us of the fragility of this imperium: “An empire based on opinion and imagination resigns for a time, and such an empire is mild and voluntary. That force reigns for ever. Thus opinion is like the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant” [3]. Is it possible to separate, nevertheless, the reign of opinion from that of force; and, secondly, the circulation of force as grounded in a fabric of language that has already descended into the empire of opinion without any trace? In a way, there is no modern politics without the presupposition of the autonomy of a field of opinion integrated into “rational control”, to use the expression of American political theorist Harvey Mansfield. And even if Carl Schmitt could state in his Constitutional Theory (1928) that no democratic secular state could effectively exist out without opinion as a diffused and disorganised form of acclamation, it is now completely obvious to us that the post-liberal state configuration, persists in a constant state of the fluctuation, compartmentalization, and archic steering of opinions. What survives the utter collapse of the category of political modernity is the flattening of language into “opinion” that provides standing to the epochal anomia. 

Following classical philologists we are tempted not to ignore that in the word anomia entails not just the suspension of legislated norms and positive commands, but also the decline of the distance between existence and the divine that in antiquity, in the age of Pindar, subsisted under the notion of eunomia as harmonious attunement of the very lived experience. In other words, the consolidation of opinion is a long historical effect of the erosion of distance and perspective  that restricts the capacity to “ascertain a spiritual excitement…and if worth anything, a language, a witness to reality” [4]. To bear witness in language is a poetic enactment that, at heart of its solitude, refuses the glacial ripples of the force of opinion vested in reality.

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Notes 

1. Blaise Pascal. Pensées (Penguin Books 1995),  192.

2. José Lezama Lima. “Pascal y la poesía”, in Obras Completas. Tomo II (Aguilar Editor, 1977), 564-565.

3. Blaise Pascal. Pensées (Penguin Books 1995), 566.

4. Pavel Florensky. “Reverse perspective” (1920), in Beyond Vision (Reaktion Books, 2002), 254. 

Quod natis exitus. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Book V of his Latin Language, and immediately after commenting the duality of Earth and Sky, Varro writes an enduring and yet enigmatic gloss of worldly life. In Roland Kent’s translation from 1938 we read: “Inasmuch as the separation of life and body is the exitus, ‘way out’ for all creates born, from that comes exitium, ‘destruction’, just as when they ineunt ‘go into’ unity, it is their initia, ‘beginnings’ [1]. It is probable that Kent had to leave the latinized terms next to familiar reiteration of modern English in order to allow the text to breath in all of its complexity, for what is Varro ultimately attempting to tell us can very depending what we want to stress, and how we read in the scope of his discussion starting in section 58. Is it that life is always marked by the wound of separation with the natural world? Or that destruction and caducity (exitium) is a necessary condition for all new beginnings, as if life understood as an enclosed organism or entity is always insufficient, because of the order of excess at the very moment that it recognizes its propriety? This excess is what cannot be contained in neither life nor in social form or political mediation; it is the initia of thought in its relation to phenomena of the world but without ever being reduced in them. In this sense, there can only be a beginning in the passion that thought grants to the separation from the world. 

This is perhaps what Pindar had in mind when writing in Isthmian 8 – in clear tone of his disenchantment before political strife – of a need to return to a shared language among friends (a language that cannot be that of the rhetorical antinomies of the polis): “It is always best to look at each thing right at our feet / for treacherous time hangs over men and twist awry the path of life. But even those things may be healed by men if freedom is with them; and a man should give care to [that] noble hope” [2]. In his commentary on these lines C.M. Bowra notes that the awry and treacherous time of life that Pindar refers is not just a personal account, but rather a state of the world of his own generation and friends [3]. Politics brings to ruin; it brings fear, but more importantly it brings oblivion to the nearness of each and every thing that stamps irreducibility. But what Bowra does not thematize is the central stress of these lines; mainly, that the Ancient poet makes a plea to the examination of proximity and nearness “look at each thing right at our feet”. The plea to take care of a true life harmonized is preoccupied with this lying out before our feet is so inapparent that it provides texture and rhythm to every appearance; it is so invisible that it can disclose the very possibility of the beginning or end of a visible world. 

It seems that Pindar’s solicitation of proximity speaks to Varro’s initia; but not because there is something like a true origin or original position (a category that modern political thought later elevate to the physics of social stratification and positional distribution), but rather because another idea of “freedom” can be rethought from the excess of what appears spatially in the world; an absolute instance of appropriation beyond life. This is perhaps beautifully expressed in one of Cézanne’s most acute images of his creative process: “I breathe the virginity of the world…a sharp sense of nuances works on me. At that moment I am as one with my paintings” [4]. Before painting and creation there is a sensuous region in which the separation of objects and subjects do not longer sustain totality except as catastrophe or force.

This means that to disclose regions of life in the world is not just about the claim of autonomy and normativity of a place; on the contrary, it is the very inapparent, almost imperceptible, possibility that lies in the wrinkled proximity when we withdraw from things ad they seem. Quod natis exitus – because we are always exiled from each and every place, it is through the thinking of the inconspicuous of each and every being that revisitation of an ethical life calls on us from the outside. Ultimately, the ethical life is nothing but the imperative of «lech lechà» in a separation that unites when overcoming the deceit of time. 

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Notes 

1. Varro. On the Latin Language, Books 5-7 (Loeb Classical Library, 1951), 59. 

2. Pindar. “Isthmian 8”, in Pindar (Loeb Library, 1997), 211.

3. C.M. Bowra. Pindar (Oxford University Press, 1964), 114. 

4. Joachim Gasquet. Cézanne: A memoir with conversations (Thames&Hudson, 1991), 45.

The idea of a world state. by Gerardo Muñoz

As a theme for his 1949 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, an American scholar, Robert Hutchins, decided to titled his conference “St. Thomas and the World State”. It is obvious that Hutchins had fresh in his mind the fact that the long European Civil War of the twentieth century, which included two World Wars, was a direct consequence of warring nationalisms and militarized nations that in our times it is once again has lavishly returned with even higher lethal consequences. There is a major historical difference, however; and that is the fact that whereas the nationalisms of the twentieth century were distinct territorial struggles in the wake of crumbling empires, the emergence of the new nationalisms are concerted, nourished, and aligned to the global commanding American imperialism. The techno-political ideal of an influential figure on American elites such as Peter Thiel takes the form of warring nations and firms against the possibility of a global world state to secure peace, interdependence, and free movement of populations across borders and communities [1]. It is fair to say that contemporary technopolitical dominance is a combination of imperial and national forces through the perpetual administration of anomia or lawlessness. 

What is striking about Hutchins’ 1949 lecture is that although Aquinas’ philosophy of law has been traditionally understood as the most important source of natural law, in his proposal Thomas’ actuality is able to fulfill positive law against the instrumental morality of nationalist empires (the United States and the Soviet Union then) that “in the absence of positive law; they may be expected to break the peace” [2]. For anyone that knows the emergence of the European state as coterminous with the secular authority of legal positivism will find this emphasis contradictory at best. The very notion of positive law requires principles of sovereign authority and normative internal recognition of its command coordination in order to consolidate a stable political form over time. This is a contradiction that Hutchins was aware of throughout his lecture. Consider, as an example, when he claims that: “The origin and meaning of the saying that a state has the natural right to sovereignty therefore, is that one state may not forcibly impose its will upon another. It means that Catholicism should oppose the foundations of a world state by force” (36). 

Or, when glossing over the obvious tension between the right of national sovereignty and a potential international federal state in the views of popes and Catholic thinkers: “I think they know that the national state is no longer the perfect community and that positive law is required to make the world community an effective political organization. I believe that they are making two points that are of the utmost importance: first, they are saying that any world government must be a federal government; and second, they see that world must come into existence by consent and not by conquest” (34). However, any student of modern political thought knows that consent and coercion are two internal modalities of governance for legitimate rule. Hutchins’ notion of “consent”, along with positive law, remains not only unthematized, but dependent on a circular of definition of law; that is, the “common good”, which is not a political concept, but a theological and moral notion extracted from the philosophy of history of Christian salvation. 

Towards the end of the lecture, Hutchins goes beyond strict positive law as if searching for some substantive ground: “…the West should not only survive, but also revive and rescue a deeper conception of human civilization than the one recently current, which enters around a religion of progress by resourceful greed and technological mastery of non-human nature” (42). But Hutchins’ plea for the retrieval of a past memory of the West runs astray when it relocates Church and State into a dual predicament of a new world state for peace on the conditions of the same structure of political theology that are no longer operative, but that actually make up the very ground of the modern collapse into nihilism – nihilism that political form does not remain immune to, quite the contrary. In fact, it is the most salient symptom of civilizational collapse. In the same way that Ernst Jünger immediately after the war called for the subsidiary spiritual assistance of the churches in the face of technological power- “the true conquest of nihilism and attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches” – Hutchins will also repeat that only the conjointment of Church and State “must now work together for world peace founded on university charity…and universal democracy” (44) [3]. And the same thesis has found a clear expression in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aetenae (2021): “To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil…Church and Empire are called to operate in harmony” [4]. This speaks directly to what we have recently called the plasticity inherent in the historical adaptations of thomism in social life [5].

This plasticity amounts to the administration of desperate souls from the structures of the state and Churches, without ever transforming the mere survival of life on Earth. This leaves us with the notion of kingdom, which Hutchins introduces in opposition to the political community of city life (polis), but only to reabsorb it into the order of political theology. And it is at this threshold, that we can claim that the kingdom is not a political theological category, but an experiential allowance in which life, the dead and languages occur beyond and before political determinations. It is no surprise, then, that Ivan Illich called the kingdom primarily a mystical experience: “I will dare to formulate a hypothesis: the kingdom is what constitutes the authentic mystical experience, if the mystic knows what experience is really constituted by. The mystical experience of the believer is the conscious experience of the kingdom before the parousia. The mystical experience is the fruit of love, and, therefore, it is also accessible to every lover. The awareness about its meaning is the fruit of faith…” [6]. 

We tend to forget that both national units and the contemporary empires of world building and destruction have been first and foremost enemies of spoken living languages and idioms. On the one hand, the historical grammars to build the unity of people’s official language, and in our days the rise of Artificial Intelligence has clearly become the last stage through which power abandons languages to computational and rhetorical obsolescence. This opening towards awareness is not an article of faith through consent nor a moral predicament that can be adequate prima facie into a political register; it is fundamentally a linguistic experience that allows for the delicate cultivation of peaceful coexistence taking place not in a world, but between them: “To learn a language in a human and mature way way is to accept the responsibility for its silences and sounds. The gift a people gives us in their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than its system of sounds…The greater the distance between two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love” [7]. 

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Notes 

1. “Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel On Ancient Prophecies And Modern Tech,” in conversation with Peter Robinson, October 2024, Hoover Institute: https://youtu.be/wTNI_lCvWZQ?si=M8-qrBh-G7bYZPfw

2. Robert M. Hutchins. St. Thomas and The World State (Marquette University Press, 1948), 15. 

3. Ernst Jünger. The Peace (Henry Regnery Company, 1948), 69. 

4. Pope Francis. “Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aeternae (2021)”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20210325_centenario-dante.html 

5. Gerardo Muñoz. “The social efficacy of thomism”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/31/the-social-efficacy-of-thomism-by-gerardo-munoz/

6. Ivan Illich. “Concertning Aesthetic and Religious Experience”, in The Powerless Church and other selected writings, 1955-1985 (University of Penn State Press, 2018), 86.

7. Ivan Illich. “Missionary Silence”, in The Church, Change, and Development (Urban Center Training Press, 1970), 121.

The love of painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

There might very well be an internal affinity between painting and love that at some point it becomes indistinguishable. A painterly picture can become love unquenched for that which remains persistently fixed and unrealizable. In one of the short essay books of his Big Sur period, Henry Miller asked this very question of painting. For him panting had a wondering origin that crosses the hand, undoing what we can easily enact. The erotic dimension of painting, thus, has nothing to do with the image or figure of the beloved, but rather with a specular limitation staged in the ability to allow the unseen to be incorporated in the visible scheme of the world. Only if we are able to see – and by the same token, only if there we are facing an event of painting – can something like use can be liberated from the constraints of mimetic compulsion. Miller writes in To Paint is to Love Again (1960): 

“To paint is to love again. It is only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to a certain manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat or unpalatable unless it is our power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see .See into and around. Or, as John Marin, once put it – “art must show what goes on in the world” [1]. 

The place of painting for Miller is an imperturbable state that refuses to be fixated on objects, but in the invisible region (as in the figure of the chora) that allows for the thing in the world to be used. This is why Miller considered Japanese watercolor and prints an absolute primer of the pictorial: it taught him the appearance of worlds within the world, regionalizing the surroundings never logically stated unto itself, which in modernity it became the catastrophic horizon of autonomy towards its posterior liquidation. This is why Miller, very much like Carlo Levi, understood that the crisis of painting in the Western tradition ultimately signaled a general sense of social terror as a new phase of human desperation attenuated by the circulation of social fictions. 

At the height of the the closure of civilization, painting reemerged, if Kurt Badt’s axiom is correct, as the last metaphysical activity of human praxis. A metaphysical activity that holds on to the experience of belief in suspended appearance of originary anthropogenesis. For Miller, in painting as much as in love “one must be a true believer” [2]. And this assertion must be understood in the backdrop of Miller’s experiential retreat in the landscape of Big Sur: an experience away from the closure of American city life in research of a “feeling of aloness as spiritual achievement”, as a relation of oneself towards disclosure [3]. In this sense, the painter is a counter-social figure that, refusing to make stir in the world, turns to serenity, silence, and to the pressing contours of the unfathomable beyond any prefiguration. The believer in painting – who is a figure of belief in the desert, after the flight of the gods in the nocturnal vigil of history – is the thrust to the experience of things without barristers or shortcuts to what is revealed.

The age of automation in mid-century transformation of American industrial production serves as the historical backdrop of Miller’s indictment regarding the poverty and eventual disappearance of painting due to the autonomization of human praxis and the gigantic scale in spatial organization. Following Georges Duhamel’s prognosis in America: the menace (1931), he shared the intuition that the crisis of dexterity meant the impossibility of realizing painting, now situated beyond the grasp of human absorption [4]. A land without landscape that, as Adorno noted, bears no traces of the human hand. And this was seen already in the 1950s when the rise of abstract expressionism in North American announced not just the end of easel painting, but the funeral of the whole pictorial tradition. The barbarism of gigantic and unlimited Americanism would run counter to painting as a sensorial activity that embraced the vital limitations of its region. 

Miller’s insistence on painting was an eulogy to a life as experience – painting is indistinguishable from the hands and souls of the painters that he encountered and shared his life – and the value of poverty as absolute necessity for a life that regionalizes our contact with the world. It was through the love of painting that humanity could only restore its divine presence without rest.

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Notes 

1. Henry Miller. To Paint is to Love Again (Cambria Books, 1960), 17. 

2. Ibid., 39

3. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34.

4. Georges Duhamel. America: the menace (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 85.

Zoning and the inalienable. By Gerardo Muñoz

The notion of “zoning” in American public law refers to the compartmentalization of land use (residential, governmental, industrial, among others), as well as the “zones” of the administrative framework that dispenses its delegated power. It is a common fact that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which includes the “Taking Clause”, states that taking territory must always be equitable compensated. The Fourteenth Amendment included during Reconstruction implements a non-discriminatory standard into zoning as division of space for political representation, and what is usually referred as “redistricting” in any given state. This means that the operative semantic and legal field of “zoning” refers simultaneously to both land as property, and territory as a spatial index of political representation. Of course, modern revolutions, whether in 1776 or in 1789, were stealth transformations of space into these two tier units of alienated property and representation, as we know from the territorial census in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Likewise, the framework of Americanism as a political civilization is that of landsurveying, which ultimately means not just to make coterminous sovereign authority to territorial limitations, but to make transactions between world forms (territory and its inhabitants). If “zoning” has become a fundamental point of contention in all spheres of American life – from housing to development, from political representation to governmental “taking”, from wildlife sites to the circulation of good and services of the metropolis – is because the essence of Calvinism was fundamentally a settler cosmos that reduced life to usurpation of territory. In this sense, Bruno Maçaes is right that in the age of planetary Americanism the predominant form of domination is world-building and world-destroying. The perpetual social war over “zoning” is precisely the movement of building and destroying life-worlds through the linguistic justification of the administrative legal apparatus. 

In his forgotten book Nomos and Physis: Origin and Meaning of One (1945) on the severability of the two notion of “order” in Ancient Greece, Felix Heinimann notes that the triumph of nomos over physis implied a separation from the world of “reality” and “deeds” from that of rhetorical language that came to dominate it (nomos). In the present, the separation between nomoi and physis is the void that is perpetually governed by the attenuation of zoning: the creation of artificial worlds, but, at the same time, the composition of artificial languages. But the paradox is the following: the world of nomoi ceases to have any contact with that of physis; and physis, the natural world, becomes an artificial life world only responsive to irreflexive and undetermined practices of social exchange. This means that zoning is the vector of force that constantly separates human beings from both the world and language, and ultimately stripped its “humanity” from the species-being. 

As the zoning process plunges extensively into all spheres of practical and intellectual relations of human beings, an increasingly grouping of unalienable life emerges in a polar night. Here solitude in language brings forth the warmth of the unalienable. Perhaps it is in this night, where a trivial amor mundi will be cultivated for other generations, as beautifully suggested by Tim Ingold. A vita nota that will only commence on the lines that are invisible and opaque to the shining surfaces of zoning.

The wreckage of design. On Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Only in rare occasions the operation of thinking finds angular or lateral points of escape. This is the gesture that characterizes Alejandra Castillo’s theoretical writing, and is particularly bright in her most recent book Antropoceno como fin de diseño (La Cebra, 2025). The zigzagging entry is an intuition that is also a guiding thread: the force of real subsumption of capitalist domination depends on the operation of design. Of course, in design one hears not only blueprint and form, but also designation, and thus the specular regime of visibility, orderability, quantification. It is the world of physiocratic forestry. In fact, Castillo’s succinct definition of the metapolitical condition of design is offered to the reader at the entrance: “Design is the figure that thinks always in advance (por adelantado) (Castillo 12). Design calculates and locates. It is through the operation of design that legibility becomes adequated to political representation so that the state can manage and attenuate the deployment of its forms and the circulations of relations of totality (Castillo 13). The design is what is common to the worker, the engineer, and the lawyer. This is why design for Castillo design is an efficacious nexus that connects the separation of objectivity and the life worlds. Understood in this sense, “design” is analogous to the enframing of the world that intensifies in the age of technology and rhetoric. But in the watershed of the end of modernity, the hegemony of design collapses, while it becomes a temporal “self-design” submerged in all spheres of expressive enactments. 

The end of the second vector of the zigzag outlined in the essay is found precisely at this conjuncture: the anthropocene brings the humanist projections and design to a final wreckage. This is means that capitalist form is not formless because it has managed to subsume the time of life as exception to labour; time is a wreckage because design no longer coincides with the world of forms, as it has temporalized experience into total transparency without reminder. For Castillo this means that in the anthropocene there is no longer “struggle for visibility”, as everything has been rendered exposed and hollow; de-substantialized in the very fabric of subjectivity (in the early millennium some called this new hyperbolic figure the Bloom). Implicitly in Castillo’s writing is the assumption that the mediation between politics and design has been severed, and the new securitarian imperium can only immunize itself against the very site that in modern times granted its legitimacy (civil society, constituent power) (Castillo 37). 

The end of design means the absolutization of design, a new carceral imperative for adaptation that makes any claim to subjectivity an endorsement of the prison of the ego. To live in a post-designed unworldly condition means not only to come face to face with the homogenous space of cultural exchange into image; it is also a new imperative that requires that “you must submit, without knowing to what; subject to what is the case anyway, and which, as a reflex to its power and commonsense, everyone believes anyway” [1]. The end of design paves the way for new plastic forms of domination towards an integral planetary unity. 

Bordiga claimed throughout his work that the democratic design was perhaps the best fitting system for the versatility of capitalist accumulation and relentless expansion. This is why in all the political cases that Castillo introduces in a text in a manner of a shadow play do not pretend to offer a new theory of ideology, but rather show how democratic design is a one-piece suit that fits all without any needs for “ideal types” to fix normativity and institutional arrangements. Indeed, there is no longer anything like an “extreme political right” – and this is just a tweak from Castillo’s vocabulary, who does insist on the term throughout the essay – but rightward figures of the political that desperately cling to any form to distract from the abyss of social legitimation. Ultimately, the ruling over this void will be  – in many ways already is – the continuation of war in the social fabric; and stasis will require new stealth development of technologies of containment that Palantir’s Alex Karp has called the new “lethal form”. This means that democratic design is not only expressively a system of sentencing to death; it is in virtue of the exchange of social forms, an inverted negation of human finitude. The point of despair would incite some to look again in the cabinet of forms; a knee-jerk reaction to the irruption of the Anthropocene against the total sum of possible designs. 

Of course, this is also what Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025) avoids at all costs. Towards the last pages of the book, Castillo calls for a transformative turn that departs from the body; a corporeal insurrection that, in refusing the rectilinear and heteronormative political corpus of the modern epoch (no coincidence that Hobbes was both the founder of the autonomy of civil as well as of the physics of the body of matter in space), is capable of responding to the call of the anthropocene in all of its profuse conflictivity. Castillo proposes the necessity to gravitate towards a “maximum distance” against the general design of orderability of public domination (Castillo 77). But this can only be understood as an incommensurable distance that dissolves the ontotheological separation of subject and object of the state of confinement.

The political constitution of a corpus appears as the promise of an exit from the temporalization of the post-auratic literalism that, according to Michel Fried, dominated the structure of the object-oriented work of art, as compensatory to the corrosion of political forms and presentist autonomy [2]. Castillo does not seek to revive a last gasp of auratic objectification, which amounts to the sleepwalking condition of the image world of mere survival. In soliciting a maximum distance to what is closest (in fact, a body), Castillo invites us, as both promise and commitment, to think at the end of nondependency – not the “independence” that carries the traces of the fictitious individuality- from the crutches of design to finally conquer another liberty beyond terror and prevention; a life imbricated in the nonbeing of place (ecology) with others.

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Notes 

1. Thedor W. Adorno. “The Cultural Industry: A Resumé”, in Without Model (Seagull Books, 2023), 58.

2. Michael Fried. “Art and Objecthood”, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172.

Pindar’s Fragment 180. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

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

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