Just a few days ago there was an esoteric exchange between Giorgio Agamben and Alberto Moreiras on the difficulty of the ‘other beginning’ and the ‘via di uscita’, a propos of a recent meeting on desecularization and theology that took place in Granada, Spain. The notion has been in the air for some time now, since two years ago this was the central problem in a 2024 meeting in Berlin. That the exchange was esoteric is not in question, since it presupposes undertaking the conditions of the conversation and papers of the meeting as well as multiple books from both Moreiras and Agamben, and I do not think that the nuances have been taken into consideration. But it must be noted that there is an exoteric dimension to the contention as well: Giorgio Agamben has favored the ‘via di usicita’ in different figures (mainly Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin; and we know that Agamben’s overbeckian urgeschichte is a clear cut rejection of an epochal beginning); and, from his end, Alberto Moreiras has also thematized the other beginning of thought and aleotropic excess in his most recent Tiempo Roto (2025), which cuts through Heidegger’s thought, and thus not limited to what is understood as heideggerianism. I want to reject the idea that these two notions – ‘via di uscita and other beginning – are just two forking paths in postheideggerianism, as complicated as it is to go beyond Heidegger’s end of Western metaphysics. And I think – and in fact I am convinced- that both Agamben and Moreiras are soliciting something that radically escapes Heidegger’s thought even when it emanates from it; a bit like what Derrida says that the chôra escapes the categorial order of Plato even though it emerges from the Timeus.
There is no doubt that at stake is a breakthrough in thought. Of course, stating this puts a finger into something fundamental; but, alas, the devil is always in the details. I am in no position to unravel the implications of the two options – new beginning and via of exodus – and to that extent I am still taken by Moreiras’ interpellation in the first day of the meeting about my own position regarding the new beginning, which I am in no way read to respond. Of course, Nicolas Poussin comes to mind (I cite from memory his epistolary words to Chantelou): “I am in the profession of mute things”. A claim of silence that in no way refrains from language and writing. Yes, I am no painter, although I am interested in painting and what painting can offer and donate to thought and philosophy. And we live in an epoch at the end of painting, and yet painting outlives everything as in a metaphysical remnant, as Kurt Badt reminds us in his great work on Cézanne.
Giorgio Agamben notes in his little Il tempo del pensiero (2023) how Heideger declared his Le Thor seminared that he always thought that Cézanne was the other figure of the tradition that resembled his own path. It is a curious analogy to a painter and the painterly praxis in the age of technological subsumption. Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, since I am working on a small book on the communication between painting and thought, and I want to understand what painting has to offer.
As a preliminary response to the difficulty that emerged in the ‘new beginning’, I am left wondering if the threshold is an intermediary space to arrest the jump beyond nihilism, which is ultimately what is at stake. This has been my way- I am all for changing that – of reading Agamben’s work: to remain at the threshold in order not to force the overcoming of nihilism, even if that anti-nihilism takes the force of antiphilosophy or thought of the unthinkable (Moreiras). Can thought breathe from the rest and imperturable dwelling in the threshold, if understood as mediated by the hand and the eye at a distance? This is for me the problem of painting as the last activity at the end of metaphysics – a theological remnant that intercepts the reduction of a historical cosmos. A duration that escapes the regime of the ontic but that does not dare to point to transcendence nor does it accept the inevitability of anthropological struggle. Yet, duration is the condition of breathing in a landscape: if we face it, is there even the need to begin or retreat?
At least since Ernst Böckenförde declared the end of secularization and the exhaustion of the liberal state form in the late sixties, the distinction between theology and politics has experienced a profound schism across Western social life, which once served as the ground and mediation to the homogeneity of “ethical life” (Sittlinchkeit) of civil society. It is still useful to recall Böckenförde’s theorem as a refresher: “What does the state live on, and where does it find the force that sustains it and guarantees its homogeneity, after the binding force emanating from religion is no longer, and can no longer be, essential for it? Until the 20th century, in a world that was first interpreted in a sacred way and then as a religious world, religion had been the most profound force involved in the political order and in the life of the state. But is it possible to find and preserve life in a completely earthly and secular way? […] Therefore, the question of binding forces is raised again, and now at its true core: the secularized liberal state lives on prerequisites that it can no longer guarantee” [1].
Indeed, one could say that in our era, clearly marked by the collapse of political mediations and categorial order, the schism between theology and political forms inherited from the Judeo-Christian eon has increasingly become full fledged and patently visible at a global scale. In a certain sense, and leaving behind all nuances, the operating horizon of thought today implies from and through the energy of this schism. If this meeting attempts anything however modest, is precisely the intuition that in the wake of the schism of political theology, the “theos”, following the trumpeting of the death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche or the flight of the gods as orphanage from the divine declared by Hölderlin, presents with an opportunity to think a non-rarefied style on the reverse of historical collapse. In recent years, a certain theological latency has been present in many contemporary theoretical projects, insisting on approaches related to mysticism and life, the gods of language and nominalism; the insistence on the communication between souls, the messianic and presence, to name just a few figures of thought without pretending to be exhaustive.
As machination and the spiritualization of technology subsumes the totality of social life in the West, existence enters a region of thoughtful and cunning marranismo, which could be taken as a form of life in the desert and a keeper of its depth of the ethos. How does one make sense in this moment of delirium and relentless decline, which include although it is not limited to, the defeat of the cycle of global uprisings and the solicitation of positions of exodus and desertion? In other words, we are trying to think of a language that we speak across distant places, and come to terms with the tonality of pain and despair. Is there a non-nihilistic way out of a civilizational project governed by the cybernetic dominium, continuous predatory extraction and lethal destruction of worlds? “Desecularization” is not naming a historical moment after “secularization” – something that has taken place in its own historical dispensation – just like posthegemony is not naming a temporal sequence to principial hegemonic politics. And of course, “desecularization” is not a program of any sort, although it is interesting in positing the possibility of “a new beginning” in the wake of the ruin of political theology as the orienting strategy of division and orderability, which fundamentally colored capitalist civilization on the abstraction of work and the work of abstraction proper to the historical modulation of Christian metaphysics and its theological rubrics. And if “desecularization” is neither a concept nor a program, I still would like to retain at least its resonance to other positions that have I have called for lack of a better term, the quadrant of positions of refusal [2].
Can theology, a confrontation with theology, drag us out of the via negativa towards something else? It is easier said than done. And it is never sane to get caught up in the spinning wheel of a term, whether it is “desecularization” or “desistence”, or “destitution”; a sort of rhetorical enchantment of the “-des”. Ultimately words say very little at the level of the concept, and they tend to offer a cell in which the process of amnesia and ratification can take place – the task of refusal, then, I take it, is also watching over, what the Cappadocian Fathers called the nepsis – what thought cannot elevate to the luminosity that emerges from the term. We are interested in theology and theos, but only insofar it opens itself to thought and the place of language, as well as the irreducibility of existence and death, to the imagination and the endurance of an ethics that undeniably invites makes itself present whenever we hold on the incommensurable distance between language and world. And if we have invited both Monica Ferrando and Alberto Moreiras to open up this seminar with us, it is because their styles of thinking are clearly devoted to pursue this question to the end. Of course, this means something consequential: they both affirm a path wherever it might take them (one can even visualize this in Monica’s extraordinary nocturnal paths in painting, such as the series “Paessaggio Perduto”, or “Lost Paths”). And it is a commonplace to say that both of them have been grappling with the problem of theology from almost opposite directions of the meridian distance awakened to the horrific abyss of our present, which means that perhaps the marrano and Pan do meet as fugitives in the forest passage both lost and found.
One word must be said about the term that is meeting is trafficking with – and perhaps “trafficking” is, alas, a good verb since none of us (perhaps with the exception of one person, and even he might feel stranger with that label) are professional theologians, nor do we have access to revelation, but perhaps this is too much on the side of intimate matters that one should refrain from commenting upon. Of course, the trafficked word is “desecularization”, which alludes to a certain rupture with the very essence of the saeculum, or the political institutional authority and its institutional arrangements in this world. When Schmitt says that all political concepts of modernity are secularized theological concepts, he is also assuming the irreversibility of secularization as internal to the historical matrix of Christianized West. In fact, according to theologian Robert A. Markus, desecularization has already become operative within the early Christian epoch of Saint Augustine. In his Christianity and the Secular (2006), Markus writes the following: “[in dialogue with Peter Berger] We may leave sorting out the complexity of that relation to the sociologists. All we need to note for our purpose is that the reverse, what some have called ‘desecularization’ has become a more recent preoccupation of sociologists of religion – and not only of sociologists. “This is just what came into being in the course of the emergence of Western Christendom from Roman Late Antiquity – a ‘deseculariation’ which is the reverse of what happened in the Wars of Religion. If the notion of the secular were to apply in such a society, it would have to be defined in more problematic terms: as what does not form part of a religious discourse … .The core of my argument in this book can be briefly summarized. Its substance is that Christian tradition has a legitimate place for the autonomy of the secular, even though for many centuries this was eclipsed in its awareness, and despite the perpetual undertow of what we have become costumed to call ‘triumphalism’ in Christian political and cultural attitudes” [3].
Of course, as Märten Bjork has recently shown, in Markus’ theological understanding of the saeculeum, the government of the Earthly city grounded in principial politics must also be relativized by the eschatology of the Kingdom – facing the event of death and the dogma of resurrection of life – that can take step back (or beyond) the libido domininandi, that generates the solipsistic desire for government and administration necessary for the circulation of a “libidinal economy” [4]. We can thus call the Markus’ position as the architheological position that dissolves the polarity of secularization and desecularization as an enterprise of Western philosophy of history and its homogeneous temporality of survival and reproduction. Secondly, it is also important to note that the notion of ‘desecularization’ made an important entry in the famous Capri conference of 1994 organized by Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida, where the French philosopher mobilized Plato’s chôra to avoid relapsing into religious faith, and thus uprooting revelation as the ur-site of Christianity. Thus, for Derrida, ‘desecularization’ is a figure of thought that seeks a third space of the a priori of the nonsecularizable. In the brief dossier “Christianity and secularization” later published in Il Pensiero: Revista Di Filosofia in 1998, Deridda sheds light unto this path of his thinking, which he never fully develops:
“….. The desert, the figure of the desert, which we discussed extensively in Capri, is clearly charged with biblical memory; and it’s not enough to say desert, or even “the desert grows,” to achieve or, conversely, abandon secularization. The desert within the desert is a radically heterogeneous desert. The motif of the chôra serves me, in general, as a guiding thread for thinking about a place, and chôra means place, to take place; and of the event, it is said that it takes place, and chôra means place or spacing, interval. This is a place that is, to use Plato’s terms, neither sensible nor intelligible, and which is spoken of in a bastardized discourse, in that it gives rise to neither a metaphorical nor a proper language, and in Plato’s text itself, it escapes all Platonic concepts and even Plato’s self-interpretation. This place is neither divine nor human… The chôra is the place where the demiurge, gazing heavenward, contemplating eternal ideas or models, inscribes the sensible copies for the formation of the world. Therefore, it is neither sensible nor intelligible, neither human nor divine; it is absolutely impassive, totally neutral with respect to all conceptual or dialectical oppositions; it is therefore the place that resists any reappropriation or reduction within the poles of anthropotheology. Chôra is that which cannot be reached even by a discourse of negative theology” [5].
The nonsite of the chôra is also what is heterogenous to the polis, and so for us the absolute differentiation between chôra and polis is precisely as important, and parallel to Monica Ferrando’s distinction between the musical nomos of the mythic topos of Arcadia, and the modern allocation of the nomoi of spatial dominium as appropriation, concrete order, and reproduction; the three pillars for the constitution of the ideological revolution of survival. Of course, the chôra can be said manifolds, but it allows us the temptation of political subsumption, of an inversion of a new “theological political” (as it is already taking place in many circles in the United States, with the unfortunate but expected in Leo XIV as equidistant, alas, the new self-delegated commissar of an “Anti-Cybernetics” point de capiton. Alas, once again hegemony knocks at the door, this time with theological garments). This reservation speaks, if not directly, at least tangentially to Alberto Moreiras’ recent affirmation against the ‘retheologization of the world’, which would entail the hegemonization of the total space of social reproduction [6]. Here we might find room for fruitful dispute and elaboration. Indeed, because it is never about re-theologization of the world, but perhaps in the old formulation of Guy Landreau and Christian Jambet’s L’Ange: Ontologie de la révolution (1976) that any gesture of true refusal or revolt requires at least the partition of two worlds, if we are to avoid the eternal dialectic of desire between Master and Rebel that nourishes the ideological projection sustained through the amnesia of any ethical elaboration.
Perhaps by ‘desecularization’ we are pointing to an exit through the liquidation of this world, in the same way that the task of thinking is a schism against calculative representation and the eccentric plane of objectivity. As Landreau and Jambet claim in El Ángel (1979): “There are two kinds of thought, just as there are two worlds: one kind of thought that belongs to God, and one kind of thought that belongs to the world; one kind of thought entirely devoted to salvation, and another kind of thought animated only by an abject desire for knowledge—a searching thought, vain curiosity: precisely what we, intellectuals, philosophers, call Thought. Gregory of Nazianzus famously asserted that one can philosophize safely about the world, about good and evil beings. The monks, on the other hand, responded to him with the words of Sirach: ‘Do not seek what is too difficult for you, do not scrutinize what is beyond your strength. The simpler the symbol, the better” [7]. In other words, against the absolute immanence of an infernal materialism and its frozen fictions of the immaterial – where all that exists subsists as equivalent – there is a reality of the soul, the abolition of sexual difference, and by that matter the libidinal bond that generates the autonomy of the revolt of the Rebel perfectly comfortable under the shadow of the Master [8]. In this sense, if another parallelism is allowed here, the chôra is the collusion of the outside world to the polis in order to start anew from scratch from the site of the sensibility of our existence.
If this position has been repeatedly called “gnostic” or maniquean by the executioners of modern irreversibility, so be it [9]. And perhaps these critics are right, and we can grant them that much: already Susan Taubes noted with scholarly precision that there are even Gnostic elements in Heidegger’s thought, even when his polemic with the architectonics of metaphysics becomes explicit against the reduction and adequatio of the medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, opening himself to a secret and clandestine tradition, in which the last god has his recollection in the excess or abyss of all vital experience (erlebnis); in what is outside of life at the entrance of another world [10]. The overcoming and taming of the gnostic manicheism has been precisely the infrastructure through the rarification of Christian theology took place – in Landreau and Jambet’s terms – which transforms the conditions of the cultural revolution (existence) into an autonomous and spectral ideological productivity, which is the limit in which theological contemplation narrativizes itself into Christian community of salvation once necessity and deficiency bind you to political dominion – it is here where the Master and the Rebel coincide in their projected goals: that there is nothing other than political struggle. But the gnostic culture of existence never disappeared as readers of modern poetry know well, even though that might not be the site for the emergence of the angelic life of beatitude today either.
As Pacome Thiellement says towards the end of his beautiful The victory of those without kings: gnostic revolution (2025): “In the absolute embrace of those without Kings, the fading of the initial eroticism is transmitted in every instant of life. It creates neither anger nor remorse, but rather gratitude and a multiplication of protected powers. It appears at the moment when solitude is profound, not from the absence of love, but as a consequence of the pleromatic state inscribed in the man with memory: the overflowing of unitive eroticism into all the possibilities that life offers, whether in this world or others” [11]. It is this theology of the infraworld – not so much of heaven, but of a memory of the worlds and the humus of the dead that becomes one with the mirror of the heavens – allows the metaphysical gnosis to breathe out in thought, allowing for the pending encounter with the metaphysics of the schism of n-1 worlds to emerge [12]. It seems to me that this subtractive movement brings back, in interesting new ways, a metaphysics of purity and inoperativity; an imperturbable existence no longer seduced nor corrupted by the images of this world.
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Notes
1. Ernst Böckenförde. El surgimiento del estado como proceso de secularización (Editorial Trotta, 2024), 45,57.
2. Gerardo Muñoz. “Quatre positions du refus”, in Entêtement: Tenir une sensibilité (Pli, 2024), 20-26.
3. Robert A. Markus. Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame Press, 2006), 8-9.
4. Märten Bjork. “Deliver me from my necessities: R. A. Markus and Erik Peterson on the End of Law”, Political Theology, Junio 2026, 13-14.
5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Cristianesimo e secolarizzazione”, in Il Pensiero: Rivista Di Filosofia, XXXVII, 1998, 155-157 .
6. Alberto Moreiras. “Gnosis marrana”. Paper read in Universidad Complutense, October 2025. Unpublished.
7. Guy Lardreau & Christian Jambet. El Ángel: ontología de la revolución (Ucrania, 1979), 128.
8. Ibid., 105-106.
9. See, José Luis Villacañas. Tierra o Ser. La gran decisión de la filosofía contemporánea (Akal 2026), specifically the section “Gnosis y excentricidad”, 416-419. His recent column against Heidegger’s philosophical legacies and afterlives also deals with the gnosis, see “Heidegger, a la distancia de medio siglo siglo”, Levante, May 25, 2026: https://www.levante-emv.com/postdata/2026/05/23/heidegger-distancia-medio-siglo-130551106.html
10. Susan Taubes. “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism”, The Journal of Religion, XXXIV, Julio 1954, 160-162.
11. Pacome Thiellement. La victoria de los Sin Rey: Revolución gnóstica (Granica, 2025), 159.
12. It is notable that Derrida in the exchange with Vitiello, Vattimo, and Ferraris already cited, he goes out of his way to claim that he never had anything against metaphysics per se. Could the same thing be said of Heidegger if one posits the differentiation between metaphysics and the holy, and onto-theology and the adequatio of Medieval Aristotelian metaphysics? Along this line, Laurence Hemmings has suggested a fertile dialogue between Heidegger and the sacred in his Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
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 [5]. 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.
5. Guy Lardreau & Christian Jambet. El Ángel: ontología de la revolución (Ucrania, 1979), 119.
In an issue of The Listener in 1935, the renowned British art historian Kenneth Clark penned a short article titled “The Future of Painting” that can be read as an early eulogy to the tradition of the pictorial craft. As a provocation – this was still the high tide of Modernist art – the ‘future’ of painting for Clark was undeniably reaching a point of irreversible exhaustion, at least in the Western tradition. In a phenomenological reduction of two major strands of modern painting – what he called “pure painting” that included Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; and, on the other, “super-realism” as the artistic consciousness that bypassed “spiritual salvation”, such as that of Surrealism and other visual experiments – Clark’s indictment deployed an indictment on what he sought as the end of the “plastic spirit”: “We must keep in mind the possibility that in the western world the plastic spirit is really exhausted and that art will be lost for many decades” [1].
For Clark, it was not that art ceased to exist as an autonomous practice of sensorial activity; it was rather that its imaginative and spiritual endeavors had a future only if mediated and “linked up” (sic) with the evolution of a “new social economic system” driven by the standards of productivity and mass spectatorship. Unlike Clement Greenberg’s reflexive plea of modernist painting as the triumph of the dialectical inversion of flatness over depth, for Clark the convergence of pictorial relation with social objectivity resulted, in the tradition of a post-Cezanne world, in draining the inherent sensible communication of painting and myth. This meant that modernist painting tout court was devoid of any mythical relation. In fact, one could very well claim that the outwardly material support (the flat canvas) of the picture became its most dramatic corroboration. Modernist painting was the triumph of social symbolization insofar as it served as a reminder of the objective space that could only be taken as unserious gratification of its own objectivity.
It does not take too many readings of Greenberg’s large claim on modernist painting to see that behind “flatness”, its very surface, lurks variations of the aura of subjectivity, expressed in “success of self-criticism”, “resistance to the sculptural”, and the drive towards systematic consistency viewed in the mirror of the “convergence of spirit with science; their concern does show the degree which Modernist art belongs to the same historical and cultural tendency as modern science” [2]. Or so writes Greenberg in his landmark text. If Greenberg goes out of his way to invite modern science into the field of aesthetics it is precisely because Modernist art has been able to spell out the potential for representation into an autonomous surface that has given up depth to the conscious effort of its material limitations as its primary concern (imagination, the divine, the liturgical theatrical aura are all secondary). It is perhaps against this backdrop that one can understand what Clark means by the exhaustion of the “plastic spirit” that underpins his prophetic understanding of the decline of painting.
But what is, ultimately, the “plastic spirit”? It is not referring to sacred representation nor artistic inspiration of the artist, but rather the receptive affinity of the pictorial gesture with nature without ever being reducible to its material support (flatness). If painting exists, it is because its lovely being “is neither sensuous nor spirit, but rather the ungraspable, diffusing over the figure…this being is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone is what the Greek language called [kharis] and we call grace” [3]. What the ‘plastic spirit’ discloses in its suspension of judgement through very disclosure of appearance is the imperturbable space, and by extension ungraspable, where figuration arrest an instance of eternity. In this sense, it always resists any assertion towards the future, because it dwells in the opening of a space “there” that fails to coincide with the material extension and limitation of the canvas.
This is what perhaps Walter Benjamin had in mind in an early fragment where he reflected on painting as an art of paradise or a state other-than-being grounded in visual contours: “Painting, too, generates space spiritually; its generation of form is likewise grounded originally in space, but it generates space in an other form. Not the dimension but the infinity of space is constructed in painting. This happens through the surface, in that, here, things develop not their dimensionality, their extension in space, but their being toward space. The depth yields infinite space. In this way, the form of concentration is given, but this now requires for its fulfillment, for the allaying of its tension, a presentation of the infinite in itself and no longer as dimensional and extended” [4]. Was not this the ungraspable caesura between depiction and nature already pointed out by Schelling?
Painting is depth, or at least it is about a certain way to accout for depth. And depth, fundus, before it takes the form of a flat spatial region in ‘thereness’, it is eminently the display of the figure that emerges from it. This “space otherwise” – that is not just a different spatial arrangement or geometrical calculation – is something of the infinite that makes both flatness and the diachronic arrow of time collapse in its unattainable rigor brought to bear in the affection through figures and colors. Every painting shows therenesss, but that is only possible through the depth of interiority that remains invisible. This can illuminate what Osip Mandelstam said of the plastic spirit when writing that “painting is also much more a matter of internal secretion than of apperception, that is, of external perceiving. To appreciate a picture you must go through a process making of restoring it” [5]. It is in this renewal that the imperturbable depth of painting fulfills before the abdication of the future. And from the “depths of nature” into the blossoming manifestation of appearance, painting recalls, beyond words, what in the sequence of time is understood, and yet often neglected, as the ungraspable.
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Notes
1. Kenneth Clark. “The Future of Painting”, The Listener, October 2, 1935, 578.
2. Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91.
3. F.W.J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, Vol. 3, 2021, 146.
4. Walter Benjamin. “The Rainbow, or the Art of Paradise”, in Early Writings 1910-1917 (Harvard University Press, 2011), 225.
5. Osip Mandelstam. Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante (Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 79.
I remember that around 2007 there was a graffiti in Venice that read: “Non c’è nessun Virgilio a guidarci nell’inferno”, which can be rendered as “There is no Virgil that can guide us in this hell”. Many street graffitis come and go, and are easy to forget, but not this one. What does it mean that we live in an epoch without the company of the Roman poet Virgil? The suggestion prima facie is quite clear: if our voyage in the present entails a concrete hell (the subjection into economic domination and nihilism), it is an evermore so repulsive voyage as we lack the presence of the poet who can bear witness to the passing of an epoch and the possibility of the coming of a new earth.
But why Virgil? As Erich Auerbach already noted, for Dante the historical Virgil is both the poet and the historical witness, given that the Roman poet’s exemplary descent into hell was the preparation of a “terrene Jerusalem (earthy Jerusalem), the universal peace that came to pass during the Roman Empire, proposed and glorified in light of its future mission…Virgil led the way as a poet because of his description of the realm of the dead; he was thus a guide through the afterlife because he knew the way. But it was not only as a poet that was destined to lead. He was destined because he was a Roman and a human being” [1]. It would follow that an age dominated by the realization of absolute indifferentiation – this is the frame of nihilism after all – highly repressive of any proximity with the dead, can have no use of any Virgil even if one would offer to open a path to leave hell behind. The artist will not be understood or recognized as either human or poet, but rather taken as fully inhuman and incomprehensible. And this perhaps speaks to the tonality of terror and blindness that defines the undifferentiated suspended posthistorical time.
That there are no Virgils to cast a forward light outside the epocal hellish condition entails that we are left with an absolute politicization over life and death that takes the form of a novel technical imperium. We know that in Antiquity, political unhappiness and disarray was a common state of affairs (and also exile from civil life); life was conditioned, although not totally subsumed, by cycles of domination and insubordination during volatile civil stasis. But still in that historical epoch, a poet like Virgil, as both human and poet, was able to turn away from the “harsh and evil world, and sets out for Arcadia where he allows no hope, not even any desire to do something about the suffering world, to lighten his sorrow and despair” in the communion of friendship and concordia to retreat from static political absorption [2]. When we say that our predicament is that of a a world without Virgil, this should not be understood as a reiteration of Max Kommerell’s paradigmatic Jugend ohne Goethe (“a youth without Goethe”); but rather, more fundamentally, as the impossibility for the human species to imagine a sense of redemption in world that reduces itself to exchange and strife. In other words, the absence of the memory of Virgil speaks directly to the ever-increasing incapacity of existence to dwell beyond the imperatives of a calamitous attenuation of destruction and oblivion. We should keep in mind that Dante’s memory of Virgil was a symbol for the poetizing myths of a new life; and, in turn, Virgil’s own Arcadian nomos was the confabulation of reality and myth expressed in a language that measured itself against the orderability of imperial force. The triumph of total politicity, which is to say the coupling of the political into effective dispensation of technology, mutes not only the voice of the poets, as much the contact of speech and the passing of the world into nothingness.
In The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch describes this very passage through the mystical death and cosmic transcendence of the Roman poet himself, who now enters “a primal darkness which had held itself hidden behind the furthermost starry orb and now, independent of the arching path of lights, indeed, without putting out a single one of them it filled the dome of existence with impenetrable darkness: the essential world-darkness burst forth, that uncreated darkness which is infinitely more than the mere loss of light or absence of light…” [3]. For Broch, the passing of the world in the wake of the death of the poet does not coincide with the silence constitutive of speech, but with the severability of a language transformed as fully transparent and unmediated, in Broch’s words “all understanding, consummating, might and commanding; the world of pledge, the pure word, becoming so overpowering that nothing could withstand it” [4].
Extrapolated to our times, the liquidation of language takes form of absolute theatricality of the word, ascending to rhetorical and computational transparency. And in this unnerving cacophony, where everything is communicated, is realized in the historical project of cybernetics and automatized languages. The ethical texture of speech becomes unattainable for both humans, as poetizing beings, as they become incapable of inhabiting the dislocated abyss between myth and reality, now pivoted to a linguistic closure that commands them into the high noon of despair. An endless despair that has relentlessly lost with the inception of the divine.
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Notes
1. Erich Auerbach. “Figura” (1938), in Selected Essays: Time, History, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 2014), 108
2. Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind (Dover Publications, 1982), 293.
3. Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil (Vintage, 1972), 471.
I still remember quite well how, a few years back at the Harvard University Bookstore, the Loeb Collection of Latin And Greek Classics, with their crimson and green covers respectively, were nowhere to be found on the shelves. And a slim store clerk when asked told me that those books on “dead languages” were no longer carried at the store. If this anecdote transmits anything is precisely the central question that still lingers from the pulsating notion of “dead languages”. What does it mean that a language is dead; if there is, in fact, such an ontological status for any language that has been traced from our past? This question returns to us today with some urgency as the most recent avatar of cybernetics, “Artificial Intelligence”, positions itself high above not just the alleged “dead languages” of the antiquity that many readers cannot longer master, but also the living spoken languages of human race as a whole.
Prophetically, this was the problem confronted by W.H.D Rouse in a short text titled “Machines or Minds?”, and published in The Classical Weekly in winter of 1913. And as we know, Rouse, a trained philologist who translated Homer and Plato, was also the creator of the Loeb Classical Collection published by Harvard University Press beginning in 1912. The task of reviving the “dead languages” in Rouse’s program was a way to contest what he saw as the collapse of civilization in the face of rise of machine and the colonization of “leisure time”, as it was becoming a world of pure “electric force” (a topoi of modern civilization that will also finds its place in the writings of Warburg, Schmitt, and Florenski as we have recently noted ).
In a description that resonantes in form and spirit with Carlo Michelstaedter’s forecast that the future of language will amount to an international language composed of technical terms, Rouse was more refined and precise in defining this instrumental transport by connecting the rise of science with that of English as a homogenous planetary language. Thus, inverting the assumption that “dead languages” are the defunct and no longer spoken idioms of past civilizations and archaic cultures; for Rouse it is “English”, and more specifically, scientific English that is ultimately a dead language, as it transmits nothing, as it is fundamentally detached from linguistic experience and imagination. As Rouse writes in one moment of his essay: “The very languages give what English does not give. Modern English is full of roundabouts, of metaphors without meaning, verbiage, shams; Greek and Latin are plain. The English language is largely dead: Greek and Latin are living languages. […] The scientific English sentences are all dead: they either wrap a single sense in meaningless words, or they seem to have a meaning when they have none [1]”. The rhetorical artifice to which language succumbs expresses itself not through the use of words, signs and icons, but in a proliferation of discourse that no longer communicates anything precisely because it has communicated everything out of the fallacy of absolute representation and absorption of a flat system of wordless objectivity. In Rouse’s indictment of human decline finds its correspondence in what language’s entry into what he called the “Dagon of Science”, opening a new scenario for human historical destiny: “never was there a world that cared less for truth in speech and thought” [2].
There is a huge risk in reading Rouse’s defense of the “classical languages” (Latin, Greek) as a humanist blueprint for a forthcoming antiquarian revival, a nihilist outlook that is being fulfilled in the United States as a parodic reiteration of Winckelmann’s neoclassical imitation ideal. Against the reification of dead languages as fictive “living entities” positioned as tools for knowledge and expertise, division of labor notwithstanding, what was fundamental for Rouse in the dead languages of the past – and in this sense, any language – is the ability of bringing about the experiential dimension of its use, thus connecting thinking and the experience without separations [3]. In other words, Rouse, very much like the last Émile Benveniste, found interest in classical languages not as a moral principle of civilization and identity foundation, but rather a site for the immediate experience between speakers embedded in a degree of the lived [4]. This is also why a poet like Eliseo Diego would state in Conversación con los difuntos (1991) reading other languages is a form of friendship beyond presence of the living. The conversation in languages is a way to keep open the passage from the living to the dead and back.
And whoever lives in language dwells in the memory and traces of all the dead languages, inscriptions, voices, and rhythms, because these contain the past as a reservoir of the figure of life. The consolidation of basic English as the hegemonic medium of communication with the return of extreme nationalism emerges, as Erich Auerbach wrote from his Istanbul exile, “to a ruse of providence designed to lead us along a bloody and tortuous path of an International of triviality and a language of Esperanto”. In this scenario, the slow annihilation of the human species takes place outside the world; that is, in the field of language, which has now become the central historical program of domination against the lived experience that connects the dead and the living. As languages become an autonomous frame of order and force, human beings’ existence is transformed into a mobile receptor of rhetoric, information, and opinion.
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Notes
1. W.H.D Rouse. “Machines or Mind?”, The Classical Weekly, V.6, 1913, 85.
2. Ibid., 86.
3. W.H.D Rouse. “Latin as a Universal Language”, Nature, February, 1916, 706.
4. Émile Benveniste. Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 67.
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.
How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the “new”, even though the price to be paid is always on the side of an overachieving cynicism and hypocrisy mediated by discourses of all kinds. At one moment of his dialogue Eupalinos or the Architect, Paul Valéry claims that whenever deep reflection is pushed by raw force, this unnatural attitude almost always misses truth: “The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced…we must do or suffer violence to see better or differently” [1]. The claim to see clearly beyond the immanent veils of the rhetorical commonplaces is still our question, although rarely posed. If our suspended epoch is that of formless rubble and extinction, one way in which this question could be reformulated today is to ask what does it mean to envision and live in the desert? Is not the desert condition, its suspended and dead temporality that gathers existence in the void, the only authentic event of posthistorical time?
This is the problem that haunts Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari, (1940), in which the waiting for an invasion and hoarding armies is conflated to the event of a wait that is infinite and excruciating, very much like the video art of Douglas Gordon at the end of the century. The steppe is a form of deserted land without forestation and depth; it is the very triumph of the symbolization of time stretched into a unified surface that recalls the emptying momentum of every form. It is nothingness as an absolute event, as Buzzati writes: “….the ramparts, the very landscape, breathed an inhospitable sinister air…At this moment Drogo was looking at the northern world – the uninhabited land across which, or so they said, no man had ever come. No enemy had ever out of it; there had been no battles; nothing had ever happened” [2]. How to account, and how to live, beyond mere survival, in a world nothing happens; that is, where the “nothingness” is the very schism between existence and world? When speaking hyperbolically of the Fortress in the steppe where the protagonist Drago is stationed, Buzzati will refer to this mundane condition as a “thankless world”.
It goes without saying that a world beyond “thanking” is a world that is unworldly in its sensible and intelligible mediations, because it no longer appears to grasp the irreductibility of presence; it needs to repress what appears figuratively in its disclosure. This is why in the vast openness of the steppe, in its blinding clearing of legibility, there is only blindness and hallucinations that are always compensatory to the pain endured by the nihilism of a disjointed time. The waiting of the barbarians does not longer hold the concept of prefiguration once held by situated or concrete politics (Turgot’s high-modernist axiom comes to mind: “we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present”); it is rather the impossible, contingent and retroactive narration that fictive communities need to elaborate to endure the ongoing pain at the end of the social bond. This is the price to be paid to survive in the glacial habituation of nihilism.
It might be very well that what can be glimpsed in the temporal wreckage of the steppe is nothing but the mute language of pain that brings presence near without political translation, because it is always an excess to the stabilization of forms. In an interview published in Milan’s Il giorno in 1959, Buzzati referred to the landscape of the steppe as “Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier…it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting”. But this strain of waiting is the thrownness of existence and its absolute distance from the world. In fact, towards the end of the novel we read a condensation of this inconspicuous tonality: “It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are from their affection for reach, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence, the loneliness of life” [3].
What remains is language not because it can describe or narrate, but because only the voice can measure up to the tonality of pain. In his short prologue on the Spanish edition of the novel, Borges claimed that Buzzati’s desert is both real and symbolic of the void, although the symbol no longer transmits any legible sense of totality; it prefigures a certain exhaustion of symbolization. The truth of language in the absence of form can no longer adequate itself to events or situations; it is now the voice that gathers the turbulence of pain in the waiting of the coming of presence already inhabited. Whenever that voice fails to speak, as René Daumal observed in his unfinished Mount Analogue (1952), life amounts to an empty carcass and a restless cadaver of oblivion. As presence fails to materialize in the world of forms and events, the only realist position is the conjuration of life as a form of expressive self-exile refusing to participate in the hallucinatory social pressure that desperately masks the serenity of a static and inapparent landscape – it is the passive eye that contemplates the plain silence of the steppe while preparing the schism for a possible transfiguration [5]. It is perhaps this passive contemplation what Andrew Wyeth’s faceless Christina laying on the grass has always been yearning for.
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Notes
1. Paul Valéry. “Eupalinos or The Architect”, in Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1989), 75.
2. Dino Buzzati. The Tartar Steppe (Canongate Books, 2018). 31.
3. Ibid., 220-221.
4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El desierto de los tártaros”, in Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos (Alianza Editorial, 1988), 22.
In his 1982 novel Aladdin’s Problem (1982), Ernst Jünger defined planetary domination through the actualization of the trope of Aladdin’s lamp. Whenever a symbol of this sort is used, we know that it always carries weight of ambivalence more than that of synthesis. The mythic lamp is a trope for magic and enduring power; of countering visibility and invisibility, but it is also made from a material that has been extracted from the Earth. In other words, raw materials are manipulated as a reservoir of energy that dispense the world of forms. In the most succinct moment of the novel, Jünger writes: “Aladdin’s lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay. The lamp guaranteed domination as far as the frontiers of the traveled world – from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming towards us titanically” [1]. Aladdin’s lamp is no longer a tool deployed by governments and armies, it is rather the autonomous commanding force that opens to human domination and technological catastrophe that generates calculable objectivity in the world.
In his conversations with Julien Hervier, Jünger stated that the “problem of Aladdin” is not a political problem, but rather one that involves the administration of energy and intelligence that is already beyond our hands, because it has been set loose by ongoing compulsion necessary to meet the indexes of production and transference of technology [2]. Of course, energy defined the broad design of modernity as the necessary condition to amplify historical forms and mediations (and deform, since it was always dialectic) of worldly events and relations. One should only be reminded that in the beginning of the 1920s three major texts by European thinkers – I am thinking of Pavel Florensky, Carl Schmitt, and Aby Warburg – saw the necessity to allude to the settled hegemony of electricity as the defining feature of the dominion of the world.
As Warburg understood it prophetically in his lecture on the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians: “But myths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world, create space of devotion and scope for reason which are destroyed by the instantaneous electrical contact – unless a disciplined humanity reintroduce the impediment of conscience” [3]. And it goes without saying that this “instantaneous electrical contact” has become so thoroughly engrained in human existence, that it is now clear that life on Earth, as advanced by the latest phase of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is no longer point to the destruction of space but of the total disruption of electricity and energy that exceeds any sensible contact. Electricity as the paradigm of artificial mediation can only liberate the spiritualization of ongoing decline.
It is no historical accident that empires and nations have always been driven by the accumulation of energy, although at its historical exhaustion, there is no longer a veneer of development and production between energy and empire, but only a unified empire of energy in a lamp that quenches and overruns itself towards extinction. This means that what defines the darkness of our times is neither disorientation nor political violence (although there is much of that too), but the blinding darkness of a translucent expropriation of the world of the living and the dead. It is through this assumption that Jünger makes the last business of the epoch of Aladdin – extractive energy as domination of objects and objecthood between worlds – as a large necropolis called Terrestra, financed by a banker named Jersson, where there is no longer any need for the liturgy or cults proper to myths, but naked exchange between gold and the material corpse that suppresses, via technological titanism, any possible relations to the irreducible. It remains to be thought whether the moment when the lamp goes off in the drained excess of its energy will also lead to the end of this world.
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Notes
1. Ernst Jünger. Aladdin’s Problem (Marsilio Publishers, 1992), 118.
2. Julien Hervier. Conversaciones con Ernst Jünger (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 100.
3. Aby Warburg. “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual”, Journal of Warburg Institute, V.2, April 1939, 292.
Federico Galende’s most recent essay El mínimo animal (ediciones metales pesados, 2025) is freestyle mediation on the singular animal that is the horse. When we say ‘horse’ we immediately dispense a bulky package: it is Pech Merle cave paintings and Franz Marc; it is Kafka’s parable of the racing red Indian, the agonizing horse in Picasso’s Guernica, as well as Juan José Saer’s mutilated horses in Nadie Nada Nunca (1980). Galende’s tiny mare, however, is first and foremost a memory of his childhood in the green grasslands of Córdoda that, we are told, had a big white spot in her muzzle. The first pages are spectacularly bucolic in a sedative language that retrieves a descriptive pollination of events and figures. But immediately the book gains depth and surprising detours. Galende notes that the relationship between humans and the horse differents slightly from that of pets, not as a question of scale, but primarily as complicity in language that shares the solitude between species: “…porque la del animal es una compania ofrecido a la soledad de lo humano en cuanto especie” (Galende 23). Avoiding the humanist temptation that makes the animal into a fantasy of the human, Galende’s situates the horse an experience beyond language. Is not this common solitude – that a few pages before Galende refers just in passing as ‘nocturnal communism’, in an esoteric allusion to his book on the cinema of Akis Kaurimakis – what has been usurped by the total domestication of species in a world that walks towards extinction? Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025) is an exercise in retrieving this innocence abode of man and animal in their reciprocal, and yet intransigent, mutation between worlds.
As a painterly writer, Galende is in full awareness that he must first interrupt the heraldic density of this animal. Because we know that the horse is an emblem of St. Paul’s way Damascus as much as it is one of modernity’s energy and mobilization. Galende is quite aware of it: the notion of “horse power” registers the unity of measurement of potential power for engines and motors. And just like the steamboat and gaslight, the horse stands a figure that unleashed a civilization defined by development and domestication of the world. The horse entered history through the main door of modern spiritualization (Galende does not elaborate on Napoleon’s famous horseback riding entrance in Germany, avoiding an image that is perhaps too obvious, already “manoseada”), allowing for social stabilization and homogenous time; the arrow of progress that underpins subjective historical consciousness. Galende writes, for instance: “De ser una masa abstracta que rodea la tierra, el espacio se convertía en una línea delgada, con la historia estirando un hilo la materia cósmica de la simultaneidad. Ahora, gracias al caballo, se tenía acceso a los lugares más retirados, solo que a causa de la velocidad de se los pasaba por alto de modo que lo que hasta allí había reinado de la imaginación comenzó a ser parte de lo accesorio, de lo circunstancial” (Galende 82).
The unification of the planet under the nomoi of depredation would not have been possible without the domestication of the horse to coerce the acceleration of time as the index over space. As a cypher of time, the horse started to pop up everywhere progress made a violent incursion. This is perhaps why Galende, in a poetic style that seeks no conceptual scaffolding for self-assertion, claims that in its mystery the horse is not embedded in an ideal of freedom – which will be the freedom already fallen prey to the tribulations of civilization and the political world – as being in the world as such, without the pretensions of overcoming it; remaining a witness to permanent discontent in the open distance of some meadows (Galende 61). Can a notion of freedom be rethought from the figure of the horse at the end of history? Galende does not provide an answer, and his muteness is an attempt to resist transforming the horse into an apodictic symbolon of human anthropology transpiring meaning where there is none. The horse – and perhaps all animals are – stands for muteness and companionship without the burden of proof.
Perhaps the ultimate meaning in El mínimo animal (2025) can only be grasped in those silences, in what remains unthought and unsaid, which is another way of saying that Galende has provided the essay not only of form but of a soul. All things considered, the mystery of horse is a passing memory of the modern: speed, total mobilization, energy dispensation, the unity of a compact and legible world. What remains of the horse after the watershed of modern times; literally its exhaustion? Ultimately, the horse as species recalls the “specio”, which means to see, and to have the visibility for discernment; to be able to see with a sensible eye that blushes at the world before it crumbles into despair and conflagration at the threshold of the Anthropocene. And in many ways we are already there. Galende’s musings speak to an abundance trimmed by a trotting horse that only reappears in a poetizing that is capable of thinking and loving what has passed, like the epoch of horses. For Galende the horse is thus always sub specie aeternitatis. Towards the end of the book, and condensing Gottfried Benn’s argument on style as ranking higher than truth, Galende makes an open apology for appearance, that is rigorously eternal because it is concrete and unforgettable (Galende 91).
Of course, the same can be said of Galende’s serpentine, courteous light prose – like a horse, that is, “una elegancia contenida” – that refuses the monumental and sterile retrievals of sedimented and dusty knowledge on the horse or any other animal (Galende 43). In this sense, Galende’s horse differs fundamentally from Blumenberg’s lion in its refusal to make of the species an anthropological metaphor, that is, a mere creed for the human bonum commune to stabilize social reality. Departing from the offerings of a meandering memory, Galende’s tiny animal is a vanishing horse that interrogates what it means to inhabit the space of non-relation that opens up when the modern scheme based on production, progress, and energy comes a halt. It is this “nothingness” what the vanishing horse reveals beyond itself, as Galende writes:
“Retirándose, el caballo le estaba advirtiendo a todo el siglo XX que la historia de retira con ellos y el mundo también, y todo lo que siguio 4 después de que por inercia ese siglo hiciera desfilar frente a sus narices las profecías más disparatadas…Pero no esperar nada no significa estar consciente de no esperar; puede ser al revés, que la nada sea una intersección invisible entre un sinfín de velocidades insustanciales. La aceleración de la vida – para decir lo con una expresión manoseada -…sirve para compensar este vacío que dura…” (Galende 87).
In the stretched historicity of boredom and nothingness, memory awaits and assaults like an incoming galloping horse. And when Galende speaks of the “nothingness” that mediates between the temporalities of human action he is indexing the fabric of life; since authentic life only happens, as Don Delillo claims at the opening lines of Point Omega (2011) not when words have been spoken or inventions patented, but in the self-awareness of microscopic fragments of facticity. It is at this moment, when history unravels as a farcical script of putative norms of human action, and imagination can begin to gather species outside itself; in this way, perhaps once and for all, leaving behind the atrophies of nihilism already deposited in a language of strange instruments and recyclable data.
Just like Marguerite Duras’ Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), where the Etruscan sculpture of a winged horse fails to enter the plot of a community of friends at a beach-town; Galende’s horse also disappears in the concluding pages of the book. In fact, there are two disappearances: first, the equestrian statue of Baquedano in Plaza Italia after the October social revolt of 2019; and, more importantly, that of his childhood mare in the hills of Córdoba. The vanishing horse at the limit of prose recalls the reality of the living for which there is no tropology: “…nunca conocí a ese ser, así como no es possible – nunca jamás – conocer a los seres ni tampoco el fin de ninguna historia” (Galende 110). As the horse makes his exit, we can only be sure that life has taken place elsewhere. Only because it has been transfigured in thought, Galende is able to seize a glimpse of it; a glimpse that is imperceptible and diluted before vanishing forever.
Infrapolitical Reflections 