Theology

The pleasure of words: persuasion in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen. by Gerardo Muñoz

In considering the reasons for Helen of Argos’ action, Gorgias’ Encomium introduces, after mentioning Chance and Necessity, the captivating force of persuasion that couples language and eros without remainder. It is nonetheless true that Gorgias is not interested in taking the role of public defender of Helen’s catastrophic actions (war itself), rather what he is after is the account of the word (logos) as a practice that can effectuate magical qualities, thus making “speech a powerful ruler…its achievements are superhuman; for it is able to stop fear and to remove sorrow, to create joy and to augment pity” [1]. The divine tonality constitutive of speech is not a matter of metaphors – even though metaphoric elevation might be in – but of  rhetorical art (technē) that triggers a somatic affection and movement when entering contact with someone else. For Gorgias, the event of speech is primordial and transformative; or, rather, it is only transformative because it can reach deep into the senses and the soul. And these are effects of creative enchantment for the human being. Not yet alienated from the mythos of nature, speech is the necessary artifice of ‘higher truth’ that is the life in persuasion. 

This is why for Gorgias there is a correlative nexus between persuasive speech and the ordering of the “mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies”, which early scholars of the school of the Sophists such as Augusto Rostagni, read in light of the medical and spellbinding teaching of the philosopher-poet Empedocles, who might have been Gorgias’ teacher [2]. There is most definitely a healing dimension of the persuasive speech that compels a proximity between language and magic as the only possible – and possible because it is sayable – to access the inaccessible world of forms that Gorgias himself negates in his philosophical skepticism. (As we know, Gorgias was the author of a lost treatise of non-being of everything that Aristotles and other writers of Antiquity registered extensively). The triumph of deception for Gorgias was irreversible, a stated fact, which meant that only persuasion in speech allowed movement and seeking in the world. This is autopoetic dimension of Gorgias’ linguistic theory, which also confirms Michelsteadter’s thesis that there is no general science and ideal of language – language can only be created as much as the world in order to appropriate the ethos in life. It is no surprise, then, that a scholar like Jacqueline de Romilly has connected Gorgias’ persuasive speech to the sacred musical of orphism as a subterranean sensorial world before the rise of the legitimacy rhetorical koine of the polis. 

In other words, whereas the rhetorical order of the polis will be about the exchangeability of values through communicational units and coordination for the reproduction of social life, what is central for Gorgias, as reported by Sextus Empiricus, is that what is revealed is the usage of language as such in the exposition of the style of enunciation. Style becomes a formless reservoir of incantation and linguistic magic, which can multiple the uses while remaining neutral to a higher truth other than itself. As stated succinctly by de Romilly: “The sound of words is no longer mysterious; it no longer implies divine intervention or even produces irrational action. It is just style, and an intellectual display of skill. The only thing it appeals to is intellectual surprise, by stirring curiosity, attention, or excitement” [3]. Thus, the magical dimension of persuasive archaic speech is not suspended in the eternal polarity between truth and falsehood, but rather in the way in which reciprocity ceases to instrumentalize language to specific protorationalist ends previously crafted [4]. The “magic” of the event of speech liberates language from the fiction that there is something like an autonomous and  truth-content to ground its legitimacy. 

The persuasive texture of speech resembles a dress that must fit for every occasion of its enactment. This is why the Encomium of Helen ends with an affirmation of ‘self-amusement’ that folds the epideictic form of speech as a nourishment for the soul. The ambivalent speech can both cure and nourish, but on its other side it is also apaté or illusion in the world afterall. There is only apaté through the mediation of persuasion of the speech event, which means that any elaboration of absorbing the totality of the world through language can only further severe our distance from it. And is not at this threshold where the ethical question is inscribed? As the classicist Neus Galí asserts in a highly condensed synthesis: “In Gorgias’ thought, apaté or illusion is consubstantial with the world, allowing us to see it and communicate it” [5]. But a world vested in apraté is a non-world: it is only in language where we can move through different worlds, and persuasion is like the magical carpet or invisible cloak that allows us to zigzag between their nonexistent unfolding of our making. The impossibility of absorbing the mythos into the protorational dimension of the logos reappears in the eros of language as the remnant of enchantment that circumvents the deployment of justification, grammar, and the syllogistic mastery that soon enough will realize autonomous language as a representational science of logical proficiency. 

The persuaded speech or image – Gorgias even reaches for an ut pictura poesis mediation towards the end with an analogy about painters completing objects and forms – becomes the nonsite for those blessed souls. For Gorgias this is a supreme fiction; but one that insists on the irruption of passion in front of the ossification of what has been stabilized as a principle of reality. This is why there is a parallel between tragedy and persuasion in Gorgias’ fragmentary thought. As Plutarch records Gorgias’ words in one of his texts: “Tragedy with its myths and emotions has created a deception (apaté) such that its successful practionary is nearer to reality that the unsuccessful, and the man who lets himself be deceived is winner than he who does not …whoever has allowed himself to be deceived is wiser, for anyone not lacking in sensibility allows himself to be won by the pleasure of words” [6]. This ‘tragic transport’ enacts a “caesura in which the idea itself appears” (pure language)” [7]. It is this unfathomable and acoustic pleasure of poetic language that accounts for an exception to social exchange of  signification that will flatten speech to an uttermost decrepit and disposable utensil without passion, arousing neither celebration nor lamentation that allowed the human voice to dwell outside the chatter of the human. Or, as a twentieth century celebrated theologian writer will note in a Gorgosian tone: “For the truth is that language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an artistic thing… the tongue is not a reliable instrument, like a theodolite or a camera. The tongue is most truly an unruly member, as the wise saint has called it, a thing poetic and dangerous, like music or fire” [8].

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Notes 

1. Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (Bristol Classical Press, 1982), 25.

2. Ibid., 29. 

3. Jacqueline De Romilly. Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Harvard U Press, 1974), 20. 

4. Gianni Carchia. “Arte, magia, razionalità”, in La legittimazione dell’arte  (Guida, 1982), 204.

5. Neus Galí. Poesía silenciosa, pintura que habla (Acantilado, 1999), 193.

6. Plutarch. De gloria Atheniensium, Sec. 5, 351.

7. Fredrich Hölderlin. “Notes on the Oedipus”, in Essays and Letters (Penguin, 2009), 318.

8. G. K. Chesterton. G. F. Watts (Duckworth & Co, 1906), 90-91.

Commentary on Monica Ferrando & Michele Dantini’s dialogue on painting and theology. by Gerardo Muñoz

The fourth issue of the journal De Pictura (Quodlibet, 2024) has just been published, and among a dozen of illuminating articles there is a very substantive and rich conversation between Monica Ferrando and the art historian Michele Dantini on theology and painting that solicits required attention, and that I can only emphatically recommend. As the very title suggests, the conversation is about the unity (and posterior historical divorce?) between painting and theology in the Western tradition, but it is also about another problem that never goes out of fashion, if ever rarely attended by a handful of scholars: mainly,  the light of the genesis of modernity vis-à-vis the aesthetic mediation with Antiquity. (Is it fair to say that this is an undeveloped path in post-Nietzschean thought? For now this is a broad question that we can only bracket, and it is needless to say that Ferrando’s own work already amounts to an indispensable barrister to take up this very concern). Be it as it may, there are two problems that I want to flag from this conversation — these are idiosyncratic concerns, as perhaps all attempts to condense a vast area of study obviously are. 

First, there is an important moment in the exchange where the problem of “perfection” is discussed as a watershed schism between the politics of representation in the wake of post-Renaissance development of painting. A notion of “perfection” that derived from the theological sphere was unequivocally different from technical mastery; it was understood as a problem of distance and proximity of pathos inherited from the great tradition of Antiquity and its canons of beauty and virtue. How else to read Poussin’s one of a kind theory of the modes of the Ancient in his famous letter to Chantelou? Of course there is also Hölderlin’s gaze towards the Greeks and Pindaric poetry decades later in the dawn of the nineteenth century only to succumb into madness. The theology grounding distance is the condition of possibility of ‘aura’, but also what Ferrando, at the highest point in the conversation, superbly defines as: “…pura della differenze temendo di riconoscere e irriducibili” (137). The liquidation of perfection into mastery of the “work of art” (and perhaps work should be overly stressed, which is linked to all the metaphysical dispensations over creation) implied that “distance” would become standardized, homogeneous, autonomous to regulated form, and finally absorbed unto the objecthood of creator and spectator in the coupling the force of secularization. Whether it is the vicarious image of the Hollywood spectacle, or the factorization of the socialized art object in the Russian avant-garde, the movement towards absorption is one-directional and open to the validity of an external justification of truth. 

What I find interesting is that the emphasis on perfection allows us to say that painting clearly put into view the history of an error about representation and its negation. As it has been noted, in the outset of Protestantism – for instance in Noa Turell’s excellent Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (2020) – there took place a new struggle over representation of perfection oriented towards “bringing painting into life”. The Northern superiority hinges upon the effectual perfection of a new legibility of the world that suspends the distance between thought, hand and the idea of pictorial praxis. The valorization of justified truth in perfection is paid by the occlusion of the truth of unintentional appearance. And the consequences are catastrophic: Ferrando at one point claims that the painting is about retaining the invisible; an argument that she has also displayed in relation to Poussin’s landscapes in her L’oro e le ombre (2015). In other words, the development of the dialectical autonomization of the very unit of pictorial space is integrated only be rationalized as an obstacle to be wrestled with and eventually overcome (an endpoint being Jackson Pollock’s outpouring of the line into a vanishing mist over white space). Prometheus unbound. Indeed, über die linie.  The “farewell to modern painting” (so elegantly trumpeted by T.J.Clark at the turn of this century) remains right on track with the only caveat that it did not began in the “age of the machines”, but at the outset of the secularization polemic over the impasse of the responses to the crisis of transcendence and the eclipse of myth.

Now, the second point can be stated briefly: the extension of autonomization implied turning away from what the tradition has offered; especially a tradition that is “pre-historical”, according to Ferrando, since painting is previous to historical consciousness and not the other way around (painting is always without a grounding principle). In the words of Stevens, this tradition can be understood as the “love ascending the humane” that attests to the authenticity of what appears-there in the disclosure of the world. A definition of painting emerges here, although not pursued in the dialogue between Ferrando and Dantini. However, for Dantini this means that the whole history of art / pictorial representation needs to be rethought and reorganized and possibly returned to its proper theological sphere. Of course, it will depend on how we understand the vertical axis of theology converging with the horizontal axis of appearance.

A counterexample here comes to mind, a sort of historical false exit: the Baroque, as a post-Renaissance paradigm of response to the crisis of the erotic and pagan image of the Renaissance paid the price of its exuberance, elliptical contortion, expenditure, and ornamentation through a reified and excessive field of self-ordered theatricality. As shown by the exemplary study of the Jesuit discipline in light of the modern state, La política del cielo: clericalismo jesuita y estado moderno (1999) by Antonio Rivera, the ascesis of the counterreformation Company required the split between director and practitioner that already presupposed the modern autonomization of spheres of signification. The baroque supra-theology (imago naturans notwithstanding) was also a reified theology whose anxiety about annihilation and total absorption of the community of the faithful would further drain the invisible outlook of the theos. Or to use the image favored by Carlo Michelstaedter: “the lamp burns out by the insufficiency of oil, but it drowns by having too much oil”. It is no coincidence, then, that the polarity of absorption and theatrically, used to understand the revolution of French modern painting, can only bring to life anything and everything under the sun of pictorial representation except its own sense of distance between appearance and what always remains unfathomable in the world.

Ethics and chorâ. by Gerardo Muñoz


A few years ago, in a book I edited on the thought of Giorgio Agamben, I tried to suggest that his work was both an archeology of politics in the wake of the closure of metaphysics and a reopening of the problem of existence. Now it seems to me that this formulation did not go deep enough, insofar as I remained silent about about existence was inscribed into a problematic field of reflection. Agamben has continued writing many other books in recent years, and in reading them I have come to think that the question of existence is intimately tied to the problem of “ethics”, which continues to be underdeveloped in his philosophical writings, but then again probably all ethics is always underwritten, oblique, and fundamentally lacking an essence. As Agamben states in La comunità che viene (1990): “….the point of departure of any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biopolitical destiny…This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance…no ethical experience would be possible – there would be only tasks to be done” [1]. 

It is obvious that ethics is unequal to morality, and here Agamben implicitly (later it will become also explicit in his opuscule L’avventura) is taking a distance from the Goethean conflation of ethos into a substrate of nature in the Aristotelian tradition [2]. But in the 1990 essay, Agamben is still considering and grappling with “ethics” from a vantage point that I would call a high-level of generality that can only connect to the conceptual exploration of potentiality and potentiality with an unequal valence, still searching for its ground as it were. In more recent books, it has become evident that Agamben’s thinking on ethics achieves a new precision. It does not mean that it modifies or alters his conviction of the untamable and unprogrammatic potentiality of ethics against morality and nihilism, but it does put it in the specific light the terrain of language. I am thinking of this moment in Filosofia prima Filosofia ultima (2023), where he writes the following:

“What corresponds to is not a limit dimension of signification [“that which is said”], not even in the mystical form of a negation or a dark night, but an experience absolutely heterogeneous to that: not a logic but an ethics; not a logos but an ethics or a form of life. In other words, ethics is first and foremost the experience that reveals itself when we dwell in a fully nonintentional language. Far from being mute and ineffable, it is the speech we wrong when language frees itself from its suppositional pretension and address itself not as an object of a metalanguage but as the rhythm and scansion of a doing, a poesis” [3] 

In no other book has a view on ethics come forth with the same force and eloquence. Although, clearly, the passage is drenched in negative conditions («not mystical, not a logic, not a logos»), the thinker also advances towards a par construens orientation that allows him to push for a different route from the relationship of ethics and language arrested in two important paradigms of Western thought: that of the mystical ineffable experience, and that of Wittgestein’s suggestion in his 1929 lecture that the ethical question runs into the “boundaries of language” in its attempt to go beyond the world [4].

The mystical experience of the “dark night” – and which Agamben seems to be recapitulating here after early essay on this very question in an edition of San Juan De la Cruz’s poetry translated in Italian – is also, in the words of Gustav Landauer’s Skepsis und Mystik (1903), the immaterial symbol of what cannot be discussed any further [5]. And in the early essay on De la Cruz’s mystic poetry, Agamben positioned himself against the elevation of dichtung as an autonomous sphere of the language’s modern wreckage into discourse and rhetoric. In both conceptions, Agamben seems to suggest, the negative lack in language seems to hold back the event of language that is nothing more than the “sayable”. And this sayable is the non-articulated, and thus in suspended judgement before the world (although not beyond it) in the opening of the voice securing its own appearance without remainder or negative threshold of substantial lack.

There is something to be said about this ex-position in Agamben’s types of the ethical life in recent books; mainly, Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin, and the formless peasantry of the Rabelaisian world. Is not common to all them, precisely, an experience of the taking place of language that, far from being divorced from the world, is able to makes its own chorā within the world? As we read in Il corpo della lingua 2024): “… is because there is no world, but always and constantly leaping worlds within worlds that sink into each other in a star-crossed blazon, which is the same sensitivity of God as a living and thinking being” [6].

The refinement around the question of ethics also illuminates the moment in L’uso dei corpi (2014) where Agamben, following French linguist Michel Bréal, attempts to secure the modal status of the “ethos” as a creative non-relation (and non-naturalist) of being, which is not only a matter of “suspension of a work of end”, but more positively, a dwelling in non-intententional use of language [7]. And is not this, precisely, the language of Persuasion (Peitho) in which the human touches the divine, an eternal life of speech that relates, in an angular manner, to Karl Barth’s suum cuique’ solace between life and death, happiness and pain? It is an open and intriguing question. The pure taking place of every thing – as God is, in fact, in all things – is the positive ethics of the chorā in which nothing is presupposed, and yet its ek-tasis never perturbes what, in fact, takes place in language.

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Notes 

1. Giorgio Agamben. La comunità che viene (Einaudi, 1990). 

2. Giorgio Agamben. L’avventura (nottetempo, 2015), 11-12. 

3. Giorgio Agamben. Filosofia prima filosofia ultima (Einaudi, 2023), 74.

4. Ludwig Wittgestein. Lecture on Ethics (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 119. 

5. Giorgio Agamben. “La ‘notte oscura’ di San Juan de la Cruz”, in Poesie (Einaudi, 1974), v-xiii.

6. Giorgio Agamben. Il corpo della lingua (Einaudi, 2024), 59.

7. Giorgio Agamben. L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014), 314.

Techne alupias. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his Lives of Ten Orators, Plutarch dedicates an entry to the sophist and rhetorician Antiphon who, among other things, allegedly possessed a technique to deal with distress of the human soul (techne alupias) [1]. We know from historical sources that anxiety was already a common psychotic malady in the life of the polis, and it is most probable that Antiphon’s discourse treatment was reacting to this general phenomenon of his time. In the testimonia of Suda and Lucian there is agreement that Antiphon was a sort of language magician, a “speech-cook” (sic), who derived his powers from the interpretation of dreams, and in the words of the second, could unlock “the office of Sleep” [2]. Although his so-called pain-removing lectures have been lost, there is enough evidence that suggests that these rested on the archaic notion of “persuasion” (Peitho), whose main object was neither human psychology nor bodily somatic terrain, but rather psyche or the soul in the state of being. It is an art that has been lost – if something like “techne alupias” can be counted as a technique is plausible, given its irreducibility. In other words, what survives is only a lacuna of a philosophical ascesis that we should locate no so much as a conceptual problem, but as an ethical one. This is a task that today seems more needed than ever if we can agree that the fundamental tonality of social existence today is, precisely, the reproduction and endurance of pain, or what has been called the self-inflicted deaths of despair.

Much of the reflective work in this direction has been lacking, however in 1958 there was a publication entitled La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica by the  Spanish physician and historian Pedro Lain Entralgo, which dedicated a whole section to Antiphon’s “techne alupias” as a fundamental strategy to treat an existential affliction. Recasting the opposition between nomos and physis as a general structure of Antiphon’s teaching, Entralgo seems to advance the hypothesis that the technique to alleviate affliction seeks to revoke the primacy of the normative conventions of the nomos towards the natural consension and causation of physis. In the most elaborate moment of his reconstruction of Antiphone’s techne alupias, Entralgo seems to project unto the opposition of nomos-physis, the rationalization of the sensible and the sensation of the corporeal through language: “Antifonte cree que para tal fin hay una «técnica» (tékhne alypías); más aún, práctica esa tékhné, informándose acerca de las causas de la aflicción y hablando al paciente en consecuencia. Actuando según las causas, la persuasión verbal logra eliminar la pena del alma: el pensamiento y la palabra del retórico sanador —su lógos— ordenan y racionalizan la vida anímica y corporal del afligido” [3]. 

But Entralgo stops short of elucidating what the language of persuasion entails in this specific elaboration. Is it just a form of compensatory mediation between nomos and physics, between soul and body dualism? The German classical philologist Julius Stenzel in an article dedicated to Antiphon in the 1920s had taken the contrary view; mainly, that the sophist’s treatment of pain does not aim at naturalizing the logos, nor at rationalizing nature (physis) for the event of affliction; it was rather an opening through language creating a new reality principle beyond all opposition, an undercurrent in which the taking place of language could only serve as the anemic nutrient [4]. Taking into account Stenzel’s intuition it becomes evident why Entralgo, as he concludes his gloss on Antiphon, seems to be skeptical of an existential techne alupias fully deprived of normative content, that is, situated outside the nomos that founded the polis so lavishly celebrated by Pindar. 

This was totally unconvincing to him, since it would seem to shake a bit the foundation of Western political civilization that needs to maintain the hylomorphism between soul and body, nomos and physis, happiness and deficiency towards a well balanced organic life. The prefix –*lup that derives from –luk should be understood as a lightening of human appearance converted into something ominous that must be contained and differentiated into a political program [5]. In this way, and if “techne alupias” is to be understood as the event of language, it is also the eruption of the involuntary form of language that “can prevent the autonomization of ethical action: pain is the “grace” that is communicated by acting. And it is, at the same time, the muteness that permits the realization of authentic communication: not that of abstract or arbitrary signs, but between souls. The obstinate, irreducible enigmaticity of pain is precisely what prevents Persuasion from falling back on the Christian morality of “sacrifice”, or of acting towards the direction of an end” [6].

This picture drawn by Gianni Carchia should reveal itself as fully contemporaneous, since today the two poles being offered (replicating the nomos and physis duality in updated versions) are on the one hand the moralization of a neo-Christian acceptance towards salvation; and, on the other, the secularized version of salvation in the form of the highly sophisticated techno-medical field. If both positions have as their central aim an offer to end pain, it is also true that they both renounce the ethical dimension of the sayable in language, which renders impossible a techne alupias to come to terms with our current abysmal sentiment. This means that no amount of prescribed pain-killers and medicalized strategies can come to terms with the soul’s angst. By choosing to erase pain from life of the soul, religious-medical integration univocally accepts the triumph of a living death.

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Notes

1. Plutarch. “Lives of the Ten Orators”, in Plutarch’s Morals, V.5 (Little Brown and Company, 1874), 18-21.

2. Antiphon the Sophist. The Fragments (Cambridge University Press, 2002), ed. Gerard J. Pendrick, 96-97.

3. Pedro Lain Entralgo. La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica (Revista de Occidente, 1958), 149.

4. Julius Stenzel. “Antiphon”(1924), in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen, Stuttgart, 33-43.

5. Hermann Usener. Götternamen (F. Cohen, 1896), 198-199.

6. Gianni Carchia. “Tragedia y persuasión: nota sobre Carlo Michelstaedter”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Técnos, 1990), 38.

Dumb pain: Magris’ reading of Michelstaedter. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is only towards the end of his novella Un altro mare (1991) where Claudio Magris deploys a philosophical synthesis on the character and lesson of Carlo Michelsteadter. In the narrative, this occurs when historical time accelerates, and we cross from the crumbling of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to the rise of Italian fascism and the confrontation between the German military occupation and the partisan forces and the postwar years. For Magris’ Gorizia characters this threshold leads the way into the historical epoché of a long civilizational decay and existential fatigue, where even the attempt to carve a ‘hide out’ (a community of salvation?) seems rather defeating. This is where Magris deploys his philosophical thesis – it must be quoted in full: 

“This too is dumb pain, a weight that falls and crushes, the delirium of believing that life is redeemable, the illusion of the “I” which finds liberation from the world’s madness by sinking to the level of brute existence. Fortunately life is a short, painful negative adverb – “non-being” – and not something everlasting. The eternal scorches that “non, that tiny, ferocious sting. To keep to oneself and to turn to flame – that is true liberation from every single changeable thing. And nothing is more changeable than man.” [1]. 

A dumb pain that crushes humanity forever. And where Magris writes in lapidary tone that nothing is “more changeable than man”, one can also read – it is impossible not to hear it – what Blanchot says of Antelme’s camp testimony: that man is indestructible because he can be infinitely destroyed. But for Magris the enduring (it might not be the proper word) lesson of Michaelsteadter’s thought is that it accounts the refusal of a trascendental delegated life on the side of the redeemable and the messianic, always too functional to the same historical – rhetorical architecture of Western rationality. Could the perspective of persuasion be an alternative to the outlook of redemption (Adorno)? We can leave this question hanging for the moment. Perhaps one of the “fundamental lies”, to put it in Nietzschean overtone, is to believe the political legend of contractualism in which the compensation for “fear” of the state of nature is solely cured by the entry to the historical time of the civilizational principle can overcome the sense of pain. 

The price to be paid for the Hobbesian logic is high: in other words, it is the dumbing of pain in life, which entails the course to optimize, suppress, and perhaps, in our contemporary vocabulary, to “medicalize” its symptoms (is not not health afterall the secularization of salvation). In English language, to speak of “dumbing” also entails “dumbing down” the quality of something or someone. Hence, the dumbing pain in which ‘life will go on without truly living’ in the reproduction of the Social will already presuppose a non-thinking life; a life that betrays and runs aways from the possibility of its ethical exposure. This is the befall towards historical time and the abstraction of positivism and value, by which precisely “every single thing” will become changeable and exchangeable for them to become legible. 

For Magris, the strategy of persuasion is not a political or social technology, it is rather a refusal of living in the time of the changeable and the civilizational organizational capacities to “hide ourselves from the reality of our own emptiness”, in which the promotion of pain is rendered oblivious through the working out of a life that has already accepted the reification of death [2]. If we are to follow John Ruskin to the letter, this is the spirit of the triumph of bourgeoisie civilizing enterprise: “vulgarity is one of the forms of Death”, he writes [3]. The acceptance of vulgar life does not mean the end of life in exceptional historical or spectacular moments (as frequently as they have become); it is the suppression of persuaded life after the fall of prophets, higher values, and transcendental principles that accumulate in useless rubble.

Vulgarity, then, is the aesthetic vortex of what social pain can only organize through the reproduction of realized self-defacement. It could very well be that what Magris says with and about Michelstaedter in Un altro mare (1991) runs parallel to what he calls the “impolitical anarchism” of Joseph Roth’s world colored by the irreducible fragments of individual feelings, passions, and working through the loneliness of pain that oscillates in the ocean of language that struggles to retain a world [4]. This is the life of the soul that before the eclipse of the modern eon (including the real existing communism, as Magris takes into account): resist, in full force, the spillover of ethical vulgarity to persuade oneself that, even after redemption, there are other irreducible paths towards death. 

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Notes 

1. Claudio Magris. A Different Sea (Harper Collins, 1993), 86.

2. Ibid., 56.

3. John Ruskin. “On Vulgarity”, in Modern Painters (1860), V.5, 348.

4. Claudio Magris. Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Einaudi editore, 1971), 225.

The face of pain. by Gerardo Muñoz

One is always struck by the pictorial intensity of Massacio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” fresco (1425) at Santa Maria del Carmine Chapel. It has something to do with the unbounded expressivity swirled by an acoustic of lamentation that springs from both faces at once. The nakedness in movement only comes second. If it is right to call it ‘modern’ is precisely because of its polarity  between movement and paralysis, light and shadow, the formation of the lines delineating the bodies and the free-style strokes that carry Massacio’s picture to a strict and unsurpassed balance. It is a picture of the gathering of  lamentation and pain, which confirms Ernesto de Martino’s intuition that in the ritual of mourning weeping and crying is also accompanied by an act of self-defacement, such as covering the face or bring the face as close as possible to the lower body position. Adam’s pain is reinforced by the hand that covers and pulls the face downwards, almost making it disappear. In a way, his walkout of Paradise is already the stroll of a nobody. 

There is perhaps an intimate relationship between defacement and pain. In his short gloss on this work, Robert Longhi notes that the source of strength of Massacio’s work is given by the intensity of light that bathes the bodies of Adam and Eve in its purest naked form [1]. This total exposition is the cause of sin that, as a great historian of religion has brought to our attention, presupposes the entire carnalization of both body and soul after being thrown into the soteriological world of the living [2]. From now on, human life vested in pain means paying the price of the destruction of the soul for the protected  and preventive set up in the world. 

The sinful life – a life that will have to be chosen but punished justly – entails the consummation of pain as the central tonality of post-felix culpa existence. In other words, it is not that life is shameful because it has been dispossessed (or because it recognizes itself possessed); it is dispossessed because it can no longer look at the world outside the blinding light of programmed obsolescence towards death without transcendence. And the liquidation of transcendence means that human beings become faceless entities in a world that will forever become unfathomable. 

In our days – a present marked by absolute secularization of ancient religious somatic religiosity and magical traces – the phenomenon of defacement and the faceless far from disappearing is all over the world around us. The ritualistic mask which provided transcendence to the living presence of the divine gods has now become a symbol of social shame self-imposed by arbitrary and ever-increasing moral mandates. In a sense, we have not yet left the path initiated in Massacio’s Adam and Eve fresco, and who knows if we’ll ever exit it in the ongoing destruction of the human species. We do know, however, that any meaningful change of the current state of things can only take place starting at the divine surface of the face, as Carlo Levi so eloquently understood it in the postwar years: 

“Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. If we go through the streets and compare the faces we see with our memory of them, we won’t recognize persons any more. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world”. [3]





Notes 
1. Roberto Longhi. Breve pero auténtica historia de la pintura italiana (Machado Libros, 2023), 114.
2. Paula Fredriksen. Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 116.
3. Carlo Levi. La doppia notte dei tigli (Einaudi, 1959), 109.

The felicitous water carrier. By Gerardo Muñoz

There is something vessel-like in communication, and the need to keep it alive and to give it consistency and texture; to prolong it in both time and space. If it is true that ‘empty chatter’ is the erasure of the possibility of making in language, then communication is not just a practice of translation and legibility, but of passing of an experience, however impossible and tenuous that could be. This passing on through communication is embodied in the old figure of the portatori d’acqua or the aguador that famously appears in early modern Spain. The aguador is a figure of stagnation that sustains life, even if he is (or precisely due to this very fact) an iconic fact of social indigence.

One can easily recall Diego Velázquez’s “El aguador de Sevilla” (1618) with his ragged clothes and noble stance in the somber bodegón picture. V. S. Pritchett was up to something when he claimed that to ‘know a people’ is to know its poor. And that poverty is, first and foremost, a poverty in temper and restraint. What does it mean to communicate in the temper of poverty? This seems to me the question at the heart of Velázquez’s exemplary aguador. What is cherished in the aguador’s concrete labor (carrying and bringing water) is a transcendental relation that retains the need of life.

In a sense, there is no surprise as to why the aguador has disappeared in the due course of long and agonic historical development. If the essence of civilization is appropriation and growth, accumulation and production, then it is to see how the impoverished water carrier is meant to disappear. Already in the Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Lázaro’s inverse transfigural condition into a social subject takes place by abandoning his short-lived condition of aguador, which is hyperbolic of the organization of the social stagnation. It is clear that Lázaro’s picaresque attitude of outsourcing the nascent commercial society of good and services – embedded in the production of criminality and banditry – is a way to overcome the original indigence of the aguador, whose sanctity must be amended through the mimetic process of autonomous secularization and the rise of the metropolis. 

Thus, the eclipse of the figure of the water carrier coincides historically with the fall of the contact of languages and experiences between human beings. This might be why in the civilizational peak of the metropolitan organization of the world, the poverty of experience refracted by the force of alienated objectivity becomes a problem for sewage engineers in the goal of the reproduction of life. Vargas Vilas’ provocative definition of the “social” as a machine of the production of excrement should be understood as an scatological image of what it means to live in a world without aguadores. 

And this why everytime that a water pitch is brought to a table an oblique and momentary happiness overtake us beyond the biological need of human thirst. To this end, Isabel Quintanilla’s Duralex water glass painting (1969) encapsulates something so divine and unfathomable; as if, in the suspension of words or stories, the resurrection of the water carrier is brought back to the sharp appearance of things.

Holding on to painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

Paying a visit to a painter’s studio is a rare experience, but definitely gratifying. Or at least, it has been for a long time even before I could put it to words. At her studio, I confirm that Laura Carralero’s commitment to painting as a practical activity has an unfathomable dimension, and I was pleasantly surprised that she shared the same sentiment that our current epoch is not one in which painting has a minimal breathing space. And whenever painting emerges in the official market circuits of art, it seems that it is always already parasitical to some verbose rhetorical apparatus or heteronomic planning that distortions the painterly sentiment. But was not painting the task of speaking the engagement regarding  “mute things”, as Poussin would have it? There is little doubt that rhetorical inflation that thrives in mechanisms to legitimate art continuously devalorizes the mysterious proximity of painting with things in the world. We should reflect – or we should continue to reflect – about what it means to be in a point in the history of humankind where the obsolescence of painting and the disappearance of the dexterous achievement of the hand has thoroughly been realized (Focillon’s praise of the hand remains as actual as when it was first written: “The artist that cuts wood, twerks metal or rock keeps alive a very ancient human past that without which we would immediately cease to exist. Is not admirable to see in the mechanical age this stubborn human survivor of the ages of the hand?”) [1].

The task is immense and abnormal, and it defies (because it exceeds it) the theoretical concept and the absolutism of the philosopher. The engagement of the painters – a secret community that still exists here and there, in different geographies of the world – is precisely a keeping of the divine vortex of the human in the abyss without higher pretensions. And there is something stubbornly strange about painting against the mounting force of destruction. Although perhaps ‘resistance’ here means nothing but to hold on to the originary instance of appropriation of experience in the wake of the epochal mutation of anthropogenic composure; as if the end of the species is also pulsating its commencement.

Holding to painting is not just a substitute to the act of refusal (something that I have recently mapped out); rather, it refuses the very negation of the anthropological erosion in its soulful interaction with what it remains outside of language. To hold on to painting means to engage in the imperturbable: what discourse cannot mold and relocate; what previously is poor in language so that a new language, and thus a new world, could emerge anew among the rubble. In his forthcoming book Those Passions, T.J. Clark states, quite forcefully, that no political transformation or epochal breakthrough can emerge without a preliminary transformation in language; and, I am tempted to say, that practice of painting is the topoi in which eye, world, and hand come together in the very act of separation of said renewal.

The terror of painting – only aggravated in the last decades or so, although a process that took off the postwar years and continued into schools of art where militant pedagogues can only shout “don’t bother to paint!” – is the general stimulus of the reified world; a world in which the paradigm of “objethood” now stands as the compensatory empty experience for poignant idolization of nothingness and “mere stuff”. Sure, there is no return to painting in its grandiose historical sequences – Renaissance, French modern painting, the European Baroque, Van Eyck’s optical discoveries – which ultimately means that painting’s instantiation with the tradition is also bare and unexplored; or, absolutely uncharted whenever there the event of true painting. While I glance at Carralero’s diminutive wooden oil paintings I have this in mind at least. There is a return to the divinity of the icon, but it is not a restitution of its theological investiture and its purported liturgy; the pictorial exercise takes into account the structural void in which painting finds itself resisting, for better or worse, representational excess.

And this speaks, I take it, to the muteness of painting as such, which is also Carralero’s silence about the import of medieval icons into the present. In a way, the painterly operation (I realize that this expression is awful) is executed in a paradoxical redemption, since space always calls forth presentism, a here and now. One is reminded of Stevens’ verses in “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “To say good-bye to the past and to live and to be / in the present state of things as, say, to paint / In the present state of painting and not the state of thirty years ago”. The emphasis of the verse declines towards that injunction “as say, to paint”, which fixes a current state of being in the world where we are in it but outside of it. Is not this, precisely, another description of the “Just”? I am eager to work through painting’s stubborn position to this description, which means to hold on to the imperturbable. 

The imperturbable seems to me like a fitting term to grasp what Carralero is doing in her pictures, although with no pretensions to exhaust her pictorial adventure. The solemnity of the icon and its inverted gnosis yields something palpable as well as unattainable. What is being held is the vortex of painting’s mystery going back to Lascaux and ancient burial paintings. Carralero rationalizes her interest in medieval and Eastern European religious painting as a retreat from the unbreathable decay of contemporary pictorial practice as a general tendency. Here the renewal of painting is only possible through the sensible dimension of an integrative imagination. Hence, to live in the present, in the hour Stevens’ simile, is also to dwell in the flashes of painting’s general economy of sensible forms. A new history of freedom can take this as its point of departure; that is, to posit no longer the social functionalization of norms and rules for relations, but to expand the sensible space of the innumerable symbols of existence. 

In the well-known essay “The Pathology of Freedom”, Günther Anders says something significant about painting’s imperturbable nature: “Painting that fixes the aspect of a man or a thing in a picture seems as it were to repeat the act by which each thing is already condemned to itself” [2]. This “being-precisely-this” could be taken as the closure of contingency in relation to all possible forms; although it is also painting in which the contingency of the non-visible in the visible what arranges the possibility of what is precisely absolute contingent as absolute in each picture. This is why in great pictures we tend to feel that the consummation of form reveals as a necessary tradition that, by virtue of being thus, it assume the thisness of the particular rendition. This commitment that weighs heavy in each of Carralero’s paintings is a testamentary to the imperturbable even if we are already entering (or already in it) the eclipsing world of the mystery of the senses, a world that can no longer see the redeeming and unassuming vision that painting can offer.

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Notes 
1. Henri Focillon. Elogio de la mano (UNAM, 2010), 131-132.

2. Günther Anders. “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification”, Deleuze Studies, Vol.3. 2009, 283.

Acies animi pictura. On Victoria Cirlot’s Taüll (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Victoria Cirlot’s vibrant short book, Taüll: liturgia y visión en los ábsides románicos catalanes (Mudito&Co, 2023) focuses on the well-known apse fresco panels of the Romanesque Saint Climent Church (Lleida) dating back to the twelfth century now housed in the Museo Nacional de Arte de Catalunya (MNAC), whose central figure is a Maesteis domini elevated to representation of the highest celestial cosmos. In another sense, Taüll should also be read (and perhaps the obligatory accent here is necessary) as a synthesis of Cirlot’s own work on the theological infusion of visuality and what it means to “see” and “being seeing” in a world that strives for legibility. Cirlot has no ‘presentist’ anxieties about the Romanesque period – its iconographic and overtly enigmatic depiction – but it is not difficult to think of the Christian temple as an aesthetic laboratory, or artist studio, in which the liturgical dimension functioned not much so much as a private space for the faithful, but rather as a site of encounters and vital experience (Cirlot 11). 

The liturgical performance depended on visual arrangement that opened visions of the inner sense, which Cirlot quoting Saint Augustine calls acies anime — transcendence through a sensible awakening that encompassed all the senses. Following Pavel Floresnky in his study about the Church as the synthesis of the arts, Cirlot attempts to portray the impossible experience at Tüll as the site of the life of the spirit; that is, where the spirit is transformed and released (Cirlot 12). Before there is acclamation and synthesis, there is an unfathomable experience facilitated by the liturgical imagery which is a passage or a preparation of sorts. 

It is almost impossible for us today – situated at the threshold of the autonomization of the arts and the division of its practices – to grasp the antecedent image (imago) through figures of what will only later be seen. Cirlot quotes Saint Paul to anchor this difficult chiasmatic movement of veiling-unveiling: “Now we see through a mirror, an enigma, but later we will see face to face (Cor.1.13) (Cirlot 22). Is the pictorial unveiling, or rather veiling, the juxtaposition of the image in space what will ultimately solve the enigma of unmediated appearance? And could appearance be released without its dependence on the mystery that prescribes the image making and destruction well into the totalization of modern pseudos at the art of depiction? There are conscious echos of Carchia’s thinking (in my reading of Cirlot, that is), which I think help to grant a bit more breathing space, as it were, to Cirlot’s unelaborated suggestion that “Pero la pintura es el fruto, no de una percepción sensible, sino del ojo visualiza eso que tiene que ser despertado en la interacción de los sentidos físicos” (Cirlot 23). 

To paint, or the painterly activity, is the gathering of an inner vision, where there is no more separation between the autonomous senses (visions, touch, flavor). Cirlot notes how the detailing of the querubin angel having small eyes painting on their hands would confirm this thesis. The movement of the hands registers a vision that touches the proximity of the specular Glory of transcendence. Following Henry Corbin, Cirlot can remind us that the angel for the mystical tradition is an entity whose “being is only vision” (Cirlot 28). In turn, the all-seeing angel is not a bird’s view (I guess today we will also say a drone commanded from a computing application) that has total vision over the terrestrial grid; it is more a vision that is able to see each thing — given that his divine vision he can see God in everything, and things in themselves because the painterly eye can only look outwards through the inner eye of the heart (Cirlot 38). In fact, the heart’s eye is a retreat from the world of countable and visual things, as transcendence becomes the mere contact of the senses with the divine. 

Part of the difficulty of grasping what is taking place at the Saint Climent of Taüll apse resides in a gesture that is the inversion of pictorial verisimilitude, if one is to take up Michael Fried’s thesis in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) as a reduction of disenchanted pictorial representation. In other words, the pictorial manifestation at Tüll is neither theatrical nor figural absorption for the spectators, but it was rather an experience with the liturgical mystery that strived in the liberation of the soul at the uncharted height of God itself (Cirlot 40).  And perhaps of being a mode, among many, with the presence of God in things, and things and names as already expressing the unavowable nature of the divine. Cirlot’s thesis gains traction and depth  at this point, since the central task of pictorial creation at Tüll is to find the means of granting visible to what must remain invisible (the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist mysterium) that breaks away from the implementation of imitatio naturae (Cirlot 44). This also speaks as to why Cirlot, with prudential reasons, never speaks of an aesthetic sublime that this pictorial commitment with the theos and experience clearly appears to reject. In the sublime construction, sense has been subordinated to the negative position, by which the return of representation will reveal itself in its erasure. 

The seemingly absorptive theatricality does not stand up to the highest music of the aspirations at Tüll. Once again Florensky appears as a central interpretive key for Cirlot: the iconomic and atmospheric opening of Romanesque art frees contemplation to a degree in which vision and the outside of life entangle to such a degree that no autonomization of the ‘aesthetic experience’ can formalize the sensorial gathering of the invisible upwards where “el alma no podía descansar”, or where the soul knows no rest. One can also recall Kurt Badt when writing about Constable meteorological landscape: such opening in the picture is the true organ of sentiment. But “that world is long gone” – the world of visual liturgical at Taüll – concludes Cirlot, and something similar could be said of the practice of painting. The minimal lesson at Taüll is as simple as it is difficult: any access to the world today requires to divest from the hand of technē so that the hand of pictura can take hold of the fleeting mystery of a life experienced. Such is the enduring vital vision at Taüll.

The Empire’s garden. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes

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

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

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