Theology

Osculum pacis. by Gerardo Muñoz

It has taken Pope Francis’s public letter addressed to the Bishops of the United States to put in perspective how late American imperial politics in matters of immigration and probably other spheres of social life is not only at odds with the Christian vocation, but even waging war against the very dogma of Christian revelation. The reminder does not come completely out of context, since as we know, the marching band of intellectuals that for a long time have defended a “Christian postliberal” transformation – some of which not long ago offered theological justifications for the Church as the universal ark for migrants – given the current hegemonic configuration find themselves as mere scribes of whatever is enacted by unilateral executive command. The impossibility of enacting a transitional political theology evidences the emptying of politics into a technical mobilization of apocalyptical overtones, as clearly defended by Peter Thiel. The attempts to pilotage a planetary gnosis to his own image in the last stage of imperial stagnation, definitely supports Francis’ assertion politics today is built “on the basis of force, and not on the truth about equal dignity….begins badly and will end badly”.  But in a way, this “end” has already taken place through the revocation of the ethical tenor of the Christian mystery. 

It comes to no surprise, then, that if the erosion of an ethics is at stake, that Pope Francis would allude to the parable of the Good Samaritan and fraternity, something that he has explored previously in the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” [1]. It is also important to note that Francis is not opposing the Good Samaritan to the ordo amoris; rather the operation is more subtle: for any community to be organized around ordo amoris, there needs to be a space for the infinite discovery that the Good Samaritan parable solicits of every Christian’s responsability. According to Francis: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”. In other words, and implicitly taking distance from the Calvinist dependency on community of salvation, the Pontifex is disclosing the memory of an ethical vocation that cannot end in social norms or national unity without exteriority. The communitarian ordo at times could also amount to oppressive familiarity, as it appears in Corrado Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte: “Village life seemed to him a strange invention, a protective agreement between people who were afraid”. Thus, what the Samaritan teaches human beings is that there are no ethical standards for which we can respond, since every encounter opens up a ‘decision of existence’ before an absolute other beyond the sacramental duty of “I ought”. 

Who is this “other human being” that now becomes your brother? As we know, in Ivan Illich’s late work the ethical inflection of the Good Samaritan illuminates the true character of our poetic relationality and creative act: “You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds….and create the supreme form of relatedness which his not given by creation but created by you. Any attempt to explain this “ought” as corresponding to a norm takes away the mysterious greatness from this act” [2]. Indeed, Illich goes further in telling us that the suppression of the ethical decision of encountering the Samaritan can only leave us with a “liberal fantasy…where bombing our neighbor for his own good” [3]. Just like today the moral justifications of “ordo amoris” or the administrative allocation of a substantive “common good” can produce justifications for mass deportation of immigrants and dividing the social space between citizens and noncitizens (removing the foundation of ius soli) can become the strange patent of a monstrous theological manipulation. 

The ethical mystery exemplified by the parable of the Good Samaritan introduced into history a new conception of “brotherhood” that was not conditioned by national, political, or family affiliations, but by a common vocation expressed upon acting through mercy and charity. Belonging to the “human fraternity” allows me to decide who is my brother through the osculum pacis – a conspiratorial mouth-to-mouth kiss that creates proportionality and peace through the encounter that yields mutual creation. Before the Samaritan we give everything without waiting for anything in return, as required by any true ethical disposition. As the scholar of Ancient Christianity, Christine Mohrman once noted, the osculum pacis was a universal relationship of the human species through their voices coming together to assert external political peace as well as interior health of the soul [4]. If the predatory programs of mass deportations and intensification of hostilities between nations have come to forefront in our days, this is due to the fact that the overall end is not to piecemeal ordo amoris coordinated by state social policies, but rather a permanent assault against the association of the free souls constitutive of the osculum pacis. 

In light of the theological drama of Christianity, nationalism can only be taken as a symptom of brute force and inequity (radical evil). As Erik Peterson reminded in his essay “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum” (1951), the cult and strife between nations and imagined communities, at least for the Chirstian vocation, do not have any traction, since the warring angels of nationalities have been overcome by the event of resurrection [4]. The ‘strange career’ of American political Catholicism is precisely that through a technocratic administration of social pain and spectacular delirium, it can only offer an noncorporeal ideal of ordo amoris “in the service of a single nation which seeks to establish its supremacy, by identify its own interest with that of humankind”, as Peterson observed  in the wake of European nationalism, but that it applies today to the letter with little variations [6].

In vain should we attempt to pin down the osculum pacis as professionalization of care or the hospitalization of pain that have become practices of a “corrupted core of a very clear and powerful ideal of democracy”. In the disjointed time that characterizes the end of political theology and its warring nomoi, the osculum pacis will be not be found in those that attempt to conjure a “Christian civilization”, but only in those that dwell in the state of adelphos, faithful to the scandal of peace and the endless conspiracy of speech. 

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Notes 

1. Pope Francis. “Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), 2020: “By his actions, the Good Samaritan showed that “the existence of each and every individual is deeply tied to that of others: life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html 

2. Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future (Anansi, 2005), 207. 

3. Ibid., 208.

4. Christine Mohrmann. “Quelques traits caractéristiques du latin des chrétiens”, in Études sur le latin des chrétien (Edizione Di Storia E Letteratura, 1961) , 29-30.

5. Erik Peterson. “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum”, Theologische Zeitschrift, 7, 1951, 81-91.

6. Erik Peterson. “Die Frage nach dem Menschen”, in Offenbarung des Johannes und Politisch-theologische Texte (Echter Verlag, 2004), 250.

The last stage of embalmed decay. by Gerardo Muñoz

The techno-administrative organization of the world that is showing off its force these days is only possible thanks to a previous devastation of the opacity of language, which ultimately connects human beings and the world. It is also the mysterious vortex of the breaking point of humanity into being, of which today there is only remembrance and scholastic teaching but seldomly authentic expression. When politicians, engineers, and social functionaries stubbornly distract us with open attempts to decimate secondary languages, prohibiting the annunciation of words through the legal enforcement of “place and manner” norms, and elevate abhorrent structures of linguistic commands and information as units of social interaction, it is obvious that the collapse has already happened. It also means that in terms of “Social” planning humanity has ceased to exist under the shadow of speech, to use an expression from Helene Lubienska. Hence, it is all the more absurd to confront this transformation with a strategy of multiplication of rhetorical codified languages that merely deepen the schism between the expressivity of language and their worlds. It suffices to say that any recognition of a para-official language of social interaction plays into the fictitious polarity of homogeneous globality and reified nationalism –  the constitution of print nationalism being the historical destruction of minor and dispersed languages of remote places and villages for the sake of the organization of a productive fictitious historical subject.

We must ponder what it means that the current imperial world order is one that does not offer a language, let alone the flourishing of minor or ‘vulgar’ languages as in the Latin Middle Ages, but rather an exit from language, which is the cybernetic project of codifying flows of information and looping inputs in which asymptotically humanity surrenders their languages. In past imperial adventures, language was either a tool to subordinate the world of the colonized, or it was a lingua franca of elites (administrators and the clergy) that allowed for the real existing languages in the territories integrated precisely by their exclusion or subalternity to the civilizing regime guided by literacy. The sharp contrast with today it is striking, since it is all too clear that the project of cybernetics, and its most recent avatar “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), is fundamentally an Empire that does not even require to rule and neutralize the “civil war over words” that Thomas Hobbes repudiated in the European confessional state, since its ultimate goal is not political statecraft, but the regulation of unworldly bodies of social reproduction. 

This is why some contemporary engineers have said that AI requires “a reconfiguration of the social contract”, with the caveat that it would necessarily be a “social contract beyond language and thus without politics”. The last social dispensation at the hands of engineers is the human soul, as it has been said. For this conception of language, it matters to only understand it as a semiotic reduction of the expressive human being to naked animality as the general form of the posthistorical being in the present. It is noteworthy that a great North American writer, Cormac McCarthy, while working on this problem of language at the Santa Fe Institute scientific research program (a central hub of American developments for artificial science and the unification of the sciences), reached the conclusion that language must be understood in relation to a virus: “a virus nicely machined. Offer it up, Turn it sligh, Push it in, Click. Nice Fit. But the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit…The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that” [1]. The “unruly nature” of language, precisely because it does not fit into the biological pattern of virological model, must be mastered into an accompanying narrative of the social world, taking the copula and grammar as the final functionalization of the fictitious community. The artificiality of language is a civilizational decay that takes place not as heteronomic cooptation by technological advancement, but within its own internal abdication of its voice and mystery. 

It is precisely this internal threat that the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa sought to expose in the most polemical moment of his posthumous tract The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Stanley Nott, 1936) – an essay that was restituted, let us not forget, by Ezra Pound precisely to confront the pauperization of ‘Basic English’ as the standard of linguistic use – in which he writes the following observation about the extreme filing of words: “Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary” [2]. Fenollosa could not have foreseen that the posthistorical epoch – an epoch of the most furious abandonment of thinking – there was nothing else to file in terms of the expressivity and poetic soil of speech. The course of American artificial humanity is not a human with a pocket-dictionary; it is something way more grotesque: an animal that can repeat and chatter sounds and symbols severed of its proximity with any linguistic inherence and the sensorial worlds. And it goes without saying that the engineering plan against the poetic soil of speech, as North American poet understood well, means that this war is waged against the last reserve; that is, the ethos understood as ‘the cave of everyone’s inner being’. 

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Notes 

1. Cormac McCarthy. “The Kekulé Problem”, Nautilus, April 2017: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

2. Ernest Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character, edited by Ezra Pound (Stanley Nott, 1936), 28.

Vladimir Lossky’s third way. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his war diary Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (2012), which recounts his itinerant vicissitudes in occupied France, the Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky makes an explicit case for the emergence of a third way beyond conservation and destruction, and its modern ideological avatars that led astray into the modern catastrophe; that is, the social revolution and conservative reaction cloaked under “traditionalism”. As it has been recently glossed, Lossky was not the only person from the East to be preoccupied with putting a halt to the eternal dialectical movement of destruction and conservation only fueling historical abstraction. Indeed, immediately in wake of the Russian Revolution, the poet Alexander Blok, in an epistolary exchange with Vladimir Mayakovsky, and anticipating the bewildering enthusiasm of the revolutionary energy, also demanded an effective exit from servitude so that “a third thing appears, equally dissimilar to construction and destruction” [1]. It matters little whether Lossky knew about Blok’s “third figure”, although it is at the same time impossible not to have it in mind when reading his own annotation in the June 16th entry of his diary, which does seem to offer a answer to Blok’s proposal:

“Nonetheless, revolutionaries are always in the wrong since, in their juvenile fervour for everything new, in their hopes for a better and a way of life built on justice they always base themselves on theories that are abstract and artificial, making a clean sweep of living tradition, which is after all, founded on the experience of centuries. Conservatives are always wrong, too…for in their desire to preservice ancient institutions that have withstood the test of time, they destroy the necessity of renewal and man’s yearning for a better way of life. Is there, then, a third way? Another destiny for society than of always being subject to the threat of revolutions which destroy life, or reactionary attitudes which mummify it? Or is this the inevitable fate of all terrestrial cities, the nature of their existence? In fact, only in the Church can we find both a Tradition that knows no revolution and at the same time, the impetus towards a new life that has no end. Which is why she is in possession of those infinite resources upon which may draw all who are called to govern the perishable cities of this world” [2]. 

It is no surprise that for both Blok and Lossky, the fundamental tension in the amphibology between conservation and rupture rests on the problem of “tradition”; given that, as Blok had also eloquently written in his letter to his fellow poet: “a breach with traditions is a tradition”. This is something that an artist like Kazimir Malevich understood well in his programmatic text about museums in the wake of the revolution (“On the Museum”, 1919): the turn into ashes of all the works of art altered their aura, but it left in place the topological frame and it still produced an image; in order words, the destructive artworks still demanded a museological space for storage, thus enacting new principles of the triumphant revolution. Understood in this sense, tradition is merely the retroactive accumulation of practices by the archē that orients its development retroactively from the point of view of the present with provisions towards the administration of the future. But, how did Lossky understand by the notion of “Tradition”? Rereading the fragment of his war diary entry, it would seem that this notion merely rests on the dogmatic transformations within the Church, and in this sense, a conceptual elucidation similar to the doctrinal exegesis not very different from John Henry Newman’s An essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845). However, in his important essay “Tradition and Traditions”, Lossky attempts at defining the site and tension of the tradition, which he notes that in the language of theology it has been a term left vague and repeatedly undefined [3]. Lossky writes with sharp precision: “Tradition sometimes receives that of a teaching kept secret, not divulged, lest the mystery be profaned by the uninitiate” [4]. Thus, Tradition is the positive and textual scripture that registers the Word, but it is not exhausted in the positive scriptural authority. 

At the heart of Lossky’s argumentation about the theological meaning of Tradition, is the fact that it exceeds both textual sources and narrative mastery and transmission. In fact, the theology garment of Tradition belongs to the mystery of revelation shared in conspiracy, rumors or whispers [5]. And although, in his essay Lossky reaffirms himself that Tradition is the invisible intertwined with the Church – what keeps the “critical spirit of the institution” for the incorporation of new dogmatic definitions – it is nonetheless important to note that for the theologian, Tradition as “opposed to the reality of the word, it would be necessary to say that Tradition is Silence” [6]. In this sense, Tradition is that which is created and transmitted but that no one has the right nor the authority to speak through its incommunicable name. Is Tradition transmitted at all? If it is not through the written word, how can there be any continuity? This is the ultimate lacuna of the theological underpinning of Tradition for Lossky: Tradition can only be properly understood as the crafting of a “unique mode of receiving truth”; in order words, it names the contact between revelation and the witness who receives its ‘fullness of knowledge’, which far from mastering the totality, it points to “the external limit…the narrow door which leads to the knowledge of Truth” [7]. As Monica Ferrando has recently glossed from Plato’s philosophical corpus, any robust conception of Tradition should be understood as that which maintains an absolute inseparability between wonder and salvation, as well as bridging invention and received grace (charîs) [8]. One step at a time, we invent traditions whenever we are thinking through the abyss that separates our language from the inheritance bestowed upon us. Tradition moves in every ethical position of thought overcoming the pseudo-authorization of alienated and metaphorical knowledge of the past.

But if  the Church is no longer the institutional site for the keeping of the impossibility of the transmission and renewal of Tradition and revealed Truth – subsumed to the mysterium iniquitatis that works against the possibility of the rendition of the eternal life of a permanent vita nova  – it entails that one can still hold on to Lossky’s assertion that the task is to be attentive to the ossified expressions and reified appearances of Truth against the “living Spirit of Truth”. Hence, to insist on the restitution of the Church in our current predicament, would place us on the side of instrumentalized and subject-oriented salvation that turns away from the active kingdom that is the only passage from the world of the living to that of the dead. The traditionalists or integralists are incompetent representatives of the Tradition in this sense: as Von Balthasar once argued, they lack the humor and contact with the invisible to apprehend the mystery that arrives without solicitation, as pure depotentialization [9]. In a godless world of the secularized gnosis of political force – that is, after the fleeing of the gods – perhaps theology could only be understood as the path of Tradition of uncountable wonders and the event of speech that produces an unworldly sensation within this world. Tradition brings the world beyond its shape and legibility. In this sense, we are always participants of Truth that the world cannot retain, and thus keepers of an enduring secret that will ineluctably outlive us. 

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Notes 

1. Philippe Theophanidis. “Alexander Blok: ‘A breach with traditions is a tradition'”, October 13, 2024: https://aphelis.net/breach-with-traditions-alexander-blok/ 

2. Vladimir Lossky. Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 54.

3. Vladimir Lossky. “Tradition and Traditions”, in In the image and likeness of God (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 141.

4. Ibid., 144-145.

5. Ibid., 146.

6. Ibid., 150.

7. Ibid., 162. 

8. Monica Ferrando. “La libera grazie della tradizione”, in Un anno con Platone (Neri Pozza, 2024), 424.

9. Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The Office of Peter And the Structure of the Church (Ignatius Press, 2013), 403.

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.