In a letter written in 1969 to her friend Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt provides a striking description of the solitary condition of thought in language: “The silent dialogue of thought goes on between me and myself, but not between two selves. In thought, you are self-less – without age, without psychological attributes, not all as you say “really are” [1]. Thinking, she goes on to claim, puts into crisis all identity and nonsense, so that the inward searching can fold “outwardly” into the world. Arendt immediately notes that the passage from interiority to the outwardness does not express a fixed purpose; it is rather a motion through which “words become part of the world”. Thought can be said to express the coming into relation between language and world.
Further exploring the depth of the language that characterizes the “inner life” of thought, the philosopher immediately emphasizes its acoustic or tonal qualities, that is, “an inevitable noise of our apparatus, which Broch called Seeleenlärm, soul-noise. It is what makes us tick”. To be in thought, or in a way to thinking, means allowing the soul noise to buzz from beneath the skin. The Seeleenlärm does not coincide with language as concept or signification; it is rather the tear that allows for the emergence of language as imagination and thinking.
This operation is nothing more than the relation of language to its own impossibility or muteness in the region of the Seeleenlärm, and what artificial models of language cannot replicate. And although Arendt compares the soul noise to other functional organs of biological existence, it is only obvious that the harmony of the soul lacks a physical compartment, and can only be expressed in the possibilities that language bestows to thinking. The notion of Seeleenlärm, if we are to call it that, appears not in philosophical context, but in a literary one; that is, in Hermann Broch’s “Zerline’s Tale”, in which the soul voice is understood as the lacuna of sensation, having nothing special in terms of intellectual faculty or knowledge collectiom, it is the sensation that fill people’s empty and boring lives” [2]. Seeleenlärm determines thought, but it is not thinking as such; it is more like the suspension of temporalization and judgement in every living being. This is why it is not even coterminous with the passions, let alone love. Perhaps the Seeleenlärm can be said to occupy a third component (tertium comparationis) through which the human being structures the mystery of his spirit [3]. Is this third component that dissolves the self for the place for ethics? In Broch’s modernist aspirations, attuning to the noise of the soul meant the aesthetic reduction of a symbol to mediate “understanding from one person to another”.
But it should be obvious that the transition of Seeleenlärm to metaphoric understanding flattens the voidinto a conglomerate of selves that come into being by setting aside thought through the communication or artistic repression. In the reverse, one could imagine then that there is only thought when the suspension of any conglomerate or community ceases to communicate by resting on proximity to the hole of the soul voice in expression. The communication between souls – beyond the transport of the symbol, beyond separation ordered by discourse – can only be understood as the incommensurable in language. This is the instance where thinking takes flight because the invisible seeleenlärm transpires from its depths.
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Notes
1. Hannah Arendt. Between Friends The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, 1995), 242-243.
2. Hermann Broch. “Zerline’s Tale”, in Selected Short Writings (Bloomsbury, 2006), 103.
3. Hermann Broch. “Some comments on the philosophy and technique of translating”, in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age (Counterpoint, 2002), 122.
In 1947, the very young Cuban poet Fina García Marruz published the liturgical poem Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Ediciones Orígenes, 1947), which stands in the modernist tradition series of attempts to probe the divine nature of language after the flight of gods and the triumph of the new secular jargons. If earlier in the century a well known Italian philosopher will predict that the international language of the future will be that of technical terms; the English Catholic poet David Jones, will reaffirm that we are “living in a world where the symbolic life (the life of the true cultures, of institutional religion and of all artists) is progressive eliminated – the technician is master. In a manner of speaking the priest and the artists are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs – for the technician divides to rule” [1]. And if “liturgy” originally meant “public service” and the sphere of gestures, as suggested by Lubienska de Lenval, then Transfiguración has to be read, even into our days, as an attempt for language to measure to the transfiguration of revelation, in which the poem is a sacramental form that retracts language to possibilities of retaining communication.
In fact, Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte, reinforcing the liturgical repetitions of an hymn and a sacred chant, enacts a flowing rhythm (“en tanto que”) that assesses the limits of the ineffable; a pure exteriority that is the negative or wound of language without ever being able to transcend it. In this sense, Marruz’s poem is only the poetic anabasis to the impossibility of a guided sacrament to organize interiority and visibility. Only the mystical can mediate between exteriority and the crisis of appearance. In an almost programmatic fashion, we read in the second part of the poem: “oh, difícilmente podríamos comprenderlo / Él se ha vuelto totalmente exterior como la luz; / Él ha rehusado la intimidad y se ha echado totalmente fuera de sí mismo” [2]. Transfiguration is the event that exiles oneself from the self (phygé), and in which language can generate contact with something other than its own conventions. This is why they [the witnesses and the martyrs] cannot provide an account about the transfigured revelation – just like anyone cannot truly provide a narrative, except by betraying the experience – except by their hearts as if being mysteriously called by a singular name (“ellos sienten que dentro de su corazón alguien / los ha llamado misteriosamente por su nombre”).
How can language disclose a sense of exteriority that is capable of moving past the autonomy of signification and self-referentiality of language? Can language befall into exteriority? Marruz provides an answer to this question, which can be taken as her contribution to the aporias of modern poetics: poetry can only attune to transfiguration as a cohabitual of a communicating being. In the year that the poem was published, Marruz also wrote in the winter issue of 1947 Orígenes a dense essay titled “Lo Exterior en la Poesía” (“The exterior in poetry) where she claims that “the heart of poem is always outside of it – it should not be that the poet can offer infinite variations of a secret self-possessed knowledge, but rather to rediscover the liturgy of the real; the extreme degree of visibility, which is also its great escape” [3]. What could the “liturgia de lo real” have meant for Marruz in 1947? Marruz does provide a clearcut theological definition of the exteriority as the “angelic”, which does corroborate the hymnological dimension of language, a transcendence between beings of the invisible. The liturgy of the real that defines the exteriority of the poetics of life does not entail a Romantic elevation by the Poet, but the effort to animate reality beyond an alienated monologue. This is why Marruz writes that “only a dialogue can realize an impossible communication, mystical, whenever it does take place in all of its purity” [4].
In 1947 Marruz went a step further than her fellow poets Gaztelu & Lezama Lima, who had defined transfiguration as a learning exercise of the potentia dei of the divine (“a todo transfigurarse sigue una suspension y el ejercicio del Monte era solo un aprendizaje”) [5]. Read side by side with Antelme’s Angel of Reims, one could very well say that for Marruz there is an event of transfiguration whenever transcendence delivers communication between beings, soul to soul; a relation that can one truly speak of the ungrounded and commencement. The liturgy clamored in language is not the memory of an original Adam severed from Nature, but the transfiguration of a linguistic relationship with the world. This might be the secret to Marruz last two verses: “como la infancia que acuña nuestro Rostro allí / donde no puede ser despertado”. If transfiguration also entails recapitulation, this means that this is not a process of forward becoming, but of retaining the atemporal detention that, like that of childhood, traces our silhouette as both figural and pure presence in the bushes of language.
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Notes
1. David Jones. “Religion and the Muses” (1941), in Epoch and Artist (Faber&Faber, 1959), 134.
2. Fina García Marruz. Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Orígenes, 1947), 6.
3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 19.
3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 22
4. Ángel Gaztelu & José Lezama Lima. Editorial: “Éxtasis de la Sustancia Destruida”, Nadie Parecía, Número IX, Nov, 1943, 1.
Anyone somewhat familiar with the writing of Josep Rafanell i Orra knows that we are in the company of a wanderer and itinerant in an infinite pursuit of what the experiences of worlds might offer [1]. A mad endeavor for a groundless epoch oriented towards planetary reduction and confinement, so obsessed with infrastructure and security, most recently through the reiteration of the politico-theological program of national sovereignty, one more desperate reaction to unrestrained planetary decline. We can say with Hölderlin that we are vagabonds in a destitute time, a poet who figures prominently at the entrance of Josep’s Traité. In our posthistorical epoch we are confronted with the thicket over the dominion of life, which means that the question of exteriority becomes pressing as existence enacts a path beyond the endless rubble of representation bestowed upon the human species in every point of the globe.
The book that the Spanish reader now holds in his hands thanks to Luciole Ediciones will immediately let in a dimming light of a singular style or maniera that dislocates the modernist assumptions of political thought into what one could what I am willing to name an analytics of sensible hybridizations between languages and thought. This analytic of the sensible refuses immediately Social normativity as well as the melancholic hangovers of the modern revolutionary tradition (always caught up between constituent and constituted power, representation and humanism, growth and production). This is why Josep will redefine communism as the nonprogramatic event that irrupts through hybridization of surrounds and regions capable of overcoming the ontotheological adequation of subject and object that has led an entire civilization astray (33). The project of the critique of metaphysics finds in Josep’s Traité a powerful schematic cartography that raises questions precisely in those spaces where the rationality of the science of political economy has never dared to enter.
If the critical projects of High Modernity were fundamentally temporal (including that of Messianism and its overemphasized trance towards absolute immanentization), Josep’s writing also has the virtue of displacing the focus to the spatial formation and the thinking of the creation of spaces understood as dwelling, once populated by the gods of the events and which modern ontotheology obliterated through integrated objectivation and technological positionality. We know that the greatest nearness of the last god eventuates only when the event is elevated into refusal, especially when it manages to become too near [2]. As a shorthand, this drift towards objectification in the liquidation of modern politics is domination of the Social totality; ultimately, it is through the plasticity of the social bond that the reproduction of biopolitical life is temporalized, legally ordered, and rhetorically subsumused into an apparatus of predatory accumulation. It is the Social (not the State, or this or that concept of the modern grammar of political thought, or even fascism) that we must refuse. The collapse of the modern secular state and its moral guarantees, is the beginning of an autonomized social bond that now coincides with the total administration of world forms. The hegemony of the Social reduction is what allows Josep to claim that the opposition is no longer between Society and the State; but rather between community as a process and praxis against the static formation of the Social. Thinking today drifts from social domination to communities of encounters, heteronomic relations, communication, and interdependence in a web that characterizes the exotic movement of the imaginative possibilities of exteriority for manifold worlds.
The notion of community in Josep’s thinking is neither about ecstatic groups or “little platoons” of identitarian belonging (as once famously defined by Edmund Burke); nor referring to filiation and propriety reductions that can subsist quite nicely under the heatwaves of the ongoing conflagrations of Empire. For Josep communities insofar as they are exposed to their excess (ubermass) are processes of external contact between souls as rites of passages. The community is formless, and in this sense it ceases to be a problem of Chistological stereology in order to become one in the order of ethics and language (50). In this sense, very much like the late Mario Tronti looking at the collapse of the modern revolutionary experiment; for Josep the ruinous fragmentation of the worlds has a silver lining: that all human, and non-human, souls are dwelling on the outside world calling for worldiness, and thus potentially sharing a sense of intimacy that re-enchants the appearance and knowability of the world through the invisible attunement to the outside (un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro) [3].
Beyond the subject and the narcissism of the Ego, the light of a “spark of the soul”, in the words of Meister Eckhart’s memorable sermon, a new animism returns not because there is a transcendental revelation to be asserted, but because the encounter between souls brings forth the concatenation of worlds that are entangled with other worlds (68). If Jünger described the epoch of planetary machination as “soul murder” (seleenmord) it was because there was no longer any contact with the unfathomable opacity between the soul and any possible worlds [4]. Josep with an elegant mannerist style enhances this intuition: “We are no longer exiles on Earth, as the romantic moment freighted by the loss of world. We ended up forcing the Earth into exile after so many deadly abstractions (108). The modern age has not ceased accumulating abstractions against the human species until becoming a whirlwind of soul murdering that has extended into the current ecocide of the worlds.
It does not come as a surprise that throughout Petit traité de cosmoanarchisme (2023) Josep appears more than skeptical about political critique (and to say skeptical might be an understanding). There is a clear imperative that is mobilized in the book and that it should not be taken for granted: political critique should evolve into the negation and abandonment of politics, which also includes the always anachronistic anarchist politics. We know that ever since the Greek polis the autonomy of politics partition and distribution was waged against the incommensurable topos of the chora, the ungovernable and infrapolitical hinterland of the new substantive community of rights and obligations posited by the logistics of representation [5]. As we know, this is what forced Heraclitus to resolutely remain playing knucklebones in the temple of Artemis: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the polis?” [6]. The knucklebones of the ancient anecdote of the presocratic philosopher is symbolic to what Josep demands of existence: the liberation of environments and surrounds for multiplicities of experiences. The experience of gaming always starts in the middle, expressing the ineffable ethics of how I become what I am already on my way of becoming (142). The maximization of politics into the very thicket of life (this is biopolitical administration) have increasingly defaced the experiential practice of existence that now extends over the course of the historical dispensation of civilization. This is the vortex of the struggle against the realist validations in the interregnum.
Against and beyond the force of abstraction and the prison of individuality, Josep situates the stakes: “It is there, where the fierce struggle we can lead today: to find the intimacy of our soul in the welcome of other souls to hear their silences and their voices. To participate in the animation of the world is to perceive the outside. And gently find the inside of the outside” (145). And between the process of the community and the soul there is no longer struggle or enmity, but only solvent philia; the influx of creation that, insofar was enmeshed in solitude, allows pain to speak in the time of transition, in the skirmishes between worlds. Ultimately, the experience of the itinerant is not that of learning to live in places; rather, it is the one that intensively yearns the presence of encounters. This remains the only ethopoetic imperative [7]. As Carlo Diano observed in an erudite study on the notion of the chora, the attunement of the soul with the world is not a conceptual entelechy; it runs materially through the sensorium of this body as it traverses the world towards its renewal [8]. To grasp this chiasmic region that dispenses the harmony of the soul as it flees the prison gates of an objective world, is the enduring letter and spirit that Petit traité grants to the ongoing task of thought.
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Notes
1. Gerardo Muñoz. “Escuchar las llamadas del mundo: diálogo con Josep Rafanell i Orra”, Disenso: Revista de Pensamiento Político, N.3, July 2020, 134-158.
2. Martin Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2012), 329.
3. Mario Tronti writes in “Disperate speranze” (2019): “È necessario trovare un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro. Io posso farlo nel solo modo in cui so farlo: tirando l’arco al punto che permette di cogliere il bersaglio più raggiungibile. Realistica visione.”. CRS, October 2019: https://centroriformastato.it/disperate-speranze/
4. Ernst Jünger. The Forest Passage (Telos Press, 2003), 93.
5. Julien Coupat. “Dialogo con i morti”, in Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019).
6. Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic (Bloomsbury, 2018).
7. Josep Rafanell i Orra. Fragmenter le monde (Divergences, 2020), 70.
8. Carlo Diano. “Il problema della materia in Platone: la chora del Timeo”, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, V.1, 1970, 335.
The passing of Jacques Camatte (1935-2025) a week ago from the writing of this text recalls a life that ostentatiously lingered in thought, and a thought that was entirely enmeshed and intertwined in the irreducibility of life. For some of us that had the good fortune to interact – however briefly and momentary, although every contact is always destinial and inescapable – Camatte transpired generosity and authenticity, and his voice evoked an almost Adanic happiness that has become rare among human beings. A common friend these days has recalled that somewhere in Camatte’s writing there is an endorsement of a capacious phrase from Chernyshevsky that could very well serve to remember his enduring ethical pursuit: ‘we have finally understood that the Earth is a place of life rather than judgement’. The opening the Earth as a dwelling place for life forms means that it is insufficient to conceive of domination as an organization of modes of production, since capital is first and foremost a spatial-temporal arrangement towards the future of the human species, and thus of a certain conquest of the world sensuous life.
This was the outstanding triumph of real sumption: the modulated and ongoing alienation of the human community (Gemeinwesen) into a community of capital that has arrested time of life to the point of adjusting it to homogenized agony of historical time. Against the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution that theologically exported the polarity of the eschaton and the ho katechon, already in the inception of 1970s Invariance Camatte called for an exteriority of any philosophy of history in order to rework of “a new relationship between human beings and nature”, and “breaking the lock that inhabits the creation of a new form of life”. The two citations in dialogue with each other come from “Against domestication” (1973) and the introduction to Urtext: frammento del testo originario di Critica dell’economia politica” (the 1977 Italian edition curated by Gianni Carchia), although these are variations from the depth of the emergence of the invariance of truth as a vantage point of the world. At the center is a form of life that renews the world that transitions beyond all forms of metaphysical logistics of appropriation, mere standing reserve, and the general arrangement for the mobilization of production. Any point of departure against domestication measures itself against the totality of this fluctuating dominion.
As it has been said of other great thinkers, Camatte’s ultimate passion was rooted in thinking one idea to the end and not of endorsing a system of concepts. For him it was the schism, that is, how to undo the historical process of domestication of a fictive community against the absorption of the increasing autonomization of fictive capital. The schism against the capitalist general equivalent also demands advancing a secondary schism against all humanism and its originary separation from nature. In schism, there is something of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers’ “thought of the word alone” that is receptive to the movement of the soul tries to account for the perceived voice. This precisely what Camatte carried as the lesson from Bordiga’s idiosyncratic original communist program: a movement against the historical benchmark of the development and political economy of growth, which will entail the exhaustion of the revolutionary horizon driven by an ideological political technification that tends to deepen the power towards the positionality of epochal nihilism expressed in the revitalization of strife and the ‘errancy of humanity’ (contrary to Martin Heidegger’s notion of errancy as a play between unconcealment and truth, for Camatte errancy is another name for the civilizational narrative that exemplifies the withering of the human community into organized and protracted social reproduction and historical abstraction). Hence, as for Bordiga, Camatte conceived the ontology of communism as a world view (not as a political program oriented by concrete historical subject or distributive economic reproduction; not a soteriological dogma nor a transhistorical material idea); that is, broadly speaking, thinking the relationship between the human beings and the earth. A question more pressing than ever given the current planetary conflagration, which exposes the civilizational course that has lead to an inhospitable world where the survival of the human being has become the byproduct of an effective hostis of the community of capital integrated to the global surplus value accumulation.
In Camatte’s unrealized thought – but perhaps all forms of thinking are so – the bordigist gesture persists in locating the schism at the threshold of the force of real subsumption of the anthropomorphization of capital, where the notion of revolution itself is transfigured since, unlike Delacroix’s paradigmatic romantic painting, ‘liberty’ no longer guides the spirit of the “living”. Its redeeming voice also carries downwards unto the depth of the souls of the dead. Amadeo Bordiga himself in “Dialogato coi morti “(1956) writes that “The Revolution…it is always, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it opened and where it promised, where it has an appointment with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: they knew that it never fails, never deceives”. True life can also take place with the nearness of that which seems remote (as Gustav Landauer once claimed: “For me, the dead also live”).
If both the collapse of the future and the increasing adaptation of social life has entered a gnostic dialectic of endless self-legitimation, it is paramount to capture not just the insurrectionary, but the resurrection flight in Camatte’s gesture that opens possibilities lodged in the dead as an emblem for the return to the world “full of joy and exuberant life”, as he wrote in an apostrophe in “Scatologie et résurrection” (1975): “I will draw from mother earth the vital and infinite power and I will resurface full of wisdom, joy and an exuberant life which will allow me to reach this human community…I will have left your world and been resurrected!” Does holding on to the unity of the Gemeinwesen require a theological undercurrent? Is not the passion for schism, and by the same token the stazion, the energy within the very dispensation withheld between mystery and revelation that has prompted the congenital forms of formal mediations and institutions for the political community? These are the questions that we are exposed to in the enduring task if we are to take seriously a continuous ‘dialogue with Camatte’, which carries the voices of the dead. Ultimately, any authentic conversation that dwells in thought does not have to invent anything new; we are depositories of an endless communication that is handed over, interrupted, and transmitted to anyone willing to hear and capable of being traversed by the shared word.
In his last year of thinking, Camatte insisted on the notion of “inversion” in the wake of the civilizational phase of extinction, which would require deposing all forms of hostilities and bringing to an end the partisan positions invested in orienting technology and morality (nature) in their seditious defense of the real dominium over the passing of the world. For the current depressing (and depressed) times, writes Camattes in “Instauration du risque d’extinction” (2020), what could very well be a prelude to a return to the repressed allowing a return to the past to initiate an inversion that would allow liquidation of lall exhibition abandoning enmity. This is why, as he told me in an exchange that we undertook five years ago, “inversion cannot be a strategy, as it is totally outside of politics, which is the dynamic of organizing people, of controlling them”. A breakthrough, then, only as a mystical downwards leap into the past? Absolutely – but only insofar as the mystic is the ethical witness to his own openness to the word, and whose exodus from the social machination prepares a return to the world beyond the flattening and dominant language molded by rhetorical dishonesty or passive narcissism of the subjectivity.
This is why according to Carlo Michelstaedter to have courage in the world means to decide between two irreducible figures: the dishonest trickster, or the mystic in the desert. There are no third terms in between. And whereas the dishonest subject knows how to play the hand to his best outcome in each given moment; the mystic knows that his decisive moment is always commencing because the genesis of the human species has yet to take place. This beginning is always at the brink of an untimely auratic experience. And aura names the incommensurable distance from the rational containment of the world — unlike Teilhard de Chardin’s internal introspection in the noosphere that will bring the fullfilment of a spiritualized humanity upon Earth (realized in part by the unification of the sciences by cybernetics); in other words, an exodus from the temporal nominalism that inhabits another life attuned to its genesis: “devenu-devenant ce monde et sur cette vie autre au moment où s’effectue sa création”, he writes in “La séparation nécessaire et l’immense refus” (1979).
The visitation of Jacques Camatte in the world bears witness to that invisible freedom of the human species ready to jump and traverse the catastrophic trumpeting into the living and the dead, making possible the refractions of thinking as original texture of existence. From now on, the exodus from the immanence of this world will embrace a disempowered but perpetual dialogue with Camatte’s demure schism of the living. Indeed, we are always on the path to an earthly beginning.
José González Sainz’s new collection of short stories, Por así decirlo (Anagrama, 2024) offers a magisterial elaboration of the ongoing nihilism that has absorbed humanity into an autonomous object of its own shipwreck. Throughout the stylistically intricate narratives, it is easy to see that for Sainz the problem is not just about the extinction of humanity – its decline and fall, but rather about stumbling into the spectacle as if nothing is taking place. The consummation of nothingness exerts itself into the very consciousness to the point that the death of the living becomes transactional for the ongoing fictions regulated by expectation and prevention.
Obviously, these are broad strokes that say little of Sainz’s well-known narrative pointillism, in which not only every object but every distance is carved out and polished with striking vivacity (this opposition between style and worldliness underpins the sharp contrast of the process of absorption); but, there is a moment in the first story of the book that can arguably be elevated as an emblem of Sainz’s outlook towards a world that has ceased to be so. Without giving too much of the plot, the scene takes place in a plaza of a Spanish provincial town where a pseudo-conductor has taken over a classical music show and who will commit a horrifying act that day. The narrative will minimize the conductor’s act in order to focus on the mass of spectators who continue enjoying the spectacle with mounting euphoria. At the peak moment of the narrative event we read this elaboration on truth and music:
“Había leído alguna vez que la verdad es el auténtico principio de la música, y que está conmueve no es tanto porque complaza al odio como porque expresa las verdaderas tonalidades afectivas del alma. Eso es, porque su objeto es el alma. Pero si el alma está hoy desfigurada, se dejó continuar, si ya no es más que su propio espectáculo o su farce o bien ya no es nada y a lo mejor, puestos a pensar, no lo ha sido nunca, por qué no iba a ser lo que oía la verdadera musica. Se convenció y no se convenció; es decir, se convenció de que no estaba convencido de nada” (Sainz 45-46).
Reacting to his own bewildered reaction to the spectators’ absorption in the fictitious, the character of the pater familias realizes that perhaps even the musical redemptive quality – and that for this very reason that Plato wanted to regulate the distinct tonalities of the instruments in the Laws to charm the souls of the youth- now encompasses an immense rhetorical environment where elucidation of the sublime of art’s truth becomes impossible. As the irreducible communication between souls fades away, there is only a vicarious subject that echoes the resonances of the intruder conductor. For anyone that reads the story, it is quite obvious that Sainz is rewriting Elias Canetti’s figure of the orchestra conductor from Crowds and Power (1983). As a hypoerbolic figure of absolute power and the ‘illusion of persuasion’, for Canetti the gestural figure of the orchestra conductor embodies mastery of the objectivation of the world who cuts through the two sides of the moral predicament: what should take place, and what will never occur [1]. And very much in the vein of the kubernetes, the conductor exerts his power as the unifier of the events in the world. In other words, the dominion of the orchestra conductor is absolutely omniscient: he can not only order what comes out in every instrument, but he can also regulate the effects of the musical discharge into an enchanted uniform audience.
The orchestra conductor is the figure of an acoustic mastery where the price to be paid will be the collapse of the original sublime (hypsos) unto the autonomous form silencing the truth of the soul. This is why Gianni Carchia, reading Longine’s treatise of the sublime, defines the ancient conception of musical redemption a the condition of the communication between souls capable of repairing maladies while moving towards love (eros)” [2]. And the narrator asks rather naively: “But why can’t I not enjoy this as well? What do I see?” (Sainz 47). However, Sainz’s intruder conductor depersonalizes Canetti’s figure, since it is no longer about an illusionary act of generalized hysteria or collective hypnotism; the experience of the truth, granted by the by the sublime (hypnos), has become a matter of the steering of opinion, and the transference of brute force of decomposition. Ultimately, it is also the decomposition of language that turns the pseudo-sublime as a vessel of meaning. The movement of the tragic suspended produces a life without accidents, and the word of Lukács: “a flat and sterile, an endless plan without any elevations…dull repose in the lap of dry common sense” [3]. Through the orchestra conductor, the allure of animation becomes the last resort to bear the crushing weight of the flatness of fictitious living.
In the threshold of total integration of the spectacle, the dialectical force of absorption that once provided grounds for the aesthetic veneration of the work of art, unleashes the form of artificial sublime to endure the absence of beauty and truth once guarantee by the soul’s touch with the melodic. The fall of the sublime into a movable feast of a social attraction discloses the last stage of humanity’s errancy: living in the wordless night of endurance to merely survive.
It is no surprise that, in fact, the story ends with the pater familias retreating to his home to sleep. And from that from that day on – that is, after the conflagration with the orchestra conductor – he will become a sort vigil watchman for his son who, drenched in sweat, recounts sleepless nights haunted by nightmares of the traumatic afternoon. And he concludes: “Velar, que hermosa palabra” (Sainz 51). A trembling insistence of the pulsating hypnos in the psychotic night of a collapsed humanity? Or, on the contrary, a self-reflection on the kalos that has dissipated only to return as a reified word? Is this Sainz’s last attempt to hand out to offer the possibility of an enacted sublime through proximity – it is the proximity of fathers and sons, after all – that gathers the pain in a silent and defaced nocturnal vigil? We do know from Longinus that in some cases, silence can also be more sublime than any words [4]. It could very well be that, at least today, this answer remains veiled (velada) in the intimacy of its own untransmittable experience.
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Notes
1. Elias Canetti. Masa y poder (Alianza editorial, 2013), 559.
2. Gianni Carchia. “De lo sublime de la poesía a la poesía de lo sublime: para una relectura del Pseudo-Longino”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 112.
3. Georg Lukács. “The metaphysics of tragedy”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 179.
4. Longinus. On the sublime (Clarendon Press, 1926), 14-15.
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.
It is not until the last third part of Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) when the reader encounters a mention to the Etruscan relic alluded by Jacques, one of the characters in the circle of friends that vacation in Italy, who passes the days drinking ‘bitter camparis’ and complaining about the nauseating and scorching presence of the summer heat. And if it were not for the title of the novel the reader could easily dismiss it as a contingent regional reference: “I looked at the map last night…After leaving Rome, I could stop at Tarquinia to see Ludi’s little Etruscan horses. After all the time he has been bending our ears about them” [1]. The ‘little horses’ are brought out a few pages before the end of the novel where Ludi, their Italian friend, goes back and forth whether to go and show them the horses figurines or not. It goes without saying that it would be an enormous distaste to press on the Etruscan reference for any deeper meaning, or to claim that Duras deployed the ancient piece as a tongue in cheek symbol for the bunch of friends roaming around the beach shores. It clarifies very little or too much as an generic reading hypothesis.
In any case, what is relevant is that their trip to encounter the horses of Tarquinia never takes place stressing the real lacuna of the narrative, which is not so much paying a visit to an ancient civilization, as much as underlying a possibility, an afterthought, a pulsating desire towards its displacement; or, in a way, the outside of life that part of the real texture of existence. A reminder that life (a happier life?) is always somewhere else, and definitely away from the excruciating heat of an Italian summer in which no compensatory activity (drinking campari, chatter among friends, having food, meeting new faces) can wrestle the desire for exodus. In The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) very little happens in terms of the organization of the narrative, and that is precisely because the domain of the possible might have been Duras’ central commitment when writing the novel: nothing will happen, not even the fleeting thought of paying the visit to the tombs of the Etruscans. Thus, the heavy weight of a narrative without events opens the incandescent proximity between life and nihilism in a strangely accommodating setting. It is summer after all, which means tranquil life of boredom, repetition, serene gazing, and the monotonous. Children catching lizards or sleeping through the night, and very little else.
According to Laure Adler, Duras’ sea novels (The Sea Wall, Gibraltar, Little Horses) wanted to persist “in search of an adventure. But afterwards everything comes together to form a whole” [2]. This holds true only at a very rudimentary and superficial level, but it does not hold to any serious scrutiny. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) is a novel in which the writing of adventure takes a very specific form: life detached from the event of the adventure. This is the reason why the adventure is not only missing from the sequence of contingent incidents, but rather it is alien to the character; as if the radical separation from character and destiny would be transplanted into a self-reflective consciousness arrested in time and space. The adventure at the closure of modern sensibility and its dialectical valence around a “worldview” is precisely that there is a coming to presence of the fact of this poverty of adventure has become its uttermost inexistence: “For a long time I had bright colored dreams of imaginary cities, where I could do what I liked, and look for adventure. But the dreams were not enough, and no I’ve turned a little mean” [3].
The end of the texture of adventure between world and existence marks the commencement of the self-autonomous subject that can narrativize the concrete order of his dreams precisely because he is convinced that they will never be accomplished in this world. After all, as Lukács claims in his Soul and Form, the adventure is no epic for epic’s sake, but a “communion of feeling, of experience, an infinitely powerful experience of the world’s many colored richness expressed in a varied series of endless adventures” [4]. In the adventure one freely becomes who one will be. Hence, the adventure named the freedom of sensible experience between language and world, coming to near convergence only so that its final separation could set to start the inconspicuous ethos of life. In this sense, the longing for adventure in Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia could be said to allegorize the chattering of experience, whose tiny pieces are ultimately picked up by the synthetic apprehension of the dialogue of chatter among friends. The empty chatter takes place once the path of language as transformative of a life becomes separated from the course of the human species. The extreme comedy of the rhetorical dialogue is that it functions as a cure for the abyss of its own separation from life.
Hence, the “dia-logos” ends up suturing that dregs of the fictitious waste required to translate the language of meaning (logos) into practical action at the expense of a life that begins to move, inadvertently, across a groundless world [5]. This is why the central character in The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) calls the boundless dialogue that they are engaged in as “a confusion of voices…from open windows, and was dissipated in the sunshine” [6]. It is not that there is never continuity between what is being said; rather, it is that dialogue is always a re-statement of either the case, the command or the subjective piety that in the suppression of real pain proper to a alienated life can only engage in the melodramatic gossip over the accessories of life. In other words, dialogic communication can only speak in the name of quotidian vulgarity. Language becomes, as Duras writes in one of the most memorable lines of the novel: “an endless chain of reciprocal waiting” [7]. It does not take much to apprehend at this point the signifier rotation in every dialogue. Waiting, but towards what? The waiting is eternal and illusionary, since the capture into the sedentary surplus of “dialogue” has already taken you to the final destination where everything is sufficient; what remains is the generalized effect of unhappy consciousness from the irrevocable sense of abstraction.
The expressivity of the dialogues of the French bourgeoisie of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) was already the indication that their wordlessness differs a whole lot from the musical infraworld of the Etruscans horses and tombs. Yes, something very precious was lost once civilization becomes entangled with the infinite realization of a schizophrenic subject that is the effect of endless chattering and utterly silence. In other words, the character of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) talk quite a lot – they never stop talking – but they are not towards a path of language in search for a missing word that marks every true adventure. And this is the adventure where thought and language bind with one another in search for the unfathomable exteriority that is always unknown. And we know that for Duras the encounter with exteriority is the imprint of intelligence, the coefficient of real and enduring thinking. As one of the characters says at one point: “Possibly it may be that there is nothing that cuts one off from the unknown so much as friendship” [8]. I take it that for Duras the Party form (and even the obligations of fictive intellectual communities and all forms of political dilettantism) was very much her preoccupation here: the militancy of friendship could very well stage the last character in the play of historical nihilism. At the expense of avoiding being “nobody” anyone could assume the faceless “friend”, as soon enough cybernetics will end up promoting in their contactless subjective networks. The agonizing sun of a vacation (exclusive in its temporality) is already foreshadowing artificial radiation and nuclear reserve as the sole container of life on earth. In this scenario visiting Tarquinia is an escape of sorts – downwards to the night but also to a vita nova – although, ultimately, it does not take place. And Duras seems to tells us: true experience falls catastrophically on the other side of writing, on the unlived.
Against the therapeutic community of friendship, one can juxtapose the unpredictability of encounter in which no friend will be crushed by the rhetorical compression of the dia-logos and its discomfort. In friendship I can embrace and release without obligations. And if friendship exists it is through a negative community that is never one with allocated leisure time; and; like love, it does not solicit holidays: “you have to live with it fully, boredom and all, there is no holiday from it” [9]. In such scenario “we would not want to change the world”, but perhaps begin inhabiting it away from the sun of exposure and recognition that clears a menacing landscape without horizon. And if according to Kurt Badt, the sky is the organ of sentiment, then one must come to the conclusion that the characters of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), as pathetic as they are, are congenital witnesses of this truth; even if they could only carry it for a moment in order to instantly betray it [10].
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Notes
1. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Riverrun Press Inc, 1985), 54.
2. Laure Adler. Marguerite Duras: A Life (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 187.
3. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 139.
4. Georgy Lukács, “Richness, Chaos, and Form”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 167.
5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Sobre el lugar del lenguaje”, in La palabra hendida (Ediciones del Serbal, 1990), 164.
6. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 149.
7. Ibid., 87.
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Ibid., 213.
10. Kurt Badt. John Constable’s Clouds (Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1950), 101.
Rereading Dionys Mascolo’s Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) in preparation for an upcoming course with Philippe Theophanidis, one gets the sense of beginning backwards or at the very end, since this late essay is a recapitulation of what the Rue Saint-Benoît Group embodied and stood for. And it is so obvious that for Mascolo what is at stake in Antelme’s letter is not a particular practice of confession (and the coupling of secrecy and extraction), but rather an integral register of an experience that belongs to “friendship in thought without reserve” [1]. And that it would not have been possible without friends, as simple as that. Of course, the condition of possibility of this shared thought in friendship has less to do with general principles, norms, or creative acts, and more with what Mascolo does not hesitate to qualify as “a sensibility that was common to us”.
What is this sensibility, and is it possible to describe it? This is a question that I do not think that is attempted to be resolved in Mascolo’s commentary nor in Antelme’s letter so consumed by its internal lacunae and effacement (I am definitely not capable of saying a word about it at the moment, and this might be one of the questions in the ongoing dialogue in the seminar). Mascolo does offer a little more when he states that this sensibility, however broad and partial, was always elevated against all totalitarianisms that were hegemonizing the political positions of the epoch. Obviously, it names the political totalitarianism (Fascist and state planned communism alike), but also the “the soul of the project” (‘est l’âme du projet et sa forme aboutie’) that must retract from it [2]. The last pages of Mascolo’s reflection is a shallow-deep, an insinuation, into the possibility of saying something in relation to this difficult proximity.
Hence, against total subsumption of life into political planning (whether on the right or left, whether ecclesiastical or in the name of the secularized forms of militant communist parties), Mascolo’s insistence on the ‘soul of the project’ is sustained by the “missing word” give that dispenses human necessities as infinite. He writes: “Et par mille et mille détours, il me (nous) fallait toujours en revenir au même point : Je suis ce qui me manque est la sentence que je porte (nous portons) inscrite à l’intérieur du front. La moindre des choses alors est de proposer que, sauf mensonge, elle vaut pour tout homme”. [3]. But what could it mean that “what I am” is always constituted by the missing word? It is definitely not a substantive attribute to a person (and thus what I can acquire), but a word that in its ideal absence and lack of epistemological validity stands as a form of seeking (zēteîn) that Nicoletta Di Vita has recently linked to the form of the ancient hymn [4]. The missing word is the passive and pure voice that calls out the rhetorical fiction of political totalitarianism. In other words, the missing word does not enact a present state of things, articulating the denomination in language with distinct objects of the world; it only has transformative weight when revealing what remains under the capes of morality.
This is why the experience of the camp constitutes a central threshold: on the one hand, it is an extreme and sharpened image of social alienation between classes; and, on the other, it is the experience that by depriving the human of its humanity it brings to an effective end the polarity between rich and poor that structured the economy of salvation and damnation of Western civilization. This is what Antelme describes in his essay “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, which according to Mascolo brings the rich to a psychotic night of desperation towards destruction and death of the specie. Hölderlin’s definition that “we have become poor in order to become rich” as a clement predicament in the face of the modern is here-forth suspended in the spiritual crisis generated by the social engineering whose most extreme case is the model of the camp.
And yet the missing word remains irreducible even after the corrupted stage of innocence and the impossibility of redemption. Mascolo, reader of Nietzsche, does not believe in the theos. This is why for him the missing word, far from being an apostrophe that offers consolation in the wake of the catastrophe, it remains concretely attached to the experience of the friend that no longer finds solace in abstract peace, but in the profound musicality of what remains inconsolable: “cette heureuse absence de paix qui est sa musique profonde, et que donne en partage l’être aimé, l’inconsolable qui console” [5]. This transfigured word – the unending capacity for hymn in the human, its nomoi mousikos – is both an excess to memory and appearance, and perhaps, more importantly, an excess to the experience of living and the dead. And is not this “seeking” passage of the missing word what the Rue Saint-Benoît Group was obsessively after?
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Notes
1. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Maurice Nadeau, 1987), 82.
2. Ibid., 83.
3. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort…,82.
4. Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022), 27.
Infrapolitical Reflections 