decline

The task of the other beginning. On Alberto Moreiras’ Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

The sudden and uninvited intrusion of Gaia in our world is something rather strange, and yet consistent with the closure of the metaphysical tradition. The call of the outside takes place at the threshold of our reflexive capacities, habits, and mental propositions in our relation with the world, which demands everything to be thought from scratch. The historical imbalance in groundlessness now requires a new task for thinking – the imperative that runs through Alberto Moreiras’ most recent book Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024). The theoretical constellation deployed over the course of a decade now comes to the forefront with extreme urgency – I am referring to marranismo, posthegemony, aprincipial anarchy, and of course, infrapolitics. Tiempo roto (2024) is not a systematic culmination of Moreiras’ philosophical (or antiphilosophical) project of thought, but it is definitely a mature elaboration insofar as the field of problematization enters a hitherto unexplored thematics of late heideggerianism. All things considered, the emerge of the anthropocene as an explicit planetary endgame and the new beginning necessarily move pass the conditions of both political and scientific praxis, which today can only effectively adequate itself into positionality (the so-called Gestell) and objectivity of a world that slowly seems coming to its end. 

It might be worth remembering that the notion of “other beginning” (“otro comienzo”) in the wake of civilizational decline was already proposed in the book Sosiego siniestro (2020), but it was far from being thoroughly explained [1]. Following Heidegger’s philosophical scene, representational thought in the tradition of adequatio of the Thomist gnoseology coincides with technological administration of every living entity (Moreiras 14). But Heidegger’s suggestion in the Parmenides that calculative representation fails as grasping the essence of the polis might also have its own limitations, insofar Gaia appeals to an excess beyond or below the politics. As Jacques Camatte also understood it, the civilizational invariant of revolutionary breakthrough departing from the historical subject of the working class can seldomly do the work except as an article of faith in the myth of the autonomy of the proletariat within real subsumption. This means that we are in the terrain of infrapolitics or the chora, which point to ontic regions of thought towards a new beginning at the end of principial metaphysics. But the other beginning can only emerge within conditions of transforming existence against the closure of political technicity. 

I do not desire to reconstruct here all the refined analytical movements that lay out the transformation of existence in Tiempo roto (2025), but there is a maxim from Pindar’s Third Pythian Ode that stands out as an emblem for the appropriation of the non-humanity of the world. Moreiras cites Pindar’s “me, phila psycha, bion athanato speude, tan d’emprakton, antlie makanan”, which can roughly be translated as “do not seek, dear soul, immortal life, but do try to carry out the fullest the use of the possible” (Moreiras 61). Moreiras correctly notes that the ultimate difficulty lies in the “emprakton makanan”, or the use of the possible, which metaphysical Humanism and effective general equivalent can only exacerbate towards the planetary production and extractive valorization. The corruption of the use of the possible is the realization of hybris, and in this sense all representational humanism is always already a form of self-deification and induced hallucination, even when it tries to claim to engage in the opposite in relation to nature (Moreiras 65). Moreiras suggests that the pindaric maxim discloses a second relation of the “use of possibles” that does constitute a lacuna  in the metaphysical tradition, and that is understanding a praxis tied to sophrosyne or phronesis that abides to the prudent inclination of the non-human (“es una actividad sometida a la vergüenza de lo in-humano”) (Moreiras 65). Giorgio Agamben’s defense an ontology of possibility against the hegemony of metaphysical realization and representation also comes to mind, although Moreiras might not feel at ease at explicitly calling for a positive ontology nourished in the waters of a transfigured metaphysics of the tradition of scholastic Averroism [2]. Although both Moreiras and Agamben come at their closest proximity in terms of the notion of the chora – and more directly the space of the chora against the primacy of the polis – which serves the ontic condition for the non-spatial surfacing of the abode or region that is necessarily infrapolitical, because it’s never determined by distributionist political isonomia or meson (Moreiras 73). 

There are important nuances here to say the least: whereas for Agamben the notion of chora appeals to the gods of place (theos aisthetos), and thus a dejointed form of divinization decoupled from the legitimacy of every politico-theological archein; for Moreiras, the chora is a praxis of thought towards desecularization that lacks theology, and thus capable of exceeding the onto-theological reduction (Moreiras 74). But Moreiras says about the tendency towards nihilism of “possibility” in the historical dispensation of positionality (Gestell) could also be said about ‘de-secularization’, as the ultimate consequence of the decay of political legitimation in Ernst Bockenforde’s famous formulation. This might not be the space nor the moment to reach a verdict between Moreiras and Agamben’s position regarding the very complicated problem of the Platonic site of the sensible, since what is presented to the reader as a ‘phenomenology of excess’ or the inapparent (something merely alluded in the Zahringer seminar), might be the condition of an atopic mediation that prepares – or that has always prepared since the times of Orphic myths – the tonality of a coming philosophy under the sign of transformative thought (Moreiras 110) [3]. 

The dispensation of the Gestell open up and also step back (a folded movement that does not have a declension into a synthesis) into the genesis of the beginning (Moreiras 115). And the anthropocentric epochal dispensation, says Moreiras, is no longer the site of the polis, but “the planet as a the historical site of humanity, although we are still unaware of it (“aunque sigamos desconociéndolo”) (Moreiras 116). This uncanny phenomenology of the primary, traversed by the discharge of the entstehung, is the infrapolitical site par excellence, because it is in the atopic region where destiny is both affirmed and displaced. This is why, as Moreiras recalls Heidegger saying, the dialogue with Parmenides never exhausts itself, and yet it prepares a destiny (Moreiras 134). I take this to mean that there is an experience of the transfiguration of language for the emergence of an “ethics” (ethos), but this might be beyond Moreiras preliminary conditions for an existential breakthrough; that is, something possible further along the path.

Tiempo roto (2024) closes with a couple of undeveloped pages that take Massimo Cacciari’s old essay “Confrontation with Heidegger” (1977), in which the Italian philosopher makes a plea for a direct confrontation with Heidegger and Nietzsche’s teachings on nihilism and the closure of metaphysics if there would still be any hope for the composition of the working class during the stage of anthropomorphized dimension of capital defined by Jacques Camatte also during those years. But much has changed since the hot Italian summer of 1977 and the formulaic conjunction of  “left Heideggerianism” might not do the work anymore, as if the totality of materialist political economy could be amended by a radicalization of the historical question and the ontological difference. Political economy plus metaphysical critique is still relying on a conception of the political as a technique, which today has transformed into what some have called the “new regime of ecological accumulation” as mere stabilization of green ecological spheres of life [4]. 

But there is  a second register to Cacciari’s programmatic thesis that remains open. And these might be Moreiras’ most important words in the concluding part of the book: “Espero haber mostrado que Hiedegger señala la posibilidad de dejar atrás la explotación y el consumo en la era del Antropoceno a través de una comprensión alotrópica de nuestra relación con el mundo. Por lo tanto, vivir en el Antropoceno debe basarse en el abandono o desplazamiento de la metafísica como modo dominante de aprehensión del mundo en la actualidad” (Moreiras 151-152). Marx’s materialist dialectic through the critique of political economy – even as a destitution of political economy through its own vectorization – might be insufficient to face the unprogrammed presence posed by planetary anthropocene. 

Perhaps we can still repeat Dionys Mascolo’s words that the coming communism will owe more to Hölderlin than than Marx, not because of an idealist dispute over concepts, but rather because of what Cacciari called in his essay, also citing the German poet, the historical “affinity of conditions” [5]. And in the age of the Anthropocene and positionality, those conditions are kept in the pattern of economic decline or stagnation in which the law of rate of profit encounters its own limit, folded unto the ongoing destruction of the life forms in the world. The allotropic praxis endorsed by Moreiras finds traction in Hölderlin’s poetic dwelling in language at the heart of decline so that something other might emerge within and beyond life, from Gaia to Ctonia. This is the most difficult task to depart from, but it is also the path that saves from the current inhabitable passage of the Earth. 

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Notes 

1. Alberto Moreiras, Sosiego siniestro (Guillermo Escolar, 2020), 24.

2. Giorgio Agamben. L’irrealizzabile: Per una politica dell’ontologia (Einaudi, 2022), 112-146. Kindle Edition.

3. For more on orphism and the limits of the site of the Greek polis, see Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019), epilogue by Julien Coupat. 

4. Gerardo Muñoz & Zeit der Ökologie. “On the New Regime of Accumulation”, Endnotes 2024: https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/on-the-new-ecological-regime-of-accumulation 

5. Massimo Cacciari. “Confronto con Heidegger”, in Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione (Marsilio, 1977).

The necessity of Penia. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is well known that Aristophanes’ late comic work on wealth, Plutus (388), provides us with what is perhaps the most dramatic and conceptual elaboration of the mythic personification of poverty (Penia) of late antiquity. What is remarkable is that in her self-presentation to the character Chremylus, Penia draws on a political parallelism that colors the ongoing crisis of governance of the ancient polis. If the Greek comedy is dependent on the function of the pólos (which is the vortex of movement that makes possible grasping the specificity of the being that is said), always prior to the arrangement of the polis, then it would follow that Aristophanes’ commentary on the centrality of Penia is neither mockery nor irony within the structure of the play, but rather an element fundamental to the historical presentation of the consciousness of historical public life. The emergence of Penia in Plutus is recorded in the lines 550-554 (a paraphrase might be adequate here): “Thrasybulus and Dionysius are one and the same according to you. No, my life is not like that and will never be. The beggar, whom you have depicted to us, never possesses anything. The poor man lives threfitly and attentively to his work; he has not got too much, but does not lack what he really needs” [1]. Poverty is an intimate relationship with needs; perhaps an unsaid relation, but one that must be accounted for nonetheless.

At her entrance into the play, we are told that Penia’s complexion is both mad (makaron) and tragic (tragōdikon); she could very well be an Erinyes companion from the underworld of the dead. Penia as a mythic figure is a fullfilled form of life. More importantly, what is crucial in the Plutus is that Penia defines herself in sharp contrast to the life of beggars or ptochos. This means that while the penetes is tied to a constitutive need as condition for a form of life; the ptochoi is a being that merely lives in a state of survival, and endures his absence of proper needs. Because Penia is contrasted to the destitute life embodied by ptochos, she can state in one moment primacy over wealth: “all your blessing….you have all that you need in abundance, thanks to me” [2]. Hence, as it has been noted, the irrevocable presence of Penia in the polis is the condition of possibility for Ploutus, god of wealth and abundance, shown in ancient representations as holding the flourishing cornucopia from the fertile harvest season. 

What is important to note is that the close and fluid relationship between Ploutus and Penia; that is, between abundance and need, far from being opposition is relational and nourished by its pólos. In this way, the being of need, the penetes, is only able to flourish if he is capable of attaining a free relation with its desire of its vital making, and not from an external power that can determine the functions directed to abstract modeling of population survival. If Aristophanes’ Penia is defined against the ptochos is not because there is a difference of degrees in terms of dispossession, negative or quantitative, but rather it is because it is a disjointed relationship between poverty as a transfigured life, and a life that become destitute because it has ceased to be attentive to its own needs. In the incommensurable ground of the polis, it could be said that the ptochoi were unformed lives that merely persisted in time on the margin of the system of relation of the human community, and for this reason they dwelled in a permanent state of apolis, since their only viable horizon was the result of economic abstraction for secondary needs. In other words, the beggars of the apolis are ultimately effects of economic forces that they do not control, precisely because they no longer have any existential relation with the realm of necessity, that is, with poverty as understood under the shadow of Penia. 

In this sense, the condition of beggar is an ultimate economic subjection that is already beyond the sufficient limitation of needs, and thus it has lost all contact with the world. It is has become deprived of the world without being truly dead. Here, one should not forget that as Plato registers the genetic relationship between Penia and Eros in an important moment of The Symposium: “Eros is the son of Poros and Penia, and partakes of the nature of both parents, the fertile vigor of the one, the wastrel neediness of the other. As he is a mean between mortal and immortal” [3]. But the erotic soul in the last resort is nothing but the desire for immortality; and, as a daimon, it mediates between passions and the beautiful, between the divine and the mortal, between need and wealth towards the depth of a harmous life [4]. As Sandrine Coin-Longeray has shown in her exemplary study, Penia (πενία) exceeds the effective qualification of the “good life” based on labour; rather it is a route of life that outlives itself in the erotic transfiguration of world towards the preservation of irreducible homeostasis of common life [5]. 

This is why Plato’s conception of the ‘happy city’ or the kallipolis was imagined as a deposition of the process of abstraction between “rich” and “poor” that ultimately has come to regulate the modern organization of social rationality proper to accumulation, production, and distribution to supply to rhe demand of ever expanding secondary needs in the general field of consumption. As Plato writes in Book III of The Laws in a section precisely dedicated to showing how to bring civil war to an end: “Because of all this, they were not intolerably poor, not driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the prevailing lack of gold and silver. Now the community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally produce the finest characters, because tendencies to violence and crime, and feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise” [6]. The civilizational path undertaken by West since the rise of institutionalized isonomy could not be but exactly the opposite of the platonic deposition of the autonomy of alienated classes. Today it is all too apparent that every sphere of social reproduction stimulates a ferocious race to the bottom between a kleptocracy and a vast administered population of ptochoi that, precisely because they have no relation to Penia, is left pursuing compensatory reactions within the social mechanism of organized begging that they are forced to endure. Under the oblique light of Penia, it becomes clear that both redistributionist policies through state institutions, as well as the autonomous market initiatives of financial models tend to be two sides of the same defense of abstract abundance on the back of the human community of penetes. 

The negative subsumption of material needs, and thus of poverty into quantifiable assets that characterize abundance and growth at a civilizational scale – with the collaboration of all modern political ideologies without exception always oriented towards production – has contributed to thwart the path of Penia that is necessary to live freely between passions and needs. This is why in his 1945 lecture “Die Armut” (“Poverty”), Martin Heidegger, departing from a well-known intuition from Hölderlin, claimed that ‘being-poor’ does not mean the absence of some property or substance, but a relation to needs; because only in poverty do we preserve a free relation unto what we need (not-wedigkeit) as necessary. And only this can be taken as the true and ultimate wealth: ‘we have become poor in order to be rich’, means that only through the preserving necessity of Penia will there be a liberating dislocation for human life beyond the indigence of mere exchange and the endless struggle over material goods and the private property. As the world becomes a more vast wasteland of beggars and disposable bodies at the service of technology, Heidegger, in Eckhartian tenor, was not wrong to claim that poverty and Penia will ultimately be the ethical destiny of the people of the West only if they become attune to the divine overtone of poverty as their destiny. Thus, the only possible abundance in a declining world can be realized through the enduring necessity and disquiet return of the essence of poverty – to come near the nothing, because there we find the dearth of the earth. Indeed, as Penia says in Plutus before leaving the stage: “One day you will speedily send for me back” [7]. 

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Notes 

1. Aristophanes. Plutus (Loeb 1946), 550-555, 421. 

2. Ibid., 501-511, 409.

3. Plato. The Symposium (Penguin Books, 1987), 203b, 82. 

4. F. M. Cornford. “The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium” (1937), in The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1950), 74. 

5. Sandrine Coin-Longeray. Poésie de la richesse et de la pauvreté: Étude du vocabulaire de la richesse et de la pauvreté dans la poésie grecque antique, d’Homère à Aristophane: ἄφενος, ὄλβος, πλοῦτος, πενία, πτωχός (Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2014), 153-56.

6. Plato. The Laws (Penguin Books, 1975), 122. 

7. Aristophanes. Plutus (Loeb 1946), 630, 421.

Decline and renaissancing. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is something to be said about the facticity of epochal decline, and the reiterated attempts to call for its overcoming. But both decline and renewal are so interconnected in the Western dispensation of community and institutional organization that any attempt to surpass only deepens and pushes onwards the pendular movement between rise and fall towards generic equilibrium and social stabilization. Oswald Spengler understood well that decline situates civilization at the center of Western internal historical development just as birth presupposes death; thus, civilization is merely the coagulation of vital energies to overcome the emergence of decline. The genesis of civilization into final decline should at least elicit a question to break this ongoing circularity: what does it mean to hold to decline without converting its minimal energy into the orientation of a new horizontal epoch? The end of growth (economic stagnation) realized in real subsumption and the autonomization of value also allows us to formulate the question in the following terms: what does it mean to seize the fall of the rate of profit affirming demobilization and the inoperative nature of life beyond its conversion into the movement of energetic production that characterized the epoch of production through the historical figure of the worker? 

Ultimately, this is a question about how to represent (or how to avoid representation) an ethical orientation of life. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was noted that the ethical bourgeois form of life was conditioned by the sense of “community upon all men” around utility of life’s functions subsumed by work, and work as the sole purpose and meaning of life. The definite character of modern social life can be said to compensate for decline for giving up the incommensurability of life forms; that is, what Lukács also called the temporality of the “genius, in the sense that [the genius] can never be measured against anything, whether interior or exterior” [1]. Confronting this very question at the threshold of the crisis of the transmission of forms in Antiquity, Bernard Berenson in The Arch of Constantine: the Decline of Form (1954) offers a distinct position: the moment for seizing decline should be a deliberate prospect of gazing backwards; a facilis descensus that will disclose something entirely different deprived of the race towards “newness” promised by temporal futurity and its social spheres rhetorically organized. In a remarkable moment of his book, Berenson writes that: “Except in unique moments like the fifth century in Hellas or some three thousand years earlier in Egypt and Sumeria, conscious, deliberate, purposeful art is constantly looking backwards – renaissancing – if I may be allowed this uncouth but necessary verb-striving to recapture some phase of its choice in the art of the past, or at least to model itself or draw inspiration from it” [2].

In other words, there is only “renaissancing” if one is able to traverse the decline of the past in the fullest sense of its inheritance of its formal stratification. The perpetual infantilism of the modern ethical outlook is that it tries to claim its definite character in irreversibility in order to exit the downwards path of decline through abundance and vulgarity (and we know from Ruskin that vulgarity is one of the forms that death takes unto the living).

For Berenson there seems to be authentic renaissancing at the level of life forms – of that incommensurable generality of human concrete and practical creation – by holding on to epochal decline, and not through state cultural policies that have sedimented the disappearance of forms of art legitimized by a “critic that will discover a deep meaning, a strange beauty, a revelaning newness in what you have done” [3]. The vicious modern liquidation of the free interplaying creation of forms of life and their external model of appearances is paid with the ascension of the rhetorical utility that will alleviate, at least momentarily, the sentiment of the decline proper to the transmission of dissolution. Whatever redemption creation can offer in the muddled waters of decline, the modern autonomy of reified forms, pushing upwards towards “newness”, will separate the sensorial transformation of life to the homogenous representation of communitarian representative order that puts an end to mood and solitude.

What Berenson calls “renaissancing” of factical experience nourishes the unrealized instances of the tradition not towards the breakthrough of a historical epoch (something like a virtuous mythic age of “Renaissance”) that can be posited by way of general background principles nor through the enforcement of a common social morality; rather the incorporated memory of the past is transformed to its very end because in its liquidation “true life” beyond measure reemerges. Berenson will state quite enigmatically that “style cannot be manufactured by taking thought” independently [4]. This is what Hölderlin had in mind when in a moment of “The Fatherland in Decline” from his theory of the tragic and its passage of dissolution: “The new life, which was to dissolve and did in fact dissolve, is not actually the ideally old, the dissolution of which was necessary, exhibiting its peculiar character between being and nonbeing…thus dissolution, as necessary, when seen from the point of view of ideal remembrance” [5]. It is this remembrance of dissolution that reveals decline as a felicitous fall without judgment that brings the appearance of life outside the irreversibility of the modern historical progress that has accumulated the oblivion of possible worlds.

This is why Hölderlin will also claim in his “The Perspective from which we look at Antiquity” (1799) that the ‘general decline of all peoples’ is due to the inheritance of forms of “an almost boundless prior world, which we internalize either through learning or experience and exerts pressure on us” [6]. To take up decline in a serious way means that we proceed from the formlessness of life, and not from the mimetic drive that expresses, in the name of ‘originality and autonomy’, the civilizational alienation towards the most distant (Antiquity) and the most near (ethos). We can then say that in decline the most distant and the irreducible becoming allows the ascension of ethical life. In this way, we can authoritatively say that there is only hope and redemption in decline because new life flourishes in a time of prudens futuri temporis exitum (“Prudently the god covers the outcome of the future in dark night”) that will transcend itself by becoming into what ceases and ultimately is.

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Notes 

1. Georg Lukács. “The Bourgeois Way of Life and Art for Art’s Sake”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 76. 

2. Bernard Berenson. The Arch of Constantine: the Decline of Form (1954), 36.

3. Ibid., 64.

4. Ibid., 22.

5. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The Fatherland in Decline”, in The Death of Empedocles (Suny Press, 2008), 154.

6. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity”, in Essays and Letters on Theory (Suny Press, 1988), 39-40.