destruction

Pasternak’s symbolism and immortality. by Gerardo Muñoz

“Symbolism and immortality”, was the title of a talk that a very young Boris Pasternak gave in 1913 to a group of students, although the paper was finalized around 1917. It has been known that the integral version was destroyed or misplaced, and only a synthesis was preserved in the author’s papers, which provides access to the thicket of the argument, which concerned ultimately the immortality of artistic creation and the transhistorical participation of the human species in the enduring process. Pasternak himself inscribes this lecture at the heights of his ars poetica: “My main purpose was to put forward the proposal that perhaps this maximally subjective and universally human corner or lot of the soul was art’s immemorial area of activity and its chief content. And, further, that although the artist is of course mortal like everybody else, the happiness of existence which he has felt is immortal and can be felt through his works by others centuries after him” [1]. Unlike the contentious positions about the creative genius and the orientation of the poet (dichter als Führer) that soon enough will inform the thick aura of European modernism in the age of dissonance, for Pasternak in the 1910s (the same decade as the early Lukacs and the youthful Michelstaedter), creation concerned a gathering of experience outside subjectivity; it was fundamentally the experience of the outside beyond the subject, which could only be cultivated by the poetic sensibility’s relation to that outside. It is not clear where there was a figural specificity to the notion of “poet” that Pasternak advances; but, what is essential, is that the poetic task was only possible through a spiritual formation and deployment of symbolization, that is, of the transfigurative use of language. 

Pasternak does not distinguish between vulgar and crafted poetic language; rather he uses the term symbolism to account for the sensible immortal reservoir that is transmitted in the stratification of the genesis of the human race. It is not of minor importance that Pasternak is writing in the dawn of a concrete materialist revolution, in which possession is only registered, counted, and even “destroyed” as mere “stuff”, thus incapable of solving the crisis of the transmission of tradition and blind to the problem of sense. Indeed, perhaps the revolution can only deepen the epochal crisis of symbolization. Pastnark will write affirmatively: “Immortality takes possession of the contents of the soul…in pure form this is what symbolism teaches” [2]. In a conception that is strikingly similar to Warburg & Saxl’s conception of the symbol (and history now designed as a study of the coagulation of symbologies) as a surplus discharged of energy as the reservoir of human sensation and formulas of imagination (the pathos formulae); the attunement towards symbolization never amounts to an accumulation of meaning and narration, but rather it is what preserves the earliest and purest stages of human expression, as argued by Saxl [3].

This is why there is no immortality except in the beginning: the real process of the anthrogenesis is only accessible in those moments of passion and experience while “being observant and drawing from nature”, Pasternak will claim in his talk. The immortality to be retained, it seems now clear, is not that of a future and postponed soteriological communal “life”; it is rather a life that clings to the ordinary and intuitive symbolism that resists the monstrous numbing of fictitious life commanded by the blackmail of the reality principle required by orderability. In this light, perhaps Alfred Metraux is right in that going beyond the neolithic age marked a catastrophic wandering for human beings. (And is not the poetic instantiation a painful reminder of this?)

The stratification of symbolism was of a higher reality; a playful dance between the figure and the non-figural, between the visible and the invisible, between the countable and the non-countable. Pasternak situates this tendency under the sign of “theos“, a religious character in which the texture of the soul is able to find some breathing space as condition of possibility for the opening of symbolism. Modernity is many things at once, but for Pasternak what was being “withered away” at the altar of morality and politics, Church and State (his terms verbatim) was precisely the historical draught of the symbolic man: “The communion of mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic, because it is full of meaning” [4]. This means that there is no community of salvation that serves as the general economy transport between the two kingdoms; if there is a Kingdom it is only of the symbolization of the irreducibility of souls, that can only enjoy immortality in the renunciation of what the materialist and survivalist life is capable of offering in detriment of the experiential possibilities of creation and language when grasping the sense of deathlessness. 

In the life of civil society you will live organized only unto death, without any experience of immortal death of any other, given that death has become mere transaction, a burdensome logistical ritual, a common spectacle. And this is why Pasternak, unlike the Cold War pawn that sometimes he was forced to embody, gradually became convinced that poetic existence could only take place outside the Social with no role or mission to subscribe to: “Do not reserve a poet’s position: it is a dangerous, if not empty” [5]. What was at stake was not a “new life” but a second birth (title of his own poetry collection, Vtoroe Roshdenie from 1934) to plunge into the depth of symbolization. The task is not to invent anything “new” (that modern fetishism), but to regain the life of the soul where the origin commences: “…and here art stops, And earth and fate breath in your face” [6]. It is a mysterious and impossible portrait of a face that reckons with the passing of the symbol and its absolute mystery. The very texture of expressivity that, against all odds, lingers on.

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Notes 

1. Boris Pasternak. An essay in Autobiography (Collins and Harvill Press, 1919), 69.

2. Boris Pasternak. “Symbolism and immortality”, in The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writing on Inspiration and Creation (2008), 40-41.

3. Fritz Saxl. “The expressive gestures of Fine Arts”, in Lectures V1-V2 (Warburg Institute, 1957). 

4. Boris Pasternak. “Foreword”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 14.

5.  Boris Pasternak. “To a Friend”, in  Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 100.

6. Boris Pasternak. “Second Birth”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 109.

The irreducible in language: a note on Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947). by Gerardo Muñoz

At the outset of L’espéce humaine (1947), Robert Antelme discloses the difficulty between language and experience that lays at the heart of the book, and which is never thoroughly assumed at the level of form in the novel. L’espèce humaine (1947) is ultimately not an account about the impossibility of describing what took place in the camps; from the banal physical violence to the desperate hunger, from the microaggressions to the slightest movements and carnage of bodies in space; from the joyful smiles in the most miserable of scenario where the ultimate goal was for the human life to slowly rot; the sequence of actions engage in no struggle to bring to a crisis the level of representation. And Antelme goes into painstaking efforts to give us a full picture of what took place, only to never talk about it again in writing or in personal conversations as Marguerite Duras tells us [1]. So, what to make of Antelme’s initial affirmation in the “Forword” where he states that: “…during the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive and we felt a frantic desire to describe it as such as it had been…[..]. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be checking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” [2]. The unimaginable for Antelme is a sort of threshold of language; a limit for the unrestricted, that is, for what could allow for an experiment of language after the catastrophe, or in the wake of the civilizational catastrophe that is consummated in the camp. 

This delirium and anxiety over language – to tell it now and how it happened and to tell “the world”, only to immediately acknowledge the impossible task of doing so – does not take place at the order of the narrative; it is first and foremost something that we get a glimpse of at the end of the book as the liberating soldiers enter the rubbled towns only to encounter the incontinence of the survivors “talk and talk, and pretty soon he isn’t listening anymore” [3]. At that moment, the face to face between human beings will follow “to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge”, Antelme tells us [4]. But what type of untransmittable and nocturnal knowledge is Antelme referring to here? It is not about some ethical exigency of the defacement of experience through linguistic construction; it is rather the torrential and densely weight of description and events, that numbs and deposes language in the very mediation of its effective sayability. The experience of human suffering and domination is untransmittable not because there is a deficit in language or the effacement of representation; but, on the contrary, precisely because there an excess of language that flattens irreducible suffering to an anaphoric socialization of speech that tacitly accepts inhumanity at face value. And that socialized distribution of speech underserves suffering, in virtue of equalizing an expansive chatter that neutralizes in survival the inherent pain of the irreducible human species within the imposible ordeal of total annihilation. 

Antelme’s L’espéce humaine  is stubbornly nominalistic in its thick descriptions of things and events, and it wants to avoid metaphoric transports. He prefers to call things as he sees it and get to the thicket of things in the most nauseating of repetitions. In a way, the hellish atmosphere of the concentration camp resides in the slow moving degradation of human life deprived of the world. However, there is one moment where Antelme resorts to calling a situation ‘hell’; that is, precisely, to an account of the transparent use of language, the raw incontinence and commanding force towards exteriority, as if there is no longer a caesura or separation between being and language once enunciation has been homogenized as commanding force. This is a language without a secret or unsaid, moving against the outside of consciousness in the same depretatory form as the same administrative machinery that has lifeless bodies as its target. In this way, language being turned into the force of speech will not only foreclose itself to the world, but it will signal the very intangibility by virtue of the flattening of verbal communication as an immediate and furious call to an annihilation of appearance. Antelme writes in this admirable moment – one of those instances where description of the state of things is incepted by the negation of the very conditions that allow for the narrative order: 

“Degradation, and flabbiness of language. Mouths whence nothing any longer ever came that was ordered, or strong enough to last. A weakly woven cloth fraying to bits. Stencens succeeded one another, contradicted one another, expressed a kind of belched up wrtnessness; a bile of words. They were all jumbled together: the son of a bitch who’d done it, the wife left on her own, food, drink, the old lady’s tear, the fuck in the ass, and so on; the same mouth could say it all, one thing after the other. It came forth all by itself; it would be empty. It only stopped at night. Hell must be like that, a place where everything that’s said, everythat’s expressed, comes forth equalized with everything else, homogenized, like a drunkard’s puke” [5]. 

The incontinence of language at the limit of what can be said is a secondary hell; that is, the last contortion that the inhumanity of the human can offer outwards in order to outlive in a moment of minimal pleasure, since the absolute pain of a glacial existence has been deprived of any real contact with the world and things. It is a linguistic hell – the looping language of the camp, will only mirror also the linguistic codification that around the same years will be elevated to the paradigm of cybernetics and the regime of information theory – will now appear as a unified block of application, enforcement and extraction. Hence, we should take Antelme at his word: language has become “flabby”, and it is a “puke”. It is circulation without sense, as in the looping mechanics of the furnaces charted by the Nazi engineers that appears in the recent sequence of the film Zone of interest (2023). It is not that sayability loses it claim to the autonomy of its form before an event; it is also that by virtue of its own degradation against the erasure of events, it can only be unified, packed, homogenized and rendered into equivalence in the wake of the absolute triumph of the historical project of alienation and external objectivity.  

The passage of the old hymnal texture of language as solace and lamentation could only entail the conservation of communication, which for Theodor Adorno writing during the same years as Antelme (1946-1947) will deduce as the “techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere whose shelter he can thrive” [6]. That the experience of the camp for Antelme ultimately meant that the “executioner can kill a man but cannot change him into something else”, must be placed in tension with the epochal transformation of a hellish experience of language at the service of the nihilistic service of equivalence that unveils its purest semblance at the camp [7]. The unitary reduction between the “socialized Man” and the “deportee” enters into a proper focus that Antelme was able to grasp with uttermost honesty: “…that there is no inherent difference between the “normal” system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a shepherd image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live” [8]. At the risk of an overtly mannerist claim, it seems to me that the kernel of Antelme’s intellectual effort is to withdraw from the condition of hell that is condensed in the block of ice fixated in the ruinous material of language [9]. Memory, experience, friendship, truth, writing, the soul – these are all tools to chip against the brute reification of the glacial subjection at the price of ultimate solitude. Is there anything else worth a shot? In the last pages of L’espéce humaine, Antelme returns to the question of “freedom”, only to claim that “to be free” implies to “say no to everything” – and could we also refuse the language as it declines into flabbiness, equivalence, and its putrid decline, as overflowing mountain of trash that covers up the ongoing pain of the human species? [10].  

Sure thing, the hölderlinean enduring and difficult task of the “free use of one’s own” appears here with some urgency as the requirement of traversing the attunement to pain. Antelme seems to have wanted to offer a negative theology to “forever starting anew”, in which the irreducible of human sayability is posited as the condition of the “only transcendence between beings” [11]. “To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience;  a prefix that for us designates distance and separation” [12]. Aren’t distance and separation two conditional criteria for grounding the irreducible? The habitation of the speaking being can harbor the contours of the unfathomable expression on the reverse of social tribulations, which is always the primal nomos of equivalence. Allowing the expansion of the irreducible as a the site of an ordinary accumulation of freedom preserves a sensible region for what takes place (“whatever happens” — and is not this taking place the opening of the non-site of the chorá?) in a language attuned to the relentless event that has forever touched us. This is already the site of the unimaginable beyond and away from the language of survival that permeates everything in both times of peace and of war. 

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Notes 

1. Marguerite Duras. El dolor (Alianza editorial, 2019 ), 71.

2. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 3.

3. Ibid., 289.

4.Ibid., 290.

5.  Ibid., 135. 

6.  Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the damaged life (Verso, 2020), 33

7. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 220.

8. Robert Antelme. “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 22. Dionys Mascolo makes more or less the same claim in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) when speaking about the stratification of species in the camps and the division of classes in society: “l’intuition aveuglante de tous les survivants est celle d’avoir fait quant à eux, sous une forme extrême, cette expérience: que l’organisation de la société en classes telle que nous la vivons est déjà une image de la division de cette société en espèces, comme dans les camps”, 87.

9. Robert Antelme. “Revenge?”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 15.

10.  Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 291..

11. Robert Antelme. “The Smiling Angel: Rheims Cathedral”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 10. 

12. Maurice Blanchot. “The Indestructible”, in The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 

Notas sobre encuentro “Parodia, Dictadura, Metafísica, y Revuelta”, Academia de Santiago, Enero-Marzo 2020. Por Gerardo Muñoz

En lo que sigue tan solo quiero registrar elementos de la conversación en curso en el taller “Parodia, Dictadura, Metafísica, y Revuelta”, organizado por Andrés Ajens en cuatro sesiones durante los meses de enero y marzo. El propósito de estas notas no es hacerme cargo de manera exhaustiva de todos los hilos de estas conversaciones, sino tan solo acotar algunas notas al margen y fragmentos que, tal vez, pudieran generar una discusión fuera de la escena. Por lo tanto, estas notas intentan organizar un derrotero interesado y personal. Si el momento que se abrió en octubre en Chile nos dice algo, como ya hemos sugerido en otra parte, no es que la conversación sea infinita, sino, por el contrario, que lo finito nos habla de una fragmentación que abre paso a posibilidades para el pensamiento y para el uso irreductible de los usos de la lengua.

El problema de la metafísica supone un problema del origen, dice Carolina Pezoa en un momento de su intervención. Y claro, el origen mismo es el arche, el mando y el principio, orden y mandato. No hay una crítica efectiva del poder sin antes atender a lo que se ha llamado una crítica metafísica de los aparatos (Tiqqun). El fin del principio como punto de partida debería poner en paréntesis la cuestión de la hegemonía, en la medida que no hay hegemon deseable para ordenar el momento existencial en la tierra. Algo de esto hay en la revuelta chilena; a saber, un paso más allá de una revuelta entendida auto-télicamente como toma de las plazas, hacia un tipo de revuelta que pudiéramos caracterizar como experiencial. La dimensión experiencial desborda todo maquinación racional de lo político. Y en efecto, el desfundamento invalida, en su pliegue, a la economía politíca como estrategia hermenéutica. La revuelta, en este sentido, despeja el cliché que se encubre desde un economicismo arcaico en la formalización de la política contemporánea.

Ilustrémoslo con lo mejor que ofrece los Estados Unidos actualmente: una opción de mayor transparencia al consumidor (Elizabeth Warren) o una mejor distribución del ingreso para suturar la desigualidad (Bernie Sanders). La economía política es hoy nihilismo equivalencial; o sea, es ya de antemano reparto del botín. En cambio, la revuelta chilena en su des-fundamento originario rompe contra todo principio económico como matriz de sentido. Hasta cierto punto Hugo Herrera tiene algo de razón en Octubre en Chile (2019): el economicismo nunca puede subsumir el momento intempestivo de lo vital que puede un pueblo. Ahora bien, no es menos cierto que en una época de anarquía de los fenómenos, la política tampoco puede ‘formalizar’ a la reacción de las pulsiones de la especie. La experiencia en el centro de la escena agrega otro elemento: una desistencia de la especie contra la fuerza ruda de la antropomorfización del capital (Camatte). La evasión de la sistematización general de nuestras sociedades es índice de la búsqueda de un afuera de matriz equivalencial a la cual se ha arrojado la vida.

Ahora ya no se trataría de una política de la revuelta, sino de una revuelta de la política. La próxima parada me parece clara: evadir la principialidad (arche) de lo político. No hay un programa, una idealia asignada, un programa movilizado por una vanguardia, aunque muchos pretendan lo contrario; lo que hay es un giro de la propia tonalidad del desencanto. En este sentido, sí, hay duelo en la nueva revuelta experiencial, pero tampoco es un duelo por la falta de los bienes comunes de lo social a los que se quiere ascender (de otra manera serían inexplicables una amplia clase media dentro de las filas de los gilet gialli). Se busca entrar en relación con el mundo, dejar atrás la administración de la equivalencia, o como lo llamó Pezoa refiriéndose al feminismo, una ‘política de la identificación’.

En efecto. El reconocimiento solo puede ser nihilismo consumado y espuma de administración tras el fin efecto de la filosofía de la historia. Pero una época que ya no puede concebir una relación con el mundo desde el pathos de la distancia y la disyunción de la singularidad, el desierto crece con archeontes, las vanguardias proliferan, las contradicciones toman posesión, los voluntarismos se maximizan, y las incoherencias capitalizan la textura del sentido domesticado.

Ajens apuntaba justamente a este dilema poniendo el dedo en las ambivalencias de la izquierda “comunitarista” ante los acontecimientos chilenos y bolivianos, haciendo ver cómo todo discurso hegemónico en política hace agua. El leninismo ya solo puede quedar como un tipo de trabajo “técnico” (ya Oscar del Barco hablaba de la dimensión técnica desde sus propios presupuestos de organización obrera) , pero que hoy abastece plenamente la movilización metafísica de los aparatos. No se llega lejos con un voluntarismo comunitario. De ahí la mala fe del proceso de justificación retórica ex post facto, así como la intensificación de las traiciones al interior del movimientismo. Lo que antes parecía una “excepción” ante la inmanencia de la revolución, ahora es el proceso mismo de una política impotente y absurda.

Interviene Luciano Allende: la crítica de la metafísica supone una destrucción de los presupuestos modernos de la filosofía occidental. La destrucción es el primer paso a la apertura del pensamiento contra la ciencia y los regímenes calculativos de la representación. Y yo añadiría: ¡también de la política! No hay otra cosa en juego en la crítica de la estructuración cibernética que la destrucción de una ciencia que no piensa y que unifica mundo y vida como dominio sobre el mundo. Por lo que la destrucción se abre más allá de una política acotada a un sujeto, o de un sujeto para la política. En otras palabras, aparece lo que Alberto Moreiras desde hace varios años ha llamado una zona del no-sujeto que no se agota en la diferencia amigo-enemigo. ¿Puede haber una política de un no-sujeto, o en realidad, dicha destrucción también abre paso a una destrucción de la política en tanto que articulación entre comunidad y hegemonía?

A esa zona intempestiva y abismal le podemos llamar infrapolítica. Finalmente, no es la infrapolítica ¿una manera de nombrar la existencia fáctica al interior mismo del encuentro de una revuelta? Al final, una revuelta es un mito (capitalizarla es matarla, como bien dijo Ajens). Al final la revuelta es una imagen posible del encuentro que despeja mundo. Despejar mundo es habitar la tierra como paso atrás de la maquinación contra la existencia.

Destrucción de la metafísica contra la ciencia de los aparatos. Por otro lado, habría que pensar la disyunción entre destrucción y violencia. Walter Benjamin en el ensayo de 1921 habla de una violencia que destruye todo salvo el alma del viviente (” una violencia dirigida a bienes, derecho, vida y lo que se asocia con ellos; jamás absoluta respecto al alma de los seres vivientes”). Pero el alma no es una entelequia abstracta, sino el vórtice informe mismo de la existencia, algo así como el color y el tono de una vida fuera de la vida.

En este sentido cuando el liberalismo contemporaneo se dirige contra la violencia (el intelectual chilenoJosé Joaquín Brunner llegó a referirse a ciertos pensadores del momento de octubre como miembros de un “Partido de la violencia”), en realidad están defiendo un mal mayor, una violencia como proxy, aquella que atenta directamente contra el alma. Una de las exigencias inmediatas es reconstituir el Partido de la violencia contra el partido historico de la depredación civilizatoria. Pero esta sería una violencia medial que en cada corte sobre la superficie del sentido establecido dispensa otras condiciones para una política otra, del no-todo. La política del Uno es hoy la política del régimen cibernético. En cambio, el corte del Partido de la violencia requiere una destitución de las demandas de una configuración ordenada de un archeonte que busque posicionarse por encima de todos y todo. Aquí la mirada paratáctica de Hölderlin guarda los posibles de una descripción.

Luciano da con lo decisivo: el destino histórico de la metafísica no es otra cosa que el dominio contra la existencia. Y pensar una existencia más allá de la fundamentación de la política es hoy una de las tareas del pensador. Por eso, en realidad, no importa la cuestión de los géneros en Hölderlin, cuestión intensamente discutida por otra parte; puesto que lo fundamental es la mirada errante que en su poetizar destituye el orden que atenta en la relación entre existencia y mundo. Parataxis: antes que una forma, un evento. La  tragedia del poeta holderliniano es que supo ver la crisis de la articulación del Hen kai pan. La parodia, entonces, no es una forma sino un proceso inmanente de desmetaforización permanente, en primer lugar, en el mismo aparato del lenguaje.

Pero, ¿qué parodia? Vale recordar que para Kierkegaard, el judaísmo se consume en parodia hasta llegar parir el cristianismo. Este es el paradigma de la reiteracion. De ahí que el mismo Kierkegaard juzgara su obra como una parodia del sistema hegeliano. Giorgio Agamben distingue en Profanazioni (2005) entre dos modos de articulación de la parodia: primero la parodia como reiteración de un modelo, y segundo, la parodia como parábasis, done se da lugar un vaciamiento de las formas del marco para el devenir del acontecimiento de una experiencia. Obviamente, interesa hoy la segunda forma de la parodia para transfigurar o desnarrativizar la política.

Entonces, ¿qué está en juego en la parodia? Primero, otra cosa que una inversión retórica o hermenéutica. En segundo término, la posibilidad de despejar el campo sensible de la experiencia (algo que puede llevar el nombre preliminar de la revuelta pero que tampoco tiene porqué terminar ahí, pues eso sería establecer una delimitación mimética y arbitraria mediante un arche). Y tercero, y quizas más interesante aun, la posibilidad de liberar el juego mismo como posibilidad de un pensamiento atento al régimen de la vida. Es importante recordar que la crítica de Huizinga a Carl Schmitt en Homo Ludens se inscribe, en efecto, desde el problema de la seriedad como instancia por cual la guerra llega al camino de la forma. En cambio, la risa es en tanto tal, es siempre pulsión que interrumpe el lenguaje, el brillo expresivo del singular como compensación de su naturaleza insondable (Plessner).

Pareciera que en una época como la nuestra la risa y el espectáculo está en todos lados. Sin embargo, estamos lejos de la verdad. Aquí habría que diferenciar entre entretenimiento y la pulsión irreductible de lo cómico y de la risa. Una risa que puede ser no menos trágica, pero siempre próxima a la pulsión de muerte. Como lo pudo intuir Lezama Lima en “Oda a Julian del Casal”: “alcanzaste a morir muerto de risa. […] ansias de aniquilarme sólo siento, fue tapado por la risa como una lava”. Lo cómico también puede arrasar, destituir.