distance

Breathing in the pain of the world. On Paz López’s Pánico y Ternura (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Paz López’s Pánico y Ternura (2026) opens with an analogy between life and school that immediately places us in attention to her writing: “Entramos a la vida como entra un niño a la escuela: mirando hacia atrás, con los ojos llorosos buscando la mano de quien hace un rato nos había variado el pelo, la nariz, las rodillas heridas, los diminutos labios” (López 14). Although the synecdoche (“la mano”) does not reveal to whom it belongs, in a way the mother is spectrally present, a figure overtly present in Paz’s writing. We enter life in the wake of separation and caesura, and that is the site of the original wound that will lead to all sorts of civilizational and mimetic compulsions that unfortunately we know too well. And yet, López does not say we enter the “law” (although this is also presupposed of course), but rather we enter school. Our civilization has slandered and tainted the notion of “schooling” and “school” to such an extent that we have entirely forgotten the fact that school is schola; that is, time of rest and interruption, “free time”, a lagging duration of contemplation of language and being, and of being in language. And if the notion of “school” is under ruthless attack in our present by an infantry of pedagogues and technicians, it is mainly due to the fact that what is being threatened is the very possibility of a form of life. Of course, our epoch is one in which the chatter of “life” is continuous and intoxicating, but the form of life is something altogether different: it entails to inhabit a space of a convergent and planar movement between language and world. 

This is one of the regions that opens in López’s book; one out of many, allow me to follow it. As López says toward the end of the essay: “…cada vez que hay un corte tenemos la posibilidad de inventar una nueva lengua, de poner de movimiento el mundo” (López 128). It would be too convenient to follow up this claim and say that this is precisely what Paz López does in her writing; clearing language in order for a tonos or a vibration of the voice to unearth tropes that have been traced almost at the level of the flesh. This is something to this autographic practice that moves gently without fetishing the body and its materiality. Ultimately, a body is always more than surface. I want to retain from López’s scene of writing a responsive form of thought that in its inconspicuous relation to writing it refrains from the certitude of both philosophy and the letter. López’s search could perhaps be one of “tanteo”, a beautiful Spanish verb that refers to the hand that seeks and reaches out for something in space, and in my memory it immediately recalls some short stories of Carmen Martín Gaite’s fiction where this gesture figures in a cinematic fashion. Hence, for López ‘tanteo’ is to refuse the hell of a world of acrimonious security and confirmations that discards the inexorable presence of doubts and fissures (López 39). But the hand that seeks is also not a pure gesture in the void; it is one that asymptotically discloses an erotic mediation with the passing world without ever abandoning it; yet unequivocally assertive in the lamentation of the state of the world (López 56). 

In other words, because we can seek (here López is enrolled in the school of Hölderlin), there is no end to the world now configured as a fragile fishing net of relations, unsaid words, glances, and incommensurable distances that make up, without exhausting it, the spectacle of life. Not “this life”, of course. For López, the brutality of our times (I am less prudent and I will say ‘onto-theology’) is precisely the general concerted opinion that we are all owners of our own little and mediocre lives, the last avatar of a self-serving will to power. Rather, for López life is always elsewhere, and this is why the “escape” or “exile” from oneself is not a place of arrival or destiny, but precisely the disposition that is always traversing every relation and every touch between bodies and souls (López 65). We are creatures of the outside, and by extension, only the cohabitation of the outside, can redeem the pain of the original laceration, as in the first image of the infant walking his path to school with his eyes turned. This is not a messianic or monastic retreat, it does not depend on the parousia, but rather one of poetic dwelling in the spaces that are both familiar and strange. It is only in them (through them) that we can only cultivate through the garden of our language. López’s anti-messianic orientation, devoid of the fiction of future time and its anxieties, is proportionally a prose of hanging spaces, of curvatures of language that affects the reader deeply without ever renouncing to the beauty that thinking that defies being brutalized through the crushing weight of technical terms or philosophical concepts. 

In this sense, López’s writing is already an autographic writing at the threshold of onto-theology convinced that only style through the resources of the voice is the path that mitigates between poetry and philosophy, painting and memory, experiences and the unlived. López’s prose, if anything, is a lot about “gathering” through the tenderness; a contact where image and eros become the medium of life: “No es eso también la ternura, una forma de “recortar nuevos espacios en el vacío informa del exterior y conquistarlos a la medida de la vida (Claudio Magris)?” (López 94). To gather and to cut through the spaces: this is the highest task of the ethics of a form of life that requires a new theology of the sensible. Theology can be taken as a strange word in López’s lexicon, and I do not think that it appears even once in Pánico y Ternura. And yet, López’s proposal is completely theological if we take the theos as the highest and most beautiful light that can nominally allow for depth through the analogy of things in the net of the world. Hence, the importance of the sighting to the inner most depth in some moments of López’s writing, such as when she ponders on the fact that every time that she plunges eyes on a minuscule element or figure of the world, she senses that “se revela el elemento bestial que se enceuntra en el centro de nuestro mundo, como si la mirada fuera un cordon umbilical….amarrados todavia al vientre brumoso del origen” (López 121). And theology is not just the highest, but also the science of the first things: through the piercing expression of our senses, we elevate ourselves not with some revealed transcendence, but with the proximity with the things that have found us. 

And yet we have been automatized – this is the sensible devastation that Pánico y Ternura is responding to without ever taking a political stance, because politics is thoroughly insufficient – to see every-thing, and every being at all times; all entities realized in the feast of interchangeability and availability. The heliotropic force of modernity now truly blinds and burns our skin, which means that no access to the solar totality of social existence can guarantee anything except continuous conflagration and commanded muteness. We cannot but feel “panic” in this current predicament López is completely right. Thus, we must find the flickering light and flames elsewhere, such as in the lamp of a dark night that can illuminate the page of a book that keeps us in attention without any real purpose. Nabokov’s suggestion comes to mind: in the lamp of our study, we reject the nihilist demands of the cacophonous social world. Paz López has given us a delicious essay to read under this tenuous light. It is a present memory of an abode that keeps the secret of secrets, a resting place of the soul where still some melody is heard.

At the threshold. By Gerardo Muñoz

Just a few days ago there was an esoteric exchange between Giorgio Agamben and Alberto Moreiras on the difficulty of the ‘other beginning’ and the ‘via di uscita’, a propos of a recent meeting on desecularization and theology that took place in Granada, Spain. The notion has been in the air for some time now, since two years ago this was the central problem in a 2024 meeting in Berlin. That the exchange was esoteric is not in question, since it presupposes undertaking the conditions of the conversation and papers of the meeting as well as multiple books from both Moreiras and Agamben, and I do not think that the nuances have been taken into consideration. But it must be noted that there is an exoteric dimension to the contention as well: Giorgio Agamben has favored the ‘via di usicita’ in different figures (mainly Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin; and we know that Agamben’s overbeckian urgeschichte is a clear cut rejection of an epochal beginning); and, from his end, Alberto Moreiras has also thematized the other beginning of thought and aleotropic excess in his most recent Tiempo Roto (2025), which cuts through Heidegger’s thought, and thus not limited to what is understood as heideggerianism. I want to reject the idea that these two notions – ‘via di uscita and other beginning – are just two forking paths in postheideggerianism, as complicated as it is to go beyond Heidegger’s end of Western metaphysics. And I think – and in fact I am convinced- that both Agamben and Moreiras are soliciting something that radically escapes Heidegger’s thought even when it emanates from it; a bit like what Derrida says that the chôra escapes the categorial order of Plato even though it emerges from the Timeus.

There is no doubt that at stake is a breakthrough in thought. Of course, stating this puts a finger into something fundamental; but, alas, the devil is always in the details. I am in no position to unravel the implications of the two options – new beginning and via of exodus – and to that extent I am still taken by Moreiras’ interpellation in the first day of the meeting about my own position regarding the new beginning, which I am in no way ready to respond. Of course, Nicolas Poussin comes to mind (I cite from memory his epistolary words to Chantelou): “I am in the profession of mute things”. A claim of silence that in no way refrains from language and writing. Yes, I am no painter, although I am interested in painting and what painting can offer and donate to thought and philosophy. And we live in an epoch at the end of painting, and yet painting outlives everything as in a metaphysical remnant, as Kurt Badt reminds us in his great work on Cézanne.

Giorgio Agamben notes in his little Il tempo del pensiero (2023) how Heideger declared his Le Thor seminared that he always thought that Cézanne was the other figure of the tradition that resembled his own path. It is a curious analogy to a painter and the painterly praxis in the age of technological subsumption. Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, since I am working on a small book on the communication between painting and thought, and I want to understand what painting has to offer.

As a preliminary response to the difficulty that emerged in the ‘new beginning’, I am left wondering if the threshold is an intermediary space to arrest the jump beyond nihilism, which is ultimately what is at stake. This has been my way- I am all for changing that – of reading Agamben’s work: to remain at the threshold in order not to force the overcoming of nihilism, even if that anti-nihilism takes the force of antiphilosophy or thought of the unthinkable (Moreiras). Can thought breathe from the rest and imperturable dwelling in the threshold, if understood as mediated by the hand and the eye at a distance? This is for me the problem of painting as the last activity at the end of metaphysics – a theological remnant that intercepts the reduction of a historical cosmos. A duration that escapes the regime of the ontic but that does not dare to point to transcendence nor does it accept the inevitability of anthropological struggle. Yet, duration is the condition of breathing in a landscape: if we face it, is there even the need to begin or retreat? 

On techne conversationis. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a wonderful poem titled “Midston House”, where the now forgotten American poet David Schubert defines the poetic task as the possibility of freeing a path through conversation capable of transposing both experience and language. The verses, also quoted in John Ashbery’s lectures on “minor poetic traditions”, taking the form of the imperative read as follow: “What is needed is a technique of conversation / but not the limited vocabulary of our experience, the surface irritations which pile up, accumulate a city, – but the expression, metamorphosed, of what they are the metaphor of– and their conversion into light” [1]. This technique of conversation and the living words should not be understood as a mere transposition or vehicle for the grounding of meaning that makes exchange possible; rather it is first and foremost an ethical mode rooted in experience that can enact the clearing, between sense and silence in order for something to appear. What emerges from the cloud of the phenomena is not the blinding light of truth; what is true can only be taken as the effortless coming in what has been cleared. This is why for Schubert the task of poetic speech is concerned with coming into “light” not as an exclusive effect of language, but as the distance between language and sensation that sparks the soul momentarily, to use an eckhartian figure. 

Conversation allows for the simplification between things through a detachment in a path where the possible supersedes that of the deficiencies and needs. This fleeting state of serenity is confirmed in further verses when Schubert endorses the possibility of the eternal place of concordia: “To a place where life is simple and decent, not too demanding …That man, whose handshake was happiness” [2]. This is not a sublimated state of bliss in a subject, but the crossing over, an event, which is usually at hand distance and yet ungraspable. In this way, it becomes pertinent to assume that what Shubert mysteriously solicits as a “technique of conversation” nourished in experience but always as excess to it,  never comes to fulfill the autonomy of poetry and life, corrupted by the exclusionary modalities of rhetorical dispensation.

But the technique of conversation is the coming of the poetic at the end of its tradition; a poeticity completely aligned with Osip Mandelstam’s revocation of the value of  “poetic work” in order to recover, as the only possibility of presence, the tension that the voice lends to the contemplation of thought. In his short poetological statement, Schubert seemed to have grasped this problem when writing that “this rather unimportant novelty [poetry] is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight” [3]. The poetic task of conversation both proceeds and exceeds life, appearing as a form of nepsis, a workable vigilance of interiority, that run through every ethical intensity. And if the poetic conversation takes the form of light, it is because its verbal illumination is far from announcing a new world; it is merely the witness to the sensation in thought that has cleared a site for cohabitation.

If the task is to measure up to a techne conversationis of language it is because the poetic tradition guarded by the age of the poet is no longer viable, since it has run astray without any possibility of legitimate restitution. In her new biography of Paul Celan, Anna Arno comments that in the early years, in a poem titled “The Arrows of Artemis”, the poet considered the Arcadian topos with great skepticism in the wake of catastrophe and historical barbarism: “….not ponder that Artemis’ arrow still lurks in the forest and in the end will strike him?” [For Celan] mythical lands provided no shelter against the shockwaves of history. Celan was declaring a new path” [4]. What is the essence of this new path? Of course, it is the path of the meridian, which in its asymptotic drift towards conversation and alterity shatters the illusion of the self-sufficient and embellished order of discourse, whether as inflationary rhetoric or as absolute muteness atrophied by delegated systems of communication. The poetic word, on the contrary, is the moment when persuasion looks at the face of the homelessness for those “who speaks truly, who speaks the shade” [5]. It is in this capitulated assortment of clearing and shadows where one can locate what Schubert called the ‘fragment of life’.

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Notes 

1. David Schubert. Works and Days (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1984), 56. 

2. Ibid., 57.

3. Ibid., “A Short Essay on Poetry”, 2.

4. Anna Arno. Paul Celan: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2026), 61. 

5. Ibid., 161. 

Pascal against the empire of opinion. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the Newtonian thematization of the limit afterall). In particular gloss 554 strikes a tenor for our current epoch: “Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes an opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say that there is nothing fine about it” [1]. In the world after the fall, the intramundane system of felix culpa, is already one of dual power.

In many respects, this image is stronger than that of nihilism as the oblivion of walking upwards gazing at the abyss, because it connects the social pressure of “opinion” to that of the common ground that makes out of blindness the legitimacy of vacuous enlightenment. In the very void that truth will carve out for authority, Pascal seems to imply that the imperium of opinion will reign as a dual power of administration and mediation with the world. This is why for Pascal, force without opinion is indocile; but opinion without force amounts to the persuasion of solitude of the last man in the earth. At the heart of the groundlessness of modern legitimacy there is the necessary organization of opinion or doxa that will regulate the community of the living and the dead because ultimately its end is to master the mystery of language in its inability to name. 

Of course, Pascal thought that language could overcome the fictive empire of opinion, which in its modern avatar of propaganda is meant to design apocalyptic tendencies towards self-destruction in the course of historical development. As a “properly speaking wholly animal”, the human can only dwell in a poetic region “entre-deux”, that is, between the abhorrent light and the infinite depth of darkness, where language endures through the symbol well beyond the experience of the fallen corruption of nature. As Lezama Lima reminds us in a short essay on the French thinker, the poetic region in Pascal is ultimately the experience of language as a mystery of creation that refuses to accept the post-mythic condition of nature and human boredom that will euthanize the use of linguistic creation [2]. Now it can be said that the intrusion of the infinite chatter of opinion takes place precisely in the logged forest of speech, which consolidates its rhetorical autonomy of language away from the possibility of distance and self-constrain of the sayable. The statecraft of rhetoric is the infrastructure of the reign of opinion, because here the draining of the depth of being is supplanted by alienated voluntary participation at the very ground of nothingness. Nihilism takes a decisive step forward when language can become any differential sign to communicate what has become impossible to be said outside the cubicle of the enthymeme.

Paraphrasing the ancient wisdom of Pindar’s famous opening verse in Fragment 169 (“Law, νόμος, the king of all”), Pascal assures us of the fragility of this imperium: “An empire based on opinion and imagination resigns for a time, and such an empire is mild and voluntary. That force reigns for ever. Thus opinion is like the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant” [3]. Is it possible to separate, nevertheless, the reign of opinion from that of force; and, secondly, the circulation of force as grounded in a fabric of language that has already descended into the empire of opinion without any trace? In a way, there is no modern politics without the presupposition of the autonomy of a field of opinion integrated into “rational control”, to use the expression of American political theorist Harvey Mansfield. And even if Carl Schmitt could state in his Constitutional Theory (1928) that no democratic secular state could effectively exist out without opinion as a diffused and disorganised form of acclamation, it is now completely obvious to us that the post-liberal state configuration, persists in a constant state of the fluctuation, compartmentalization, and archic steering of opinions. What survives the utter collapse of the category of political modernity is the flattening of language into “opinion” that provides standing to the epochal anomia. 

Following classical philologists we are tempted not to ignore that in the word anomia entails not just the suspension of legislated norms and positive commands, but also the decline of the distance between existence and the divine that in antiquity, in the age of Pindar, subsisted under the notion of eunomia as harmonious attunement of the very lived experience. In other words, the consolidation of opinion is a long historical effect of the erosion of distance and perspective  that restricts the capacity to “ascertain a spiritual excitement…and if worth anything, a language, a witness to reality” [4]. To bear witness in language is a poetic enactment that, at heart of its solitude, refuses the glacial ripples of the force of opinion vested in reality.

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Notes 

1. Blaise Pascal. Pensées (Penguin Books 1995),  192.

2. José Lezama Lima. “Pascal y la poesía”, in Obras Completas. Tomo II (Aguilar Editor, 1977), 564-565.

3. Blaise Pascal. Pensées (Penguin Books 1995), 566.

4. Pavel Florensky. “Reverse perspective” (1920), in Beyond Vision (Reaktion Books, 2002), 254. 

Aladdin’s lamp and world domination. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his 1982 novel Aladdin’s Problem (1982), Ernst Jünger defined planetary domination through the actualization of the trope of Aladdin’s lamp. Whenever a symbol of this sort is used, we know that it always carries weight of ambivalence more than that of synthesis. The mythic lamp is a trope for magic and enduring power; of countering visibility and invisibility, but it is also made from a material that has been extracted from the Earth. In other words, raw materials are manipulated as a reservoir of energy that dispense the world of forms. In the most succinct moment of the novel, Jünger writes: “Aladdin’s lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay. The lamp guaranteed domination as far as the frontiers of the traveled world – from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming towards us titanically” [1]. Aladdin’s lamp is no longer a tool deployed by governments and armies, it is rather the autonomous commanding force that opens to human domination and technological catastrophe that generates calculable objectivity in the world. 

In his conversations with Julien Hervier, Jünger stated that the “problem of Aladdin” is not a political problem, but rather one that involves the administration of energy and intelligence that is already beyond our hands, because it has been set loose by ongoing compulsion necessary to meet the indexes of production and transference of technology [2]. Of course, energy defined the broad design of modernity as the necessary condition to amplify historical forms and mediations (and deform, since it was always dialectic) of worldly events and relations. One should only be reminded that in the beginning of the 1920s three major texts by European thinkers – I am thinking of Pavel Florensky, Carl Schmitt, and Aby Warburg – saw the necessity to allude to the settled hegemony of electricity as the defining feature of the dominion of the world. 

As Warburg understood it prophetically in his lecture on the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians: “But myths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world, create space of devotion and scope for reason which are destroyed by the instantaneous electrical contact – unless a disciplined humanity reintroduce the impediment of conscience” [3]. And it goes without saying that this “instantaneous electrical contact” has become so thoroughly engrained in human existence, that it is now clear that life on Earth, as advanced by the latest phase of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is no longer point to the destruction of space but of the total disruption of electricity and energy that exceeds any sensible contact. Electricity as the paradigm of artificial mediation can only liberate the spiritualization of ongoing decline. 

It is no historical accident that empires and nations have always been driven by the accumulation of energy, although at its historical exhaustion, there is no longer a veneer of development and production between energy and empire, but only a unified empire of energy in a lamp that quenches and overruns itself towards extinction. This means that what defines the darkness of our times is neither disorientation nor political violence (although there is much of that too), but the blinding darkness of a translucent expropriation of the world of the living and the dead. It is through this assumption that Jünger makes the last business of the epoch of Aladdin – extractive energy as domination of objects and objecthood between worlds – as a large necropolis called Terrestra, financed by a banker named Jersson, where there is no longer any need for the liturgy or cults proper to myths, but naked exchange between gold and the material corpse that suppresses, via technological titanism, any possible relations to the irreducible. It remains to be thought whether the moment when the lamp goes off in the drained excess of its energy will also lead to the end of this world.

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Notes 

1. Ernst Jünger. Aladdin’s Problem (Marsilio Publishers, 1992), 118. 

2. Julien Hervier. Conversaciones con Ernst Jünger (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 100.

3. Aby Warburg. “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual”, Journal of Warburg Institute, V.2, April 1939, 292.

The vanishing horse. On Federico Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Federico Galende’s most recent essay El mínimo animal (ediciones metales pesados, 2025) is freestyle mediation on the singular animal that is the horse. When we say ‘horse’ we immediately dispense a bulky package: it is Pech Merle cave paintings and Franz Marc; it is Kafka’s parable of the racing red Indian, the agonizing horse in Picasso’s Guernica, as well as Juan José Saer’s mutilated horses in Nadie Nada Nunca (1980). Galende’s tiny mare, however, is first and foremost a memory of his childhood in the green grasslands of Córdoda that, we are told, had a big white spot in her muzzle. The first pages are spectacularly bucolic in a sedative language that retrieves a descriptive pollination of events and figures. But immediately the book gains depth and surprising detours. Galende notes that the relationship between humans and the horse differents slightly from that of pets, not as a question of scale, but primarily as complicity in language that shares the solitude between species: “…porque la del animal es una compania ofrecido a la soledad de lo humano en cuanto especie” (Galende 23). Avoiding the humanist temptation that makes the animal into a fantasy of the human, Galende’s situates the horse an experience beyond language. Is not this common solitude – that a few pages before Galende refers just in passing as ‘nocturnal communism’, in an esoteric allusion to his book on the cinema of Akis Kaurimakis – what has been usurped by the total domestication of species in a world that walks towards extinction? Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025) is an exercise in retrieving this innocence abode of man and animal in their reciprocal, and yet intransigent, mutation between worlds.

As a painterly writer, Galende is in full awareness that he must first interrupt the heraldic density of this animal. Because we know that the horse is an emblem of St. Paul’s way Damascus as much as it is one of modernity’s energy and mobilization. Galende is quite aware of it: the notion of “horse power” registers the unity of measurement of potential power for engines and motors. And just like the steamboat and gaslight, the horse stands a figure that unleashed a civilization defined by development and domestication of the world. The horse entered history through the main door of modern spiritualization (Galende does not elaborate on Napoleon’s famous horseback riding entrance in Germany, avoiding an image that is perhaps too obvious, already “manoseada”), allowing for social stabilization and homogenous time; the arrow of progress that underpins subjective historical consciousness. Galende writes, for instance: “De ser una masa abstracta que rodea la tierra, el espacio se convertía en una línea delgada, con la historia estirando un hilo la materia cósmica de la simultaneidad. Ahora, gracias al caballo, se tenía acceso a los lugares más retirados, solo que a causa de la velocidad de se los pasaba por alto de modo que lo que hasta allí había reinado de la imaginación comenzó a ser parte de lo accesorio, de lo circunstancial” (Galende 82). 

The unification of the planet under the nomoi of depredation would not have been possible without the domestication of the horse to coerce the acceleration of time as the index over space. As a cypher of time, the horse started to pop up everywhere progress made a violent incursion. This is perhaps why Galende, in a poetic style that seeks no conceptual scaffolding for self-assertion, claims that in its mystery the horse is not embedded in an ideal of freedom – which will be the freedom already fallen prey to the tribulations of civilization and the political world – as being in the world as such, without the pretensions of overcoming it; remaining a witness to permanent discontent in the open distance of some meadows (Galende 61). Can a notion of freedom be rethought from the figure of the horse at the end of history? Galende does not provide an answer, and his muteness is an attempt to resist transforming the horse into an apodictic symbolon of human anthropology transpiring meaning where there is none. The horse – and perhaps all animals are – stands for muteness and companionship without the burden of proof.

Perhaps the ultimate meaning in El mínimo animal (2025) can only be grasped in those silences, in what remains unthought and unsaid, which is another way of saying that Galende has provided the essay not only of form but of a soul. All things considered, the mystery of horse is a passing memory of the modern: speed, total mobilization, energy dispensation, the unity of a compact and legible world. What remains of the horse after the watershed of modern times; literally its exhaustion? Ultimately, the horse as species recalls the “specio”, which means to see, and to have the visibility for discernment; to be able to see with a sensible eye that blushes at the world before it crumbles into despair and conflagration at the threshold of the Anthropocene. And in many ways we are already there. Galende’s musings speak to an abundance trimmed by a trotting horse that only reappears in a poetizing that is capable of thinking and loving what has passed, like the epoch of horses. For Galende the horse is thus always sub specie aeternitatis. Towards the end of the book, and condensing Gottfried Benn’s argument on style as ranking higher than truth, Galende makes an open apology for appearance, that is rigorously eternal because it is concrete and unforgettable (Galende 91). 

Of course, the same can be said of Galende’s serpentine, courteous light prose – like a horse, that is, “una elegancia contenida” – that refuses the monumental and sterile retrievals of sedimented and dusty knowledge on the horse or any other animal (Galende 43). In this sense, Galende’s horse differs fundamentally from Blumenberg’s lion in its refusal to make of the species an anthropological metaphor, that is, a mere creed for the human bonum commune to stabilize social reality. Departing from the offerings of a meandering memory, Galende’s tiny animal is a vanishing horse that interrogates what it means to inhabit the space of non-relation that opens up when the modern scheme based on production, progress, and energy comes a halt. It is this “nothingness” what the vanishing horse reveals beyond itself, as Galende writes:

“Retirándose, el caballo le estaba advirtiendo a todo el siglo XX que la historia de retira con ellos y el mundo también, y todo lo que siguio 4 después de que por inercia ese siglo hiciera desfilar frente a sus narices las profecías más disparatadas…Pero no esperar nada no significa estar consciente de no esperar; puede ser al revés, que la nada sea una intersección invisible entre un sinfín de velocidades insustanciales. La aceleración de la vida – para decir lo con una expresión manoseada -…sirve para compensar este vacío que dura…” (Galende 87). 

In the stretched historicity of boredom and nothingness, memory awaits and assaults like an incoming galloping horse. And when Galende speaks of the “nothingness” that mediates between the temporalities of human action he is indexing the fabric of life; since authentic life only happens, as Don Delillo claims at the opening lines of Point Omega (2011) not when words have been spoken or inventions patented, but in the self-awareness of microscopic fragments of facticity. It is at this moment, when history unravels as a farcical script of putative norms of human action, and imagination can begin to gather species outside itself; in this way, perhaps once and for all, leaving behind the atrophies of nihilism already deposited in a language of strange instruments and recyclable data.

Just like Marguerite Duras’ Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), where the Etruscan sculpture of a winged horse fails to enter the plot of a community of friends at a beach-town; Galende’s horse also disappears in the concluding pages of the book. In fact, there are two disappearances: first, the equestrian statue of Baquedano in Plaza Italia after the October social revolt of 2019; and, more importantly, that of his childhood mare in the hills of Córdoba. The vanishing horse at the limit of prose recalls the reality of the living for which there is no tropology: “…nunca conocí a ese ser, así como no es possible – nunca jamás – conocer a los seres ni tampoco el fin de ninguna historia” (Galende 110). As the horse makes his exit, we can only be sure that life has taken place elsewhere. Only because it has been transfigured in thought, Galende is able to seize a glimpse of it; a glimpse that is imperceptible and diluted before vanishing forever.

The wreckage of design. On Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Only in rare occasions the operation of thinking finds angular or lateral points of escape. This is the gesture that characterizes Alejandra Castillo’s theoretical writing, and is particularly bright in her most recent book Antropoceno como fin de diseño (La Cebra, 2025). The zigzagging entry is an intuition that is also a guiding thread: the force of real subsumption of capitalist domination depends on the operation of design. Of course, in design one hears not only blueprint and form, but also designation, and thus the specular regime of visibility, orderability, quantification. It is the world of physiocratic forestry. In fact, Castillo’s succinct definition of the metapolitical condition of design is offered to the reader at the entrance: “Design is the figure that thinks always in advance (por adelantado) (Castillo 12). Design calculates and locates. It is through the operation of design that legibility becomes adequated to political representation so that the state can manage and attenuate the deployment of its forms and the circulations of relations of totality (Castillo 13). The design is what is common to the worker, the engineer, and the lawyer. This is why design for Castillo design is an efficacious nexus that connects the separation of objectivity and the life worlds. Understood in this sense, “design” is analogous to the enframing of the world that intensifies in the age of technology and rhetoric. But in the watershed of the end of modernity, the hegemony of design collapses, while it becomes a temporal “self-design” submerged in all spheres of expressive enactments. 

The end of the second vector of the zigzag outlined in the essay is found precisely at this conjuncture: the anthropocene brings the humanist projections and design to a final wreckage. This is means that capitalist form is not formless because it has managed to subsume the time of life as exception to labour; time is a wreckage because design no longer coincides with the world of forms, as it has temporalized experience into total transparency without reminder. For Castillo this means that in the anthropocene there is no longer “struggle for visibility”, as everything has been rendered exposed and hollow; de-substantialized in the very fabric of subjectivity (in the early millennium some called this new hyperbolic figure the Bloom). Implicitly in Castillo’s writing is the assumption that the mediation between politics and design has been severed, and the new securitarian imperium can only immunize itself against the very site that in modern times granted its legitimacy (civil society, constituent power) (Castillo 37). 

The end of design means the absolutization of design, a new carceral imperative for adaptation that makes any claim to subjectivity an endorsement of the prison of the ego. To live in a post-designed unworldly condition means not only to come face to face with the homogenous space of cultural exchange into image; it is also a new imperative that requires that “you must submit, without knowing to what; subject to what is the case anyway, and which, as a reflex to its power and commonsense, everyone believes anyway” [1]. The end of design paves the way for new plastic forms of domination towards an integral planetary unity. 

Bordiga claimed throughout his work that the democratic design was perhaps the best fitting system for the versatility of capitalist accumulation and relentless expansion. This is why in all the political cases that Castillo introduces in a text in a manner of a shadow play do not pretend to offer a new theory of ideology, but rather show how democratic design is a one-piece suit that fits all without any needs for “ideal types” to fix normativity and institutional arrangements. Indeed, there is no longer anything like an “extreme political right” – and this is just a tweak from Castillo’s vocabulary, who does insist on the term throughout the essay – but rightward figures of the political that desperately cling to any form to distract from the abyss of social legitimation. Ultimately, the ruling over this void will be  – in many ways already is – the continuation of war in the social fabric; and stasis will require new stealth development of technologies of containment that Palantir’s Alex Karp has called the new “lethal form”. This means that democratic design is not only expressively a system of sentencing to death; it is in virtue of the exchange of social forms, an inverted negation of human finitude. The point of despair would incite some to look again in the cabinet of forms; a knee-jerk reaction to the irruption of the Anthropocene against the total sum of possible designs. 

Of course, this is also what Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025) avoids at all costs. Towards the last pages of the book, Castillo calls for a transformative turn that departs from the body; a corporeal insurrection that, in refusing the rectilinear and heteronormative political corpus of the modern epoch (no coincidence that Hobbes was both the founder of the autonomy of civil as well as of the physics of the body of matter in space), is capable of responding to the call of the anthropocene in all of its profuse conflictivity. Castillo proposes the necessity to gravitate towards a “maximum distance” against the general design of orderability of public domination (Castillo 77). But this can only be understood as an incommensurable distance that dissolves the ontotheological separation of subject and object of the state of confinement.

The political constitution of a corpus appears as the promise of an exit from the temporalization of the post-auratic literalism that, according to Michel Fried, dominated the structure of the object-oriented work of art, as compensatory to the corrosion of political forms and presentist autonomy [2]. Castillo does not seek to revive a last gasp of auratic objectification, which amounts to the sleepwalking condition of the image world of mere survival. In soliciting a maximum distance to what is closest (in fact, a body), Castillo invites us, as both promise and commitment, to think at the end of nondependency – not the “independence” that carries the traces of the fictitious individuality- from the crutches of design to finally conquer another liberty beyond terror and prevention; a life imbricated in the nonbeing of place (ecology) with others.

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Notes 

1. Thedor W. Adorno. “The Cultural Industry: A Resumé”, in Without Model (Seagull Books, 2023), 58.

2. Michael Fried. “Art and Objecthood”, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172.

Pindar’s Fragment 180. by Gerardo Muñoz

Understanding what the ancient Greeks thought of sayability in language is no easy task, but in Pindar’s Fragment 180 we can confirm that the use of language must come to terms with the internal lacuna of silence. Pindar says as a way of recommendation: “Do not break out useless speech in front of everybody; there are times when the path of silence is most trustworthy, but lofty discourse holds the sting of domination” [1]. Although this fragment has been read as a form of “prudential speech”, it might be more interesting to read it as a form of the inception of the sublime in language, which Longinus, although not referring directly to the same fragment, inscribed it under the idea of being ‘tongueless’ or aglossīa, which like Ajax’s silence says significantly more in its restrain than from saying something directly. Language becomes useless – that is, it ceases to have any use with itself – if it becomes a tactic to diminish any given rhetorical order. It is no surprise that in our time the predominant use of language takes the form of a transaction through technical terms that has no use of its own. 

It has been shown that Pindar’s conception of language was not about representation, but rather about the voice or kompos that takes place whenever there is vibration or harmony in the collision or contact between two objects [2]. Of course, the truly originary collision in language is between the voice and the idea, where the cradle of language opens to its own poetic and ethical possibilities. Hence, if there is restraint and silence as constituent of language, it is because there is a rhythmic movement that accommodates without the intromission of an external force. Here, it is the well known definition of poetic creation that Pindar lays out in “Olympian 6”: “Upon my tongue I have the sensation of a clear-sounding whetstone, which I welcome as it comes over me with lovely streams of breath” [3]. What carries those streams of sounds?

The poet is not an independent creator with higher access to language; the poetic instance is only accessible to those who, in contact with inspiration, can sharpen their tongues to the use of one’s language. We are in language when we find ourselves in the direction of a “path of words” [4]. Thus, the contact of language is not with objects or entelechies of the visible world, it is first and foremost with the receiving movement of the voice as a “lovely streams of breath”. In this way, Pindar’s plea for silence is not to be understood as an active negation of “saying”, but of an internal lapse or suspension of language that allows the emergence of the truth of the voice. The absence of kompos turns language into an instrument that can only prepare and foment conflict and domination, seeking to overcome something that is ultimately captive of the common ground of an uninspired language. And this means that language without inspiration is not only a voice that has run astray from its rhythm, it is also a language that will only find war in its path. 

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Notes 

1. Píndaro. “Fragmento 180”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 410. 

2. Helga Kriegler. Untersuchungen zu den optischen und akustischen Daten der bacchylideischen Dichtung (Verlag Notring, 1969), 90.

3. Píndaro. “Olympian 6”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 90. 

4. Píndaro. “Olympian 1”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 90. 

Hypocrisy as last refuge. by Gerardo Muñoz

In an entry of Dopo Nietzsche (1974), Giorgio Colli states that after the overcoming of all values and taboos, the contending moral strife finds its highest value in hypocrisy. Colli goes on to say that “hypocrisy is the last bastion where moral forces have found their refuge” [1]. One can clearly see that for Colli hypocrisy as the highest value is quite distinct from morality, since it is the “refuge” where the contending moralities invest themselves in rhetorical encroachment. That hypocrisy has become – as Colli saw with clarity in the 1970s – the last alcove of humanity, means, for one thing, that the human species have ceased to have any faith in the language that they use, and that for this very reason there is only an estimation of rhetoric, procedure and technical terms abstracted from the sensible world. If understood as such, it would come to no surprise that the majority of public institutions in advanced societies are embracing, and for the most part promoting, the incorporation of Artificial Languages and Intelligence to organize the interactions of their lives. Ultimately, the order here is clear: it is not that new technological advances will lead to a rise in untruthfulness; rather, these instrumental mutations are a consequence of the deep hypocrisy that runs through the social bond.

In fact, one can only assume that Colli was pointing at something more profound and obscure in his gloss when he referred to hypocrisy as the last refuge, and in this sense he was pointing beyond Nietzsche. After all, Nietzsche understood hypocrisy as mimesis and appearance that if incorporated over a long period of time ceases to be hypocrisy to become real [2]. A series of good acts and deeds in the spirit of friendship makes a person benevolent. In the same way that Miguel de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno Martir through his public faith and habits, was a symbol of Catholic faith for all the believers of his tightly knit community in spite of his interior doubts (this is the Knight of Faith). Now, Colli is pointing to a second degree hypocrisy that is no longer explicated by mimicry, but by its dependence to an ethereal value that governs and justifies any set of given actions. The actions are no longer in relation to faith or non-faith, but are properly acts of “bad faith”, since they make belief captive to the justification of the highest moral value. This will be consistent with Nicola Chiaromonte’s description that the end of secularization is not an epoch lacking faith, but one that dwells in “bad faith”. 

And what is ultimately “bad faith”? It is the realm of hypocrisy that, due to its impossibility of communication, understands its mission waged on the petty negation of one value over another. It is a mutation of Goethe’s nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse into the sphere of prevailing forces. The civilizational stage of enlightened hypocrisy prepares the human being to renounce the use of language and unmediated appearance. This means that the triumph of the technoadministration of the world would not be possible without the alluring refuge of hypocrisy that conquers reality through the very means that renders inaccessible the real presence of the world. It is not that politics and politicians have become hypocritical; it is that politics can only subsist thanks to its refuge in hypocrisy. The hypocrite is the last figure that steers in unworldliness.  

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Notes 

1. Giorgio Colli. Dopo Nietzsche (Adelphi Edizioni, 1974), 50.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human (Cambridge U Press, 1996), 39-40.

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

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

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

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

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

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