divine

Ethics and chorâ. by Gerardo Muñoz


A few years ago, in a book I edited on the thought of Giorgio Agamben, I tried to suggest that his work was both an archeology of politics in the wake of the closure of metaphysics and a reopening of the problem of existence. Now it seems to me that this formulation did not go deep enough, insofar as I remained silent about about existence was inscribed into a problematic field of reflection. Agamben has continued writing many other books in recent years, and in reading them I have come to think that the question of existence is intimately tied to the problem of “ethics”, which continues to be underdeveloped in his philosophical writings, but then again probably all ethics is always underwritten, oblique, and fundamentally lacking an essence. As Agamben states in La comunità che viene (1990): “….the point of departure of any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biopolitical destiny…This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance…no ethical experience would be possible – there would be only tasks to be done” [1]. 

It is obvious that ethics is unequal to morality, and here Agamben implicitly (later it will become also explicit in his opuscule L’avventura) is taking a distance from the Goethean conflation of ethos into a substrate of nature in the Aristotelian tradition [2]. But in the 1990 essay, Agamben is still considering and grappling with “ethics” from a vantage point that I would call a high-level of generality that can only connect to the conceptual exploration of potentiality and potentiality with an unequal valence, still searching for its ground as it were. In more recent books, it has become evident that Agamben’s thinking on ethics achieves a new precision. It does not mean that it modifies or alters his conviction of the untamable and unprogrammatic potentiality of ethics against morality and nihilism, but it does put it in the specific light the terrain of language. I am thinking of this moment in Filosofia prima Filosofia ultima (2023), where he writes the following:

“What corresponds to is not a limit dimension of signification [“that which is said”], not even in the mystical form of a negation or a dark night, but an experience absolutely heterogeneous to that: not a logic but an ethics; not a logos but an ethics or a form of life. In other words, ethics is first and foremost the experience that reveals itself when we dwell in a fully nonintentional language. Far from being mute and ineffable, it is the speech we wrong when language frees itself from its suppositional pretension and address itself not as an object of a metalanguage but as the rhythm and scansion of a doing, a poesis” [3] 

In no other book has a view on ethics come forth with the same force and eloquence. Although, clearly, the passage is drenched in negative conditions («not mystical, not a logic, not a logos»), the thinker also advances towards a par construens orientation that allows him to push for a different route from the relationship of ethics and language arrested in two important paradigms of Western thought: that of the mystical ineffable experience, and that of Wittgestein’s suggestion in his 1929 lecture that the ethical question runs into the “boundaries of language” in its attempt to go beyond the world [4].

The mystical experience of the “dark night” – and which Agamben seems to be recapitulating here after early essay on this very question in an edition of San Juan De la Cruz’s poetry translated in Italian – is also, in the words of Gustav Landauer’s Skepsis und Mystik (1903), the immaterial symbol of what cannot be discussed any further [5]. And in the early essay on De la Cruz’s mystic poetry, Agamben positioned himself against the elevation of dichtung as an autonomous sphere of the language’s modern wreckage into discourse and rhetoric. In both conceptions, Agamben seems to suggest, the negative lack in language seems to hold back the event of language that is nothing more than the “sayable”. And this sayable is the non-articulated, and thus in suspended judgement before the world (although not beyond it) in the opening of the voice securing its own appearance without remainder or negative threshold of substantial lack.

There is something to be said about this ex-position in Agamben’s types of the ethical life in recent books; mainly, Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin, and the formless peasantry of the Rabelaisian world. Is not common to all them, precisely, an experience of the taking place of language that, far from being divorced from the world, is able to makes its own chorā within the world? As we read in Il corpo della lingua 2024): “… is because there is no world, but always and constantly leaping worlds within worlds that sink into each other in a star-crossed blazon, which is the same sensitivity of God as a living and thinking being” [6].

The refinement around the question of ethics also illuminates the moment in L’uso dei corpi (2014) where Agamben, following French linguist Michel Bréal, attempts to secure the modal status of the “ethos” as a creative non-relation (and non-naturalist) of being, which is not only a matter of “suspension of a work of end”, but more positively, a dwelling in non-intententional use of language [7]. And is not this, precisely, the language of Persuasion (Peitho) in which the human touches the divine, an eternal life of speech that relates, in an angular manner, to Karl Barth’s suum cuique’ solace between life and death, happiness and pain? It is an open and intriguing question. The pure taking place of every thing – as God is, in fact, in all things – is the positive ethics of the chorā in which nothing is presupposed, and yet its ek-tasis never perturbes what, in fact, takes place in language.

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Notes 

1. Giorgio Agamben. La comunità che viene (Einaudi, 1990). 

2. Giorgio Agamben. L’avventura (nottetempo, 2015), 11-12. 

3. Giorgio Agamben. Filosofia prima filosofia ultima (Einaudi, 2023), 74.

4. Ludwig Wittgestein. Lecture on Ethics (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 119. 

5. Giorgio Agamben. “La ‘notte oscura’ di San Juan de la Cruz”, in Poesie (Einaudi, 1974), v-xiii.

6. Giorgio Agamben. Il corpo della lingua (Einaudi, 2024), 59.

7. Giorgio Agamben. L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014), 314.

The face of pain. by Gerardo Muñoz

One is always struck by the pictorial intensity of Massacio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” fresco (1425) at Santa Maria del Carmine Chapel. It has something to do with the unbounded expressivity swirled by an acoustic of lamentation that springs from both faces at once. The nakedness in movement only comes second. If it is right to call it ‘modern’ is precisely because of its polarity  between movement and paralysis, light and shadow, the formation of the lines delineating the bodies and the free-style strokes that carry Massacio’s picture to a strict and unsurpassed balance. It is a picture of the gathering of  lamentation and pain, which confirms Ernesto de Martino’s intuition that in the ritual of mourning weeping and crying is also accompanied by an act of self-defacement, such as covering the face or bring the face as close as possible to the lower body position. Adam’s pain is reinforced by the hand that covers and pulls the face downwards, almost making it disappear. In a way, his walkout of Paradise is already the stroll of a nobody. 

There is perhaps an intimate relationship between defacement and pain. In his short gloss on this work, Robert Longhi notes that the source of strength of Massacio’s work is given by the intensity of light that bathes the bodies of Adam and Eve in its purest naked form [1]. This total exposition is the cause of sin that, as a great historian of religion has brought to our attention, presupposes the entire carnalization of both body and soul after being thrown into the soteriological world of the living [2]. From now on, human life vested in pain means paying the price of the destruction of the soul for the protected  and preventive set up in the world. 

The sinful life – a life that will have to be chosen but punished justly – entails the consummation of pain as the central tonality of post-felix culpa existence. In other words, it is not that life is shameful because it has been dispossessed (or because it recognizes itself possessed); it is dispossessed because it can no longer look at the world outside the blinding light of programmed obsolescence towards death without transcendence. And the liquidation of transcendence means that human beings become faceless entities in a world that will forever become unfathomable. 

In our days – a present marked by absolute secularization of ancient religious somatic religiosity and magical traces – the phenomenon of defacement and the faceless far from disappearing is all over the world around us. The ritualistic mask which provided transcendence to the living presence of the divine gods has now become a symbol of social shame self-imposed by arbitrary and ever-increasing moral mandates. In a sense, we have not yet left the path initiated in Massacio’s Adam and Eve fresco, and who knows if we’ll ever exit it in the ongoing destruction of the human species. We do know, however, that any meaningful change of the current state of things can only take place starting at the divine surface of the face, as Carlo Levi so eloquently understood it in the postwar years: 

“Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. If we go through the streets and compare the faces we see with our memory of them, we won’t recognize persons any more. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world”. [3]





Notes 
1. Roberto Longhi. Breve pero auténtica historia de la pintura italiana (Machado Libros, 2023), 114.
2. Paula Fredriksen. Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 116.
3. Carlo Levi. La doppia notte dei tigli (Einaudi, 1959), 109.

The felicitous water carrier. By Gerardo Muñoz

There is something vessel-like in communication, and the need to keep it alive and to give it consistency and texture; to prolong it in both time and space. If it is true that ‘empty chatter’ is the erasure of the possibility of making in language, then communication is not just a practice of translation and legibility, but of passing of an experience, however impossible and tenuous that could be. This passing on through communication is embodied in the old figure of the portatori d’acqua or the aguador that famously appears in early modern Spain. The aguador is a figure of stagnation that sustains life, even if he is (or precisely due to this very fact) an iconic fact of social indigence.

One can easily recall Diego Velázquez’s “El aguador de Sevilla” (1618) with his ragged clothes and noble stance in the somber bodegón picture. V. S. Pritchett was up to something when he claimed that to ‘know a people’ is to know its poor. And that poverty is, first and foremost, a poverty in temper and restraint. What does it mean to communicate in the temper of poverty? This seems to me the question at the heart of Velázquez’s exemplary aguador. What is cherished in the aguador’s concrete labor (carrying and bringing water) is a transcendental relation that retains the need of life.

In a sense, there is no surprise as to why the aguador has disappeared in the due course of long and agonic historical development. If the essence of civilization is appropriation and growth, accumulation and production, then it is to see how the impoverished water carrier is meant to disappear. Already in the Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Lázaro’s inverse transfigural condition into a social subject takes place by abandoning his short-lived condition of aguador, which is hyperbolic of the organization of the social stagnation. It is clear that Lázaro’s picaresque attitude of outsourcing the nascent commercial society of good and services – embedded in the production of criminality and banditry – is a way to overcome the original indigence of the aguador, whose sanctity must be amended through the mimetic process of autonomous secularization and the rise of the metropolis. 

Thus, the eclipse of the figure of the water carrier coincides historically with the fall of the contact of languages and experiences between human beings. This might be why in the civilizational peak of the metropolitan organization of the world, the poverty of experience refracted by the force of alienated objectivity becomes a problem for sewage engineers in the goal of the reproduction of life. Vargas Vilas’ provocative definition of the “social” as a machine of the production of excrement should be understood as an scatological image of what it means to live in a world without aguadores. 

And this why everytime that a water pitch is brought to a table an oblique and momentary happiness overtake us beyond the biological need of human thirst. To this end, Isabel Quintanilla’s Duralex water glass painting (1969) encapsulates something so divine and unfathomable; as if, in the suspension of words or stories, the resurrection of the water carrier is brought back to the sharp appearance of things.