eros

The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

The central question that “The Aleph” raises is as banal as difficult to answer: who is Beatriz Viterbo? For one, she is dead. Borges’ Leibnizian experiment with the infinite point of the universe is that even assuming that we account for all the possible predicates of this person we still cannot exhaust who lurks behind “Beatriz Viterbo”. In a way, Beatriz remains encrypted in a house soon to be demolished, remaining unattainable and mysterious in the passing of the world. As we know, there have been critics that have taken up the detective task to understand the significance of the name Beatriz Viterbo by probing the story’s dedication to Estela Canto, who later became the rightful owner of the original manuscript, and that connects to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of its cantiche structure as well as the figure of Beatrice [1]. However, as Giorgio Agamben once said regarding the Italian poet, it is utterly senseless to attempt to identify a subject behind Beatrice, since what is at stake in Dante’s poetics, perhaps of all poetics, is the experiment of language as an experience of love [2]. What the name Beatriz Viterbo enacts is no different. 

Indeed, in Borges’ Beatriz Viterbo this experience of love is one that fundamentally lacks images and predicates of this world; which means that love, if to be held as an intensity of the living, in the name harbors the region between life and death, between memory and forgetting. These distinctions are not oppositional, but rather an angular index that defines erotic intensity; and, as we know, the name is the supreme vehicle of the impropriety of oneself because it precedes it. As Borges writes in “The theologians” also included in The Aleph: “There are some that look for love in a woman in order to forget her; in order to cease thinking about her” [3]. The fundamental formlessness of love does not depend on neither images nor acts, but on the enduring vocative or song (canto) that shines forth in the open secret of the name. 

This is why the portrait of the deceased is insufficient for the narrator of the story. In a moment that is the clearest parallelism to the concatenation of “things seen” in the aleph, the name appears four times in repetition: “Beaitriz, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre…” [4]. If Osip Mandelstam once remarked that the “eye is an instrument of thought”, one could say that the the voice of the name is the instance where language and thought coincide without remainder; a convergence of Heaven and Earth, of the dead and the living in the grain of the voice. There are no static images of Viterbo because her mysterious life, the unlived life with the narrator, is precisely the missing image guarded by the name. In the basement, facing upwards to peek into the aleph, we are told that he, Borges, will be able to “establish a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz” (“podrás entablar un diálogo con todas la imágenes de Beatriz”). But what the aleph cannot yield is the missing image that is only the event of his irreducible linguistic contact proper to his memory. Once again Maldelstam: “The word, the name, is a psyche…does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten” [5]. But what is not forgotten is not that quality or that image of a person, but the enduring rustling of a name that recalls the oldest human experience: the mystery of the voice.

It might also be for this reason that Beatriz Viterbo recalls not just Dante’s divine and eternal Muse, but the world of the dead; the vetus in ‘Viterbo’, that is, the oldest or ‘most ancient’ life that dwells in the underworld, because its direct provenance is the archaic Etruscan civilization [6]. If Beatrice, as the trope of transcendence beyond the Earth has been a repeated object of literary interpretation, Viterbo as the vetus burial has rarely generated any interest (if the house of Viterbo is being demolished, this also means that in her proper name is the burial site at the end of remembrance). 

In the cadence of the name “Beatriz Viterbo” we can hear the transit between the living and the dead, the invisible and the present, the possible predications as well as the defaced; a work of oblivion in virtue of its own caducity. “Me trabajó otra vez el olvido”, writes Borges towards the end evoking the erosion of forgetting in the void of nonpresence: the working of eros pushes to the end, towards absolute oblivion through the very accruing of remembrance. Life is this immemorial that is encrypted, as if were, in a handful of names. 

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Notes 

1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges : A Literary Biography (Paragon House, 1988), 414.

2. Giorgio Agamben. “No amanece el cantor”, in En torno a la obra de José Ángel Valente (Alianza Editorial, 1996), 49.

3. Jorge Luis Borges. “Los teólogos”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 50.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El Aleph”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 189. 

5. Osip Mandelstam. “The Word and Culture” (1921), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1975, 531.

6. Adolfo Zavaroni. Etymological Dictionary of Etruscan Words (2024), 310.

The love of painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

There might very well be an internal affinity between painting and love that at some point it becomes indistinguishable. A painterly picture can become love unquenched for that which remains persistently fixed and unrealizable. In one of the short essay books of his Big Sur period, Henry Miller asked this very question of painting. For him panting had a wondering origin that crosses the hand, undoing what we can easily enact. The erotic dimension of painting, thus, has nothing to do with the image or figure of the beloved, but rather with a specular limitation staged in the ability to allow the unseen to be incorporated in the visible scheme of the world. Only if we are able to see – and by the same token, only if there we are facing an event of painting – can something like use can be liberated from the constraints of mimetic compulsion. Miller writes in To Paint is to Love Again (1960): 

“To paint is to love again. It is only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to a certain manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat or unpalatable unless it is our power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see .See into and around. Or, as John Marin, once put it – “art must show what goes on in the world” [1]. 

The place of painting for Miller is an imperturbable state that refuses to be fixated on objects, but in the invisible region (as in the figure of the chora) that allows for the thing in the world to be used. This is why Miller considered Japanese watercolor and prints an absolute primer of the pictorial: it taught him the appearance of worlds within the world, regionalizing the surroundings never logically stated unto itself, which in modernity it became the catastrophic horizon of autonomy towards its posterior liquidation. This is why Miller, very much like Carlo Levi, understood that the crisis of painting in the Western tradition ultimately signaled a general sense of social terror as a new phase of human desperation attenuated by the circulation of social fictions. 

At the height of the the closure of civilization, painting reemerged, if Kurt Badt’s axiom is correct, as the last metaphysical activity of human praxis. A metaphysical activity that holds on to the experience of belief in suspended appearance of originary anthropogenesis. For Miller, in painting as much as in love “one must be a true believer” [2]. And this assertion must be understood in the backdrop of Miller’s experiential retreat in the landscape of Big Sur: an experience away from the closure of American city life in research of a “feeling of aloness as spiritual achievement”, as a relation of oneself towards disclosure [3]. In this sense, the painter is a counter-social figure that, refusing to make stir in the world, turns to serenity, silence, and to the pressing contours of the unfathomable beyond any prefiguration. The believer in painting – who is a figure of belief in the desert, after the flight of the gods in the nocturnal vigil of history – is the thrust to the experience of things without barristers or shortcuts to what is revealed.

The age of automation in mid-century transformation of American industrial production serves as the historical backdrop of Miller’s indictment regarding the poverty and eventual disappearance of painting due to the autonomization of human praxis and the gigantic scale in spatial organization. Following Georges Duhamel’s prognosis in America: the menace (1931), he shared the intuition that the crisis of dexterity meant the impossibility of realizing painting, now situated beyond the grasp of human absorption [4]. A land without landscape that, as Adorno noted, bears no traces of the human hand. And this was seen already in the 1950s when the rise of abstract expressionism in North American announced not just the end of easel painting, but the funeral of the whole pictorial tradition. The barbarism of gigantic and unlimited Americanism would run counter to painting as a sensorial activity that embraced the vital limitations of its region. 

Miller’s insistence on painting was an eulogy to a life as experience – painting is indistinguishable from the hands and souls of the painters that he encountered and shared his life – and the value of poverty as absolute necessity for a life that regionalizes our contact with the world. It was through the love of painting that humanity could only restore its divine presence without rest.

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Notes 

1. Henry Miller. To Paint is to Love Again (Cambria Books, 1960), 17. 

2. Ibid., 39

3. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34.

4. Georges Duhamel. America: the menace (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 85.

The necessity of Penia. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

2. Ibid., 501-511, 409.

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

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

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

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

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

Pasiones de Giorgio Cesarano: introducción a un dossier. por Gerardo Muñoz

¿Es posible seguir insistiendo en la apertura del pensamiento contra el cierre de la época incrustada en la elipsis infernal de la supervivencia ventilada en las sombras del desierto nihílico y entregada a los aparatos de la reproducción social? Escribiendo en la convulsa década de los setenta – y que algunos pensadores han llamado, no sin razón, el “big bang” de la transformación geoeconómica del mundo donde la revolución queda finalmente liquidada – la apuesta de Giorgio Cesarano en Manuale di sopravvivenza (1974) -y su antecesor Apocalisse e rivoluzione (1973) co-escrito con Gianni Collu – sigue constituyendo un esfuerzo desmesurado y singular por encontrar una bifurcación por fuera de las anquilosadas formas de la antropomorfización capital que entonces ya aparecía como como el destino catastrófico de la especie humana reducido a la compulsiva maquinación de las totalidades ficticias [1]. 

En efecto, como observa Cesarano con un gran poder de síntesis: el triunfo revanchista de la fuerza de la subsunción real, en realidad, confirma que el verdadero y único objetivo del principio de equivalencia no tiene otro blanco que la usurpación de un mundo domesticado y desprovisto de acontecimientos. Un mundo hecho a la medida de las necesidades de sus inmates, tal y cómo lo había previsto John Cowper Powys en una de sus brillantes pesadillas literarias [2]. Pero este es el mundo que hemos heredado y que seguimos atravesando, aunque algunas décadas nos separen de la provocación que a la altura de 1974 Cesarano alzaba ante las herraduras dialécticas de la época. En realidad, era una provocación asumida desde la posibilidad de la afirmación de una gnosis – algo que, como sabemos había aprendido gracias al diálogo sostenido con algunos representantes de la corriente bordiguista de la cultura radical del pensamiento italiano y de su estrato poético, como lo confirma en La casa di Arimane (1979) de Domenico Ferla – aunque sin abandonar la posibilidad de un movimiento en retroceso de éxodo, capaz de integrar un nuevo programa de emancipación de la comunidad real de la especie (Gemeinwesen) contra todas las celdas de la objetualidad y sus satisfacciones reguladas.  

Un arduo primer paso: la retracción como rechazo de la hostilidad generalizada contra la presencia. Así, en un momento de Manual Cesarano podía escribía: “Ahora tener origen como fin es un programa perfectamente realista” [3]. Un realismo que optaba por abandonar el produccionismo apocalíptico al interior de la filosofía de la historia del capital en la metástasis de sus representaciones sociales. O bien, como escribe en uno de los momentos más emblemáticos contra la reificación del sujeto del saber y de la conciencia en Manual de supervivencia: “…el decrépito-infante Yo se tambalea….Se desvanecerá, morirá finalmente, lo mataremos cualquiera sea la máscara que lleve en ese instante. Porque el fin es el origen, el nacimiento de una comunidad-especie realizada, el nacimiento continuo de la presencia coherencia, la afirmación del ser inobjetivo….El fin del Yo marcará el principio de la presencia” [4]. Volver a la prehistoria, entonces, para desembotar el dominio cibernético de la optimización biopolítica administrativa de la vida que domicilia a la especie humana en el armazón de la producción de lo ficticio. Así, el vaciamiento paulatino de la vida tendrá en cada ápice de la simbolización el sol irradiante de la justificación y de la expansión del verosímil retórico de una comunidad abstracta. Por lo tanto, para Cesarano, la embestida contra la reificación del “Yo” debe su destitución a la intempestividad de la pasión del pensamiento como contraofensiva ante el ascenso depredador de la fuerza de la objetivación. Justo en este umbral Cesarano inscribe la partida para la época del agotamiento del reino de las formas y de la crisis de la legitimación política: “No es una clase de lo social, entonces, la que realizará la abolición de las clases emancipándose, sino que la negación de lo “social” y de sus clases, efectuada por el cuerpo proletarizado de la especie, emancipará a la especie de la “sociedad” como comunidad ficticia, prehumana” [5]. Apostar por particiones de valor social (el infinito juego de la hegemonía without end) solo podía perpetuar el espesor de la más rampante agonía.

De la misma manera que la crisis histórica validada por la astucia negativa del proceso infinito de acumulación apela a nuevas artes de estabilización y optimización de la abstracción Social (el paradigma de la unificación cibernética que Cesarano logra identificar en un momento de reestructuración de los propios mecanismos de la gobernabilidad del liberalismo tardío y de la consumación de la mediatización de los entes) de su propia incesante reproducción; para Cesarano toda “critica radicale” – que debe ser asumida como crítica en suspenso, más allá de todo sujeto posicional y posicionado en la estructura del movimiento humanista de la negatividad dialéctica – ya no se caracteriza por funcionamientos programáticos preelaborados mediante el rigor epistémico de la vanguardia militante o justificados en la divisa de la objetividad metodológica; se trata, en última instancia, de constituir espacios sensibles que despejen la desficcionalización absoluta de un movimiento existencial y de estilo cuyo único programa histórico se constataba mediante la inalienabilidad de la comunidad de la especie humana: la irreductibilidad de la pasión [6].

Si la modernidad consistió en la domesticación de las pasiones con el fin de impulsar el rendimiento objetivo y alienado de la diversificación de los intereses diagramados en el valor, ahora se trata de afirmar la liberación del yo como fractal de la no-objetualidad de mis pasiones sin que ésta sea entendida como una mera compensación traducida a la autonomía postromántica del arte [7]. La pasión del pensamiento en Cesarano es condición hiperbólica de una erótica que desoculta la chôra de lo inconmensurable; esto es, la distancia que marca el encuentro entre los restos del mundo natural y el uso vocativo de la lengua: “….ese paso de acercamiento, es abrazo de amor y de lucha, parece tanto más absurdo cuanto más lo cotidiano parece desierto. Es en este movimiento que cada uno podrá, encontrándose en la persistencia del deseo resistente a la aniquilación objetual, descubrir en sí mismo la presencia de ese programa histórico que es la pasión y sentirse listo” [8]. La autoafirmación de la génesis inconclusa de la pasión descentra el nudo gordiano de el terror de una vida sometida al proceso de adaptación en el que la máquina y la humanidad se cierran sobre si mismas.

Pero la pasión es el recurso que valida el recorrido ético de la apropiación de mi existencia; esto es, no es ni condición antropológica ni forma en la que puedo orientar mi relación con lo inefable del mundo. Y dado que nunca sabemos realmente qué constituye el objeto de la pasión – al menos que este dispuestos a abdicar la pasión a la matriz recursiva de lo objetual – la existencia sólo puede darse en la disponibilidad de la vida misma cuando ésta coexiste con la laguna de la pasión y del asombro en el mundo. Dicho en otras palabras, de nada vale “vivir por una pasión” como suele decir el automatismo retórico del contrabando de las pasiones y de la propaganda de agitación social; el valor absoluto radica allí donde la pasión se deja vivir en el movimiento finito de una vida que no puede ser otra, y que solo se mide con respeto a las propias conquistas o encuentros que marcan el ritmo de un destino. En este sentido, como escribe Cesarano en la glosa “Erotismo y Barbarie” (1974) que incluimos en este dossier: “La pasión es el sentido de lo sagrado que se demuestra como tal” [9]. La tonalidad sagrada de la pasión es aquello que no puede ser verbalizado como imperativo o veneración externa para la promoción servil de los hombres-masas orientados a la infinita idolatría sacrificial que, en el curso de la secularización cristiana, implicó el triunfo ficticio del ordenamiento del principio civil [10]. Para Cesarano, las pasiones de la especie es el no-lugar – de ahí que sea una chôra, un lugar de contacto imaginal con la expresión que solicita siempre en cada caso el umbral del afuera – mediante el cual la vida encuentra formas contra la supervivencia y la agobiante auto-aniquilación que el logos descarga sobre cada exigencia vital. 

Sin muchos más rodeos podemos decir que el programa de la pasión sigue abierto en una época, la nuestra, cuyo régimen cibernético-administrativo sobre todos los ámbitos del viviente ha conseguido intensificarse con mayor ferocidad en el punto más álgido de nuestra civilización. Como si se tratase de un don fortuito, la excelente y cuidada traducción en castellano del mítico libro de Giorgio Cesarano por Emilio Sadier publicada en La Cebra y Kaxilda finalmente nos facilita una conversación que, a pesar de haber sido postergada durante tanto tiempo, regresa con la intensidad y el brillo de una voz entonada desde las catacumbas para confirmarnos que no todo ha quedado obliterado. Sobre esos restos se arremolina la ascesis singular de la pasión común de los hombres póstumos tras un mundo que se eclipsa. Y de este modo regresa la conquista singular de los encuentros, la despotencialización del ego, y el recogimiento de una morada en la insondable piel de las estrías del mundo. El dossier que presentamos a continuación sobre el pensamiento y la poética de Cesarano no pretende constituir otro gesto que aquel que contribuye, a su manera, a la continua “comunicación entre almas” al interior de una época que continúa encandilada en la fuerza de la objetivación y la producción de la impaciencia [11]. Y cómo intuía Cesarano en unos versos de su temprano L’erba bianca (1959): “…la buena canción tardó demasiado, pero había que esperar en el vacío para dejar resonar al corazón. Ahora lo sabes, hoy toda fortuna se ha disipado” [12]. ¿Nos hemos disipado también nosotros? Allí donde las pasiones toman la palabra y los tintes del alma dilatan su expresión las dudas para semejante interrogación disminuye y se disipa. Así, atravesados por el timbre de la pasión, moramos en la inesencia, pero sin realmente pertenecer a ella.  

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*Esta es la introducción al dossier sobre el pensamiento de Giorgio Cesarano que preparé a raiz se la publicación en castellano de Manual de supervivencia (Kaxilda, La Cebra 2024), y de próxima aparición en la revista chilena Escrituras americana en la primavera de 2025.

Notas 

1. Willy Thayer. ‘”Fin del trabajo intelectual y fin idealista/capitalista de la historia en la ‘era de la subsunción real del capital’”, en El fragmento repetido: escritos en estado de excepción (ediciones metales pesados, 2008).

2. John Cowper Powys. The Inmates (Macdonald, 1952).

3. Giorgio Cesarano. Manual de supervivencia (La Cebra, Kaxilda 2023), 112.

4. Ibid., 49-50.

5. Ibid., 130.

6. Furio di Paola. “Dopo la dialettica”, Aut Aut, N.165-166, 1978, 63-103.

7. Para la elaboración de este argumento, ver el ensayo de Gianni Carchia, “Modernità anti-romantica”, en Pharmakos: Il mito trasfigurato (Ernani Stampatore, 1984), 9-13.

8. Giorgio Cesarano. Manual de supervivencia (La Cebra, Kaxilda 2023), 75.

9. Giorgio Cesarano. “Erotismo o Barbarie (1974)”, incluido en traducción al castellano en este dossier. 

10. Carlo Levi. Paura della libertà (Neri Pozza, 2018), 120.

11. Gianni Carchia. “Tragedia y persuasion: nota sobre Carlo Michelstaedter”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Editorial Tecnos, 1994), 35.

12. Giorgio Cesarano. “A un amico”: “So che per te di troppo tardarono / il bacio dell’amata e la buona canzone / ma bisognava saper asperttare / e lungamente e a vuoto lasciar risuonare il cuore. / Ora lo sai, chiusa ogni ventura.”, en L’erba bianca (Schwarz Editore, 1959), 39.

The decaying sublime. On Gónzalez Sainz’s Por así decirlo (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

José González Sainz’s new collection of short stories, Por así decirlo (Anagrama, 2024) offers a magisterial elaboration of the ongoing nihilism that has absorbed humanity into an autonomous object of its own shipwreck. Throughout the stylistically intricate narratives, it is easy to see that for Sainz the problem is not just about the extinction of humanity – its decline and fall, but rather about stumbling into the spectacle as if nothing is taking place. The consummation of nothingness exerts itself into the very consciousness to the point that the death of the living becomes transactional for the ongoing fictions regulated by expectation and prevention. 

Obviously, these are broad strokes that say little of Sainz’s well-known narrative pointillism, in which not only every object but every distance is carved out and polished with striking vivacity (this opposition between style and worldliness underpins the sharp contrast of the process of absorption); but, there is a moment in the first story of the book that can arguably be elevated as an emblem of Sainz’s outlook towards a world that has ceased to be so. Without giving too much of the plot, the scene takes place in a plaza of a Spanish provincial town where a pseudo-conductor has taken over a classical music show and who will commit a horrifying act that day. The narrative will minimize the conductor’s act in order to focus on the mass of spectators who continue enjoying the spectacle with mounting euphoria. At the peak moment of the narrative event we read this elaboration on truth and music:

“Había leído alguna vez que la verdad es el auténtico principio de la música, y que está conmueve no es tanto porque complaza al odio como porque expresa las verdaderas tonalidades afectivas del alma. Eso es, porque su objeto es el alma. Pero si el alma está hoy desfigurada, se dejó continuar, si ya no es más que su propio espectáculo o su farce o bien ya no es nada y a lo mejor, puestos a pensar, no lo ha sido nunca, por qué no iba  a ser lo que oía la verdadera musica. Se convenció y no se convenció; es decir, se convenció de que no estaba convencido de nada” (Sainz 45-46). 

Reacting to his own bewildered reaction to the spectators’ absorption in the fictitious, the character of the pater familias realizes that perhaps even the musical redemptive quality – and that for this very reason that Plato wanted to regulate the distinct tonalities of the instruments in the Laws to charm the souls of the youth- now encompasses an immense rhetorical environment where elucidation of the sublime of art’s truth becomes impossible. As the irreducible communication between souls fades away, there is only a vicarious subject that echoes the resonances of the intruder conductor. For anyone that reads the story, it is quite obvious that Sainz is rewriting Elias Canetti’s figure of the orchestra conductor from Crowds and Power (1983). As a hypoerbolic figure of absolute power and the ‘illusion of persuasion’, for Canetti the gestural figure of the orchestra conductor embodies mastery of the objectivation of the world who cuts through the two sides of the moral predicament: what should take place, and what will never occur [1]. And very much in the vein of the kubernetes, the conductor exerts his power as the unifier of the events in the world. In other words, the dominion of the orchestra conductor is absolutely omniscient: he can not only order what comes out in every instrument, but he can also regulate the effects of the musical discharge into an enchanted uniform audience.

The orchestra conductor is the figure of an acoustic mastery where the price to be paid will be the collapse of the original sublime (hypsos) unto the autonomous form silencing the truth of the soul. This is why Gianni Carchia, reading Longine’s treatise of the sublime, defines the ancient conception of musical redemption a the condition of the communication between souls capable of repairing maladies while moving towards love (eros)” [2]. And the narrator asks rather naively: “But why can’t I not enjoy this as well? What do I see?” (Sainz 47). However, Sainz’s intruder conductor depersonalizes Canetti’s figure, since it is no longer about an illusionary act of generalized hysteria or collective hypnotism; the experience of the truth, granted by the by the sublime (hypnos), has become a matter of the steering of opinion, and the transference of brute force of decomposition. Ultimately, it is also the decomposition of language that turns the pseudo-sublime as a vessel of meaning. The movement of the tragic suspended produces a life without accidents, and the word of Lukács: “a flat and sterile, an endless plan without any elevations…dull repose in the lap of dry common sense” [3]. Through the orchestra conductor, the allure of animation becomes the last resort to bear the crushing weight of the flatness of fictitious living.

In the threshold of total integration of the spectacle, the dialectical force of absorption that once provided grounds for the aesthetic veneration of the work of art, unleashes the form of artificial sublime to endure the absence of beauty and truth once guarantee by the soul’s touch with the melodic. The fall of the sublime into a movable feast of a social attraction discloses the last stage of humanity’s errancy: living in the wordless night of endurance to merely survive.

It is no surprise that, in fact, the story ends with the pater familias retreating to his home to sleep. And from that from that day on – that is, after the conflagration with the orchestra conductor – he will become a sort vigil watchman for his son who, drenched in sweat, recounts sleepless nights haunted by nightmares of the traumatic afternoon. And he concludes: “Velar, que hermosa palabra” (Sainz 51). A trembling insistence of the pulsating hypnos in the psychotic night of a collapsed humanity? Or, on the contrary, a self-reflection on the kalos that has dissipated only to return as a reified word? Is this Sainz’s last attempt to hand out to offer the possibility of an enacted sublime through proximity – it is the proximity of fathers and sons, after all – that gathers the pain in a silent and defaced nocturnal vigil? We do know from Longinus that in some cases, silence can also be more sublime than any words [4]. It could very well be that, at least today, this answer remains veiled (velada) in the intimacy of its own untransmittable experience.

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Notes 

1. Elias Canetti. Masa y poder (Alianza editorial, 2013), 559.

2. Gianni Carchia. “De lo sublime de la poesía a la poesía de lo sublime: para una relectura del Pseudo-Longino”, en Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 112.

3. Georg Lukács. “The metaphysics of tragedy”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 179.

4. Longinus. On the sublime (Clarendon Press, 1926), 14-15.

A Peitho relief. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a small marble Roman relief of Peitho (it is about 15” x 5” wide) of what used to be a larger decorative plate illustrating Helen being persuaded by Aphrodite to accept her husband’s voyage to Troy. The personification of Peitho in the form of a seating lady accompanying Aphrodite is not rare in classical representation, and if we are to follow Friedrich W. Hamdorf’s genealogy, it was actually the norm when it came to visual depiction of the deity [1]. What is striking in this Roman relief of Peitho is precisely the unassuming silence of the figure, who is merely gazing down and touching a dove or bird with her right hand and sunk in thought. Is not this mystical silence what bathes the mythical figure of Peitho, which according to Euripides has no other sanctuary than that of language?

The Peitho relief stands as a fragmentary of an ancient memory where the event of language implicated persuasion instead of commanding; a sensibility of saying instead of legitimate validation; granting space for the poetizing in the world instead of rationalizing, in the advent of the polis and the bios politikos, the transcendental condition of the political community [2]. Peitho will become rhetorical once it has taken the autonomos form of the transaction and the mutilated word by which nothing is ever said except a lethargy of the immanent movement of the logos. In the Roman relief Peitho does not communicate because she dwells in the poetic lacuna of language. 

In fragment 81 of Aeschylus’ Niobe we read a mysterious outline of Peitho: “Death desires no gifts; one can gain nothing by making sacrifice…from him, alone among divinities, Persuasion stands aloof.” The ossification of language in hand with the general autonomization of rhetorical separation, in the words of Gianni Carchia, will mark the destitution of Peitho’s poetic magic allowing death to speak through the fierce instrument of demagoguery and and the production of justifiable certainties [3]. In a world without the irruption of the mythic-magical element personified by Peitho, there is only general declensions towards persuasion as a form of predication: to convince, to obey, to follow, and to concede belief as persuasion was transformed linguistically [4]. It is no surprise that the civilizational decline of the mythos of Peitho coincides with the rise of the rhetorical techné that guaranteed the autonomization of the world (private & public, appearance & truth); but, most fundamentally, the stabilization of the resource of rule-based lexicon as the dominion over exteriority.  

Even the Sophist Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen defines Peitho as “Language is a power ruler who with a tiny and invisible body accomplishes deeds most devine” [5]. The process of deification of language (in the sense of the sources of archê) can topple the divine in order to mobilize all the energies no longer in the “uninterest encounter between souls” (Carchia’s words), but rather by grounding a necessity that, first and foremost, establishes its ontological solvency in the unending rhetorical polemics. As the sensible myth of Peitho withers into organized grammar and rules of predication, it is noteworthy to recall that in the monotheist tradition the organization of the invisible in becomes colored by “faith” in the law. 

This could explain why Saint Paul seemed to have made a conscious attempt to oppose any remnant of the Hellenic persuasion (πειθώ) in favor of “demonstration of faith” (ἀποδείξις). As we read in Corinthians 2:4-5: “My words and proclamation were not based on the persuasion (πειθώ) of wisdom, but on demonstration (ἀποδείξις) of the Spirit and power… that your faith would not be  based on human wisdom, but on the power of God. Indeed, “apodeixis” (ἀποδείξις), the word deployed by Paul, will guarantee persuasion only in revelation and the Christian philosophy of history; meaning that Peitho will remain, like the Roman relief from the First Century, a mute aesthetic artefact and a petty reminder of the expulsion of ethōs from language. 

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Notes 

1. Friedrich W. Hamdorf. “Peitho”, in Griechische Kultpersonifikationen der vorhellenistischen Zeit (Zabern, 1964), 64-65.

2. Francis Kane. “Peitho and the Polis”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol.19, N.2, 1986, 118.

3. Gianni Carchia. “Eros y Logos: Peitho arcaica y retórica antigua”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Técnos, 1994), 23-24.

4. María Dolores Jimenez López, “‘Persuadir’ en griego: el marco predicativo de peitho”, in Word Classes and Related Topics in Ancient Greek (Peeters Louvain-La-Neuve, 2006), 175-176. 

5. Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (Bloomsbury, 2008), 44.

Dumb pain: Magris’ reading of Michelstaedter. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is only towards the end of his novella Un altro mare (1991) where Claudio Magris deploys a philosophical synthesis on the character and lesson of Carlo Michelsteadter. In the narrative, this occurs when historical time accelerates, and we cross from the crumbling of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to the rise of Italian fascism and the confrontation between the German military occupation and the partisan forces and the postwar years. For Magris’ Gorizia characters this threshold leads the way into the historical epoché of a long civilizational decay and existential fatigue, where even the attempt to carve a ‘hide out’ (a community of salvation?) seems rather defeating. This is where Magris deploys his philosophical thesis – it must be quoted in full: 

“This too is dumb pain, a weight that falls and crushes, the delirium of believing that life is redeemable, the illusion of the “I” which finds liberation from the world’s madness by sinking to the level of brute existence. Fortunately life is a short, painful negative adverb – “non-being” – and not something everlasting. The eternal scorches that “non, that tiny, ferocious sting. To keep to oneself and to turn to flame – that is true liberation from every single changeable thing. And nothing is more changeable than man.” [1]. 

A dumb pain that crushes humanity forever. And where Magris writes in lapidary tone that nothing is “more changeable than man”, one can also read – it is impossible not to hear it – what Blanchot says of Antelme’s camp testimony: that man is indestructible because he can be infinitely destroyed. But for Magris the enduring (it might not be the proper word) lesson of Michaelsteadter’s thought is that it accounts the refusal of a trascendental delegated life on the side of the redeemable and the messianic, always too functional to the same historical – rhetorical architecture of Western rationality. Could the perspective of persuasion be an alternative to the outlook of redemption (Adorno)? We can leave this question hanging for the moment. Perhaps one of the “fundamental lies”, to put it in Nietzschean overtone, is to believe the political legend of contractualism in which the compensation for “fear” of the state of nature is solely cured by the entry to the historical time of the civilizational principle can overcome the sense of pain. 

The price to be paid for the Hobbesian logic is high: in other words, it is the dumbing of pain in life, which entails the course to optimize, suppress, and perhaps, in our contemporary vocabulary, to “medicalize” its symptoms (is not not health afterall the secularization of salvation). In English language, to speak of “dumbing” also entails “dumbing down” the quality of something or someone. Hence, the dumbing pain in which ‘life will go on without truly living’ in the reproduction of the Social will already presuppose a non-thinking life; a life that betrays and runs aways from the possibility of its ethical exposure. This is the befall towards historical time and the abstraction of positivism and value, by which precisely “every single thing” will become changeable and exchangeable for them to become legible. 

For Magris, the strategy of persuasion is not a political or social technology, it is rather a refusal of living in the time of the changeable and the civilizational organizational capacities to “hide ourselves from the reality of our own emptiness”, in which the promotion of pain is rendered oblivious through the working out of a life that has already accepted the reification of death [2]. If we are to follow John Ruskin to the letter, this is the spirit of the triumph of bourgeoisie civilizing enterprise: “vulgarity is one of the forms of Death”, he writes [3]. The acceptance of vulgar life does not mean the end of life in exceptional historical or spectacular moments (as frequently as they have become); it is the suppression of persuaded life after the fall of prophets, higher values, and transcendental principles that accumulate in useless rubble.

Vulgarity, then, is the aesthetic vortex of what social pain can only organize through the reproduction of realized self-defacement. It could very well be that what Magris says with and about Michelstaedter in Un altro mare (1991) runs parallel to what he calls the “impolitical anarchism” of Joseph Roth’s world colored by the irreducible fragments of individual feelings, passions, and working through the loneliness of pain that oscillates in the ocean of language that struggles to retain a world [4]. This is the life of the soul that before the eclipse of the modern eon (including the real existing communism, as Magris takes into account): resist, in full force, the spillover of ethical vulgarity to persuade oneself that, even after redemption, there are other irreducible paths towards death. 

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Notes 

1. Claudio Magris. A Different Sea (Harper Collins, 1993), 86.

2. Ibid., 56.

3. John Ruskin. “On Vulgarity”, in Modern Painters (1860), V.5, 348.

4. Claudio Magris. Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Einaudi editore, 1971), 225.

Carlo Michelstaedter: Pain and the Social. A seminar with Revista Disenso. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the following months some of us will offer an eight week seminar exclusively dedicated to a close and analytical reading of the enigmatic work La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) by Italian thinker Carlo Michelsteadter (1887-1910). Ever since his death – as can be easily gasped by Giovanni Papini’s obituary in 1917 – there has been an aura of mystery around the infamous philosophical suicide of Michelsteadter that only parallels that of Socrates’ hemlock or Otto Weiniger’s self-inflected gunshot. Of course, we will be less interested in the biographical motives, and if push comes to shove attention to this detail will be elaborated in light of the nexus of his thought to the event of his death.  

La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) offers a unique theoretical elaboration about the civilizational decline of the “living” into the rhetorical deferment of life as realized in the organization of social alienation. And for Michaelsteadter there is no other purpose of rhetorical form than the absolute submission to the general abstraction that defaces the event of pain. It is no accident that he was also interested in the thematics of health and ancient techniques of pain-relief (the techné alupias, for instance), even if underdeveloped in his thinking given his sudden premature death. So, it is for us, his posthumous readers, to take these sets of issues and move them forward in our present any way we can. This is part of the task that motivates putting together this seminar after a series of conversations with friends and interlocutors.

La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) deploys the classical metaphysical tradition through the ancient poles of “rhetoric” and “persuasion”, where the second (the ancient Peithò) seeks to return the voice and expression to the problem of pain as an ineffable type of speech (Logos) that refuses the elevation of force that harbors the circulation of violence and the administration of social death. The ancient notion of the Peithò withdraws echoes of the mythical inception and the sacred, as also reminded by Aristophanes: “Persuasion’s only shrine is eloquent speech (Logos)…And I Persuasion (Peitho), the most lovely word” (The Frogs, 1391-1395). Where and how do we attune ourselves to the peitho today – the imperative of the eros of the word in the wake of the regime of social production of pain? 

In the aftermath of the collapse of the cycle of civilizational secularization, it is only obvious that all these questions stratified in the tradition once again become attractive and pertinent. In this light, we think that Michelstaedter’s thought still offers us a series of  significant hypotheses to think through the crisis of social man and the domination of the civil that colors our current predicament, where the question of “pain” is still an understudied problem. Throughout this course we will address notions such as rhetoric and persuasion, life and communication, nihilism and values, the logic of capital and the social bond, or the notion of world and pain. Our aspiration when approaching Carlo Michelsteadter’s work is to develop reflective conditions to address the thorny issue of an ethics of pain that so thickly enmeshed in our historical moment.

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‡: Information about the registration to the seminar will be made available at Revista Disenso in upcoming days. The seminar will run every other week for a period of eight sessions (roughly from the beginning of September to early December, 2024).

Holding on to painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

Paying a visit to a painter’s studio is a rare experience, but definitely gratifying. Or at least, it has been for a long time even before I could put it to words. At her studio, I confirm that Laura Carralero’s commitment to painting as a practical activity has an unfathomable dimension, and I was pleasantly surprised that she shared the same sentiment that our current epoch is not one in which painting has a minimal breathing space. And whenever painting emerges in the official market circuits of art, it seems that it is always already parasitical to some verbose rhetorical apparatus or heteronomic planning that distortions the painterly sentiment. But was not painting the task of speaking the engagement regarding  “mute things”, as Poussin would have it? There is little doubt that rhetorical inflation that thrives in mechanisms to legitimate art continuously devalorizes the mysterious proximity of painting with things in the world. We should reflect – or we should continue to reflect – about what it means to be in a point in the history of humankind where the obsolescence of painting and the disappearance of the dexterous achievement of the hand has thoroughly been realized (Focillon’s praise of the hand remains as actual as when it was first written: “The artist that cuts wood, twerks metal or rock keeps alive a very ancient human past that without which we would immediately cease to exist. Is not admirable to see in the mechanical age this stubborn human survivor of the ages of the hand?”) [1].

The task is immense and abnormal, and it defies (because it exceeds it) the theoretical concept and the absolutism of the philosopher. The engagement of the painters – a secret community that still exists here and there, in different geographies of the world – is precisely a keeping of the divine vortex of the human in the abyss without higher pretensions. And there is something stubbornly strange about painting against the mounting force of destruction. Although perhaps ‘resistance’ here means nothing but to hold on to the originary instance of appropriation of experience in the wake of the epochal mutation of anthropogenic composure; as if the end of the species is also pulsating its commencement.

Holding to painting is not just a substitute to the act of refusal (something that I have recently mapped out); rather, it refuses the very negation of the anthropological erosion in its soulful interaction with what it remains outside of language. To hold on to painting means to engage in the imperturbable: what discourse cannot mold and relocate; what previously is poor in language so that a new language, and thus a new world, could emerge anew among the rubble. In his forthcoming book Those Passions, T.J. Clark states, quite forcefully, that no political transformation or epochal breakthrough can emerge without a preliminary transformation in language; and, I am tempted to say, that practice of painting is the topoi in which eye, world, and hand come together in the very act of separation of said renewal.

The terror of painting – only aggravated in the last decades or so, although a process that took off the postwar years and continued into schools of art where militant pedagogues can only shout “don’t bother to paint!” – is the general stimulus of the reified world; a world in which the paradigm of “objethood” now stands as the compensatory empty experience for poignant idolization of nothingness and “mere stuff”. Sure, there is no return to painting in its grandiose historical sequences – Renaissance, French modern painting, the European Baroque, Van Eyck’s optical discoveries – which ultimately means that painting’s instantiation with the tradition is also bare and unexplored; or, absolutely uncharted whenever there the event of true painting. While I glance at Carralero’s diminutive wooden oil paintings I have this in mind at least. There is a return to the divinity of the icon, but it is not a restitution of its theological investiture and its purported liturgy; the pictorial exercise takes into account the structural void in which painting finds itself resisting, for better or worse, representational excess.

And this speaks, I take it, to the muteness of painting as such, which is also Carralero’s silence about the import of medieval icons into the present. In a way, the painterly operation (I realize that this expression is awful) is executed in a paradoxical redemption, since space always calls forth presentism, a here and now. One is reminded of Stevens’ verses in “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “To say good-bye to the past and to live and to be / in the present state of things as, say, to paint / In the present state of painting and not the state of thirty years ago”. The emphasis of the verse declines towards that injunction “as say, to paint”, which fixes a current state of being in the world where we are in it but outside of it. Is not this, precisely, another description of the “Just”? I am eager to work through painting’s stubborn position to this description, which means to hold on to the imperturbable. 

The imperturbable seems to me like a fitting term to grasp what Carralero is doing in her pictures, although with no pretensions to exhaust her pictorial adventure. The solemnity of the icon and its inverted gnosis yields something palpable as well as unattainable. What is being held is the vortex of painting’s mystery going back to Lascaux and ancient burial paintings. Carralero rationalizes her interest in medieval and Eastern European religious painting as a retreat from the unbreathable decay of contemporary pictorial practice as a general tendency. Here the renewal of painting is only possible through the sensible dimension of an integrative imagination. Hence, to live in the present, in the hour Stevens’ simile, is also to dwell in the flashes of painting’s general economy of sensible forms. A new history of freedom can take this as its point of departure; that is, to posit no longer the social functionalization of norms and rules for relations, but to expand the sensible space of the innumerable symbols of existence. 

In the well-known essay “The Pathology of Freedom”, Günther Anders says something significant about painting’s imperturbable nature: “Painting that fixes the aspect of a man or a thing in a picture seems as it were to repeat the act by which each thing is already condemned to itself” [2]. This “being-precisely-this” could be taken as the closure of contingency in relation to all possible forms; although it is also painting in which the contingency of the non-visible in the visible what arranges the possibility of what is precisely absolute contingent as absolute in each picture. This is why in great pictures we tend to feel that the consummation of form reveals as a necessary tradition that, by virtue of being thus, it assume the thisness of the particular rendition. This commitment that weighs heavy in each of Carralero’s paintings is a testamentary to the imperturbable even if we are already entering (or already in it) the eclipsing world of the mystery of the senses, a world that can no longer see the redeeming and unassuming vision that painting can offer.

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Notes 
1. Henri Focillon. Elogio de la mano (UNAM, 2010), 131-132.

2. Günther Anders. “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification”, Deleuze Studies, Vol.3. 2009, 283.

The melody of the soul: on Guy de Pourtalès’ Nietzsche in Italy (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Nietzsche in Italy (Pushkin Press, 2023) by Guy de Pourtalès, originally published in 1929, has a particular texture that makes it inadequate to consider it a standard intellectual biography. Pourtalès does not follow the contours of the psychological and chronological construction; rather he is more interested in sketching out the telluric effects on the transformative tonality in the thinker’s soul. Nietzsche’s radiant affinity to Italy and “latinity” has been well known, and at stake there is the possibility of finding an exit from the grandiose enactments of the German romantic gestalt. For Pourtalès, “latinity” is the prescription that Nietzsche writes out for himself in order to maintain sanity in the world; and, ultimately, to find its own destiny and path in the face of modern nihilism. Sure thing, Italy is many things for Nietzsche: it is the zenith of his poetic relationship with the Wagners but also their farewell in Sorrento; it is Venetian music and pleasant weather; it is the open and physical form of a possible community of the Free Spirits and artistic expressivity. And Italy is also a refuge from brewing culture of force in the North through the Renaissance uomini singulari where music persists, as he writes to his friend Peter Gast: “Life without music is imply a mistake, enfeeblement, an exile” (94). Pourtalès narrative collage (the different vignettes of Nietzsche’s visits and residencies in the Italian geography) detects the philosopher’s fundamental existential homecoming: a melody of the soul in a world increasingly organized through the chaos as the essence of force. To be attuned to the melody of the soul becomes the task of the artist: “to hear and see beyond the vast “lost time” of humanity what others no longer hear or see, but just unwittingly hum as a tune, vague and wordless”, writes Pourtalès (41).

And if music is an aesthetic form of prophecy, Pourtalès’ sheds light on Nietzsche’s insistence to become a prophet of the age of nihilism: wrestling with the poignant homelessness in the human world of a postmythical age. Pourtalès insists that the “Italian experience” opens up for Nietzsche multiple possibilities to confront the Wagnerian solution through the concretion of the forced and unhealthy (these are Pourtalès’ terms) aesthetic formalization of the mythic redemption. The Nietzschean attempt (the beloved and unresolved versuch) is the final confrontation of “music versus music”, since “all philosophy is a series of events of the soul and finds its symbol only in music” (49) explains Pourtalès. This is what Italy seems to be providing Nietzsche with: the withdrawal from the intoxication of the “Wagnerian flame without being consumed by it” (66). This entails an acceptance to pain without instrumentalizing the rewards provided by the genial artistic form of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the enslaving commandments of Christianity. Wagner and Christianity now stand in the way of the path of destiny without paying dues to mimetic investments. This is Nietzche’s last battle, and thanks to Pourtalès we realize that Italy becomes the battleground for an ultimate detachment. But is it successful? Is Nietzsche as the artistic genialismus prophet able to accomplish the radical abandonment? 

This is the resolute ambiguity in Nietzche’s proximity and distance from the Italian tonality. Indeed, Nietzsche seems never to have abandoned the rhetoric of the genialismus. Pourtalès quotes him: “Italian genius is by far the one which makes the freest and most subtle use of what it has borrowed…..and is thus the richest genius, the one with the most to give” (89). At times Nietzsche’s words about Italians or latinity is a metonymic for Christianity, his ultimate confrontation after Wagner, because to overcome Christianity implies to embrace the melody of life. This is why for Nietzsche Jesus is a higher form of life, whose kingdom is, according to Pourtalès (resonating here with the late work of Von Balthasar), “that of children, his faith is without rancor and without reprimand; it lives, it is itself its own miracle and reward” (100). The transfiguration of Christianity becomes a path to arrive at the very attunement of life itself, although this requires understanding love so that the “Kingdom of heaven becomes a state of the heart” (100). This nomos of the heart is Nietzsche’s ultimate and impossible search; perhaps one that does not truly find the path to a proper homecoming. 

Was it due to Nietzsche’s failed efforts at finding the melody of the soul in his ruthless, cuerpo a cuerpo (“Dionysius against The Crucified”), struggle against Christianity? Were the terms of the prophetic transfiguration a mere illusion of guidance and redemptive incarnation? To put it in Cowper Powys’ lucid observation: “If Nietzsche had not been obsessed by Christianity he would have thought of Life before Christ came”. Pourtalès does provide us with another hypothesis: “Perhaps amongst the last things he [Nietzsche] understood was the profound speech of this piano, of this fiend, whose inner music he had always been the only one to hear. But no thought, no word emerged from this ruinate soul. Nietzsche expired, walled up his silence” (110-111). In Pourtalès’ interpretation, Nietzche’s lacked the central aspiration of melody of the soul: “knowing how to love”, which is obviously the unlearned lesson from the Italian landscape and the world of visuality. The fact that Nietzsche had no patience for painting according to Pourtalès says a lot regarding his incapability for an erotic mediation to escape spiraling towards madness in a desperate effort for completion. I am not saying that painting could have saved Nietzsche; but, as the last active metaphysical activity in modern nihilism (Kurt Badt), pictorial persistence is the ultimate exercise to hold on to the world from the point of view of one’s daimon. Pictorial persistence clears the illusionary strife over concepts of the tradition. Pourtalès’s Nietzsche in Italy (2023), even if only obliquely, is as lucid of a portrait as we might get in order to raise this question in a serious fashion.