The common Spanish verb “desvivirse” resists obvious translations. Could one translate “desvivirse” as “unliving”, “constructing by destroying”, or “fulfilled life”? It seems that none of them capture the full meaning of an expression that is anchored in practical use. It is important to note that when the term emerged in the intellectual discourse of Spanish twentieth century, its depth was intimately connected to its meaning (life, living, vocation) that it immediately took the life of a concept for cultural milieu and national character. In his lecture “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, Manuel García Morente suggested that “vivir desviviendose” was the singular form of life of Hispanic being that attained eternity while on the terrestrial world:
“Porque lo típico del hombre hispánico es, por decirlo así, su modo singular de vivir, que consiste en “vivir no viviendo”, o, dicho de otro modo, en “vivir desviviéndose”, en vivir la vida como si no fuera vida temporal, sino eternidad. El hombre hispánico no considera la vida eterna. O la salvación del alma como el remate, término y fin de la vida terrestre, sino como remate, término y fin de cada uno de los instantes y de los actos de la vida terrestre. La salvación eterna no es para él solamente un objeto de contemplación; ni tampoco solamente una norma de conducta, sino que es, ante todo y sobre todo, lo que da sentido y finalidad concreta a cada uno de los actos en que se descompone la vida terrestre” [1]”.
For García Morente, the specific meaning of “desvivirse” entails a tension between interiority and exteriority; and, by extension, between life and death, and in fact of death in life that leads to resurrection and a new life. He writes: “La vida del alma hispánica es un constante morir y resucitar para volver a morir; hasta que la última resurrección” [2]. “Desvivirse”, quite literally, happens at the level of the soul when life continuous through finitude and concrete death. This is why the notion of “desvivirse” has a clear theological underpenning that one can pair with the divine apocatastasis in intramundane life. “Desvivirse” is never about personal salvation and the economy of election, which is why Americo Castro would emphasize that this vocation does not align well with modern individualism, because the “vivir desvivido” experiences its own ruin like a joyous and exuberant Saturnalia” [3].
As in the indication by García Morente, for Castro “desvivirse” entails something like an external perspective in which life can ultimately only take place from its transcendence with a relation to what’s outside ofitself. This outside is neither determined by politics nor rhetoric [4]. To live “desviviéndose” entails an intensity that persists not just as an interior affirmation of self-preservation, but as an erotic relation with what is most desired and venerated (many Spanish thesaurus of the nineteenth century would define desvivirse as “to love or desire with eagerness”, “amar con ansia”). If extracted from the cultural and identitarian historical context, “desvivirse” appeals to the object of passion that overflows the senses of human life.
This overflow is embedded in the word itself. The great Spanish scholar of Benedictine monasticism, García Colombás, in his book El monje y el Misterio Pascual (1984), made a simple, and yet remarkable lexicographical observation about the word “desvivirse”. Colombás noted that while in most of monastic literature the prefix “-des” donates privation and deficiency, the function of this prefix in “desvivirse” suffered a complete inversion, since now it entails to love intensively and thoroughly, as in “se desvive por complacer a todo el mundo” [5]. As a theologian, it should not have passed Colombás that the term in question is a triad of three linguistic units: -des/vivir/-se. This means that it is not just that the prefix exerts the meaning of privation of “life”, but also makes room for the reflexive “se”. It is curious that in in Spanish grammar “vivirse” is often used in relation to location (i.e. “el va a vivirse al campo”), and never as a conventional reflexive action (i.e. “él quiere vivirse solo”, “el se vive solo” = this would be incorrect). Taking this cue, one could perhaps say that the inversion so keenly perceived by Colombás acts upon the living so that they can repeatedly making space for the unfolding of life, rendering possible the soul’s crossing the inside and outside in every form of life.
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Notes
1. Manuel García Morente. “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, in Idea de la Hispanidad (Espasa-Calpe, 1947), 215.
2. Ibid., 216.
3. Américo Castro. España en su Historia: Cristianos, Moros, y Judíos (Editorial Losada, 1948), 45.
4. Ibid., 279.
5. García M. Colombás. El monje y el Misterio Pascual (Ediciones Monte Casino, 1984), 132.
Among Robert Antelme’s posthumous writings the short text “L’ange au sourire” has a decisive place if we are to explain the transfigured theological experience of the French writer. To anyone familiar with French architecture history the title should sound familiar, since the ‘l’ange au sourire’ was already a common expression used by French scholars of architecture during the interwar years. Charles Sarazin, arguably the most important scholar of the architecture of Reims, penned a separata titled “Le Sourire de Reims” (1929), in which he celebrated the mysterious smile of the angel Gabriel that was severely damaged due to shell fire of the Cathedral during the fall of 1914 [1]. But a decade prior to the destruction, art historian Arthur Gardner, in a detailed essay on the sculptures of the facade of the Rheims Cathedral, also took note of this angel’s gaze writing that: “…the angel Gabriel of the Annunciation in which the French smile has almost become a grin, the beginning of the contorted expressions frequently found over the border in Germany.” [2]. The particular aspect of this unique angel’s face that Antelme undresses from the cloak of authority is also wonderfully documented in the photographic book by Pierre Antony-Thouret, who also showed pictorial interest in the way that angel Gabriel was chipped in a large area of the right frontal relief (image 1) [3].
Image 1. Reims au lendemain de la guerre (1928), plate 52.
This curatorial context informs the historical background of Antelme’s reference to destruction and what he references as the crushed: “But not crushed by this building, or by that event, or by some power. It has always been crushed, crushed forever” [4]. For Antelme the tenuous, almost imperceptible, smile of the Angel of Rheims is what outlives absolute destruction because to be destroyed cannot be executed absolutely. It is the soul of existence that, because of its exteriority to history, is powerless “to have forever to be”. Even if this being has become petrified and immobile from its original plastic appearance auf vif of sacred art. This is what Malraux captured in his brief mention of the “L’ange au sourire” in The Voices of Silence (1951), where he also compares it to the Buddhist faces of Oriental sacred art (image 2): “The Smiling Angel of Rheims is a statue whose “stiffness” increased with every century; but at its birth it was a similar incarnate, a face that had suddenly come alive – like all faces sponsoring a discovery in the field of the lifelike” [5]. In order words, to see in the muteness of the face the nothingness that allows expressive relations to emerge in the open. This holds for Antelme’s description as well: “Radiant or hidden, inevitably it is there. Word, image, music: everything expresses it, and nothing. It lies at the heart of that realm where all relations are born. Forever starting anew. Possessing nothing, capable of nothing, it must be there, forever”.
Image 2. Angel of Rheims in The Voices of Silence (1964).
But what Antelme was able to capture through the smiling angel of the Rheims Cathedral was not a problem of iconology of art forms, but rather the very essence of the theological problem of angels as it relates to the poetics of life itself. The angel is not a promythical figure scaled to a specific historical moment, but an instantiation of the divine appeals to the withdrawal the possibilities and modes of the human being. This is why Antelme can state that “the only transcendence is the relation between beings”. Even in its muteness, the theologica depth of the angel is the poetic speech of divinity through a surge in language that has no end, but only celebration or hymnology.
This is why Erik Peterson writes towards the end of “The Book of Angels” about the intimate relation of angels in human existence: “A human being can draw near to the angels because the angel too – as its name already indicates – can draw near to humanity. […] The angels are more than poetic ornamentation left from the storehouse of popular fables, they belong to us. For us, they stand for a possibility of our being, a heightening and intensifying of our being – but for the possibility of a new faith…as a passion for mental clarity and an authentic existence” [6]. It is fair to say that, although the figure of the angel does not show again in Antelme’s work, all of his vision and witness accounts in the face of political horror must be placed in the endless vigil of a nocturnal life that is shared with the ethos of angels (utirur vigilis, angelorum vitam procul dubio meditatur).
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Notes
1. Charles Sarazin. “Le Sourire de Reims” (s.l.n.d, 1929).
2. Arthur Gardner. “The sculptures of Rheims Cathedral”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, V.26, 1914, 64.
3. Pierre Antony-Thouret. Reims au lendemain de la guerre: la cathédrale mutilée, la ville dévastée (Jean Budry, 1928).
4. Robert Antelme. Textes inédits sur l’Espèce humaine (Gallimard, 1996), 14.
5. Andre Malraux. The Voices of Silence (Secker & Warburg, 1964), 317.
6. Erik Peterson. “The Book of Angels”, in Theological Tractates (Stanford University Press, 2011), 139.
Anyone somewhat familiar with the writing of Josep Rafanell i Orra knows that we are in the company of a wanderer and itinerant in an infinite pursuit of what the experiences of worlds might offer [1]. A mad endeavor for a groundless epoch oriented towards planetary reduction and confinement, so obsessed with infrastructure and security, most recently through the reiteration of the politico-theological program of national sovereignty, one more desperate reaction to unrestrained planetary decline. We can say with Hölderlin that we are vagabonds in a destitute time, a poet who figures prominently at the entrance of Josep’s Traité. In our posthistorical epoch we are confronted with the thicket over the dominion of life, which means that the question of exteriority becomes pressing as existence enacts a path beyond the endless rubble of representation bestowed upon the human species in every point of the globe.
The book that the Spanish reader now holds in his hands thanks to Luciole Ediciones will immediately let in a dimming light of a singular style or maniera that dislocates the modernist assumptions of political thought into what one could what I am willing to name an analytics of sensible hybridizations between languages and thought. This analytic of the sensible refuses immediately Social normativity as well as the melancholic hangovers of the modern revolutionary tradition (always caught up between constituent and constituted power, representation and humanism, growth and production). This is why Josep will redefine communism as the nonprogramatic event that irrupts through hybridization of surrounds and regions capable of overcoming the ontotheological adequation of subject and object that has led an entire civilization astray (33). The project of the critique of metaphysics finds in Josep’s Traité a powerful schematic cartography that raises questions precisely in those spaces where the rationality of the science of political economy has never dared to enter.
If the critical projects of High Modernity were fundamentally temporal (including that of Messianism and its overemphasized trance towards absolute immanentization), Josep’s writing also has the virtue of displacing the focus to the spatial formation and the thinking of the creation of spaces understood as dwelling, once populated by the gods of the events and which modern ontotheology obliterated through integrated objectivation and technological positionality. We know that the greatest nearness of the last god eventuates only when the event is elevated into refusal, especially when it manages to become too near [2]. As a shorthand, this drift towards objectification in the liquidation of modern politics is domination of the Social totality; ultimately, it is through the plasticity of the social bond that the reproduction of biopolitical life is temporalized, legally ordered, and rhetorically subsumused into an apparatus of predatory accumulation. It is the Social (not the State, or this or that concept of the modern grammar of political thought, or even fascism) that we must refuse. The collapse of the modern secular state and its moral guarantees, is the beginning of an autonomized social bond that now coincides with the total administration of world forms. The hegemony of the Social reduction is what allows Josep to claim that the opposition is no longer between Society and the State; but rather between community as a process and praxis against the static formation of the Social. Thinking today drifts from social domination to communities of encounters, heteronomic relations, communication, and interdependence in a web that characterizes the exotic movement of the imaginative possibilities of exteriority for manifold worlds.
The notion of community in Josep’s thinking is neither about ecstatic groups or “little platoons” of identitarian belonging (as once famously defined by Edmund Burke); nor referring to filiation and propriety reductions that can subsist quite nicely under the heatwaves of the ongoing conflagrations of Empire. For Josep communities insofar as they are exposed to their excess (ubermass) are processes of external contact between souls as rites of passages. The community is formless, and in this sense it ceases to be a problem of Chistological stereology in order to become one in the order of ethics and language (50). In this sense, very much like the late Mario Tronti looking at the collapse of the modern revolutionary experiment; for Josep the ruinous fragmentation of the worlds has a silver lining: that all human, and non-human, souls are dwelling on the outside world calling for worldiness, and thus potentially sharing a sense of intimacy that re-enchants the appearance and knowability of the world through the invisible attunement to the outside (un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro) [3].
Beyond the subject and the narcissism of the Ego, the light of a “spark of the soul”, in the words of Meister Eckhart’s memorable sermon, a new animism returns not because there is a transcendental revelation to be asserted, but because the encounter between souls brings forth the concatenation of worlds that are entangled with other worlds (68). If Jünger described the epoch of planetary machination as “soul murder” (seleenmord) it was because there was no longer any contact with the unfathomable opacity between the soul and any possible worlds [4]. Josep with an elegant mannerist style enhances this intuition: “We are no longer exiles on Earth, as the romantic moment freighted by the loss of world. We ended up forcing the Earth into exile after so many deadly abstractions (108). The modern age has not ceased accumulating abstractions against the human species until becoming a whirlwind of soul murdering that has extended into the current ecocide of the worlds.
It does not come as a surprise that throughout Petit traité de cosmoanarchisme (2023) Josep appears more than skeptical about political critique (and to say skeptical might be an understanding). There is a clear imperative that is mobilized in the book and that it should not be taken for granted: political critique should evolve into the negation and abandonment of politics, which also includes the always anachronistic anarchist politics. We know that ever since the Greek polis the autonomy of politics partition and distribution was waged against the incommensurable topos of the chora, the ungovernable and infrapolitical hinterland of the new substantive community of rights and obligations posited by the logistics of representation [5]. As we know, this is what forced Heraclitus to resolutely remain playing knucklebones in the temple of Artemis: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the polis?” [6]. The knucklebones of the ancient anecdote of the presocratic philosopher is symbolic to what Josep demands of existence: the liberation of environments and surrounds for multiplicities of experiences. The experience of gaming always starts in the middle, expressing the ineffable ethics of how I become what I am already on my way of becoming (142). The maximization of politics into the very thicket of life (this is biopolitical administration) have increasingly defaced the experiential practice of existence that now extends over the course of the historical dispensation of civilization. This is the vortex of the struggle against the realist validations in the interregnum.
Against and beyond the force of abstraction and the prison of individuality, Josep situates the stakes: “It is there, where the fierce struggle we can lead today: to find the intimacy of our soul in the welcome of other souls to hear their silences and their voices. To participate in the animation of the world is to perceive the outside. And gently find the inside of the outside” (145). And between the process of the community and the soul there is no longer struggle or enmity, but only solvent philia; the influx of creation that, insofar was enmeshed in solitude, allows pain to speak in the time of transition, in the skirmishes between worlds. Ultimately, the experience of the itinerant is not that of learning to live in places; rather, it is the one that intensively yearns the presence of encounters. This remains the only ethopoetic imperative [7]. As Carlo Diano observed in an erudite study on the notion of the chora, the attunement of the soul with the world is not a conceptual entelechy; it runs materially through the sensorium of this body as it traverses the world towards its renewal [8]. To grasp this chiasmic region that dispenses the harmony of the soul as it flees the prison gates of an objective world, is the enduring letter and spirit that Petit traité grants to the ongoing task of thought.
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Notes
1. Gerardo Muñoz. “Escuchar las llamadas del mundo: diálogo con Josep Rafanell i Orra”, Disenso: Revista de Pensamiento Político, N.3, July 2020, 134-158.
2. Martin Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2012), 329.
3. Mario Tronti writes in “Disperate speranze” (2019): “È necessario trovare un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro. Io posso farlo nel solo modo in cui so farlo: tirando l’arco al punto che permette di cogliere il bersaglio più raggiungibile. Realistica visione.”. CRS, October 2019: https://centroriformastato.it/disperate-speranze/
4. Ernst Jünger. The Forest Passage (Telos Press, 2003), 93.
5. Julien Coupat. “Dialogo con i morti”, in Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019).
6. Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic (Bloomsbury, 2018).
7. Josep Rafanell i Orra. Fragmenter le monde (Divergences, 2020), 70.
8. Carlo Diano. “Il problema della materia in Platone: la chora del Timeo”, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, V.1, 1970, 335.
The techno-administrative organization of the world that is showing off its force these days is only possible thanks to a previous devastation of the opacity of language, which ultimately connects human beings and the world. It is also the mysterious vortex of the breaking point of humanity into being, of which today there is only remembrance and scholastic teaching but seldomly authentic expression. When politicians, engineers, and social functionaries stubbornly distract us with open attempts to decimate secondary languages, prohibiting the annunciation of words through the legal enforcement of “place and manner” norms, and elevate abhorrent structures of linguistic commands and information as units of social interaction, it is obvious that the collapse has already happened. It also means that in terms of “Social” planning humanity has ceased to exist under the shadow of speech, to use an expression from Helene Lubienska. Hence, it is all the more absurd to confront this transformation with a strategy of multiplication of rhetorical codified languages that merely deepen the schism between the expressivity of language and their worlds. It suffices to say that any recognition of a para-official language of social interaction plays into the fictitious polarity of homogeneous globality and reified nationalism – the constitution of print nationalism being the historical destruction of minor and dispersed languages of remote places and villages for the sake of the organization of a productive fictitious historical subject.
We must ponder what it means that the current imperial world order is one that does not offer a language, let alone the flourishing of minor or ‘vulgar’ languages as in the Latin Middle Ages, but rather an exit from language, which is the cybernetic project of codifying flows of information and looping inputs in which asymptotically humanity surrenders their languages. In past imperial adventures, language was either a tool to subordinate the world of the colonized, or it was a lingua franca of elites (administrators and the clergy) that allowed for the real existing languages in the territories integrated precisely by their exclusion or subalternity to the civilizing regime guided by literacy. The sharp contrast with today it is striking, since it is all too clear that the project of cybernetics, and its most recent avatar “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), is fundamentally an Empire that does not even require to rule and neutralize the “civil war over words” that Thomas Hobbes repudiated in the European confessional state, since its ultimate goal is not political statecraft, but the regulation of unworldly bodies of social reproduction.
This is why some contemporary engineers have said that AI requires “a reconfiguration of the social contract”, with the caveat that it would necessarily be a “social contract beyond language and thus without politics”. The last social dispensation at the hands of engineers is the human soul, as it has been said. For this conception of language, it matters to only understand it as a semiotic reduction of the expressive human being to naked animality as the general form of the posthistorical being in the present. It is noteworthy that a great North American writer, Cormac McCarthy, while working on this problem of language at the Santa Fe Institute scientific research program (a central hub of American developments for artificial science and the unification of the sciences), reached the conclusion that language must be understood in relation to a virus: “a virus nicely machined. Offer it up, Turn it sligh, Push it in, Click. Nice Fit. But the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit…The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that” [1]. The “unruly nature” of language, precisely because it does not fit into the biological pattern of virological model, must be mastered into an accompanying narrative of the social world, taking the copula and grammar as the final functionalization of the fictitious community. The artificiality of language is a civilizational decay that takes place not as heteronomic cooptation by technological advancement, but within its own internal abdication of its voice and mystery.
It is precisely this internal threat that the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa sought to expose in the most polemical moment of his posthumous tract The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Stanley Nott, 1936) – an essay that was restituted, let us not forget, by Ezra Pound precisely to confront the pauperization of ‘Basic English’ as the standard of linguistic use – in which he writes the following observation about the extreme filing of words: “Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary” [2]. Fenollosa could not have foreseen that the posthistorical epoch – an epoch of the most furious abandonment of thinking – there was nothing else to file in terms of the expressivity and poetic soil of speech. The course of American artificial humanity is not a human with a pocket-dictionary; it is something way more grotesque: an animal that can repeat and chatter sounds and symbols severed of its proximity with any linguistic inherence and the sensorial worlds. And it goes without saying that the engineering plan against the poetic soil of speech, as North American poet understood well, means that this war is waged against the last reserve; that is, the ethos understood as ‘the cave of everyone’s inner being’.
In considering the reasons for Helen of Argos’ action, Gorgias’ Encomium introduces, after mentioning Chance and Necessity, the captivating force of persuasion that couples language and eros without remainder. It is nonetheless true that Gorgias is not interested in taking the role of public defender of Helen’s catastrophic actions (war itself), rather what he is after is the account of the word (logos) as a practice that can effectuate magical qualities, thus making “speech a powerful ruler…its achievements are superhuman; for it is able to stop fear and to remove sorrow, to create joy and to augment pity” [1]. The divine tonality constitutive of speech is not a matter of metaphors – even though metaphoric elevation might be in – but of rhetorical art (technē) that triggers a somatic affection and movement when entering contact with someone else. For Gorgias, the event of speech is primordial and transformative; or, rather, it is only transformative because it can reach deep into the senses and the soul. And these are effects of creative enchantment for the human being. Not yet alienated from the mythos of nature, speech is the necessary artifice of ‘higher truth’ that is the life in persuasion.
This is why for Gorgias there is a correlative nexus between persuasive speech and the ordering of the “mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies”, which early scholars of the school of the Sophists such as Augusto Rostagni, read in light of the medical and spellbinding teaching of the philosopher-poet Empedocles, who might have been Gorgias’ teacher [2]. There is most definitely a healing dimension of the persuasive speech that compels a proximity between language and magic as the only possible – and possible because it is sayable – to access the inaccessible world of forms that Gorgias himself negates in his philosophical skepticism. (As we know, Gorgias was the author of a lost treatise of non-being of everything that Aristotles and other writers of Antiquity registered extensively). The triumph of deception for Gorgias was irreversible, a stated fact, which meant that only persuasion in speech allowed movement and seeking in the world. This is autopoetic dimension of Gorgias’ linguistic theory, which also confirms Michelsteadter’s thesis that there is no general science and ideal of language – language can only be created as much as the world in order to appropriate the ethos in life. It is no surprise, then, that a scholar like Jacqueline de Romilly has connected Gorgias’ persuasive speech to the sacred musical of orphism as a subterranean sensorial world before the rise of the legitimacy rhetorical koine of the polis.
In other words, whereas the rhetorical order of the polis will be about the exchangeability of values through communicational units and coordination for the reproduction of social life, what is central for Gorgias, as reported by Sextus Empiricus, is that what is revealed is the usage of language as such in the exposition of the style of enunciation. Style becomes a formless reservoir of incantation and linguistic magic, which can multiple the uses while remaining neutral to a higher truth other than itself. As stated succinctly by de Romilly: “The sound of words is no longer mysterious; it no longer implies divine intervention or even produces irrational action. It is just style, and an intellectual display of skill. The only thing it appeals to is intellectual surprise, by stirring curiosity, attention, or excitement” [3]. Thus, the magical dimension of persuasive archaic speech is not suspended in the eternal polarity between truth and falsehood, but rather in the way in which reciprocity ceases to instrumentalize language to specific protorationalist ends previously crafted [4]. The “magic” of the event of speech liberates language from the fiction that there is something like an autonomous and truth-content to ground its legitimacy.
The persuasive texture of speech resembles a dress that must fit for every occasion of its enactment. This is why the Encomium of Helen ends with an affirmation of ‘self-amusement’ that folds the epideictic form of speech as a nourishment for the soul. The ambivalent speech can both cure and nourish, but on its other side it is also apaté or illusion in the world afterall. There is only apaté through the mediation of persuasion of the speech event, which means that any elaboration of absorbing the totality of the world through language can only further severe our distance from it. And is not at this threshold where the ethical question is inscribed? As the classicist Neus Galí asserts in a highly condensed synthesis: “In Gorgias’ thought, apaté or illusion is consubstantial with the world, allowing us to see it and communicate it” [5]. But a world vested in apraté is a non-world: it is only in language where we can move through different worlds, and persuasion is like the magical carpet or invisible cloak that allows us to zigzag between their nonexistent unfolding of our making. The impossibility of absorbing the mythos into the protorational dimension of the logos reappears in the eros of language as the remnant of enchantment that circumvents the deployment of justification, grammar, and the syllogistic mastery that soon enough will realize autonomous language as a representational science of logical proficiency.
The persuaded speech or image – Gorgias even reaches for an ut pictura poesis mediation towards the end with an analogy about painters completing objects and forms – becomes the nonsite for those blessed souls. For Gorgias this is a supreme fiction; but one that insists on the irruption of passion in front of the ossification of what has been stabilized as a principle of reality. This is why there is a parallel between tragedy and persuasion in Gorgias’ fragmentary thought. As Plutarch records Gorgias’ words in one of his texts: “Tragedy with its myths and emotions has created a deception (apaté) such that its successful practionary is nearer to reality that the unsuccessful, and the man who lets himself be deceived is winner than he who does not …whoever has allowed himself to be deceived is wiser, for anyone not lacking in sensibility allows himself to be won by the pleasure of words” [6]. This ‘tragic transport’ enacts a “caesura in which the idea itself appears” (pure language)” [7]. It is this unfathomable and acoustic pleasure of poetic language that accounts for an exception to social exchange of signification that will flatten speech to an uttermost decrepit and disposable utensil without passion, arousing neither celebration nor lamentation that allowed the human voice to dwell outside the chatter of the human. Or, as a twentieth century celebrated theologian writer will note in a Gorgosian tone: “For the truth is that language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an artistic thing… the tongue is not a reliable instrument, like a theodolite or a camera. The tongue is most truly an unruly member, as the wise saint has called it, a thing poetic and dangerous, like music or fire” [8].
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Notes
1. Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (Bristol Classical Press, 1982), 25.
2. Ibid., 29.
3. Jacqueline De Romilly. Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Harvard U Press, 1974), 20.
4. Gianni Carchia. “Arte, magia, razionalità”, in La legittimazione dell’arte (Guida, 1982), 204.
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 aboutabout 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.
Let us imagine a person that in a short period of time finds himself haunted by successive deaths, abandonments, missed encounters, displacements, and lost possibilities – the list could go on. All of this amounts to a loss of world. This is obviously the narration of anyone’s life, and every moment of it would seem to imply an internal necessity of its unfolding as felt in the weight of its coming together in remembrance. Obviously factical life will continue on – and it always goes on – but the ultimate question will reside in the relationship between existence and the narrative order of that past. All of Duras’ narrative world is almost entirely a direct wrestling with the possibility of going against this specific weight of narrativization, because to narrate means to forget oneself from the experience of being in the world here and now. The demand of recollection imposes rhetorical limitations to the unfathomable present. Remembrance is the courtyard of historical and religious necessity where self-transformation takes a secondary role in a massive and alienated narrative of causes and reasons.
Duras’ first novel La vie tranquille (1944) reacts strongly against the burden of memory in the name of forgetting: “Once you lose the ability to forget you are deprived for a certain life” [1]. But what could a “certain life” amount to? Obviously, this forgetting here does not mean a neutralization of conflict in life (as in the status of a civil war in a political community); rather, it entails a sort of rebirth, in which the density of life refuses the crushing force of fictitious acceptance dispensed by the order of the past. That loosely defined “certain life” does not qualify nor situates “life” to the survival of “this life”; on the contrary, it seeks to open life to its open and self-evolving possibilities. In other words, there is “only one life” because there are only irruptions of the tragic possibilities that will always elicit a vita nova. The “certain life” that is always lacking allows the infinite possibilities of rebirth in the face of the eruption of the tragedy. And tragedy requires affirmation and exposition to the world in a strong sense. This could very well be the ultimate tone and color of the adventure for Duras.
Dionys Mascolo once wrote that Marguerite Duras’ literary and cinematic work is a transfigurative elaboration of the the tragic, and for this very reason the active undoing of the civilizational narrative at least since the humans of the neolithic that had resulted in the production of justifications and reasons to live “our life” [2]. And in a way the irruption of the tragic is the confirmation that civilization does not have the last word of absolute moral order. But life – and this is the “mystery” coloring a good part of Duras’ imagination – is always about keep afloat the possibility of the certain life without the threats of self-absorption and destruction in the wake of nihilism and abstract political equality between beings in the world. A “certain life” (our certain life without qualifications other than being attuned to the object of our passions) is always elsewhere, and for this very same reason as a transfigured revelation outside of what appears as the enclosed necessities of ‘this life’. “A certain life” is a higher indented form of the theos unto life, whose transcendence is not regulated by an article of faith or the anthropological deficiency of sin (this is at bottom the difference between Christ and Saint Paul). In other words, the tranquil life that many readers have generally understood as wilful irony wrapping Duras’ narrative bears the truth to that life – the only one worth affirming as destiny – must always be outside itself. As the character of La vie tranquille (1944) confesses in one of the peak moments of the monologue in the second part of the novel:
“I’ve existed for twenty-five years. I was very little, then I grew and reached my size, the size I am now and that I’ll be forever. I could have died in one of the thousand ways people die, and yet I managed to cover twenty-five years of life, I am still alive, not yet dead. I breathe. From my nostrils emanates real breath, wet and warm. Without trying, I managed to die of nothing. It advances stubbornly, what seems halted, in this moment: my life. …My life: a fruit I must have eaten without tasting it, without realizing it, distractedly. I am not responsible for this age or for this image…” [3].
The bite into the fruit in this monologue differs from the metaphoric self-confession that ascertains the theological irreversibility of original sin and felix culpa; it signals the passage of the narrative of life into denarrativization. Here a “certain life” might open against the fluvial current of the order of necessity that will make the subject into a bundle of legible and memorable infortunios. The passage to the tranquil or serene life, however, is not just grounded in the description of a trembling account of onself. In Duras, it has a proper name: thought. In fact, as we will find in the last part of the novel: “You must advance with the last of your powers;…with the power of thought” [4]. And following Mascolo to the letter, one could say that this ‘power’ is misplaced – it is not a power of the subject to force a will to do or act – it is rather a passion of thought (“la passion de la pensée”) that elevates itself against necessity and actualization through a “refusal” of any given historical order.
This is to say, the breakthrough to the ‘certain life’ or the ‘serene life does not presuppose a counterpolitical strategy, as much as the movement of thought enacted in refusal as condition for any democratic requirement that no one can ultimately possess, as Duras a decade later will go on to write in the third issue of Le 14 Juillet [5]. The serene life is only possible as an infinite movement of denarrativization. The inhabitation of the world in La vie tranquille (1944) was already preparatory for the gesture of ‘refusal’ where a certain life follows a retreat from the hypsipolis apolis (superpolitical apolitical) into the existential xenikos of a contemplative life that is irreducible to both the principles of humanity and the normative regulations of social interaction. The serene life is only achieved when the separation of thought and life enters into the incommunicable sense of persuasion (the ancient peitho) capable of decompressing the vector of force that has only produced a generic humanity of political depredation, acceptance, and excruciating tonality of boredom. Duras’ writing – at its best moments – is an intense search of this kind; a search does not end in neither politics nor literature, but on what remains outside of them.
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Notes
1. Marguerite Duras. The Easy Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 90.
2. Dionys Mascolo. “Naissance de la tragédie”, in A la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (fourbis, 1993), 397.
3. Marguerite Duras. The Easy Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 96-97.
4. Ibid., 114.
5. Marguerite Duras. “Responses à l’enquête auprès d’intelectuels français”, Le 14 Juillet, N.3., 1959, 5-6.
Philippe Theophanidis has recently brought to my attention an emphatic statement in Dionys Mascolo’s Lettre polonaise sur la misère intellectuelle en France (1957): “La politique est notre passion. Nous en parlons, ne faisons que cela, et tout l’ennui du monde est dans ces dialogues-disputes, dans cette démarche perpétuellement contentieuse qui donne envie de s’occuper de n’importe quoi d’autre, de plaisanter, de se taire, de s’en aller” [1]. These are intense words not entirely divorced from a deep sense of desperation entangled with a commitment to realism – minimally understood as bringing into thought how things looked at the time. In a recent collaborative introduction to the writing scene of this group (preliminary work towards an upcoming seminar) – which included Mascolo, but also Duras, Vittorini, Blanchot, and other continental friends – we took into consideration how the heterogeneous and internal tensions were brought into bear in the effort to connect the creative act to the existential texture of communication and concrete world events [2].
Mascolo’s statement must be read as historically marked and situated, as who today could claim that “politics”, however broadly or loosely understood, is the exclusive “object” of our passion? Mascolo seems to have been aware of the subordination of passion into politics, leading to dialogues and disputes where nothing could facilitate the clearing of a way out. When politics becomes the final object of one’s passion it could only mean that the reign of chatter has liquidated our experience with the world. And it is at this point where the ‘missing word’ that attunes the search for one’s passion can regress as nihilism; that is, as mere force to steer rhetorical valence and representational exchange within the expansive intramural rules of civil society. Restricting one’s passion to the determination of politics merely inverts the order of modern legitimacy (i.e. the repression of passions by the interests), compressing both terms as a higher principle of politics.
If at the outset of modernity contractualism suppressed the passions in exchange for sovereign security from the fear of violent death; in the attempt to elevate the passion to the grammatical height of politics, what is rendered obsolete is precisely the possibility of securing an existential site of freedom outside and beyond politics, that is, in the the nonplace of the passion itself. Of course, one could also read Mascolo’s apothegm in light of his revolutionary politics, in which the name of “politics” solicited the revolutionary emancipation of the civilizational alienation of the human species towards a transformative sequence beyond the scarcity of needs. But the problem of the category of revolution is that it remains tied to the very development of the legitimacy of the political and its erosion (for Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the configuration of the state is the crowning revolutionary event against disorderly barbarism), which the members of the Saint-Benoît Group were first hand witnesses in the postwar epoch.
I think this speaks to my suggestion that the assertion ‘politics is our passion’ was historically embedded; a sort of last breath of trying to hold onto the utopia that will soon crumble in every active paradigm of planetary order (postcolonial, Soviet state planning, European communism and social democracy). But at least – and this is what remains of interest, as I see it – the Rue Saint-Benoît friends had the courage to confront it in order to enact a farewell to the very assumption of ‘revolution’, which already in 1968 was clearly moot. In the words of Maurice Blanchot after the events of 1968: “…but from now on I will hold onto an exigency: to become fully conscious, and always anew, that we are at the end of history, so that most of our inherited notions, beginning with the one from the revolutionary tradition, must be revised and, as such, refuted. […]. Let us put everything into question, including our own certainties and verbal hopes. The revolution is behind us: it is already an object of consumption and, occasionally, of enjoyment. But what is before us, and it is terrible, does not have a name” [3]. Thus, to conflate “politics” as the passion could no longer offer solid ground in the intra-epochal interregnum of suspended historical time. Just a few years later, Duras will claim that politics had little to offer, since there is an “absolute equivalence between all political programs, and only right ideology seems to be able to do politics as such. We no longer believe in politics…there is only a burrow of hope. We must submit ourselves to the hard evidence of its total degradation” [4]. To dwell in a delimited burrow means a return to the rooting of place and new geographies beyond the temporal axis.
One can read both Duras and Blanchot’s elucidations of the collapse of modern politics and its negation (the ius revolutionis) as a corrective posture to move past Mascolo’s hope to make the unfathomable texture of one’s passion coincide with the object of a political project, even if understood as an archipolitics. But it is precisely in the abyss opened by a terrible and nameless epoch that a new light is casted on the free-standing and ungraspable nature of the passion; the irreducible law that establishes a contact between the ethical life and the world beyond objectivation as both excess and deficit of the tribulations of political order. Perhaps a modification to Mascolo’s thesis is now necessary: passion is what escapes every possible fall into the objective world, and for this very reason it is a ‘refusal’ of what the compensatory bond of politics can offer under the sermo humilis of stagnant artificial utopias. There is no political passion just like there is no political friend, since both friendship and one’s passion remains always objectless, only mediated by the overcoming of the preconditions of fear and of delegated life. In Manuale di sopravvivenza (1974), Giorgio Cesarano will claim that passion was the name of the coming historical program of a sensible presence resisting the “annihilating force of social objectivation” of the world [5]. And the Italian poet will define the passion as the sacred taking possession of the return to appearance. A transformation of politics could only emerge after one’s passion could finally prevail experientially against the terrible and nameless (and unnamed) world organized towards planned obsolescence and generalized humiliation. And it goes without saying that we are still very much our predicament. The caesura between passion and politics has now become spectacularly absolute and irreversible.
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Notes
1. Dionys Mascolo. Lettre polonaise sur la misère intellectuelle en France (Éditions de minuit, 1957).
It is not until the last third part of Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) when the reader encounters a mention to the Etruscan relic alluded by Jacques, one of the characters in the circle of friends that vacation in Italy, who passes the days drinking ‘bitter camparis’ and complaining about the nauseating and scorching presence of the summer heat. And if it were not for the title of the novel the reader could easily dismiss it as a contingent regional reference: “I looked at the map last night…After leaving Rome, I could stop at Tarquinia to see Ludi’s little Etruscan horses. After all the time he has been bending our ears about them” [1]. The ‘little horses’ are brought out a few pages before the end of the novel where Ludi, their Italian friend, goes back and forth whether to go and show them the horses figurines or not. It goes without saying that it would be an enormous distaste to press on the Etruscan reference for any deeper meaning, or to claim that Duras deployed the ancient piece as a tongue in cheek symbol for the bunch of friends roaming around the beach shores. It clarifies very little or too much as an generic reading hypothesis.
In any case, what is relevant is that their trip to encounter the horses of Tarquinia never takes place stressing the real lacuna of the narrative, which is not so much paying a visit to an ancient civilization, as much as underlying a possibility, an afterthought, a pulsating desire towards its displacement; or, in a way, the outside of life that part of the real texture of existence. A reminder that life (a happier life?) is always somewhere else, and definitely away from the excruciating heat of an Italian summer in which no compensatory activity (drinking campari, chatter among friends, having food, meeting new faces) can wrestle the desire for exodus. In The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) very little happens in terms of the organization of the narrative, and that is precisely because the domain of the possible might have been Duras’ central commitment when writing the novel: nothing will happen, not even the fleeting thought of paying the visit to the tombs of the Etruscans. Thus, the heavy weight of a narrative without events opens the incandescent proximity between life and nihilism in a strangely accommodating setting. It is summer after all, which means tranquil life of boredom, repetition, serene gazing, and the monotonous. Children catching lizards or sleeping through the night, and very little else.
According to Laure Adler, Duras’ sea novels (The Sea Wall, Gibraltar, Little Horses) wanted to persist “in search of an adventure. But afterwards everything comes together to form a whole” [2]. This holds true only at a very rudimentary and superficial level, but it does not hold to any serious scrutiny. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) is a novel in which the writing of adventure takes a very specific form: life detached from the event of the adventure. This is the reason why the adventure is not only missing from the sequence of contingent incidents, but rather it is alien to the character; as if the radical separation from character and destiny would be transplanted into a self-reflective consciousness arrested in time and space. The adventure at the closure of modern sensibility and its dialectical valence around a “worldview” is precisely that there is a coming to presence of the fact of this poverty of adventure has become its uttermost inexistence: “For a long time I had bright colored dreams of imaginary cities, where I could do what I liked, and look for adventure. But the dreams were not enough, and no I’ve turned a little mean” [3].
The end of the texture of adventure between world and existence marks the commencement of the self-autonomous subject that can narrativize the concrete order of his dreams precisely because he is convinced that they will never be accomplished in this world. After all, as Lukács claims in his Soul and Form, the adventure is no epic for epic’s sake, but a “communion of feeling, of experience, an infinitely powerful experience of the world’s many colored richness expressed in a varied series of endless adventures” [4]. In the adventure one freely becomes who one will be. Hence, the adventure named the freedom of sensible experience between language and world, coming to near convergence only so that its final separation could set to start the inconspicuous ethos of life. In this sense, the longing for adventure in Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia could be said to allegorize the chattering of experience, whose tiny pieces are ultimately picked up by the synthetic apprehension of the dialogue of chatter among friends. The empty chatter takes place once the path of language as transformative of a life becomes separated from the course of the human species. The extreme comedy of the rhetorical dialogue is that it functions as a cure for the abyss of its own separation from life.
Hence, the “dia-logos” ends up suturing that dregs of the fictitious waste required to translate the language of meaning (logos) into practical action at the expense of a life that begins to move, inadvertently, across a groundless world [5]. This is why the central character in The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) calls the boundless dialogue that they are engaged in as “a confusion of voices…from open windows, and was dissipated in the sunshine” [6]. It is not that there is never continuity between what is being said; rather, it is that dialogue is always a re-statement of either the case, the command or the subjective piety that in the suppression of real pain proper to a alienated life can only engage in the melodramatic gossip over the accessories of life. In other words, dialogic communication can only speak in the name of quotidian vulgarity. Language becomes, as Duras writes in one of the most memorable lines of the novel: “an endless chain of reciprocal waiting” [7]. It does not take much to apprehend at this point the signifier rotation in every dialogue. Waiting, but towards what? The waiting is eternal and illusionary, since the capture into the sedentary surplus of “dialogue” has already taken you to the final destination where everything is sufficient; what remains is the generalized effect of unhappy consciousness from the irrevocable sense of abstraction.
The expressivity of the dialogues of the French bourgeoisie of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) was already the indication that their wordlessness differs a whole lot from the musical infraworld of the Etruscans horses and tombs. Yes, something very precious was lost once civilization becomes entangled with the infinite realization of a schizophrenic subject that is the effect of endless chattering and utterly silence. In other words, the character of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) talk quite a lot – they never stop talking – but they are not towards a path of language in search for a missing word that marks every true adventure. And this is the adventure where thought and language bind with one another in search for the unfathomable exteriority that is always unknown. And we know that for Duras the encounter with exteriority is the imprint of intelligence, the coefficient of real and enduring thinking. As one of the characters says at one point: “Possibly it may be that there is nothing that cuts one off from the unknown so much as friendship” [8]. I take it that for Duras the Party form (and even the obligations of fictive intellectual communities and all forms of political dilettantism) was very much her preoccupation here: the militancy of friendship could very well stage the last character in the play of historical nihilism. At the expense of avoiding being “nobody” anyone could assume the faceless “friend”, as soon enough cybernetics will end up promoting in their contactless subjective networks. The agonizing sun of a vacation (exclusive in its temporality) is already foreshadowing artificial radiation and nuclear reserve as the sole container of life on earth. In this scenario visiting Tarquinia is an escape of sorts – downwards to the night but also to a vita nova – although, ultimately, it does not take place. And Duras seems to tells us: true experience falls catastrophically on the other side of writing, on the unlived.
Against the therapeutic community of friendship, one can juxtapose the unpredictability of encounter in which no friend will be crushed by the rhetorical compression of the dia-logos and its discomfort. In friendship I can embrace and release without obligations. And if friendship exists it is through a negative community that is never one with allocated leisure time; and; like love, it does not solicit holidays: “you have to live with it fully, boredom and all, there is no holiday from it” [9]. In such scenario “we would not want to change the world”, but perhaps begin inhabiting it away from the sun of exposure and recognition that clears a menacing landscape without horizon. And if according to Kurt Badt, the sky is the organ of sentiment, then one must come to the conclusion that the characters of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), as pathetic as they are, are congenital witnesses of this truth; even if they could only carry it for a moment in order to instantly betray it [10].
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Notes
1. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Riverrun Press Inc, 1985), 54.
2. Laure Adler. Marguerite Duras: A Life (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 187.
3. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 139.
4. Georgy Lukács, “Richness, Chaos, and Form”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 167.
5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Sobre el lugar del lenguaje”, in La palabra hendida (Ediciones del Serbal, 1990), 164.
6. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 149.
7. Ibid., 87.
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Ibid., 213.
10. Kurt Badt. John Constable’s Clouds (Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1950), 101.
In his Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague (Thames & Hudson, 2023), Christopher Neve ponders whether there is something like an “experience” of late style in painting. He immediately sets up himself to the task in the last works of great modern masters, from Cézanne to Soutine. The notion of “late style” can only be raised at the definitive end of the artist’s path. The old age style is an aspotilla no longer dependent on approval and excellence; it favors inner capacity and dexterity of seeing. This is why late style is, probably, always self-transformative: it poses the notion of work under erasure as it comes near the zenith of retraction. For Adorno late style registers the failure of synthesis as well as the force of dissociation in the permanence of the catastrophic. Neve will perhaps agree this much: painting is not about fixing temporality (the density of the history, the vulgarity of the contemporary, the monumentality of the past); rather what remains is the fugitive scene of depiction. If the question of “late style” is immensely difficult to raise, that is because it resists conceptualization: it merely seeks to denote achievement and the ruinous; appearance and retreat; unlearning schematics and producing “from life” itself, to put it with Poussin’s pictorial vocabulary. Late style is not about the moment of judgement and recapitulation – it is what depiction can achieve in the twilight of creative powers. As Goethe once defined old age: “Old age is gradual retreat from appearance”. But this retreat animates the space that had remained secluded in the order of temporal abstraction.
There is no theory (and there will never be) of late style of pictorial representation. It is a question that merits the weight of description – which Neve combines, quite successfully, with that of emblematic instances of the artists’ form of life. In other words, late style does not require conceptual renditions; it demands the elaboration of strong descriptions that can grasp the resonance of a fundamental ethos. Neve glosses Delacroix’s ethical imperative: ‘only in old age does a painter finally know what sort of artist he should have been all along’. In late style there is coming to conclusion because there is a path for homecoming. This ethical dimension of the artist is neither regulated by form nor by epistemological conditions. Late style implies a stripping away of things; it bares a specific nudity: it can reveal interiority (the invariant) without argumentative absorption. If anything else, it is the non-knowledge of the gesturing hand. Neve points calls this “statement” when offering a treatment of Rembrandt’s old age: “…technique and the process of getting older, and that this was somehow done all in one, summed up and expressed undeniable and in confidence of one blow and as a single statement. And I wished that all painting could be like this” (46). We suppose Neve’s desire as hyperbolic, since painting under a single statement also implies the moment when the picture approaches the abyss between the hand and the order of reality.
Painting gravitates towards a single statement when it surpasses life by taking death seriously. There is much truth in reminding that the work of art aspires to its bare lyrical moment of decline and unworking of itself – this was also Cézanne’s moment of “not being able to realize!”- in order to flee from the objective fixation of the “thisness of nature”. Painting assembles a transfigurative force against the temporal succession of the pro-duction of a specific work on a surface. As expressed by the old Pisarro from the window of his studio quoted by Neve: “A little more work before dying” (54). True, nothing else but painting mattered to Pisarro, as Neve reminds us. Now, does this mean that he is holding on to the unchanged and muted essence of things as a “metaphysical solace” in the face of the whirling of a world in chaos? Perhaps there is something to this suspicion that must be reckoned with – painting comes close to theological presuppositions insofar as creation unsettles a disenchanted world and its fictitious mimesis. Alas, this is a question not fully posed by Neve, but it is also one of the ways in which his book could travel without much effort. The question of immortality of a picture has a point of departure here. But is immortality conceivable as a form of solace and fallen piety? One should refuse to ask this question in the form of generality. The works Titian, Goya, Cézanne, the dreary and posthumous glory of Velázquez or the suffering Soutine during the Nazi occupation are all efforts to pose the problem of late style painting as the ethical attunement of each artist.
In the most elevated and charged moment of Neve’s efforts to grapple with the notion of style he recurs to Soutine (and it requires us to turn to the picture “Children playing at Champigny” from 1942): “What you are seeing, when Soutine paints the Auxerre trees, is what I think happens in the work of most of the artists I haven written about here. This storm of temperament is true painting, an inexplicable combination of seeing, feeling, memory, response, imagination, and profound oddness. And so he turns away in exhaustion” (122). Late style registers the collapse of a possible fulfillment with the world by indexing a detour to the point where realization seeks to “return to simplicity and order”. Truth indicates the literal thereness on the surface devoid of illusions. So, solace does not have the last word; this is not how a painting subsists under a single statement. And that accounts for the ultimate risk: the ethical presupposition of painting exposes the artist to the “terrible freedom” as the distance between the passions (temperament) and the gesture within profound disorder and arbitrariness of nature.
Someone like Carlo Levi will find himself at home: true freedom cannot begin by the suppression of the passions in the name of interests; rather, the burden of freedom is the caesura of passions that displaces the otherwise inexorable fear of civilizational progress. Painting as the event of truth dethrones fear as the primary attunement in reality. Through our emperament one finds the exit from alienation, gathering the moment of depiction into order. There is a gentleness of freedom in the mutual self-supporting carrying of things, as Kurt Badt saw in Cézanne’s old style. And this might be the tragic element of painting and its fundamental antinomy.
For Neve this means nothing shorter than “the world reduced to a series of prodigious impulses, the revelation of the inner intact, the change taken to see the universe in a new light at the risk of failing utterly” (130). Late style is what reveals inner intact to the fruition of exteriority – this is the compass of visibility. A failed world followed by decline – two terms where mythic transfiguration moves painting to the eccentric luminosity of altering the jarring relation with the world. Old style enacts a catastrophe that refuses the insolvency of pulsation that binds character to the harmony of form. One might add that it could very well be that painting is, as revealed in the abyssal caesura of a late style, a stated mystery: a passionate life that profoundly perturbs the world, a transcendence that falls into an irrevocable eternity.
Infrapolitical Reflections 