existance

Ethics and chorâ. by Gerardo Muñoz


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morin’s autocritique and the human species. by Gerardo Muñoz

Edgar Morin’s memoir of the interwar years, Autocritique (1970), is a coherent elaboration of the early disaffection with the official culture of the Communist Party years, and the nihilist production of justifications to outlive the suppression of life into the abstraction of dogmatic principles. There are some harsh pages in Autocritique that color the general party-line position against the emerging critique of Stalinism. Let us just take this example: “The nonnegotiable and intransigent position against any anti-stalinsim would compensate for a life without principles with the enactment of a set of principles without life” [1]. It does not require much self-reflection to see that this formulation – the production of abstract reasoning in the name of boundless defense of principles – seeks to legitimize the dialectical ruse that indexes the general sense that “life does not live”, if one were to paraphrase Fernand Kürnberger. The self-assumed nihilism and bad faith denounced in the pages of Autocritique was not just that sacrifice was the abstract historical assumption of liberation, but rather that the reality of sacrifice was unbearable for many; specially for those who found themselves in a situation to suffer it [2]. And part of the memoiralist reconstruction by Morin is to leave all this behind, and in the effort to do so, also embrace a political option beyond the collapse of the historical utopia. 

Of course, there is some ambiguity here, and to put it in this way it is already a form of understatement. About halfway through the book, Morin recalls that Elio Vittorini had told them [Antelme and Mascolo, his two good buddies during the postwar years] that communist culture had a saturation of politicization within itself; and, already in 1949, this saturation of politics had calcified  into a “policing control within politics” [3]. In other words, the postwar Cold War context was the consummation of the static politics of the previous decade, only that now it was co-extensive with planetary gigantism as two formations of civilizational states (Americanism and the Soviet Union). Could there have been an option for a different political elaboration, to put in Morin’s own terms; that is, a communism without the iron law (and lawlessness) of objective-driven efficacy and efficiency? (This second was Morin’s term) [4]. Morin does not have a positive answer to this question at least in 1970. However, we can reconstruct a possible answer by taking into account at least two divergent symptoms. First, is Morin’s critical target: political stalinism as hyperbolic of the communist aspiration and necessary culmination, which had cut through the thicket of the gordian knot of historical dialetics movement for emancipation.

Let’s take this moment: “Stalinism was monstrous, I myself perceived in 1949. But this monstrosity had tainted the most admirable form conceived by man: communism. Now evil and good would intertwine in an intimate way….and the attempt to eliminate the cancer’s cause was not, at the sametime, also a form to suppress the fountain of life” [5]. If anything this is a symptom that for Morin, it seems to me, that communism cuts through political ideology, and cannot be contained otherwise. At the same time, the leveling of the critique at this height entails that Morin’s own leveled critique is still prey to ideological determinations blanketed as political rationality. In fact this is something that Autocritique never abandons; and, perhaps its retention indexes its impasse, which is also the impasse of the political subjectivity. 

The second symptom is that Morin never dares to mention Robert Antelme’s The Human Species as a touchtone memoir of the experience of the camp, and the camp as hyperbolic of the destruction of politicity. Of course, the strongest distillation of Antelme’s book is not waged at the level of political ideology, but rather about rather at the level of the human species as the final destination of infinite destruction (because he can be infinitely destroyed in virtue of its indestructible irreducibility) that brings back the indivisible origin of the human species. Of course, this rings true with Amadeo Borgida’s thesis that ideological determination puts emphasis on the individual (in positive or negative sense), whereas communism attends to the human species as the ground level of the species [6]. 

Needless to say, what is realized in both Stalinism and Nazism, albeit their different designs and orientations, is the confused struggle of the separation within what is unfathomable kernel of the human species (this is after all the naturalist project of Hitler’s Black Earth). And what Antelme discovers – although the verb discovering here is providing a scientific optic that is not too appropriate – is that the human species is at the ground of needs, but insofar as the need of the human species transcends itself to its biological reduction. Perhaps this is where the thorny question of “ethics” should be situated; a question that, in return, will also put in perspective our distance with the generation of Rue Saint Benoit and the humanist-nonhumanist polemic regarding the miraculous transcendence of human beings in the world. Was not this Antelme’s definition in the “The Smiling Angel”: “The only transcendence is the relation between beings”? Morin’s concluding remarks in Autocritique decisively go to the heart of this question, which is worth citing in full: 

“Ethics is an existential feeling, like the feeling of freedom, answered by every science, by every look at the past as well as by every forecast of the future, but which is the lifeblood of the lived present. And this sap of what has been lived, a paradoxical thing, is the presence in our inner core of the ought-to-be, of the ideal, of the negation, that is, of the virtual and the imaginary. And everything that eliminates the ought, the denial, the ideal, the imaginary and the virtual, concerns what is dead and fossilized. The only thing we can do is become aware of this contradiction. Perhaps a new conception of the world, where the relationship between what is called real and what is called virtual will have taken on a new meaning, will allow us to progress further.” [7]. 

At the end of Autocritique Morin seems ready to accept the magical and mystified dimension of reification, a necessary philosophical and practical technical anthropology invest a new ordered relationship with the world. But this is also symptomatic of Morin’s subjectivism and humanism that stops him at the nearness of the question of the human species. He never arrives there, or he stops too short. This is the distance that keeps illumination at hand; that is, that stubbornly insists on holding to modernity’s capacity for reinvention and, upholds the dialectics between critique and autonomous freedom. But, this is precisely what is no longer what could suffice the opening of “a new conception of the world today”, even if the gordian knot is precisely at the conjuncture of ethics, language, and existence. No subject without critique, and no critique without the emergence of a new subject. As such, self-critique becomes an unconvincing condition to advance towards a beaten and well known path.

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Notes 

1. Edgar Morin. Autocrítica (Editorial Kairós, 1976), 117

2. Ibid., 45. 

3. Ibid., 163. 

4.Ibid., 72. 

5. Ibid., 162. 

6. Amadeo Bordiga. “Specie umana e crosta terrestre” (1952), in Drammi gialli e sinistri della moderna decadenza sociale (Iskra, 1978), 94.

7. Edgar Morin. Autocrítica (Editorial Kairós, 1976), 266-267.

Homo Lupus Felix: Against Civilization. Notes for a presentation in the Eckhardt S. Program, Lehigh University. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is no question that Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice (2018) is a marvelous cinematic work insofar as it measures up against the epoch by radically questioning the principles that have upheld what we know as civilization. This slight adjustment is critical given that ideology, political economy, or subject oriented frameworks of analysis have become insufficient to deal with the crisis of civilization. As a matter of fact, they have become functional (mere deployments of technique, to put it in Willy Thayer’s vocabulary) to the infrastructure, and its specific philosophy of History that promotes the maintenance of Order after the liquidation of its legitimacy. I would like to clarify that I am understanding civilization in a twofold register: as a genetic process of human anthropology based on the matrix of “appropriation, distribution, and production” of the world (a techno-political grid popularized by Carl Schmitt); but also as the total realization of an economic or political theology, which we can directly link to the function of “credit” (and the process of abstract dialectic between credit and debt, as a ground of a new “faith”) that is deployed as the medium of the total sum of social relations that commands beings in the world. Civilization is the general matrix of a process of optimal rationalization of the events that take place in the world, making us potential reactionary agents of the time of its phenomenality.

Aside from all the Christian and religious imaginary, Lazzaro felice is a theological film, but only insofar as it takes the irruption of the mythical remnant very seriously. There is something to be said here – and I think the film stresses this in several parts of the story – between religion and theology, dogma and the spiritual (anima), and the sacred and the commandment solicited by faith (pistis). In other words, Lazzaro felice enacts a destruction of a political theology by insisting on the civilizatory decline towards reproduction of as mere life of survival; a life that is delegated to the abstract faith of credit. In this sense, it is no mistake that Lazzaro’s homicide takes place in a bank and executed by the community of believers (capital, in the end, has already been incarnated; it is the Subject). The laboratory where this takes place is the metropolis, which as I have argued elsewhere is the site of devastation and optimization life in our epoch, which unifies world and life putting distance into crisis, in a suspense of the experiential [1]. The consumption of the new political theology of unreserved equivalence between humans and objects is what Rohrwacher interrupts through the fable of the beatitude of Lazzaro as a life to come in the threshold of the highest phase of the metropolitan stagnation. I will limit my commentary here to three nodes that allow the Lazzaro felice to expand this critique of civilization and the principle of the “civil society”, a notion that we will return to.

First, there is the fable, a capsule of an ancient gnostic wisdom. The fable is what can radically alter evil by tipping its objective realism into a real of the imagination against the grammar of order. Avoiding the order of narration based to account for the history of progress and developmentalism from the rural to the civilization of the metropolis, Rohrwacher’s strategy resorts to the ancient craft of the fable. This is fundamental for a number of reasons. First of all, because the fable allows to withdrawal from pure counter-narrative of historical development and its justifications that allow for the interruption of the time of development, while offering a possibility of an otherwise transformation of the world. This is the gnostic texture of the fable that Hans Blumenberg identified in this form, since obscuring of the distinction between humans and animals relaxes the burden of proof of the absolutism of reality as predicated in the matter of facts [2]. It through fables that something escapes, because there is always an image that escapes the narration of the events of this world. But the fable also offered something else: the beginning of myth as the site of legitimation for foundations of social relations. This is why, as T.J. Clark has reminded recently, Hegel associated the fable with the origin of master and slave dialectic, as a new form of domination of world once the world’s enchantment and mystery was dissolved: “In the slave, prose begins” [3].

The end of a paractical poetics? Perhaps. This means that the price to be paid to enter into the prose of “civilization” is to assimilate the unfathomable and invisible contours of the world into the polemos of storytelling; to be a subject of a story, and as a result, of historical transition. This is what civilization mobilizes through the fable as its posited legitimacy. It is in the fable where the abyss that separates us from the world becomes animated, ordered, and narrated in order for the apparatus of production to commence. It seems to me that Alice Rohrwacher goes to arcanum of civilization when she treats the fable of the wolf, which has functioned to legitimize the passage from the state of nature to the modern concept of the civil in Hobbes’s theory of the state. We should remember the brief fable in Lazzaro felice:

“Let me tell you the story of the wolf. A very old wolf had become decrepit, he could hunt wild animals anymore. So, he was excluded from the pack…and the old wolf went to houses, to steal animals, checks and sheep. He was hungry. The villagers tried to kill him in every way possible, but they didn’t succeed…as if he were invisible.”

It is a remarkable fable that inverts the political fiction of the wolf in Hobbes; mainly: a man is an arrant wolf to another man (homo homini lupus), which justifies the exodus from the state of nature as the “miserable condition of civil war” between men. The stakes are clear: by repressing civil war (stasis), civil society emerges as a divided but unified body under a sovereign principle of authority [2]. The wolf is first established as creature of fear and depredation in order to allow for the principle of civilization to emergence as uncontested and necessary. The fable of the wolf is the protofigure that guards the history of perimeters of civilization as a way to pacify and repress the latency of civil war. Rohrwacher, against the Hobbes political fable, gives us a fable of the wolf that not only is uncapable of waging life as war, but that it enacts full refusal and desertion to be hunted; that is, to be invisible, which ultimately entails a life not outside of a politics of hunting and the secondary pacification by which the end of hunting mutates to the enclosure of domestication [4]. 

If the wolf stands for the invisible it is because it occupies the excess of total legibility of a new civil order, that is, of a world administered by technique of order. The wolf is a prefiguration of the invisible that is improper to every life (and thus to all biopolitical domestication proper to civilization) in the passage from the organic community of the living to the civilizatory topos of the metropolis. The wolf condenses the instructive character in every life; that is, what cannot be reduced to the fiction or the depredatory total war of the civilization nor the fiction of the community lacking an open relation to the world.  This fable, then, is not just what unveils the fictional grounds of the legitimacy of civilization (its “black magic” under the light of rationality and control) but also what reprepares another community. A community in which what we have in common is not an attribute, a substance, or an identity, but an irreducible ethical relation in which civil war cannot equate total hostility and what establishes an absolute difference between life and the “principle of the civil” that formalized the aspiration of isonomic equality:

“The immemorial bad reputation of the wolf (wolf bashing) informs us about one of the oldest tricks of civilization. This consists of bearing the weight of predation on what is heterogeneous to it. To be able to say that man is a wolf of man, the wolf must first have been disguised as a “predator.” We do not mean that the wolf is gardener of daisy flowers, we mean that he behaves neither as a tyrant nor as a bloodthirsty animal, and even less as an individualist (the famous “lone wolf”). In fact, the wolf may have taught communism to humans. The cub that opens its eyes among humans recognizes them as part of its clan. Two lessons: 1) friendship ignores categories; 2) the common is the place where we open our eyes to the world. What the human, for his part, has “taught” to the wolf – like an angry father yelling at his son “I’ll teach you!” – is the servility of the good puppy and the good cop”. [5]. 

               The end of the film comes full circle with the only condition of finding a way out, producing a break in the infrastructure of the domestication, opening a path within and against the metropolis. It is almost as if the film, like in life, was a preparation for the moment of exodus and retreat. In fact, the wolf deserts the metropolis passing through and beyond the highway in plain rush hour. According to Alice Rohrwacher, the wolf leaving the city and not being seen was a reinforcement of the invisible ethical dimension that is proper to every life (an ethos, which in the old Pindaric sense that refers not only our character, but also, and more fundamentally to our abode and habits that are world-forming), and that is devastated by the anthropological crisis of the species in the wake of the process of civilization [6]. However, the wolf exit from the metropolis is not an abandonment of the world in the manner of a monastic communitarian retreat; but rather the pursuit of liberating an encounter with the events of the world foreclosed by topological circulation of credit that amounts to borrowed life without destiny. 

Now to the question that signals an instance of construens in what follows the desertion: what about happiness? It is here, it seems to me, where the beatitude of Lazzaro could be thought as an ethical form of life – as preparation to learn to how live a life against the abstract processes of domestication – that exceeds the two hegemonic paradigms of happiness offered by Western civilization: on the one hand, happiness understood as an equilibrium operative to virtue (aretē); or, on the other, the community of salvation as a compensatory effect for the structural gap of the fallen subject, original sin (felix culpa). One could clearly see that politics at the level of civilization could now be defined as the instrument that manages the production of happiness as a temporal exception in life, but never a defining form of our character.

The wolf that is Lazzaro’s form of life – at a posthistorical threshold that dissolves the anthropological divide man and animal – offers us a third possibility: happiness understood as the refusal to partake in the promises of civilization in order to attune oneself to an errancy of life that allows itself to be hunted by an experiential imbuing of the world. Happy Lazzaro? Yes, but never a Sisyphus who is incapable of experiencing the vanishing horizon between earth and sky in infinite divisibility of the world. The wolf unleashed traverses a geography against domestication, revoking the phantasy of home (the oikos). I will let the last words be made by some fellow-travelers contemporary American thinkers: “Civilisation, or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have one.” [7].

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Notes

1. Gerardo Muñoz. “Dix thèses sur Lazzaro felice” en tant que forme de vie”, Lundi Matin, May 2019: https://lundi.am/Dix-theses-sur-Lazzaro-felice-en-tant-que-forme-de-vie

2. Hans Blumenberg. “Of Nonunderstanding: Glosses on Three Fables” (1984), in History, Metaphors, Fables (Cornell University Press, 2020), 562-566.

3. T. J. Clark. “Masters and Fools”, LRB, vol.43, No.18, September 2021. 

4. Thomas Hobbes. Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive) (Hackett, 1991), 11.

5. “Éléments de descivilisation” (part 2), Lundi Matin, april 2019:  https://lundi.am/Elements-de-decivilisation-Partie-2

6. Jerónimo Aterhortúa Arteaga. “Creer en las imágenes: entrevista a Alice Rohrwacher.”, Correspondencias, May 2021: http://correspondenciascine.com/2021/03/creer-en-las-imagenes-entrevista-a-alice-rohrwacher/

7. Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 132.