experience

Gethsemane as experience. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a panel in the Museo del Prado titled “Agony in the Garden”, attributed to the French painter Colart de Laon (1377) whose religious work barely survives (this panel is, in fact, one piece from an original triptych). The scene portrays the well known stay of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsamane on the Mount of Olives, where solitude and abandonment prepares the interval for the moment of transfiguration. If anything, Gethsamane is an experience of inwardness outside itself, which the painter has marvelously captured in the figure of Jesus raising his hands in supplication to the starry skies and god. Or so we think. The crisp blue tone of the sky immediately reminds the view of the vault of the Villa Farnesina that Fritz Saxl has interpreted as the transmission of a previous pagan astrological faith in the pictorial composition. The intense blue tone coupled with the emphatic stars arrest our imagination, but also that of the humane and worldly Christ.

What kind of experience is to look up into the firmament from man’s place on Earth and the cosmos? And what are we to make of the inability of the civilized human being to look into the blue depth not as a mirror of Nature, but of the non-totalizable and irreducible experience of solitude? It must be said that in a post-mythical world, the increasing loss of the opening of the sky goes hand in hand with the boundless loss of the Earth. And this is why we are tempted to read Colart de Laon’s picture as a gesture that renders legible the passage of the same movement: the Jesus that raises his hands outwards to the sky; and, simultaneously, the dozing Jesus that inhabits the contemplative state at the center bottom of the picture. To live in the world is defined neither by the experience of the time of arrival of the sky nor by the inward experience of the soul, but by the ability of transiting from one state to the other. And only there the worldly divine can be disclosed beyond the sclerosis of form.

This might also explain why Søren Kierkegaard following the German hymnist Gerhard Tersteegen could write in a gloss of his diaries that Jesus arises from the love feat into the path of Gethsemane: “It is always this way: Gethsemane lies closest to the highest bliss” [1]. The highest place is not the moment of absolute transcendence through faith; it is the secret that for Tersteegen expresses a kenotic hymn that empties life in the direction of poverty and death. In other words, the “highest bliss” is the experience of expropriation of every life; making life and death become indistinguishable in the vacillating night. A night beyond time and without god.  

Perhaps not just the “religious experience”, but all experience has as its central paradigm, the highest bliss in the face of death in which language can only account for it in its muteness and reverence. This is not an experience of vital teleology of humanity, but of a furtive relation. “Hacía sobre ella la experiencia”, as a Chilean writer once put it in the imperfect tense. But this can only mean to do an experience on the dissolution of oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. Journals and Notebooks V.7 (Princeton University Press, 2014), 368.

Kallopismata orphnes: the eclipse of language. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his most decisive confrontation with the scientific method and the legitimacy of science through objective knowledge, Carlo Michelstaedter introduces a rather loosely expression from Plato’s Gorgias to lever his position against the sufficiency of the scientific experiment: the “kallopismata” (καλλωπίσματα), which can be rendered as “embellishments” or “ornaments” that is constituted in figures such as matter, law, the final cause, or ruling principles (archein) that align the conditions for calculative and sufficient reasoning [1]. For Michelstaedter, the world of objectivation and scientific neutrality proceeds through figures of rhetorical ornamentation, kallopismata, which allows conquering the future; that is, what remains completely foreign and inaccessible to the domain of calculative reason waged upon a series of expressed goods. 

It could be said that kallopismata is the artifice that allows the absorption of those goods to the historicity of civilization as they undergo their own ‘corruptio optimi pessima’ a process of functional realization of their entelechy: the desert becomes a cloister, the banquet an academic, the artist’s studio a school of beaux artists…imitative technique assumes the name of art; any virtuosity assumes the name of virtue [2]. In a language similar to that of Heidegger’s, Michelstaedter speaks of the constitution of an “exceptional machine”, which positions the organization of the world through rhetorical deployment (and it was not by coincide that Heidegger referred to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness with one another”), and hence the fundamental metalinguistics of any social economy. The exceptional machination not only deploys generic meaning from the irreducibility of things, but also organizes the mediations between the subjective plane and the objective reality. In this way, the rise of the hegemony of science in the hands of the ‘pioneers of civilization’ and a “community of the wicked”, as Michelstaedter calls the endeavor of modern scientists, can violate nature offering security and comfort to the totality of mankind. This will explain their civilizational endurance and the recursive positionality for historical self-amendment and renewed adaptation.

How can this community of the wicked achieve absolute consent and domination through their practice? The domination over nature is not exclusively an anthropological process extended outwardly; it posits a nexus between interiority and exteriority where the question of language itself is entirely redefined. This is why the most stealth invention of the practice of scientists for Michelstaedter is to “infiltrate life with certain words….on which meaning unknowingly prop themselves for their daily needs, without acknowledging them they pass them on as they were received” [3]. The ultimate experiment of the techno-scientific understanding of the world amounts to the elaboration of cybernetics (a term that Michelstaedter never uses but that obviously colors the effect of his general scheme of civilizational nihilism); that is, the unification between the phenomena of the world and the human’s sayable language. To this end, Michelstadter will emphasize this proximity: “Technical terms give men a certain uniformity of language. In  vain do the proponents of internally created international languages dream. The international language will be language of technical terms; of kallopismata orphnes, ‘ornaments of the darkness’ [4]. Whereas darkness denotes the harboring of language and its limit – and one can recall Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris – its slow decay in darkness, kallopismata orphnes, outlives itself by the artificial luminosity that tears all mediation from the sensible world, now realized as fully alien to the appearance of truth and the truth of appearance. As Giorgio Agamben has noted, in what could be read as an esoteric gloss on the triumph of the kallopismata orphnes in our times, the technical question in the scientific paradigm is not merely a problem of the modes of techniques and instrumentalization, but more concretely a process that brings to an end the use of language as a sensible experience with the world [5]. And insofar as “sense” is only an idea of the sayable, it might as well be senselessness has been fully integrated into the infinite production of “informational differences” (“data run”), a final hypertrophied form of an unworldly logoi. 

It would not have passed Michelstaedter that the context in which the degraded notion of kallopismata (embellishment, ornament, decoration as adjectives do the work, but one should also register the kallos, a central tonality in Plato’s musical thought) happens in a rebuttal of Callicles to Socrates’ critique of force and personal interest as requirement for a conception of Justice. In 492c of the Gorgias Callicles will reply to Scorates stating the following: “No, in good truth, Socrates—which you claim to be seeking—the fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness, and the rest of these embellishments (kallōpismata)—the unnatural covenants of mankind—are all mere stuff and nonsense” [6]. In other words, for Callicles anything that does not have the force of principle or justification has already fallen to the level of “stuff” and “nonsense”, even though that nonsense is itself the use of language in its contact with the “thereness” of appearances. It is no coincidence that in his lecture of ethics, Wittgestein will press upon the nonsensical expressions of language in order to elude the escaping and impossible essence of language every time that it seeks to move beyond the world” [7]. In other words, if Callicles is the hyperbolic figure of the rhetorician-scientist, what is at stake in the inception of kallōpismata as veil of language is nothing else than the effective liquidation of its ethical dimension, which in turn transforms the use of language into a mere coding instrument at the altar of philopsychia, or, in the words of Callicles, of empty “unnatural covenants” (para physin synthēmata), depleting language to exclusive semantic and and metaphoric correspondence [8]. In other words, the ascendancy of the nonlanguage of the kallopismata will now entail abandoning the imperative mode in which language and life can enter a secret relation as defined by its use [9]. 

Can one even speak of human life after the ascension of the kallopismata orphnes as the civilizational matrix of the world? A life without the use of language, under the veil of kallōpismata, represents an unprecedented milestone and perhaps something beyond the rhetorical enthymemes. Perhaps one could elucidate this point in this way: according to Hans Blumenberg, the most important rhetorical form ever invented was that of the prayer because through its practice one is ultimately trying to persuade a God. In contrast, in the complete darkness prefigured by kallōpismata orphnes that dwells in a civilization eclipse – the rise and fall of modern secularization and political idolatry – the gods can no longer be posited as exteriority towards the taming of the gnosis for the anthropological need of self-affirmation [10]. Because the process of fictitious anthropomorphism has reached its own limit to the point of becoming itself an “exceptional machine” (macchina eccezionale), the mystery of the senselessness of language has lost the world not necessarily by becoming mute and silent, but by enslaving itself to the endless chatter and infinite consensus by the moral equilibrium of the social age that for Michelstaedter ultimately meant “the machinery of dispersing interests, where the paths of existence are no longer clearly traced, but become confused and disappear; hence it is up to every existence to create the luminous path among the universal chaos; as if were, an art of practical life” [11].  It is that existential path granted by the nonsense of language (soul to soul) that grants beauty in the event of appearance, that cuts through and overcomes the civilizational allure of linguistic kallopismasta whose radiant heliotropism can only result in the most spectacular of blindness. 

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Notes

1. Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric (Yale University Press, 2004), 98.

2. Ibid., 96.

3. Ibid., 98.

4. Ibid., 98.

5. Giorgio Agamben writes in “Sul dicibile e l’idea”, Che cos’è la filosofia? (Quodlibet, 2016): “Technics is not an “application of science”: it is the fundamental production of a science that no longer wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends to replace its hypothesis with reality, to “realize” them. The transformation of the experiments – which now takes place through machines there so complex that they do have anything to do with real conditions, but purport to force them – eloquently shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake. As science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question through ideas, in language, loses its necessary connection with the sensible world”, 115. The attempt to escape appearance and experience to turn the world into a mimetic illusion administered by the aesthetic dominance of the pseudos was also elaborated by Gianni Carchia in his analysis of Plato’s aesthetics in L’estetica antica (Editori Laterza, 1999), 89-100.

6. Plato. Gorgias (Loeb, 1967), 413.

7. Ludwig Wittgstein. Lecture on Ethics (Wiley & Sons, 2014), 50-51.

8. Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric (Yale University Press, 2004), 97.

9. Carlo Michelstaedter “Appendici I: Modi Della Significazione Sufficiente”, in La persuasione e la rettorica (Adelphi Edizioni, 1995), 142.

10. Hans Blumenberg. “Una aproximación antropológica a la actualidad de la retórica”, in La realida en que vivimos (Ediciones Paidós, 1999), 133. Philippe Theophanidis recently suggested in a discussion that we should read kallopismata orphnes in mind with the formulation  “God help me”—because I haven’t the courage to help myself” that Michelstaedter introduces in the chapter “Rhetoric”, 69. “Notes on The Constitution of Rhetoric”, unpublished, February 2025.

11. Carlo Michelstaedter. Epistolario (Adelphi Edizioni, 1983), 159.

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.

Acies animi pictura. On Victoria Cirlot’s Taüll (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Victoria Cirlot’s vibrant short book, Taüll: liturgia y visión en los ábsides románicos catalanes (Mudito&Co, 2023) focuses on the well-known apse fresco panels of the Romanesque Saint Climent Church (Lleida) dating back to the twelfth century now housed in the Museo Nacional de Arte de Catalunya (MNAC), whose central figure is a Maesteis domini elevated to representation of the highest celestial cosmos. In another sense, Taüll should also be read (and perhaps the obligatory accent here is necessary) as a synthesis of Cirlot’s own work on the theological infusion of visuality and what it means to “see” and “being seeing” in a world that strives for legibility. Cirlot has no ‘presentist’ anxieties about the Romanesque period – its iconographic and overtly enigmatic depiction – but it is not difficult to think of the Christian temple as an aesthetic laboratory, or artist studio, in which the liturgical dimension functioned not much so much as a private space for the faithful, but rather as a site of encounters and vital experience (Cirlot 11). 

The liturgical performance depended on visual arrangement that opened visions of the inner sense, which Cirlot quoting Saint Augustine calls acies anime — transcendence through a sensible awakening that encompassed all the senses. Following Pavel Floresnky in his study about the Church as the synthesis of the arts, Cirlot attempts to portray the impossible experience at Tüll as the site of the life of the spirit; that is, where the spirit is transformed and released (Cirlot 12). Before there is acclamation and synthesis, there is an unfathomable experience facilitated by the liturgical imagery which is a passage or a preparation of sorts. 

It is almost impossible for us today – situated at the threshold of the autonomization of the arts and the division of its practices – to grasp the antecedent image (imago) through figures of what will only later be seen. Cirlot quotes Saint Paul to anchor this difficult chiasmatic movement of veiling-unveiling: “Now we see through a mirror, an enigma, but later we will see face to face (Cor.1.13) (Cirlot 22). Is the pictorial unveiling, or rather veiling, the juxtaposition of the image in space what will ultimately solve the enigma of unmediated appearance? And could appearance be released without its dependence on the mystery that prescribes the image making and destruction well into the totalization of modern pseudos at the art of depiction? There are conscious echos of Carchia’s thinking (in my reading of Cirlot, that is), which I think help to grant a bit more breathing space, as it were, to Cirlot’s unelaborated suggestion that “Pero la pintura es el fruto, no de una percepción sensible, sino del ojo visualiza eso que tiene que ser despertado en la interacción de los sentidos físicos” (Cirlot 23). 

To paint, or the painterly activity, is the gathering of an inner vision, where there is no more separation between the autonomous senses (visions, touch, flavor). Cirlot notes how the detailing of the querubin angel having small eyes painting on their hands would confirm this thesis. The movement of the hands registers a vision that touches the proximity of the specular Glory of transcendence. Following Henry Corbin, Cirlot can remind us that the angel for the mystical tradition is an entity whose “being is only vision” (Cirlot 28). In turn, the all-seeing angel is not a bird’s view (I guess today we will also say a drone commanded from a computing application) that has total vision over the terrestrial grid; it is more a vision that is able to see each thing — given that his divine vision he can see God in everything, and things in themselves because the painterly eye can only look outwards through the inner eye of the heart (Cirlot 38). In fact, the heart’s eye is a retreat from the world of countable and visual things, as transcendence becomes the mere contact of the senses with the divine. 

Part of the difficulty of grasping what is taking place at the Saint Climent of Taüll apse resides in a gesture that is the inversion of pictorial verisimilitude, if one is to take up Michael Fried’s thesis in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) as a reduction of disenchanted pictorial representation. In other words, the pictorial manifestation at Tüll is neither theatrical nor figural absorption for the spectators, but it was rather an experience with the liturgical mystery that strived in the liberation of the soul at the uncharted height of God itself (Cirlot 40).  And perhaps of being a mode, among many, with the presence of God in things, and things and names as already expressing the unavowable nature of the divine. Cirlot’s thesis gains traction and depth  at this point, since the central task of pictorial creation at Tüll is to find the means of granting visible to what must remain invisible (the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist mysterium) that breaks away from the implementation of imitatio naturae (Cirlot 44). This also speaks as to why Cirlot, with prudential reasons, never speaks of an aesthetic sublime that this pictorial commitment with the theos and experience clearly appears to reject. In the sublime construction, sense has been subordinated to the negative position, by which the return of representation will reveal itself in its erasure. 

The seemingly absorptive theatricality does not stand up to the highest music of the aspirations at Tüll. Once again Florensky appears as a central interpretive key for Cirlot: the iconomic and atmospheric opening of Romanesque art frees contemplation to a degree in which vision and the outside of life entangle to such a degree that no autonomization of the ‘aesthetic experience’ can formalize the sensorial gathering of the invisible upwards where “el alma no podía descansar”, or where the soul knows no rest. One can also recall Kurt Badt when writing about Constable meteorological landscape: such opening in the picture is the true organ of sentiment. But “that world is long gone” – the world of visual liturgical at Taüll – concludes Cirlot, and something similar could be said of the practice of painting. The minimal lesson at Taüll is as simple as it is difficult: any access to the world today requires to divest from the hand of technē so that the hand of pictura can take hold of the fleeting mystery of a life experienced. Such is the enduring vital vision at Taüll.

Pasternak’s symbolism and immortality. by Gerardo Muñoz

“Symbolism and immortality”, was the title of a talk that a very young Boris Pasternak gave in 1913 to a group of students, although the paper was finalized around 1917. It has been known that the integral version was destroyed or misplaced, and only a synthesis was preserved in the author’s papers, which provides access to the thicket of the argument, which concerned ultimately the immortality of artistic creation and the transhistorical participation of the human species in the enduring process. Pasternak himself inscribes this lecture at the heights of his ars poetica: “My main purpose was to put forward the proposal that perhaps this maximally subjective and universally human corner or lot of the soul was art’s immemorial area of activity and its chief content. And, further, that although the artist is of course mortal like everybody else, the happiness of existence which he has felt is immortal and can be felt through his works by others centuries after him” [1]. Unlike the contentious positions about the creative genius and the orientation of the poet (dichter als Führer) that soon enough will inform the thick aura of European modernism in the age of dissonance, for Pasternak in the 1910s (the same decade as the early Lukacs and the youthful Michelstaedter), creation concerned a gathering of experience outside subjectivity; it was fundamentally the experience of the outside beyond the subject, which could only be cultivated by the poetic sensibility’s relation to that outside. It is not clear where there was a figural specificity to the notion of “poet” that Pasternak advances; but, what is essential, is that the poetic task was only possible through a spiritual formation and deployment of symbolization, that is, of the transfigurative use of language. 

Pasternak does not distinguish between vulgar and crafted poetic language; rather he uses the term symbolism to account for the sensible immortal reservoir that is transmitted in the stratification of the genesis of the human race. It is not of minor importance that Pasternak is writing in the dawn of a concrete materialist revolution, in which possession is only registered, counted, and even “destroyed” as mere “stuff”, thus incapable of solving the crisis of the transmission of tradition and blind to the problem of sense. Indeed, perhaps the revolution can only deepen the epochal crisis of symbolization. Pastnark will write affirmatively: “Immortality takes possession of the contents of the soul…in pure form this is what symbolism teaches” [2]. In a conception that is strikingly similar to Warburg & Saxl’s conception of the symbol (and history now designed as a study of the coagulation of symbologies) as a surplus discharged of energy as the reservoir of human sensation and formulas of imagination (the pathos formulae); the attunement towards symbolization never amounts to an accumulation of meaning and narration, but rather it is what preserves the earliest and purest stages of human expression, as argued by Saxl [3].

This is why there is no immortality except in the beginning: the real process of the anthrogenesis is only accessible in those moments of passion and experience while “being observant and drawing from nature”, Pasternak will claim in his talk. The immortality to be retained, it seems now clear, is not that of a future and postponed soteriological communal “life”; it is rather a life that clings to the ordinary and intuitive symbolism that resists the monstrous numbing of fictitious life commanded by the blackmail of the reality principle required by orderability. In this light, perhaps Alfred Metraux is right in that going beyond the neolithic age marked a catastrophic wandering for human beings. (And is not the poetic instantiation a painful reminder of this?)

The stratification of symbolism was of a higher reality; a playful dance between the figure and the non-figural, between the visible and the invisible, between the countable and the non-countable. Pasternak situates this tendency under the sign of “theos“, a religious character in which the texture of the soul is able to find some breathing space as condition of possibility for the opening of symbolism. Modernity is many things at once, but for Pasternak what was being “withered away” at the altar of morality and politics, Church and State (his terms verbatim) was precisely the historical draught of the symbolic man: “The communion of mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic, because it is full of meaning” [4]. This means that there is no community of salvation that serves as the general economy transport between the two kingdoms; if there is a Kingdom it is only of the symbolization of the irreducibility of souls, that can only enjoy immortality in the renunciation of what the materialist and survivalist life is capable of offering in detriment of the experiential possibilities of creation and language when grasping the sense of deathlessness. 

In the life of civil society you will live organized only unto death, without any experience of immortal death of any other, given that death has become mere transaction, a burdensome logistical ritual, a common spectacle. And this is why Pasternak, unlike the Cold War pawn that sometimes he was forced to embody, gradually became convinced that poetic existence could only take place outside the Social with no role or mission to subscribe to: “Do not reserve a poet’s position: it is a dangerous, if not empty” [5]. What was at stake was not a “new life” but a second birth (title of his own poetry collection, Vtoroe Roshdenie from 1934) to plunge into the depth of symbolization. The task is not to invent anything “new” (that modern fetishism), but to regain the life of the soul where the origin commences: “…and here art stops, And earth and fate breath in your face” [6]. It is a mysterious and impossible portrait of a face that reckons with the passing of the symbol and its absolute mystery. The very texture of expressivity that, against all odds, lingers on.

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Notes 

1. Boris Pasternak. An essay in Autobiography (Collins and Harvill Press, 1919), 69.

2. Boris Pasternak. “Symbolism and immortality”, in The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writing on Inspiration and Creation (2008), 40-41.

3. Fritz Saxl. “The expressive gestures of Fine Arts”, in Lectures V1-V2 (Warburg Institute, 1957). 

4. Boris Pasternak. “Foreword”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 14.

5.  Boris Pasternak. “To a Friend”, in  Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 100.

6. Boris Pasternak. “Second Birth”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 109.

Politics as our passion? by Gerardo Muñoz

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).

2. Gerardo Muñoz & Philippe Theophanidis. “¿Por qué volver a la Rue Saint-Benoît? Conversación sobre un seminario, Ficción de la razón, February 2024: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2024/02/26/gerardo-munoz-y-philippe-theophanidis-por-que-volver-a-la-rue-saint-benoit-conversacion-sobre-un-seminario/ 

3. Maurice Blanchot. “On the Movement” (1968), in Political Writings 1953-1993 (Fordham University Press, 2010), 109. 

4. Marguerite Duras. “Entrevista en A Fondo” (1979): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmnVBenAoyw

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

Tradition according to Wallace Stevens. by Gerardo Muñoz

The fact that there is a continuous and secret communication between painting and tradition is something that has been registered in the genesis of myth well into aesthetic autonomy of modernity and the artificious equivalence of difference that regulates the temporal caducity of the new [1]. In a specific sense, the crisis of tradition in the contingency of the modern has the activity of painting as a privileged site because it holds the outside together in a perpetual unveiling; as if the human species were permanently exiting the shadows of the cave every time a hand strokes an animated brush over a surface. Painting clears the site of the inaccessible so that true life can emerge without the crutches of incorporated scripts of social organization. But what could it mean to think of ‘tradition’ in a painterly manner? In a poem of 1945, unequivocally entitled “Tradition”, Wallace Stevens seems to offer a response and an outlook for our consideration. 

In a conversationalist style, Stevens thinks that tradition is an uncontrolled question insofar as it can only be assessed through poetic form. Of course, for Stevens the character of tradition could not be grasped neither in a compilation of well delineated forms nor detailed through “a set of laws…to identify it is not tradition” [2]. As it was for Hölderlin’s practice relation to Greek antiquity, tradition is something that is always missed or unfulfilled from its uttermost strangeness. It is, as he asks in the fifth stanza “an unfamiliar sum, a legend scrawled in a script we cannot read?” [3]. The illegible transcription of what is passed as tradition holds to the incommensurability between what remains unfamiliar and what is already familiar and perceptible. We must resist the attempt at disambiguation, since any relation to tradition must be anachronistic as Nicoletta Di Vita has suggested [4]. Thus, for Stevens “tradition is always near”, at hand. And the hand calls forth the mystery of painting. It keeps a world at the threshold of the verbal. The placement of nearness, however, will be on the side of formlessness that characterizes the genesis of one’s existence. In other words, the true task of approaching tradition is neither at the level of the construction of forms nor about the analogical pairing of historical evolution; it is the painterly relationship between life and the experience in the world that precedes and outlives the time of life. This is what Stevens will denote a “ascending the Humane”; meaning a life qualified by fulfilling the adventure of a destiny that is capable of addressing the outside. In the most emphatic verses of “Tradition”, Stevens shows his absolute nearness to what he has in mind: 

“Ascending the humane. This is the form 

Tradition wears, the clear, the single form,

The solid shape, Aenas seen, perhaps,

By Nicolas Poussin, yet nevertheless 

A tall figure upright in a giant’s air.” [5]. 

The use of “form” in the first verse is most definitely mischievous, but it is also the playful ambiguity that Stevens wants to bring to our attention. One way to read it is to circle back to the sense in which the painterly becomes the utile passage between life and world. After all, tradition “wears” the dress of nature, although this is only facilitated by the sensible activity of painting. Exactly a decade later in the essay “The Whole Man” (1955), and speaking directly to the rise of cybernetics and technico-political technicians that had consolidated their mastery over the events of the world, Stevens will suggest that “Modern art often seems to be an attempt to bridge the gap between facts and miracle…to succeed in doing this, if it can be done at all, seems to be exclusively the task of the specialist, that is to say, of the painter” [6]. Why the painter and not the poet? At a very general level, the two figures are interchangeable; however, if one takes the painterly mediation, it becomes possible to claim that painting has a more subtle expressive footing in showing the nearness of tradition.

Painting is the non-language that  gathers the formless tune of tradition: “The vigor of art perpetuates itself through generations of form. But if the vigor of art is itself formless, and since it is merely a principle it must be, its form comes from those in whom the principle is active, so that generations of form come from generations of men. The all-round man is certain to scrutinize form as he scrutinizes men, that is to say, in relation to all past forms” [7]. Thus, for Stevens the possible tradition is that which creates a space in which a new life can take place in the world attentive to the transmission of forms. Of course, not any world, but to “live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it” [8]. This is why Steevns will differentiate between two modalities of the task of poetry: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience; favoring the second because of how it folds our existence within the given order of space and time. 

Is not painting, precisely, a frozen instant in the spatial and temporal coherence that reveals, in turn, a hidden harmony that never fully coincides with nature nor stands in opposition to it? [9]. This is why “tradition wears” but it is also the transitory body of Aenas, which Stvevens inserts in the poem as a matter of ut pictura poesis in relation to Nicolas Poussin’s “Venus presenting arms to Aenas” (1639), which is ultimately the story of the persuasion unto one’s destiny. As it is well known, Poussin captures in a sequence Aenas being directed to his destiny invested in the arms of war. But where is destiny embodied for Stevens? Is it in the gesticulating figure of Aenas or in floating Venus that occupies the central sky of the landscape? It is almost as if Stevens acquired, as Walter Friedlander said of late Poussin, a “sublime vagueness” in visibility of the inner workings of imagination drifted from the physical imbalance of the activity of imitation [10]. 

After all, for Stevens Poussin stood precisely as the source of partition and the miniscule, confirming the primacy of “imagination” against the rhetorical compression that renders legible the modern abstraction [11]. Following André Gide who had had written on Poussin’s work, Stevens repeats without any elaboration that Poussin is to be taken “little by little” (peu à peu), so that only then its pictorial absorption can unfold against what at first sight appears as a theatrical and self-enclosed translucid stage. This is the distant ‘traditionalism’ that Stevens wanted to reject if the work of art was to endure, and still have the vigor to generate a tranquil and peaceful state of mind solicited by the late Poussin. Painting could only be expressed as a ‘mode’ — which for Poussin stood for moderation and restraint, but more importantly as the condition of a certain sensible order “by which the thing keeps itself in existence” both firmly and invisibly, that is, beyond enunciation [12]. Otherwise, as Gerald Cohen once claimed, tradition becomes the thing that you can only hold on to when it has relaxed its hold on you ceasing to color the genesis of life [13]. And while tradition cannot be fully absorbed by rules or forms of pictorial depiction, it does retain the “good that we have loved”, dispensing a noeud vital in which the divine (theos) disengages us from the compression of objective reality and into the nearness of the eternal. This is the integrity of painting that allows Stevens to proclaim the ascendance of the supreme human “good”: tradition is kept alive by the soul of an erotic deification. After all, “God and imagination are one” Stevens will suggest in the fragments of Adagia [14]. Against the edifice of sedimentation and rupture, repetition and originality, possession and abstraction; tradition will name the disembodied genesis of appearing between things in a “reflected seeming-so”. 

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. “Per un’estetica dellainvecchiato”, in Dario Lanzardo, Dame e cavalieri nel Balon di Torino (Mondadori, 1984).

2. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 595-596

3. Ibid., 595.

4. Nicoletta Di Vita. Il nome e la voce (Neri Pozza, 2022), 28.

5. Ibid., 596.

6. Wallace Stevens. “The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 874.

7. Ibid., 875. 

8. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 904. 

9. Monica Ferrando. “L’ultimo quadro di Poussin”, in L’oro e le ombre (Quodlibet, 2015), 82.

10. Walter Friedlander. Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (Harry Abrams, 1964), 82.

11. Wallace Stevens. “Tradition”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 737.

12. Cited in Étienne Gilson’s Painting and Reality (Cluny Media, 2020), 173. 

13. G. A. Cohen. “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value”, in Finding oneself in the other (Princeton U Press, 2013), 155.

14. Wallace Stevens. “From Adagia”, in Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997), 914. 

The Rue Saint-Benoît Group. Introduction for a 2024 seminar. by Gerardo Muñoz & Philippe Theophanidis.

The Rue Saint-Benoît Group, organized by Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme, and Dionys Mascolo and other fellow-travelers of the interwar years can hardly be defined as a political movement, a literary school, nor an intellectual community with a direct orientation or aesthetic program. In fact, the Saint-Benoît Group (transnational in its composition) understood itself as a shared experience of thought that gravitated under the words of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “The life of the mind among friends, thought is formed in the exchange of the written word and for those who seek”. It is also known that Hölderlin was the quintessential poet dwelling in the fracture between tradition and modernity, the flight of the gods and the eclipse of the poetic in the wake of a consummated technological Prometheism. To affirm Hölderlin’s words entails to confront the difficult questions of language and the voice as conditions for thought. How can we think of an intellectual experience in which friendship becomes inseparable from thought; and, at the same time, when thought becomes a condition for the endurance of friendship? And to what extent could this double register allow for a reinvention of the autonomy of politics in the wake of the crisis of Humanism? 

These are the enduring questions that the experiential setting of the Saint-Benoît Group bequeaths to us today. If the Saint-Benoît experience has remained opaque and invisible even within monumental historiographic narratives of twentieth-century ideas, it is because only seldom have these problems been rightly posed. Under the sign of a “friendship of thought” – a transfigurative plane that immediately resonates with the immaterial common intellect, the Heideggerian incursion on the task of thinking, and the revival of a sensible Platonism – the members of the Saint-Benoît Group witnessed the catastrophe of modern politics in real time; such as, although not limited to, the concentration camp, the postcolonial wars of liberation, communist totalitarianism, and the exhaustion of the fundamental categories of political Liberalism. Taking distance from the elaboration of a normative political theory, the Saint-Benoît Group favored the heterogeneity of stylistic endeavors and expressive acts in order to grapple with the crisis of experience. And it is to their specific scenes of writing that we must attend to in a systematic and careful way. 

In this eight-week course we will explore the diversity of the writings of the group, including figures such as Dionys Mascolo, Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Elio Vittorini and other fellow-travelers to explore questions concerning the nexus between experience and creation (both of us have worked on some of these writers intermittently in the past couple of years). To the extent that we still live among the ruins of the legitimacy of modern politics, the contestatory style of Saint-Benoît Group still raises the question about the human species within our civilizational collapse.

What type of authority emerges from their writings, communication, and imagination of a fractured humanity? And how could the concept of ‘revolution’ be transformed from its moral and technical elaborations that hegemonized the twentieth century? We are aware that the Saint-Benoît Group has no “lesson” to be extracted and made “actual”; rather, we are interested in what we would call a “gesture of thinking” that prepares the condition for a life in freedom within and beyond the contours of the polis. 

*For those interested in registering for the eight week seminar beginning in February 2024, please consider signing up at 17/instituto de estudios críticos: https://17instituto.org, or by writing to extension@17edu.org.

Under a single statement: on Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts: Late Style (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

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.

Naturae species ratioque. On Guillermo García Ureña’s Las semillas y el vacío: pensar con Lucrecio (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura is one of the most used and abused texts of the tradition, and like all classics it has had the most diverse receptions imaginable: the poem of modern science, a baroque expression of creationism for the English metaphysical poets, the precursor of historical materialism and atheism, and a tract of scientific positivism that laid the foundation for the regulation of nineteenth century social order. Once a text becomes an emblem, it usually means that it has lost its prehistoric imprint and place in the tradition. Against this backdrop, Guillermo García Ureña’s just published Las semillas y el vacío: pensar con Lucrecio (La Oficina, 2023) has the prudential gesture of disclosing the great Roman poem to its fundamental structure; attentively listening to its original complex articulation difficult to grasp with the categories of modern philosophical thought. In this sense, Ureña’s purpose is not to deploy another “philosophical account” of De rerum natura – endorsing and subscribing the influence of Epicurus and its later resonances in modern theories of physicalism and materialism of the continental schools – but rather to engage in its own ground exerting an original philological exploration of the text that opens up an array of different problems for thought. Whoever is looking for a “theory” of Lucretius will find none in this brilliant and well articulated essay. But the reader will find, nonetheless, a comprehensive hermeneutics of a text that stands as a threshold between the closure of Greek classical antiquity and the Roman reintegration of the tradition. Now, for Ureña De rerum natura proem discloses the originary understand of the epic, or épos, through which the stability of the things as they appear takes place; whether it is the Muses, the gods, being and language, the simulacra or the soul, the physical declination of creation (the atomic clinamen) and the final document of language invigorated in the corpus of the poem itself. De rerum natura is both a cosmology and a poetics with the ambition of elucidating the most obscure things of this world: Lucretius’ text defies a fixed representation through a choreography (a term that it is not used by Ureña, it must be said) that discloses the possibilities of worlds; the combination of worlds only to posit the question of how to live within them, which is another way of saying how to account for a form of life.

One of Ureña’s commitments is to hold on to Lucretius’ aesthetic and philosophical autonomy. This implies treating the influence of Epicureanism with great care; engaging with Epicurus insofar as the aesthetic autonomy and its loci of poetization reject the classical structure of the epic hero incarnated by the soteriological impulse of the great poet-philosopher (we know that this is the same problem that centuries later Hölderlin will identify through the tragic drama of Empedocles). Lucretius is writing after the twilight of the classical Greek genres. Furthermore, there is no community under an organized program of leadership and telos; on the contrary, there is only an existence that “one day will want to desert all of us” (41). True, the Epicurean notion of serenity (ataraxía) is retained and treasured; but only as the aspiration of every living being who seeks to transfigure the shadows of superstitiousness and fear that govern over the perceptive mediating forces in the world. In this sense, to dwell in the world does not consist in the limitless relationship with the simulacra; it is rather, the self-transformative exercise of freeing possibilities within the void in which forms of life can emerge. As Ureña reminds, the rainfall of the atom is as fast as that of thought itself. It is already an image of thought, as well as the figure of imagination. And the image of thought validates the history of cosmos as a patchwork of accumulations and deflections, creations and destructions, repetitions and disintegrations in a swerve of forms that infinitely recline on its ethical possibilities (139). It is altogether interesting that Ureña reminds us that, in fact, De rerum natura is not interested in staging the things in Nature; on the contrary, at the center there is the question of the ‘nature of things’ in the luminous expression of their irreducibility. This is what modern onto-theological closure brings to a process of domestication, whether through the composition of the civil structure (limitless exchange according to philosopher Felipe Martínez Marzoa, who figures prominently in Ureña’s book) or through the progressive historical structure commanded by the essence of technology that blurs the relations between forms and techniques.

If De rerum natura abandons universal history and historical narration, it is because its structure is profoundly kenotic: it can only be assigned as contingent historical transmission of the most immediate and sensorial (not necessarily “true” in the metaphysical sense) that allows the convergence of the history of forms of life and natural history (140). The operation of subtraction implies the transfiguration of freedom through the becoming of forms – their interests, constructions, and pacts (foedera naturae) as guarantee for a plastic relationship between things in a world that is always already a fragment in the void. The highly attractive Lucretian notion of foedera or “pact” (that expresses separation in coming together: a com-pact that de-compacts) is almost the inversion of the modern principle of irreversibility, if one were to take Hans Blumenberg’s  legitimation hypothesis at face value. And this is so because a foedus or pact is insufficiently strong to resist the impact of the clinamen, but indispensable for the emergence of a body that materializes its own fate towards dissolution.

The lack of unity of being allows for the existence of simulacra as that which does not have sufficient matter to compose itself as foedera; and so, it is a material semblance as an image without figure that makes it an ephemeral entelechy. In this choreography between the downwards of atoms and ephemeral intermittence of events the taking place of the world emerges a topoi of a combination of rhythms that intertwine the weight of bodies and the animation of souls. The possible combination and stylization of multiplicities in separation is the way in which a form of life emerges as the desertion from superstition and fear that hinges upon the irreversible stabilization of a principle of reality. Ureña does not go this far into the wager of Lucretius’s text – and he does not have to in his close reading of the text – but it is precisely this thick dimension of the ethical primacy that makes Lucretius’ dislocated comprehension of materiality a vibrant tune against the weight of alienation that we are still struggling to abandon.

The struggle against the alienated life – the alienation from the world, and the external manipulation of the simulacra that has become a gnostic planetary form of “TV Democracy’ (Schmitt) of the “society of the spectacle” (Debord), which implies the usurpation of our imaginal and erotic relationship with the world – well understood, does not mean to relocate the confrontation at the level of political order; it rather, rests on what we have understood by order and disorder for the reconstitution of a happy or contemplative life (naturae species ratioque). This serene life declines the offer to negotiate at the arena of sacrifice and legitimate domination, favoring the event of friendship. At this point Lucretius comes closest to Epicurus’s society of friends – studied by Carlo Diano in an important 1966 conference in relation to the organization of the passions and the transmission of love – that can guarantee a content life in the presence of “other joyous gazes” (glossing Diano’s terms) away from the persistence of war and the compensatory administration of pain. This is the ultimate treat of De rerum natura: the exemplary dimension of the serene life takes shape through the community of friends, the civilizational invariant of the human experience (prehistoric times, the classical epoch, and in our times) that abandons the paradigm of perpetual war that obfuscates omnia cordi.

It is not too ambitious to claim that only at this point we finally grasp the full extent of the Lucretian épos: not just an ephemeral and contingent declension of the primacy of atoms in the void; but, more importantly, it can disclose the irreducibility of an experience with friends. Ureña wisely closest his book with an image of the “buena vida en compañía” (the good life in companion) that insists that serenity is only possible (or desirable) in the open landscape, a nowhere-land of an eternal foedera (or a sinousia, as it appears in Plato’s Symposium) that even if temporarily too short-lived or inconsequential it paints an earthly paradise just above the grass: “poder tendernos unos juntos a otros en el césped suave, cabe un arroyuelo, a la sombra de un árbol copudo, y regalar el cuerpo sin grandes dispendios; sobre todo si el cielo sonríe y la estación del año esparce de flores el verdor de la hierba (II, 29-33)” (203). It is this inconspicuous and mute experience that strangely holds on to the passing of the world.