facticity

Quod natis exitus. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Book V of his Latin Language, and immediately after commenting the duality of Earth and Sky, Varro writes an enduring and yet enigmatic gloss of worldly life. In Roland Kent’s translation from 1938 we read: “Inasmuch as the separation of life and body is the exitus, ‘way out’ for all creates born, from that comes exitium, ‘destruction’, just as when they ineunt ‘go into’ unity, it is their initia, ‘beginnings’ [1]. It is probable that Kent had to leave the latinized terms next to familiar reiteration of modern English in order to allow the text to breath in all of its complexity, for what is Varro ultimately attempting to tell us can very depending what we want to stress, and how we read in the scope of his discussion starting in section 58. Is it that life is always marked by the wound of separation with the natural world? Or that destruction and caducity (exitium) is a necessary condition for all new beginnings, as if life understood as an enclosed organism or entity is always insufficient, because of the order of excess at the very moment that it recognizes its propriety? This excess is what cannot be contained in neither life nor in social form or political mediation; it is the initia of thought in its relation to phenomena of the world but without ever being reduced in them. In this sense, there can only be a beginning in the passion that thought grants to the separation from the world. 

This is perhaps what Pindar had in mind when writing in Isthmian 8 – in clear tone of his disenchantment before political strife – of a need to return to a shared language among friends (a language that cannot be that of the rhetorical antinomies of the polis): “It is always best to look at each thing right at our feet / for treacherous time hangs over men and twist awry the path of life. But even those things may be healed by men if freedom is with them; and a man should give care to [that] noble hope” [2]. In his commentary on these lines C.M. Bowra notes that the awry and treacherous time of life that Pindar refers is not just a personal account, but rather a state of the world of his own generation and friends [3]. Politics brings to ruin; it brings fear, but more importantly it brings oblivion to the nearness of each and every thing that stamps irreducibility. But what Bowra does not thematize is the central stress of these lines; mainly, that the Ancient poet makes a plea to the examination of proximity and nearness “look at each thing right at our feet”. The plea to take care of a true life harmonized is preoccupied with this lying out before our feet is so inapparent that it provides texture and rhythm to every appearance; it is so invisible that it can disclose the very possibility of the beginning or end of a visible world. 

It seems that Pindar’s solicitation of proximity speaks to Varro’s initia; but not because there is something like a true origin or original position (a category that modern political thought later elevate to the physics of social stratification and positional distribution), but rather because another idea of “freedom” can be rethought from the excess of what appears spatially in the world; an absolute instance of appropriation beyond life. This is perhaps beautifully expressed in one of Cézanne’s most acute images of his creative process: “I breathe the virginity of the world…a sharp sense of nuances works on me. At that moment I am as one with my paintings” [4]. Before painting and creation there is a sensuous region in which the separation of objects and subjects do not longer sustain totality except as catastrophe or force.

This means that to disclose regions of life in the world is not just about the claim of autonomy and normativity of a place; on the contrary, it is the very inapparent, almost imperceptible, possibility that lies in the wrinkled proximity when we withdraw from things ad they seem. Quod natis exitus – because we are always exiled from each and every place, it is through the thinking of the inconspicuous of each and every being that revisitation of an ethical life calls on us from the outside. Ultimately, the ethical life is nothing but the imperative of «lech lechà» in a separation that unites when overcoming the deceit of time. 

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Notes 

1. Varro. On the Latin Language, Books 5-7 (Loeb Classical Library, 1951), 59. 

2. Pindar. “Isthmian 8”, in Pindar (Loeb Library, 1997), 211.

3. C.M. Bowra. Pindar (Oxford University Press, 1964), 114. 

4. Joachim Gasquet. Cézanne: A memoir with conversations (Thames&Hudson, 1991), 45.

Florenski/Schmitt, 1922. by Gerardo Muñoz

The legend of modern political theology is well known, and it has received extensive research and documentation. Less so is the legend of the theology of the visible as it relates to the problem of liturgy. For some time now some of us have pondered on a curious historical coincidence: the fact that in 1922 Pavel Florenski and Carl Schmitt, two epigonal figures that confronted head on Western modernity with its theological substratum, wrote parallel texts with strong positions regarding the same problem. I am of course referring to “The liturgy as a synthesis of the arts” (1922), and Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1922). From the strictly philological point of view, even the genesis of these two programmatic texts have a parallel development that go back to 1918, as can be seen in Schmitt’s only theological text entitled “The visibility of the Church” and Florenski’s “The reverse perspective”.

Why would two distinct thinkers confront the theological-pictorial in this specific historical dispensation of Western secularization? And, why does liturgy in the early twentieth century become a central problem for thought well beyond the walls of the Church and its ministries? What are the relations and divergences between theologia and visibility in the wake of the rise of European nihilism? If we press on the year 1922, it begs to ask why the problem of the “synthesis of arts” – theology as nothing more than the visible and a mode of seeing, to put it in Florenski’s own words – becomes so medular in European thought; and, under what conditions this emerges, given that already since the time of Johannes Vermeer, as Gregor Weber and Daniel Arasse have studied, the theological was already a fundamental topological injunction of specular understanding. These are questions that we hope to elucidate by closely examining  both texts side by side with the working hypothesis that the theos – not theology as a science of Church dogmatics, which has little interest in the wake of the death of the unitary God, heis theos – but rather as a topological or choratic expression of facticity, as well as mediation with the disclosure of the world. 

Almost parallel to the developmental height of the autonomy of art, it seems that both Schmitt and Florenski sought to come to terms in their own ways with the lagging energy of a specific topos of the theological trace: liturgy. It is then our task while reading these texts to ask why did liturgy become the site of inscription necessary to render legible the mediation, and possible transfiguration, of the theological as a first order question for the West. If theologian Laurence Hemming in Worship as a Revelation: The Past Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy (2008) is correct in saying that our age sees everything in terms of manufacture and efficacy mimicking the notion of “sacred worship” in liturgy, it becomes necessary for us today to understand the theological assumptions, as well of the possibilities, of the theos and the mystery at the very granular level of desecularization.

We thus propose a minor pictorial-theological legend of 1922 between Florenski and Schmitt – that is also that of the proximity and separation between East and West, theology and the pictorial, the visible and the invisible, revelation and authority – that could shed light on some of these concerns that continue to nourish discussions that have yet to find its proper treatment and productive assessment.

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*This short text is meant as a working hypothesis for a forthcoming reading / study on Florenski/Schmitt and the question of the pictorial and liturgy set to begin in November 2025.