finitude

Arcadia after the age of poets. by Gerardo Muñoz

Monia Ferrando’s archeological reconstruction of Arcadia as a “political paradigm” that retreats from the nomos of force and usurpation has as its fundamental condition poetry and the voice of the poets. Given the tripartite nomoi of Arcadia (as law of the heart, song, and meadows), which exceeds the autonomy of the polis in Athens, poetic voice functions as the mediation for the effective transmission of the mythopoetic figure that would guarantee another relation, a non-productive and authentic proximity with the world. Throughout the book, whenever Ferrando wants to take a distance from the polis as derivative from the polis she goes to the poets and poetry. Consider for instance, this moment (all the translations are mine from the Spanish edition) in the last chapter on the political paradigm of Virgil: “Poetry, then, is called upon, from its own painful present, to venture like a new Orpheus, but as a memore veggente [a memorious seer], into the darkness of the past, to give new form to love without being content with its mere image. To traverse the stratification of human experience that has shaped the world in order to reshape, in turn, a love reduced to a bloodless and deceptive phantom” [1]. The ‘pre-political’ site of Arcadia is in the poetic voice, whose fundamental task is to transform the ideal of triumph and victory to that of erotic enchantment and fascination that refuses the autonomization of the erotic image [2]. 

If one considers the totality of Il Regno Errante it is not all too difficult to discern that the transmission and ambivalent origin of irruption in the tradition – which Ferrando thinks with Overbeck’s urgeschichte  – is only possible through both a poetization of politics, and the substitution of the hēgemon by the poet when thinking about the afterlife of Arcadia in the genesis of the West, in the very passage from Antiquity to the modern epoch. In this way, poetics is not subsumed to political practice, guided by the classical figure of the ‘Dichter als fuhrer’ described by Max Kommerell, but a state of the via contemplativa in its distancing with the world. In a very elucidating moment Ferrando thematizes this as follows: “Eros is not a political practice in which thought is neatly concealed, but a poetics that culminates in the disinterested contemplation of beauty, in pure theoria. Here, poetry will be philosophical, and philosophy, poetic, without any distinction” [3]. But it is also here that poetry is acting as the supreme activity that can retrieve and connect existence in the world, which is the proper to the classical antiquity, which solicits the question: could this still hold for the philosophical predicament of the poem in modernity? Can the poet stand and mediate to the prophecy at the moment of the decline of the logos, positing the dichtung as an operative substitute? It seems to me that this presents us with an unavoidable difficulty about the transmission of the memory of Arcadia. And we should do well to articulate it.

In her recent biography of Paul Celan, Anna Arno mentions in passing and without no theoretical pretensions, that the young Jewish poet, still under the influence of his mentor Alfred Sperber, wrote a poem that while taking place in the meadows of Arcadia, there is a loose arrow that hinders and hunts the possibility and and shadow of death. The last verses of the poem titled “The arrow of Artemis” introduce something like an oblique and unfathomable shadow in the landscape of Arcadia, which Arno describes in this way:  

“The ‘born again’ poet dedicated “The arrow of Artemis” to his mentor. Celan rendered the Arcadian landscape, but in the final stanza he expressed his fear: “How should he who, above sky-blue pebbles…not ponder that Artemis’ arrow, still lurks in the forest and in the end will strike him?”. Introducing a sense of peril, the poem struck up a polemic: mythical lands provided no shelter against the shockwaves of historic barbarism. Celan was declaring a new path, unlike what Sperber could have chosen for him”. [4].

While on the surface there is a superficial way of reading this commentary in the manner of the typical proximity-distance of the “anxiety of influence”, I want to read this moment as emblematic and hyperbolic of the condition of the crisis of the age of the poets in modernity where the transmission of the Arcadian bliss is impossible in the wake of historical barbarism, which also shatters the structure of poematicity as it runs through the intricate work of Celan. How do we understand Celan’s ‘new path’ that seems absolutely heterogeneous to the divinization of the musical voice required to disclose the Arcadian myth? Perhaps modern poetry, and modern poets at large, cannot initiate the restitution of Arcadia because they can only recognize its own autonomy in a postmythic world after the fleeing of the gods and the absence of God (as verbalized in Hölderlin’s fragment on Oedipus).

This is what Giorgio Agamben has seen in his text on San Juan de la Cruz when discussing poetry to mystical theology:  “Indeed, San Juan’s mystical theology still presupposes the existence of a positive theology and of a Holy Scripture, from which it derives its own legitimacy and guarantee. Modern poetry, instead, does not recognize any other holy scripture but itself. For this reason, modern poetry—insofar as it is its own, sole guarantor—has been fatally led to question its own limits and its own adequacy and to search in its own incessant, ironic sacrificial self-negation for the only valid guarantee of its own authenticity” [5]. And more recently, this thesis has also been validated explicitly in Il corpo della (2026), where he recalls that all major poetic gestures of Western poetry in the twentieth century – from Pound’s Cantos to Eliot’s The Wasteland, from Mandelstam’s Fourth Prose to Celan’s own destructive poetry of the German language  – only manages to preserve the ruins and fragments of the tradition. The poet can only register those fragments, but he is incapable of building another world in the accumulated site of its ruins. 

In its possibility of bearing witness in language, experience might open up the trace of the voice in the non-place of death as the sole destiny of between beings, as Carchia suggests in his early essay on Celan’s “The Meridian” [6]. But poetry transfigured in this way entails that the figure of Arcadia can only be taken as the possibility that emerges from the event of language at the border of nihilism and madness. As emblems of this poetic experience without revelation, both Hölderlin’s madness and Celan’s suicide are perhaps instances of this ‘seeking’ in the shadow of Arcadia’s disinterested via contemplativa of beauty, where the nocturnal black that casts a shadow into the clear and sunny landscape of the memory of Arcadia. This shadow does not eclipse the myth of Arcadia; far from it; in its theistic passage disclosed by light of the eros daimon, the voice seems to be prolonged and eternal at the very end of the experience of modern poetry.

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Notes 

1. Monica Ferrando. El reino errante: la Arcadia como paradigma político (Adriana Hidalgo, 2024), 638.

2. Ibid., 595. 

3. Ibid., 538. 

4. Anna Arno, Paul Celan: A Life (Harvard Press, 2026), 60-61.

5. Giorgio Agamben. “La notte oscura di Juan de la Cruz”, in Poesie: Juan de la Cruz (Einaudi, 1974), xii.

6. Gianni Carchia. “Il Meridiano di Celan”, Rivista di Estetica, XVIII, May-August 1973, 196. 

The wreckage of design. On Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Only in rare occasions the operation of thinking finds angular or lateral points of escape. This is the gesture that characterizes Alejandra Castillo’s theoretical writing, and is particularly bright in her most recent book Antropoceno como fin de diseño (La Cebra, 2025). The zigzagging entry is an intuition that is also a guiding thread: the force of real subsumption of capitalist domination depends on the operation of design. Of course, in design one hears not only blueprint and form, but also designation, and thus the specular regime of visibility, orderability, quantification. It is the world of physiocratic forestry. In fact, Castillo’s succinct definition of the metapolitical condition of design is offered to the reader at the entrance: “Design is the figure that thinks always in advance (por adelantado) (Castillo 12). Design calculates and locates. It is through the operation of design that legibility becomes adequated to political representation so that the state can manage and attenuate the deployment of its forms and the circulations of relations of totality (Castillo 13). The design is what is common to the worker, the engineer, and the lawyer. This is why design for Castillo design is an efficacious nexus that connects the separation of objectivity and the life worlds. Understood in this sense, “design” is analogous to the enframing of the world that intensifies in the age of technology and rhetoric. But in the watershed of the end of modernity, the hegemony of design collapses, while it becomes a temporal “self-design” submerged in all spheres of expressive enactments. 

The end of the second vector of the zigzag outlined in the essay is found precisely at this conjuncture: the anthropocene brings the humanist projections and design to a final wreckage. This is means that capitalist form is not formless because it has managed to subsume the time of life as exception to labour; time is a wreckage because design no longer coincides with the world of forms, as it has temporalized experience into total transparency without reminder. For Castillo this means that in the anthropocene there is no longer “struggle for visibility”, as everything has been rendered exposed and hollow; de-substantialized in the very fabric of subjectivity (in the early millennium some called this new hyperbolic figure the Bloom). Implicitly in Castillo’s writing is the assumption that the mediation between politics and design has been severed, and the new securitarian imperium can only immunize itself against the very site that in modern times granted its legitimacy (civil society, constituent power) (Castillo 37). 

The end of design means the absolutization of design, a new carceral imperative for adaptation that makes any claim to subjectivity an endorsement of the prison of the ego. To live in a post-designed unworldly condition means not only to come face to face with the homogenous space of cultural exchange into image; it is also a new imperative that requires that “you must submit, without knowing to what; subject to what is the case anyway, and which, as a reflex to its power and commonsense, everyone believes anyway” [1]. The end of design paves the way for new plastic forms of domination towards an integral planetary unity. 

Bordiga claimed throughout his work that the democratic design was perhaps the best fitting system for the versatility of capitalist accumulation and relentless expansion. This is why in all the political cases that Castillo introduces in a text in a manner of a shadow play do not pretend to offer a new theory of ideology, but rather show how democratic design is a one-piece suit that fits all without any needs for “ideal types” to fix normativity and institutional arrangements. Indeed, there is no longer anything like an “extreme political right” – and this is just a tweak from Castillo’s vocabulary, who does insist on the term throughout the essay – but rightward figures of the political that desperately cling to any form to distract from the abyss of social legitimation. Ultimately, the ruling over this void will be  – in many ways already is – the continuation of war in the social fabric; and stasis will require new stealth development of technologies of containment that Palantir’s Alex Karp has called the new “lethal form”. This means that democratic design is not only expressively a system of sentencing to death; it is in virtue of the exchange of social forms, an inverted negation of human finitude. The point of despair would incite some to look again in the cabinet of forms; a knee-jerk reaction to the irruption of the Anthropocene against the total sum of possible designs. 

Of course, this is also what Alejandra Castillo’s Antropoceno como fin de diseño (2025) avoids at all costs. Towards the last pages of the book, Castillo calls for a transformative turn that departs from the body; a corporeal insurrection that, in refusing the rectilinear and heteronormative political corpus of the modern epoch (no coincidence that Hobbes was both the founder of the autonomy of civil as well as of the physics of the body of matter in space), is capable of responding to the call of the anthropocene in all of its profuse conflictivity. Castillo proposes the necessity to gravitate towards a “maximum distance” against the general design of orderability of public domination (Castillo 77). But this can only be understood as an incommensurable distance that dissolves the ontotheological separation of subject and object of the state of confinement.

The political constitution of a corpus appears as the promise of an exit from the temporalization of the post-auratic literalism that, according to Michel Fried, dominated the structure of the object-oriented work of art, as compensatory to the corrosion of political forms and presentist autonomy [2]. Castillo does not seek to revive a last gasp of auratic objectification, which amounts to the sleepwalking condition of the image world of mere survival. In soliciting a maximum distance to what is closest (in fact, a body), Castillo invites us, as both promise and commitment, to think at the end of nondependency – not the “independence” that carries the traces of the fictitious individuality- from the crutches of design to finally conquer another liberty beyond terror and prevention; a life imbricated in the nonbeing of place (ecology) with others.

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Notes 

1. Thedor W. Adorno. “The Cultural Industry: A Resumé”, in Without Model (Seagull Books, 2023), 58.

2. Michael Fried. “Art and Objecthood”, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 172.