form of life

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.

The Etruscan bona lux in Paradiso. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Chapter Ten of Paradiso, José Lezama Lima’s magnus opus, we encounter a curious dialogue between Cemí and Fronesis colored by a fortuitous reference to the Etruscan world, which speaks to the poet’s profane, and at times monstrous form of Catholicism. As it is known, even for an ecclesiastical authority like Tertulian, all Etruscan mythological and iconographical inventions had to be incorporated into the Roman civilizational state in order to wipe out the barbaric fraudsters and con artists soothsayers and liver readers out of date from the new revelation [1]. I have recently written on Lezama’s transfigurative Etruscan theology into his conception of the poetic image, therefore here I will only note how this particular transfiguration is enacted in the very existential outlook of the characters in novel. It seems to me that confirms that for Lezama the Etruscan sensibility was not to be understood solely as a resource of his complex poetics, but rather as an ethical form pertaining to the demonic in life. It is no surprise, then, that this happens in the reiteration of the encounter – the whole of Paradiso as the memorable final lines emphatically show is about recommencement of the unfolding of life – between the two friends: 

“Bona lux, como saludaban los etruscos – le dijo Cemí… Ex templo, en seguida entre los romanos. Todo lo que no es en seguida es demoníaco, dice Kierkegaard. La vaciedad de la mañana se había trocado de pronto en la alegría del encuentro. – Vamos en seguida al cafecito de enfrente para hablar un poco – a Fronesis le pareció que la palabra cafecito, dicha por Cemí, bailaba en la mañana” [2]. 

I have not been able to find or corroborate that Etruscans, whose language is still a linguistic mystery, in fact greeted each other with something slightly similar to ‘bona lux’ as Lezama makes Cemí say. And it is still strange to think of Etruscans in relation to light and the morning phase of the day. What could it mean in this context where a minimal theory of the encounter is sketched (‘the encounter had brought happiness to the emptiness of the morning’) that Lezama explicitly identified the alleged mysterious Etruscans with a “good” light or illumination that is self-transformative? Lezama could have known the work of pioneer English archeologist George Denis, whose Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) reminds us how even in the tomb underworld of the Etruscans, there were always banquets decorated by lamp lights, erecting a threshold between the noche oscura of the infraworld of the dead, and the colorful landscape of the living image merging without reminder thanks to the bona lux of the encounter [3]. Is this it, then, a folded communion between the interiority of the dead and the exteriority world of the living? Obviously, nothing could more alien from Lezama’s intricate poetic world than a direct metaphoric restitution of the Etruscan world fixed in the autonomy of modern poetry, which will amount to a desperate attempt to deify language through a ‘spiritual drama’ as the conquering of self-absorptive verbal immediacy (it is in fact “en seguida” of the presentist time of response). 

As Lezama had written in the gloss “Conocimiento de salvación” (1939): “Todos los grandes intentos poéticos contemporáneos, desde la poesía pura hasta el surrealismo, no son otra cosa que un esfuerzo desesperado por prolongar la percepción de temporalidad rapidísima, o trocar el estado sensible – ocupado según Schiller en mantener al hombre en los límites del tiempo – en ajustada percepción” [4]. But what is suspended here is the possibility that living poetically and sensibly – the dwelling of a serene life encountering in company of others, that is, in concordia – validates the attunement of life with its demon. And this was at the heart of Lezama’s perception of the Etruscan everlasting mystery: not simply what remains foreclosed in the arcanii of the infraworld, but the liberation of human potentiality through the grasping of its prophetic images: “Los etruscos ofrecían una palabra misteriosa, el potens, si es posible, a esto se añade el hoc age, házlo, es decir si es posible hazlo. El potens por la imagen hace posible la sobrenaturaleza” [5]. The potens stands in as the name for the incommensurable distance of living among things (theín). Hence, the only common good resides between things, and not in a substantive higher source.

In a thorough rejection of the supreme moral order proper to rationalist natural law, Lezama will take the enlightened pictorial sense of the Etruscans as the realm of possibilities that can organize life in the  presence of what it has discovered: “un splendor formae…las imágenes como interposiciones de la distancia entre las cosas…ya no su enemistad, sino una llaneza de inmediato” [6]. The enlightened form produced by the encounter realizes a state of happiness that, thanks to the free use of language – the spoken word as the greeting voice in this case – it enacts a dance beyond sense becomes moving. This is why it is through the unknowable charitas of language that human beings become equals to the momentary gods of things in the world. Or at least puts them in proximity. One can believe that is the occasion for the gleaming abundance of  bona lux – the mystery where something finally begins. 

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Notes 

1. Lucy Shipley. The Etruscans (Reaktion Books, 2023), 163.

2. José Lezama Lima. Paradiso (Ediciones Cátedra, 1980), 478.

3. George Denis. The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (John Murray Street, 1848), 37.

4. José Lezama Lima. “Conocimiento de salvación”, in Analectra del reloj (Origenes, 1953), 251-252.

5. José Lezama Lima. “Apuntes para una conferencia sobre Paradiso”, en Paradiso (ALLCA XX, 1996), 712.

6. José Lezama Lima. “Las imágenes posibles”, in Analectra del reloj (Origenes, 1953), 179.

In search of an adventure. Commentary on Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953). by Gerardo Muñoz

It is not until the last third part of Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) when the reader encounters a mention to the Etruscan relic alluded by Jacques, one of the characters in the circle of friends that vacation in Italy, who passes the days drinking ‘bitter camparis’ and complaining about the nauseating and scorching presence of the summer heat. And if it were not for the title of the novel the reader could easily dismiss it as a contingent regional reference: “I looked at the map last night…After leaving Rome, I could stop at Tarquinia to see Ludi’s little Etruscan horses. After all the time he has been bending our ears about them” [1]. The ‘little horses’ are brought out a few pages before the end of the novel where Ludi, their Italian friend, goes back and forth whether to go and show them the horses figurines or not. It goes without saying that it would be an enormous distaste to press on the Etruscan reference for any deeper meaning, or to claim that Duras deployed the ancient piece as a tongue in cheek symbol for the bunch of friends roaming around the beach shores. It clarifies very little or too much as an generic reading hypothesis.

In any case, what is relevant is that their trip to encounter the horses of Tarquinia never takes place stressing the real lacuna of the narrative, which is not so much paying a visit to an ancient civilization, as much as underlying a possibility, an afterthought, a pulsating desire towards its displacement; or, in a way, the outside of life that part of the real texture of existence. A reminder that life (a happier life?) is always somewhere else, and definitely away from the excruciating heat of an Italian summer in which no compensatory activity (drinking campari, chatter among friends, having food, meeting new faces) can wrestle the desire for exodus. In The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) very little happens in terms of the organization of the narrative, and that is precisely because the domain of the possible might have been Duras’ central commitment when writing the novel: nothing will happen, not even the fleeting thought of paying the visit to the tombs of the Etruscans. Thus, the heavy weight of a narrative without events opens the incandescent proximity between life and nihilism in a strangely accommodating setting. It is summer after all, which means tranquil life of boredom, repetition, serene gazing, and the monotonous. Children catching lizards or sleeping through the night, and very little else.

According to Laure Adler, Duras’ sea novels (The Sea Wall, Gibraltar, Little Horses) wanted to persist “in search of an adventure. But afterwards everything comes together to form a whole” [2]. This holds true only at a very rudimentary and superficial level, but it does not hold to any serious scrutiny. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) is a novel in which the writing of adventure takes a very specific form: life detached from the event of the adventure. This is the reason why the adventure is not only missing from the sequence of contingent incidents, but rather it is alien to the character; as if the radical separation from character and destiny would be transplanted into a self-reflective consciousness arrested in time and space. The adventure at the closure of modern sensibility and its dialectical valence around a “worldview” is precisely that there is a coming to presence of the fact of this poverty of adventure has become its uttermost inexistence: “For a long time I had bright colored dreams of imaginary cities, where I could do what I liked, and look for adventure. But the dreams were not enough, and no I’ve turned a little mean” [3].

The end of the texture of adventure between world and existence marks the commencement of the self-autonomous subject that can narrativize the concrete order of his dreams precisely because he is convinced that they will never be accomplished in this world. After all, as Lukács claims in his Soul and Form, the adventure is no epic for epic’s sake, but a “communion of feeling, of experience, an infinitely powerful experience of the world’s many colored richness expressed in a varied series of endless adventures” [4]. In the adventure one freely becomes who one will be. Hence, the adventure named the freedom of sensible experience between language and world, coming to near convergence only so that its final separation could set to start the inconspicuous ethos of life. In this sense, the longing for adventure in Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia could be said to allegorize the chattering of experience, whose tiny pieces are ultimately picked up by the synthetic apprehension of the dialogue of chatter among friends. The empty chatter takes place once the path of language as transformative of a life becomes separated from the course of the human species. The extreme comedy of the rhetorical dialogue is that it functions as a cure for the abyss of its own separation from life.

Hence, the “dia-logos” ends up suturing that dregs of the fictitious waste required to translate the language of meaning (logos) into practical action at the expense of a life that begins to move, inadvertently, across a groundless world [5]. This is why the central character in The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) calls the boundless dialogue that they are engaged in as “a confusion of voices…from open windows, and was dissipated in the sunshine” [6]. It is not that there is never continuity between what is being said; rather, it is that dialogue is always a re-statement of either the case, the command or the subjective piety that in the suppression of real pain proper to a alienated life can only engage in the melodramatic gossip over the accessories of life. In other words, dialogic communication can only speak in the name of quotidian vulgarity. Language becomes, as Duras writes in one of the most memorable lines of the novel: “an endless chain of reciprocal waiting” [7]. It does not take much to apprehend at this point the signifier rotation in every dialogue. Waiting, but towards what? The waiting is eternal and illusionary, since the capture into the sedentary surplus of “dialogue” has already taken you to the final destination where everything is sufficient; what remains is the generalized effect of unhappy consciousness from the irrevocable sense of abstraction.

The expressivity of the dialogues of the French bourgeoisie of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) was already the indication that their wordlessness differs a whole lot from the musical infraworld of the Etruscans horses and tombs. Yes, something very precious was lost once civilization becomes entangled with the infinite realization of a schizophrenic subject that is the effect of endless chattering and utterly silence. In other words, the character of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) talk quite a lot – they never stop talking – but they are not towards a path of language in search for a missing word that marks every true adventure. And this is the adventure where thought and language bind with one another in search for the unfathomable exteriority that is always unknown. And we know that for Duras the encounter with exteriority is the imprint of intelligence, the coefficient of real and enduring thinking. As one of the characters says at one point: “Possibly it may be that there is nothing that cuts one off from the unknown so much as friendship” [8]. I take it that for Duras the Party form (and even the obligations of fictive intellectual communities and all forms of political dilettantism) was very much her preoccupation here: the militancy of friendship could very well stage the last character in the play of historical nihilism. At the expense of avoiding being “nobody” anyone could assume the faceless “friend”, as soon enough cybernetics will end up promoting in their contactless subjective networks. The agonizing sun of a vacation (exclusive in its temporality) is already foreshadowing artificial radiation and nuclear reserve as the sole container of life on earth. In this scenario visiting Tarquinia is an escape of sorts – downwards to the night but also to a vita nova – although, ultimately, it does not take place. And Duras seems to tells us: true experience falls catastrophically on the other side of writing, on the unlived.

Against the therapeutic community of friendship, one can juxtapose the unpredictability of encounter in which no friend will be crushed by the rhetorical compression of the dia-logos and its discomfort. In friendship I can embrace and release without obligations. And if friendship exists it is through a negative community that is never one with allocated leisure time; and; like love, it does not solicit holidays: “you have to live with it fully, boredom and all, there is no holiday from it” [9]. In such scenario “we would not want to change the world”, but perhaps begin inhabiting it away from the sun of exposure and recognition that clears a menacing landscape without horizon. And if according to Kurt Badt, the sky is the organ of sentiment, then one must come to the conclusion that the characters of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), as pathetic as they are, are congenital witnesses of this truth; even if they could only carry it for a moment in order to instantly betray it [10].

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Notes

1. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Riverrun Press Inc, 1985), 54. 

2. Laure Adler. Marguerite Duras: A Life (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 187.

3. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 139.

4. Georgy Lukács, “Richness, Chaos, and Form”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 167.

5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Sobre el lugar del lenguaje”, in La palabra hendida (Ediciones del Serbal, 1990), 164. 

6. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 149.

7. Ibid., 87.

8. Ibid., 84.

9. Ibid., 213.

10. Kurt Badt.  John Constable’s Clouds (Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1950), 101.

The missing word. A note on Dionys Mascolo’s Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987). by Gerardo Muñoz

Rereading Dionys Mascolo’s Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) in preparation for an upcoming course with Philippe Theophanidis, one gets the sense of beginning backwards or at the very end, since this late essay is a recapitulation of what the Rue Saint-Benoît Group embodied and stood for. And it is so obvious that for Mascolo what is at stake in Antelme’s letter is not a particular practice of confession (and the coupling of secrecy and extraction), but rather an integral register of an experience that belongs to “friendship in thought without reserve” [1]. And that it would not have been possible without friends, as simple as that. Of course, the condition of possibility of this shared thought in friendship has less to do with general principles, norms, or creative acts, and more with what Mascolo does not hesitate to qualify as “a sensibility that was common to us”. 

What is this sensibility, and is it possible to describe it? This is a question that I do not think that is attempted to be resolved in Mascolo’s commentary nor in Antelme’s letter so consumed by its internal lacunae and effacement (I am definitely not capable of saying a word about it at the moment, and this might be one of the questions in the ongoing dialogue in the seminar). Mascolo does offer a little more when he states that this sensibility, however broad and partial, was always elevated against all totalitarianisms that were hegemonizing the political positions of the epoch. Obviously, it names the political totalitarianism (Fascist and state planned communism alike), but also the “the soul of the project” (‘est l’âme du projet  et sa forme aboutie’) that must retract from it [2]. The last pages of Mascolo’s reflection is a shallow-deep, an insinuation, into the possibility of saying something in relation to this difficult proximity. 

Hence, against total subsumption of life into political planning (whether on the right or left, whether ecclesiastical or in the name of the secularized forms of militant communist parties), Mascolo’s insistence on the ‘soul of the project’ is sustained by the “missing word” give that dispenses human necessities as infinite. He writes: “Et par mille et mille détours, il me (nous) fallait toujours en revenir au même point : Je suis ce qui me manque est la sentence que je porte (nous portons) inscrite à l’intérieur du front. La moindre des choses alors est de proposer que, sauf mensonge, elle vaut pour tout homme”. [3]. But what could it mean that “what I am” is always constituted by the missing word? It is definitely not a substantive attribute to a person (and thus what I can acquire), but a word that in its ideal absence and lack of epistemological validity stands as a form of seeking (zēteîn) that Nicoletta Di Vita has recently linked to the form of the ancient hymn [4]. The missing word is the passive and pure voice that calls out the rhetorical fiction of political totalitarianism. In other words, the missing word does not enact a present state of things, articulating the denomination in language with distinct objects of the world; it only has transformative weight when revealing what remains under the capes of morality.

This is why the experience of the camp constitutes a central threshold: on the one hand, it is an extreme and sharpened image of social alienation between classes; and, on the other, it is the experience that by depriving the human of its humanity it brings to an effective end the polarity between rich and poor that structured the economy of salvation and damnation of Western civilization. This is what Antelme describes in his essay “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, which according to Mascolo brings the rich to a psychotic night of desperation towards destruction and death of the specie. Hölderlin’s definition that “we have become poor in order to become rich” as a clement predicament in the face of the modern is here-forth suspended in the spiritual crisis generated by the social engineering whose most extreme case is the model of the camp.

And yet the missing word remains irreducible even after the corrupted stage of innocence and the impossibility of redemption. Mascolo, reader of Nietzsche, does not believe in the theos. This is why for him the missing word, far from being an apostrophe that offers consolation in the wake of the catastrophe, it remains concretely attached to the experience of the friend that no longer finds solace in abstract peace, but in the profound musicality of what remains inconsolable: “cette heureuse absence de paix qui est sa musique profonde, et que donne en partage l’être aimé, l’inconsolable qui console” [5]. This transfigured word – the unending capacity for hymn in the human, its nomoi mousikos – is both an excess to memory and appearance, and perhaps, more importantly, an excess to the experience of living and the dead. And is not this “seeking” passage of the missing word what the Rue Saint-Benoît Group was obsessively after?

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Notes 

1. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Maurice Nadeau, 1987), 82.

2. Ibid., 83.

3. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort…,82.

4.  Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022), 27.

5. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort…, 89.

The unknown song. On Giorgio Agamben’s La voce umana (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Giorgio Agamben’s most recent La voce umana (Quodlibet, 2023) sets the scene with an elemental question: what is to call on something, and what is it to be called upon? The exploration around the notion of the voice (a sort of chorâ that falls between the different antinomies of human language, as we will soon learn) is far from new in Agamben’s work, who from the the early period of Il linguaggio e la morte (1982) directly confronted the negative foundation of phonê in relation to the closure of metaphysics. In a certain way, the perimeter of La voce umana (2023) is now deliberately limited to how the ‘mystery of the language’ is to be found in the unending event of the voice as the arcanum of anthropogenesis itself. At this stage of his investigations, the problem of the voice for Agamben designates a double movement of inflection and recapitulation: the voice proves the internal division of political life in the West; at the same time, it is also the most intense experience that a form of life can bestow the disclosure of the world. The attentive reader might recall the last pages of L’aperto: l’uomo e l’animale (2002) where the impasse of the anthropological machine was assigned by caesuras between human and animal, the semiotic and the semantic, the word and the name, redemption and the end of time, writing (gramma) and sound. But it is now with the voice that a clear way out becomes apparent. In the analytics of the voice klesis no longe stands as a political-theological category of the West; but, on the contrary, a call of language unto itself, the vocative that resists linguistic denomination and the free-standing outside the case and even language itself (“fuori lingua”) as suggested by Gustave Guillaume.

The vocative dimension of language is shown as pure means of the human experience: the apostrophe that calls something – as in Moby Dick’s majestic beginning “Call me Ishmael” – is already the call through the act of naming, and naming falling into the voice becomes the originary place of language in the denomination of speech (21). Irreductible to the antinomy of langue and parole, the semantic and the semiotic, the vocative texture of the voice emerges as the third figure that neither linguistics, philosophy of language, phonology, analytical linguistics, and biological cybernetics are capable of truly grasping. And this is so – Agamben does not says it in this brutish way – because there cannot be any theory of the voice and the vocative denomination; there can only be a poetics of the voice in which the transformative and self-generative experience with reality is staged: “Ma è possibile pensare il linguaggio prescindendo dal suo rifermenta lla realtà? La voce – il vocabolo – non designa soltanto un significant, chiama piuttosto un ente reale…non si limite a elencare segni in un lessico, ma annuncai ed encunia realtà” (36).

In my respects – and this is not the place to bring into focus Emile Benveniste’s last seminar on language and writing – Agamben’s treatment of the voice is nourished by pushing beyond the limits of the great twentieth century linguist who, for the most part, remained silent on the place of the voice. Not that there is a need for another substantive treatment of the vocative; in fact, one of the great achievements of La voce umana (2023) is precisely the archeological reconstruction of the Aristotelean “what is in the voice” (ta en té phonē) formula in which the classical metaphysical inception of language comes closest to the voice only to render it “articulate” and thus subordinated to the legibility of gramma or the written sign (42-44). And whatever one thinks of what constitutes the “primacy” of metaphysics in West (phone or gramma), what is important is the fact that domestication of language has been auxiliary by the “fundamental discipline of the West” (grammar) that sets off the immediate point of dialectical force between speech and the alphabetical inscription in the voice (45-46). Civilization is nothing more than the historical process of taming one’s voice.

At this point, it becomes clear that Agamben remains faithful to his old friend, the Spanish poet José Bergamín, whose bewildering essay from 1933 “La decadencia del analfabetismo” (“The decline of illiteracy”), argued precisely that the upwards movement of civilization of grammar and writing undermined the living voice and imagination of concrete and localized people (“pueblos minorías”) livelihood [1]. Indeed, it does not take much to see how the grammaticalization of human experience was a fundamental infrastructure for the consolidation of civil society grounded in the articulation of internal recognition of rules, normative directives, and binding statutory enforcement. The triumph of the order of grammar will only intensify the movement towards the total integration of every form of life into the fictive rhetorical space on behalf of what has already been stated without having to persuade, to put in Carlo Michaelstaedter’s terms that I do not think contradict the terms that Agamben extracts from his exegesis of the voice.

The political problems emerging from the confrontation with the voice are multiple. One can recall how in modernity, when “words have been liberated from their sacred denomination” (something pondered by Joseph De Maistre in his The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions as political revolution sets through universal recognition), the closure of the rhetoric embedded in “social life” captures the event of the voice into a stable communicative dimension of language (“suoni della lengua”), which for Agamben resembles the etymology of the word phònos: murder, that is, the self-conscious assassination of the voice at the altar of free-floating rhetoric and the order of discourse (50-51). By the same token, in our epoch every living being has the malleable equalizer and “amplifier” (a word used, indeed, by the Supreme Court of the United States when deciding the case that granted equity between finance campaign and ‘public use of language’) of words, but it is only rare to see anyone truly possessing a voice. If every entity in the world has been previously assigned and grammatically ordered, what is absent is precisely the chōra as the “invisible and formeless place” (‘invisibile e senza forma”) in which the intelligible pure state of the language in the voice. In this strict sense, whoever possesses a voice is one who dissolves the axiomatic arrangement of discourse only to transform the world as inhabited. This is why the voice remains not a threshold to semantic register or the written technology, but rather an unknown song (“canto ignoto”), as it was called by Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo. And this song, the voice, can be followed and deciphered but never truly mastered as absolute transparent knowledge (45).

And if music is an index of prophecy, as Gianni Carchia once suggested, then this means that the voice, like the mythic harmony of the spheres, is what exceeds the proper human as indivisible and non-exchangeable realized only here and now. The political consequences are immense, Agamben is right. This means that we need to restate the medial and geographical distances of the chorā over the orderly cultural exchange of the polis. As it has been noted, the rise of the city state is waged against the orphic poetic myth; in the same way that the Roman imperium was possible by the erasure of the Etruscan musical underworld. Agamben reminds us that the birth of biopolitics coincides with the historical invention of the science of language leading to the impoverishment of the intangible and expressive communication between souls. This is Agamben’s rendition that the task of philosophy – not historical benchmarks or epistemological categorizations – resides in the attunement to the highest hymn of expressive form as it has been studied by Nicoletta De Vita’s erudite monograph Il nome e la voce (2022). There is no philosophical or theological closure as long as the song remains.

We can say that wherever there is a chorā of the voice something like this minor transcendence of the original human being that retracts from the soteriological false exits that have devastated the anthropogenic event. And it occurs to me that we could thematize three areas of what this closure means for us today: first, the technification of politics in epoch has been reduced, precisely, to a discursive theory of articulation (of social demands) to craft the fictive totalization of hegemony; second, the collapse of the political representation within contemporary democracies has turned into the optimal organization of containing willful self-expression in light of the contingency of values of the dominant aesthetic regime; and finally, the very understanding of legal culture and constitutionalism in the West has shuffled different modalities of the written authorial intention to generate the internal rules of institutional and statutory norms only to expand police powers and codification of conducts. At the expense of the unknown song, all sorts of prosthetic contraptions have been erected to douse the prehistoric voice that nevertheless keeps overflowing and reemerging like the unnerving cracking squick of Kafka’s Josephine. It is this watershed mystery of the anthropogenesis with its philo-poetological density that calls on humanity by the highest superlative imaginable: its voice.

Towards a new life. On Rodrigo Karmy’s Stasiología (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

What comes after state form? The grounds for a self-evolving civil war at the heart of the social is what opens up in the wake of the collapse of the categories and grammar of modern politics. Stasiology becomes the fundamental unit to grasp the decoupling of the liberal state from its fixed guarantees and duties. Already during the crisis of legitimation of the seventies, we were told that the modern secular liberal state can no longer guarantee the conditions that made it possible, in the famous hypothesis developed by Böckenförde. The stasiological paradigm thoroughly governs the once implied mediations, social forms, and positive juridical norms of state-society internal mechanics without reminders and procedures. This is why all calls for political realism today are futile and insufficient; the only real existing realism is the one that must be confronted with increasing categorial inversions that ultimately channel the passage from a sufficiently ordered polity (the equilibrium of commerce and virtues) to the conflagration of the civil war as the production of social fabric.

All of this is implicit and glossed in Rodrigo Karmy’s excellent essay Stasiología: guerra civil, formas de vida, capitalismo (Voces Opuestas, 2023) in which the empty performance in the stage of fictitious contemporary sovereignty exchanged for the effective precautionary inversions that have become operative at a planetary scale: republicanism has given in to empire; the horizon of “liberty” nows entails dispossession and domination; authoritative and legitimate rule now means interpretative and exceptional discretionary execution; and, civil society (the modern civilizational unity for social cohesion) has become an axiomatic nexus to manage the tractions and turbulence of total economy (equivalence). The current state of things could not be more grim – and everything that passes through the sign of “order” (orderability, ordinary, ordo) elevates in the name of an self-sufficient abstraction that government paranoia to guide every deviation. The Leviathan stage has zoomed in into the pastoral exercise of uncontested dominion. Those that have claimed that the polis – precisely, as the sphere of social exchange and masquerade, in other words, of practical nihilism – is defunct are perhaps right in stating that its autonomy was destined to become the sheltered territory for pirates, delinquents, and the mafia. What is civil society today if not the confluence or the commuting space of the concert of all existing indirect powers?

For Karmy, abstraction and inversal do not mean just arbitrariness and formlessness lacking description. There is some rationality to what is arbitrary and anarchic in how the public powers are conjoined, distributed, and organized under several logistical units of optimal endurance: a) an axiomatic method that is immanent, flexible, and technologically sophisticated in its aversion to civil war; b) there is a process of exposition and vigilance that, conflating oikos and polis, makes hostis and inimicus indistinguishable, and by extension, coextensive to a global police (just as predicted by Carl Schmitt in the prologue to the Italian edition of The Concept of the political) that can manage and intervene in world-events as without residue. Expressively, Karmy reminds us, the police apparatus becomes the composition of cybernetic deployment based on the capillary consortium of information, reproduction, and differentiations. c) And finally, there is a nomic coupling between politics and geopolitics as the univocal destiny of a planetary humanity as a nihilistic mastery over nature, passions, and geographical localities. But if a century ago Benjamin suggested in One-Way Street (1928) that the power of the proletariat amounted to the measure of its convalescence, it seems that this is a materialist ideal that also has sunk deep into the anomia of the seas. Neither a “collective and sensible” proletariat nor a mobilized pacifist can enact the much expected epochal katechon; the immanent subject of Empire is already invested in the paradigm of force and counter-force, reinforcing what Karmy sees as the global practical and rhetorical geopolitics as an ongoing polemos: “Toda guerra es, ante todo, una guerra contra el pensamiento, Por eso abunda el análisis geopolítico” (Karmy 79). The manifest destiny of geopolitical grounding (knowledge, measurement, exposition) can only admit voluntary servitude towards the conflagration and the distributions of dominance and “influence” that has only intensified from the Iraq invasion of the early millennium to the Covid-19 pandemic techno-administrative measures.

But geopolitical dominance can no longer be said to integrate – there are too many cracks and holes in what it is still called, by inertia (Karmy calls it the ‘Newtonian hypothesis’) , the autonomy of the social. Similarly, its universality is a fallen one; but not because it has accepted the Augustuinian saeculum against the Pelagian heresy, but rather because its unitary mold consists in an internal stasis fractured within: a schism of every community from itself, a separation between things and forms in the originary sense of the Greek polis. Could another nomoi be recovered here? This is the last question posed by Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) through the poetic scene of Guadalupe Santa Cruz, whose turn to the garden is an involuntary act that gathers whatever is left of an ethical life from the ongoing devastation enacted by the barbarism of civilization. The garden is the threshold to a world according to Karmy reading Santa Cruz: “…al borde del mundo, el jardín es la figura que remite al cultivo de estilo, cuidado de la potencia de la imaginación, en último término, lo que designa un gesto” (Karmy 102-103). It is no coincidence that gesture and gestar is a polysemic term that allows to comprehend the figural and self-evolving of a transformation of life; “freedom” is not to deploy internal force towards the appropriation of advantageous outcomes and interest, but of the possibility of delineating the appearance of “a life” holding the unmeasurable world in proximity [1]. It is at this point where forms color how we become who we are.

What must be saved is not “life itself”, but rather the theōs between world and existence that opens “new possibilities” that is anti-scientific precisely because it is not incorporated by the pressure of objective absorption. The theōs is the invisible deviation from the worldly necessity of how things should be and what our lives should aspire to become; and only in this sense we are all martyrs as witnesses to this nearness. Extracting a further consequence from Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) one could claim that every desertion from geopolitical destiny – its unspeakable misery, its blatant bad faith, its farcical prepotence that forces a parodic eschatology – presupposes a return to a new life, which has always began at the surface of our face, as if anticipating reality prophetically: “Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world.” [2]. If the acclamations for a “New Man” concerned the humanist aspiration of the productive modernity; the vita nova concerns, first and foremost, the conservation of the partition of the soul, the only true entity of alienability where life conquers death. The practice of stasilogy sets out an exercise of this elegant depiction: allowing invisibility to prefigure and breach a new life from the trenches of a never ending struggle.

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Notes

1. Monica Ferrando. “Gestare la figura. Note sulla pittura e il suo gesto”, Giardino di studi filosofici, Quodlibet, 2018.

2. Carlo Levi. The Two-Fold night: A narrative of travel in Germany (Cresset Press, 1962), 109.

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.

Treasure of the earth: on Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic voice: Poetry and Natural History (2022). by Gerardo Muñoz

Written at a time when the sciences of biological life were becoming fully integrated to technological and procedural social experimentation, Elizabeth Sewell’s 1960 The Orphic voice (nyrb, 2022) dared to pose the question of poetic myth as the mirror of scientific transformation of the modern world. Given that myth reopens the question of poetry and the natural world, for Sewell the modern exposure entails a profound misunderstanding: it is not that myth has eclipsed from the developments of scientific regime, but rather that science is incapable of absorbing it through its formal explorations in a system of subdivisions, classifications, and applicabilities. But for Sewell, it is myth itself that conditions scientific activity, providing ground for the discovery of situations and play in the world of forms. In other words, it is the persistence of myth in biological imagination the real forgotten path in the crisis of the transmission of tradition in a world aligned by the movement of scientific objectivity. For Sewell’s understanding of myth, there is no positive dialectical movement between myth and calculative rationality; rather, myth is what stands for the irreducibility of life in the cosmos. It is the very mystery of the anthropogenesis of creation as pure metamorphosis of forms. Why Orpheus, then? For Sewell, the orphic figure becomes “myth as a living thought and the very type of thought in action, and for all those other self-reflecting forms; for the human organism as an indivisible whole trying to understand itself….for biology reflection on the whole span of life in which thinking man appears as the last enigmatic development” (41). Orphism is the natural prehistory of becoming. This implies nothing less than reminding modern science of its “mistaken mythology”; as it is poetry – not mathematics or a scientific theory of language – the proper site for the adventure of life.

The strange career of orphism in the modern age is one of struggle, according to Sewell. A “struggle” that accounts for change, process, organism, and life” in an epoch that thinks of itself as definite and irreversible; completing the demythologization of the old gods and the ultimate achievement of secularization. Unlike for Oskar Goldberg for whom the civilizational regime of fixation of humanity is a matter of thousands of years (at least since Cain); for Sewell it has only bern a couple of centuries that has led to an esoteric experimentation with natural history in the wake of his postmythical substitution. At bottom, her task is to bring together, once and for all, the voice of Orpheus and “natural history and poetry, had not parted company and it only remains to try to bring them, after their long and wintry estrangement, back to one another” (48). This is the central task of the modern poet, Sewell seems to tell us: to wrestle the potentiality of myth to craft the a “model of thought” that transfigures the logical framework of rational thought into a “flexible and plastic” (beweglich und bildsam) play between form and formlessness that becomes inalienable from the metamorphosis of nature. This does not mean that all modern poets are orphic; and, I am not sure that Sewell will go as far as to accept that all orphism comes in the form of poetry (this will be of scarce persuasion). What the Orphic voices are saying “is that the poet and his world is part of natural history…it is postlogic” (153). The postlogic stands a tenuous and loose term to avoid the supreme autonomy of reason of scientific modernity. Rather than a tool to understand the causation of natural processes, or a set of artificial strategies for representation, the postlogical poetics is the music of a world as being transformed through experience and immersion. It is no doubt strange that Sewell calls postlogical method to account for the permanent overflowing of the orphic voice; although it becomes clear that she wants to think of it as a utensil inseparable from the form that it makes. In other words, the “method” stands for the possibilities of use through the attunement with worldly phenomena. Postlogical method wants to give substance to how well we construct and tailor the potent infinity of form. As Sewell writes: “The method, the lute strung with the poet sings, consists in the use of the self, and mind, heart ,as well as intelligence, as an instrument of wider interpretation, with language assisting in the process” (168).

The free use of one’s own is surely the hardest task for the poet, as we already know from Hölderlin who grasped the crisis at the outset of Romantic modernity. The capacities of the orphic poet wants to wrestle the force of expression from the stage of history into the methodology of forms. This is what Sewell reads positively in Goethe’s Urworte and Urpflanze as the “methodology of transformations…the key to all the signs in nature” (274). It is noteworthy that Sewell does feel the need to revise Hölderlin’s poetological attempt at the insufficiency of the tragic poet embedded in the play of Empedocles mediation between the material craft of art and the aorgic excess of nature. And it is too bad that she does not (alas, Hölderlin remains the missing key for many of these problems). But it might be that for Sewell the orphic voice is not a transfigurative element, but rather the acoustic composition of the play between creation and decreation. In this sense, the bios orphikos is, not merely of this world, but also the immemorial journey to the infraworld sidestepping tragic overflowing. It is very late in her book that Sewell defines this pathways that transcends all form and contours of scientific vitality:

“The origins of all our bodily and mental powers are in an exact sense with the dead, in heredity and tradition; thus the dead are not wholly dead here within the living body. The heart and the center of the kingdom of the dead to which Orpheus goes in search of Eurydice is also the penetralia of the individual human life which pulsates and thinks…Anthropology suggest that the labyrinth of primitive man, the maze emblem and the real mazes of the caves, were capable also of being the body, and the site of a journey between the two worlds of living and dead. The orphic search here goes past Orpheus back into immemorial antiquity.” (326-327). 

Immemorial antiquity – these are the wonderful markers of everything that Sewell’s book does not accomplish or flesh out in its voluminous 400 plus plages. But, it is only at this point that we are capable of understanding that what Sewell calls “biological thinking” has nothing to do with the basic mental capacities that dispenses the anthropological density of the modern reserve to self-assertion (in Blumenberg’s unsurpassed definition), and everything with a tradition of the immemorial that is creation’s most intense point of bifurcation between the living and the dead. The passage to this region becomes testament to the validity of one’s experience. This is also why the orphic voice cuts through the the subdivision of the polis and the modern autonomy of art; as it takes life through the fleeting instance of the freedom of forms in its non dependency with historical necessity and domestication, as Gianni Carchia lucidly reminded us [1].

The orphic immemorial will not appeal to a morality of nature based on its fictive aura of normative order, but rather, it will supply the potentiality of the taking place of language. Hence, it is no surprise that the taking place of the voice (its postlogical status) lifts the human outside of itself, at the same time that it retains its most absolute nearness to the symbolic strata of myth. Commenting on Wordsworth, Sewell writes: “…the first provisional conclusion on method in the poem: that each language is a treasure of the earth but that poetry is the more valuable (as if our word, postlogic, might here receive additional justification)” (358-359). The voice has never been an organ or a specific faculty that belongs properly to the human; it is the passage between humanity and its constitutive exteriority in the world. Like the harmony of the spheres, the voice registers tone in the wake of the impossibility of communicating in the murky waters of physis.

If at the turn of the century Aby Warburg had shown how modern technical civilization had ended up soaking the mythical force of the serpent from the stormy sky of the Pueblo Indians (and thus the luminous space of contemplation of man in the cosmos); Sewell’s extremely idiosyncratic essay shows, between lines and amidst rhetorical inflation, that the echoes of the mythic imagination are still an integral part of the sliding amore fati, whose “aim is the discovery of the world” (405) [2]. The lesson in our epoch becomes easily adapted: the ethical standard does not prove itself by appealing to norms and substitute fictive authorities, but rather in terms of how well one is able to attend to the incoming vibrations of forms. One can even go as far as contradict Sewell post factum and say that this is no longer a request to be made on science, which has fully ascended to the place of prima philosophia as prima politica. So, it is perhaps love (that figures so poorly in Sewell’s book in relation to the centrality of cerebral intelligence, barely making an appearance in the very last page) the symbol of the highest riches transfiguring myth into a voice that outlives the specter of humanity and the futility of the machine. If orphism means anything, it is that the voice implies withdrawing from the cacophony of a world that has imprisoned the living in the blistering entertainment of their own wrongdoing. “Flebile lingua murmurat exanimis”, signs Ovid — right, but who is still able to listen?

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. Orfismo e tragedia: Il mito trasfigurato (Quodlibet, 2019), 

2. Aby Warburg. “A lecture on Serpent Ritual”, Journal of the Warburg Institute, April 1939, 292. 

Bonnard (1910): painting and dissonance. by Gerardo Muñoz


Here is a little masterpiece by Pierre Bonnard at the Phillips Collection, “Interior with boy” (1910). Its simplicity does not shy away from the fact that it is a picture struggling with the problem of sensation as the highest task of painting. Bonnard is most definitely working on the threshold of Pissarro for whom the supreme mystery of a picture at the turn of the century is the act of wrestling with sensation as the world is coming to an eclipse. Or, to put it in a straightforward manner: departing from the objectivized world. If there is anything at the outset of the first decade of the twentieth century – from the stretch of 1890s to the 1910s – is the vibrant undertone of a conscious sense of what experience has become in the world. Painting, it would seem, takes up the challenge of this seeming aspect of life among things.

For Bonnard this means disclosing what appears for the first time: “to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden”. And this is what “Interior with boy”(1910)  is showing us: peeking into a room with a boy sitting at a table quietly reading or going through something. The object is dissolved. We are not sure what the boy is doing. But, does it matter? The painting works around this silent vortex (although silent might not be the exact word). The figure does emphatically grows out the different color blocks of the interior (there is a solid black line that makes his body stand out). The effort of painting is achieving the seemingly weightless there-ness of the figure, blending itself to its surround, and gathering a strong sense of its appearance. 

As Bonnard would tell Matisse years later: “I see things differently every day, the sky, objects, everything changes continually; you can drown in it. But that is what brings life” [1]. For Bonnard it is not that painting gifts the events of the world with life; rather it brings the event of life away from the drowsiness of the temporal organization of its own elements. Painting is not disorganized for the sake of disorganization; it organizes life around its unmitigated appearance where form does not have the last word. Hence the insufficiency of the question “What is the boy really doing?”. The attempt to define it would ruin the experience of the painting – the subtle but well placed magenta hue connects a fragment of the back door with the boy’s downwards face, and finally to the left corner of the table. In a superficial sense the magenta is a schism of light coming through the picture, but it is also a diagonal that registers the dissonance of the painting, and thus, its ultimate mystery. Can painting integrate dissonance? The early Lúkacs seem to have thought against it. This is what he had to say in Soul and Form (1910): 

“In painting there cannot be dissonance— it would destroy the form of painting, whose realm lies beyond all categories of the temporal process; in painting, dissonance has to be resolved, as it were, ante rem, it has to form an indissoluble unity with its resolution. But a true resolution— one that was truly realized— would be condemned to remain an unresolved dissonance in all eternity; it would make the work incomplete and thrust it back into vulgar life.” [2].

But does painting need to find a resolution to dissonance, or is it quite the contrary? Bonnard’s search for the ante rem is not the sensorial apprehension to this dilemma; it is what refuses recoiling to “vulgar life”. But the passage from Soul and Form (1910) allows me to claim that the vulgarity of life begins when things start to tip towards the end of appearance; that is, when the soul disappears and the only thing remaining is the aggregation of allocated forms for sake of ‘originality’. If anything is achieved, then, in Bonnard’s “Interior with boy” (1910) is that it folds the question of dissonance to the task of painting while acknowledging that the taking place of life is always unattainable; as invisible as the boy’s inscrutable undertaking can be.

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Notes 

1. Bonnard/Matisse Letters Between Friends: 1925-1946 (H.N. Abrams, 2007), 62.
2. Gyorgy Lukács. “Longing and Form”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 123.

Hölderlin’s song. Provisional annotations. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a moment in Hölderlin’s late hymn “Friedensfeier” (1801) where communication is strictly defined as becoming a song. The verses in question are about midway into the poem, and we read read the following: 

“Viel hat von Morgen an, 

Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander, 

Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang.”

“Mucho ha, desde la mañana, 

desde que diálogo somos y oímos unos de otros, 

aprendido el ser humano; pronto empero seremos canto”.

This is the Spanish rendition by the Venezuelan poet and translator Verónica Jaffé [1]. These lines stand for Hölderlin’s unique effort during the years 1800-1804 to substantially qualify what he had confessed to his mother as his true task: to live a serene or quiet life. I think this Spanish translation is much closer to the original German. Jaffé hangs on the present perfect with conviction: “Mucho ha…”, as if knowledge remained at a distance in the metric while becoming a temporal duration, a form of experience. This is the poetic “strict mediacy” for Hölderlin that can only be cultivated [2]. And it is only through the duration of experience that one will become a song (“seremos canto”). We are not yet there, hence the apostrophe. In the late period, duration meant dealing directly with Pindar. Thus, the song is something other than language – even if announced through language. But it is a paratactic dispersion that seeks to free the pure voice. In one of the “Pindar fragments”, this is what Hölderlin claims: “then only the difference between species makes a division in nature, so that everything is therefore more song and pure voice than accent of need or on the other hand language”. [3]

I am caught up in the moment of “division in nature”. The subtraction from representational language allows for the true appearance of a more originary separation, where the song can finally emerge in its proper attunement with the world. The becoming song is another form of separation, which institutes the passage from the Empedocles (tragic sacrifice) to the Pindaric relation to the divine. This is the “highest” poetic challenge for Hölderlin – an impossible task after the fleeing of the gods. It is definitely maddening. Nevertheless, the song remains. It puts us in nearness in a postmythical world without recoiling back to the image of the tragic. Indeed, as Hölderlin says in passing in “The Ground of Empedocles”, his time already “did not demand a song” [4]. The passion for natural unity was an Olympic illusion whose retribution could only become romantic debris as the exclusive possession of the dichter. On the contrary, the clearing for the song has emancipated itself from the exclusivity of the modern autonomy of dichtung as mimetically separated from the experience of life. This is what the song wants to pursue before the closure of a significant (and signifying) world. Fundamentally, this means a subtraction from the continuum of language, and thus a form of prophecy as elaborated by Gianni Carchia in a difficult passage from “Dialettica dell’immagine”: 

“Where music and prophecy, in the inexhaustibility of their tension – an endless effort to overcome the Babel dissipation of language by freeing the residual state of the unexpressed – testify to a disposition to meet precisely in what passes, in pure transience, the need for salvation and the idea of fulfillment, beauty as a totalitarian and exclusive appearance is, on the other hand, nothing but the product of an arrest in the dynamics of the spirit which withdraws from the horror of worldly laceration to seek refuge on the scene circular and static of the eternal”. [5]

If the song addresses the prophetic it is because language has fallen to the fictitious needs that arrest the experience of the human being into the exclusivity of rhetorical force and poetic genius. Is not the song a refusal of both? A refusal now aimed at the “highest” task – that is, the serene life? Against the exclusivity of appearance that Carchia points to, what appears discloses a different sense of law. A few verses in the same poem, in fact, we are confronted with the “law of destiny”: when there is serenity (or peace) there are also words. And a few lines after: “the law of love” is equilibrium from “here” to the “sky”. What appears there is the landscape that comes through in a pictorial depiction: “[Sein bild….Und der Himmel word wie eines Mahlers Haus Wenn seine Gemälde sind aufgestellt] / “[su cuadro e imagen….y el cielo se vuelve como de un pintor una casa cuando sus cuadros de exponen]”.

Does not this also speak to the insufficiency of language, which justifies the step into a folded painting? There is a painting and a vanishing image, but also the painter marveled at gleaming finished masterpieces. Is painting the original placeholder for the song as originary attunement of life? Perhaps. But in its enactment it also means that the song is impossible to disclose except through pictorial invocation. It is a painting of a life in the world, and nothing less. The transfiguration of the law places men no longer into undisputed submission, whether in its positive or natural determinations, but rather of a “strict mediacy” that is ethical in nature. A third way of the law that does not renounce the problem of separation.

Monica Ferrando has insisted upon the enormous importance of this conception: the fact that Pindar’s nomoi, in fact, relates to the nomos mousikos, which is fundamentally dependent on gathering substance of the song [6]. The strict mediacy finds itself between the mortal and the immortal. It is definitely not a “return to the state of nature”, and I do not see how it could be reduced to “genius”, except as an ethics whereby appearing is no longer at the service of objectivity [7]. Adorno was of course right: it is a ruthless effort to deal with disentanglement of nature – and the nature of reason – but only insofar as it is a return to the song. Or, at least, to have a path toward the song: a lyricism of the indestructible against the closure of a finite time dispensed and enclosed.

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Notes

1.  Friedrich Hölderlin. “Fiesta de Paz”, in Cantos hespéricos (La Laguna de Campona, 2016), Traducción y Versiones Libres de Veronica Jaffé, 93. I thank Philippe Theophanidis the exchange initial exchanges on these verses.

2. Friedrich Hölderlin. “Pindar fragments”, in Essays and Letters (Penguin Classics, 2009), 566. Kindle Version. 

3.Ibid., 565.

4. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The Ground of the Empedocles”, in Essays and Letters (Penguin Classics, 2009), 465. Kindle Version. 

5. Gianni Carchia. “Dialettica dell’immagine: note sull’estetica biblica e cristiana”, in Legittimazione dell’arte (Guida Editori, 1982), 21.

6. Lucia Dell’Aia. “Il Regno d’Arcadia: intervista a Monica Ferrando”, in Il mito dell’Arcadia (Ledizioni, 2023), 121. 

7. T.W. Adorno. “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry”, in Notes to Literature (Columbia University Press, 1992), 148-149.