Humanity’s way out: antinomies of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945). by Gerardo Muñoz

In an early review of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), Renato Poggioli noted that one of the important merits of the novel was that in spite of the authort’s political commitment, the narrative was “neither partisan nor ideological. I dare to say it is not political; the author even apologizes for this at the end of the volume” [1]. Poggioli, of course, is referring to Vittorini’s Postscript where he states, favoring a thin notion of the autonomy of art, that the end of art is to “seek in art the trace progress of humanity is altogether different from fighting for it upon the political and social terrain” [2]. This is enough evidence to bring to bear Vittorini’s humanist project grounded in a faith in the “progress of the human species” that he wrestled with throughout his life, and that he never really abandoned according to Franco Fortini [3]. Of course, Vittorini’s ‘progressivism’ is not bounded to ironclad guidelines of political economy and the science of a materialist history, rather his position is the attempt to flee from it, to undertake a different path in which humanity and inhumanity could enter into an improper and inconspicuous relationship towards presence.

Here we can part ways with Poggioli’s suggestion that Uomini e no (1945) is not “sufficiently political” because the characters do not dare to make political slogans or identify themselves with a concrete political party line (the Communist Party that Vittorini himself identified with in spite of having written a non-political novel) during the underground resistance during the years of fascist domination in Milan during the interwar years. If Uomini e no (1945) drifts aways from engaging in a formal political identification to mobilize the narrative persuasion it is because for Vittorini there is an original struggle for “life” that necessarily precedes subjection and political action: it is the struggle of human species to confront the difficulty of its own inhuman threshold, which becomes necessary to account for in any materialist conception. The whole tension of the novel hinges on the unnerving formal composition of the narrative with the asphyxiating dread and angst of the character that embodies the existential the practice of an incarnated struggle beyond survival.

However, what is beyond survival? What comes after the desert of a world that soon enough – in the words of Theodor Adorno at the height of the mid century – will turn human life into “mere functions within a monstrous social machine in which “life does not longer lives”…in which what grows is the scope of socialization and its functions. What I want to say is that liberty has become a mere pretext to enhance the ways of domination” [4]. If politics is the religion of modernity (political theology suturing the void with authority), the accumulation of liberty can only be understood as the moment of expansion and reproduction of effective domination. In a way, the metropolitan scenario in Uomini e no (1945) foreshadows the evolving historical epoch of this ‘monstrous socialization’ as a civil war or stasis, in which the mere survival of political struggle is proportional to the dispensation of death of humanity as the last dialectical movement of humanity against itself; that is, towards the concrete extinction of the human. For Vittorini the swerving black sun of fascism and political militancy (in its idealized version invested in the paradigm of sacrificial structure of history) can only amount to the realization of epochal nihilism and the fertilization of the expansive desert in the novel at the expense of sacrificing the erotic mediation with the world, which entails the liquidation of the sensibility external to human: “Love, in those deserts, is at its most squalid; it is not that life is absent from but the life it has is not alive. You are thirsty and have a chance to drink; there is water. You are hungry, you have a chance to eat; there’s bread. There is a spring and alms around, just the one you are looking for. But it is only a mirage, it is not the thing itself” [5]. The fundamental question posed by Vittorini is never truly resolved by Uomini e no (1945): crossing the desert to achieve something like an erotic distance with the thing itself as ultimately the confirmation of one’s irreductible destiny. No doubt, there are moments where this emerges in strange ways, at the limit of narration and as a linguistic declaration. This is scripted through the exchange with the old lady Selva on happiness: “We work in order that men be happy. Isn’t that what we are working for?…Men need to be happy. Would there be any point to our clandestine newspapers? To our conspiracies?” [6].

Is happiness a subterfuge to return to the world, or is happiness, authentic non-compensatory happiness, the stimmung of life as it retreats from the delegated representations of civil society? The suspended dialectical closure at the level of form in Uomini e no (1945) provides a preliminary resolution to the question of happiness amidst wreckage; a collapse that speaks to Vittorini’s impossibility to bring into synthesis political action and existential authenticity. The narrative texture of Uomini e no (1945) is a preparatory exploration – showing the false exists in the meantime – towards the possible liberation of man’s passions, even against the premises of a reconciled ‘Humanity’ capable of leaving behind the antinomies of humanism and antihumanism at the service of the ‘communist way’. And we know that for Vittorini the commitment to ‘Communism’ was inscribed not in the idea or the organizational tactics but in the notion of the “way” (una via), capable of opening possibilities to counter the coercive efficacy of the administrative social apparatuses that turn historical progress into a totalizing desert [7]. How to do so – is there any legible index to the “via comunista”? As a novel Uomini e no is preparatory towards this retreat from the confusion of the inhumanity of the human on the one hand, and the total humanization of the world to deface the possibility of happiness and experience with the world itself.

In this sense, Fortini is right in describing the lyricism of the novel as attuned to a funeral oration or song (“canto funebre”), which is also a prolonged farewell to the ideals of Vittorini himself as a moral humanist; that is, as someone committed to the ideals and abstraction of redemptive self-sacrificial christology and the self-serving autonomous action of the pardon as man’s last hope to absorb the inhuman kernel into the vita nova of a redeemed universal Humanity. And in fact, these are two “endings”’ of Uomini e no (1945): the self-immolation and sacrifice of the protagonist N2 waiting to confront the Nazi official Cane Nero, and the final sequence of the worker that refuses to murder a German soldier because he looked “sad” even when standing on occupied soil, even when he occupies the role of the protectorate of the nomos of the earth [8]. These are the novel two preparatory distinct actions in the dense fog of the interregnum: the Christological path of sacrifice of N2 – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, which according to René Girard’s defines the advent of the Christian sacrificial practice- seeks a last action of resistance holding on to “humanity’s internal weakness”, which carries the elevation of secularized mythic discharge of subjective martyrdom [9]. On the other, the milanese worker offers redemption as a form of secret forgiveness (without a justification and without a why) to the occupier, and in this way integrate the inhuman into the human species as the solution to the repeated rumination over the movement of struggle and resistance: “Why, without being in any way forced to do so, had they entered this duel to the death, and why did they continue to wage it?” [10].

In his early reading of Uomini e no (1945) Franco Fortini offered a thesis that I am tempted to call the domestication of the wolf argument; an inversion of Hobbesian anthropology and the Christian felix culpa in which struggle’s optimism will ultimately transfigure the internal wolf unto the human’s heart [11]. But we know that the homo homini lupi depends on a thick notion of anthropology, of the human’s unfathomable deficiency in relation to ‘object reality’ so that any domestication of the wolf within humanity is also an anthropological quest; perhaps the last “route” of negating humanism through substantive acts (sacrificial sacrifice and forgiveness) in the attempt to reconcile the wolf with man. But this is the very enterprise of civilizational techniques of adaptation proper to the tooling of political anthropology – that is, the domestication of the savage wolf entails its conversion to the passive dog. Could there be a way out to the final verdict of dialectical form beyond struggle, and the reconciliation of humanity with its negation? Perhaps this is only registered as the unthought in Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945); an experience that prepares a return to the world through the conatus essendi, or the preservation of each thing’s being as their are. This is registered in only instances of the novel in the backdrop of a landscape; indeed, outside the subject of self-reflection, and beyond the premises of radical evil proper to moral platitudes. And the moment reads like this in chapter CXXX: “The long dusty road, the drowsiness, the hay, the stitches where the cicadas were: everything that was, and that, along with everyone who is lost, still wants to be. And the sky filled with kites? The sky that was filled with kites” [12]. The perseverance of the conatus essendi puts to rest what the delegated forms that politics and morality have to offer as temporal substitutes for dragging the historical promise of humanism within epochal nihilism.

In this suspended imagery of an arid landscape, Vittorini descends to the preservation of things as they open to their manifestation of another sense of freedom – no longer tied to the paradigm of historical liberation nor to the assumption of synthetic anthropological determinations to sooth pain – comes upwards, always silently, through the order of description outside the human. And is not in this description what Gianni Carchia would call “the non-human…a gesture of farewell to the idealist movement; a farewell to the exaltation of the human up to the highpoint of its explosion. The refusal to substitute the dead god for a human that in the depredatory scope of totality crosses every limit, every transcendence, and infinity” [13]? This transposition of this proximity with this “other-than-humanity” ( what Humanity can no longer hold on to) is the secret to Vittorini’s infrapolitical impasse in Uomini e no (1945) that holds the key to his insistence on a notion of “freedom” against the subject incapable of overcoming itself in the face of the abstraction (morality) or ideological reassurance (militancy) [14]. One could assume that the worker’s last line in Uomini e no (1945) – which also coincides with Vittorini’s mimetic repetition in his “Postscript” – in the form of a promise (‘I’ll learn better’) registers the final attempt to grasp what remains on the exterior fog of humanity: a notion of freedom that, in seeking ‘a way out’, insists in the possibilities of establishing contact with the world. Thus, the program of historical liberation can only be achieved against historical and civilizational fixation; traversing the polarity of humanity and inhumanity, and thus deposing the sublimated sentiment of pain that social domination can administer as an unending process of degenerated and moribound humanity as mere continuation of the fictive life.

Notes

1. Renato Poggioli. “Review of Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini”, Books Abroad, Vol.20, N.4, 1946, 393.

2. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 199.

3. Franco Fortini. “Ma esisteva Vittorini?”, L’Expresso, 4, 2 febbraio 1986, 86.

4. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. “El mundo administrado o la crisis del individuo”, Pensamiento al margen: revista digital de ideas políticas, N.19, 2023, 200.

5. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 34.

6. Ibid., 13.

7. Elio Vittorini. “El comunismo como vía”, in Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 279.

8. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 50.

9. René Girard. Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 65.

10. Ibid., 196.

11. Franco Fortini. “Che cosa può l’uomo: Uomini e no” (1945), in Saggi italiani (1987), 253.

12. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985),190.

13. Gianni Carchia. “Glosa sull’umanismo”, L’erba voglio, N.29-30, 1977, 9.

15. Elio Vittorini. “La libertad es difícil” (1956), en Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 382.

adventure civilization Dionys Mascolo Elio Vittorini existence Freedom infancy irreductible militancy Mystery Nihilism sensation tonality world

Elio Vittorini on the time of existence. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Elio Vittorini’s short travel book Sardegna come un’infanzia (1957), entirely composed of painterly vignettes of his visit in the thirties, there is one of them that immediately jumps out at the reader, because it is the only moment where the radiance of the image and the possibilities of thought touch each other without any reservation. It is almost the moment in which the senses of what is felt and seen mysteriously touches a region that is not entirely political, even though it figures as the highest ‘political moment’ in Vittorini’s chronicle.

Vittorini is observing the ordinary lives of the common people in Sardinia when all the sudden he writes the following: “Now, and in spite of everything, those sitting down, almost drowsy and without much to do, are in life. The others in the struggle are not, especially if they fall into consciousness by the struggle and the movement, without understanding any other pleasure than that of the full warehouse. The secret is to struggle for existence, but without being colonized by the struggle’s idealism…in this way, there will be true life in the very roaming path. I have always understood activism for activism’s sake as the business of flies that, once they have taken off, they begin to scratch their head or sharpen their legs” [1]. It is almost as if written the parable of the fly is written for our times, where so many are blinded by the secularization of a Jesuit figure of the militant. The activity of fly, just like that of the political militant, falls into the pretense, thanks to the allure of his self-consciousness, that something moves in spite of its complete paralysis. The fly only moves in the metaphysical abstraction from ideal projection to material outcome and preconceived ends that it knows beforehand. Nothing moves and nothing ever can amount to a discovery or an event. The fly will recurrently miss the world because it has become obsessed by the illusion of its movement, convincing itself that flying over fresh dung is something entirely different.

The political subject is primarily the subject of the accumulated freedom, but it can rarely grasp ‘a way out’, as Peter Red claims in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”. Vittorini’s roaming and inert path is the sentiment of true life (“the serene truth of life”, he will say in a few pages later), which is always on the predicated on the possibility of experience against the crust of ideological falsification – even when this process is narrated from the point of view of the proletariat as the motor of the dialectic of history of its self-overcoming to completion. The ‘secret is to struggle for existence’, which entails how to grasp life as utterly outside that can only be shaped by a contact with the world. Perhaps by “sensing” the world without ever becoming its master; rather, what’s involved is a task of a cultivation that must remain singular by virtue of its own irreductibility.

And in a way, this was Vittorini’s own heterodox understanding of communism where there is according to him there was no “collective building of the soul, but rather the destitution of false differences so that once those regulated differences are abolished, new possibilities of absolute differences can flourish” [2]. This is why Vittorini could not find solace in the political militant or the engaged intellectual, except as figures already acting as smugglers of the planned obsolescence of a civilization overtly defended by those facilitating its own demise [3]. In the landscape of Sardinia – by the most passive of roles, he was merely a theōrós after all – Vittorini unravels the metapolitical blackmail of the epoch in order to conquer the most essential and inapparent: the time of existence in a minuscule world within worlds – and thus, always in a permanent state of infancy – that treasures something immense because it will be forever remain unknowable.

Notes

1. Elio Vittorini. Sardegna come un’infanzia (Mondadori, 1957), 64.

2. Dionys Mascolo & Edgard Morin. “Une interview d’Elio Vittorini”, Les Lettres françaises, 27 juin 1947: https://entetement.com/une-interview-delio-vittorini/

3. Elio Vittorini. “La civilización no es algo que defender” (1937), in Diario en público (Gadir, 2008), 86.

aesthetics Arcadia civilization Classicism depiction distance existence force Freedom happiness Heidegger landscape Monica Ferrando painting polis political theology Renaissance sense soul Theology tradition world

Living among the gods. On Monica Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

For anyone familiar with the delicate thought of Monica Ferrando, the short book just published, Arcadia Sacra (Il Molino, 2024), makes it impossible not to read it in light of her the two previous works, the ambitious Il regno errante (Neri Pozza, 2018) that reconstructs the political paradigm of the nomos of Arcadia, and L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), which brought to light the corrupted meaning of a theopoetic understanding of “election” and its appropriation by an effective economic theology apparatus that governs over the destiny of the modern edifice. Arcadia Sacra continues Ferrando’s highly original reconstruction of the unforgettable myth of Arcadia within the obscure setting of secular modernization in which painting itself has come into crisis to the point of utter obsolescence. We might be the first epoch in the history of humanity (or even prehistoric, since painting goes back to the non-original origin of the caves, as Ferrando has argued) in which painting itself is lacking and almost non-existent [1]. And although Ferrando does not allude to the present directly, it goes without saying that by choosing as her focal point Titian’s early picture “The Flight into Egypt” (1508), the vision deployed in the essay can only speak to us as urgently, where the thematics confronted by the Renaissance of Venetian painting returns to our present in a fractured flash: imperial conflagration, unlimited deployment of force, usurpation of territory and multiplication of legal checkpoints, and the accelerated disconnection between architecture and nature, color the ongoing devastation of the vantage point of the landscape now eclipsed by the radiant artificial confinements of the contemporary metropolitan designs.

Already during his postwar years in the United States, Theodor Adorno observed how the unbounded sadness of the American landscape has nothing to do with an inhuman romantic sublime; it was rather that the landscape feels as if it bears no traces of the human hand [2]. If Americanism configures the long lasting night of planetary nihilism; this is so, not only due to capitalist subsumption and production of human life, but fundamentally because of the inherent obliviousness of the landscape that forecloses dwelling in the world. But the myth of Arcadia, as Ferrando will insists, is no utopia nor crafted rhetoric (the bucolic genre as an aesthetic compensation to the normative grid of the social bond); it is also the question about the earthly ground of existence, and the necessary attunement with the things that have been domesticated into order of the metaphysics of idolatry and objectivity (Ferrando 28). In this sense, Arcadia does not name another world to come; it is a world that has been registered many times, reappearing whenever the hand reaches out in proximity as if caressing the landscape’s skin.

The mytho-poetical deployment of Arcadia returns amidst a world in conflagration, and for Ferrando this has fundamental political implications insofar as it shows a way out from the grammar at the service of force and political dominion of commanders and soldiers – which is always already exercised as legitimate to coerce and to become a tool for the regulation of abstract mediations – into the voice of poets, painters, and shepherds (Ferrando 51). Arcadia reveals that the human species is a ductile animal that can sense by the ability to touch and use. This is why Arcadia stands as a third space outside the political dichotomy of empire and republicanism, between the struggle of usurpation and conquest, and the techno-political administration of common goods of social distribution and institutional delegation. The abstract humanism of the Renaissance, as Heidegger once claimed alluding to Machiavelli’s political thought, is also the commencement of a specific political technology rooted in certainty and justification that can only conceive representation as the ground for the production of an “effective truth” [3]. The virtuous homini militari of the Italian city states anticipate the neutralization of force as legitimate rule that will prepare the stage of modern political realism based on fear and normative rule of law. The final efficacy of force is to transform the sense of the world into a mere object, as Weil clearly understood it in her essay on Homer’s Iliad. One of the key insights of Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024) is that it shows that, parallel to the revolution in political technologies taking place in Renaissance Humanism, the image of Arcadia was being rediscovered in treatises and paintings in order to remain faithful to a different attunement of the nomoi, in which the philosophy of history of sacrifice, endless civil wars, and destruction of the Earth do not constitute true destiny (Ferrando 14). In an exoteric way – and it is so, because the craft of the painter is, precisely, depiction and figuration of the nakedness of what appears before our vision- painters like Titian, Veronese, and Bellini, became witnesses to the acquiescence of the nomos mousikos, which far from soliciting the conceptual density of a theory of Justice; it registered the preeminent condition of poetizing nature of living in the vanishing world. Indeed, it was in the musical nomos where the soul could establish the communication between exteriority and interiority within the gleaming order of things.

If Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art suggests that the erection of work occupies the open space of this clearing; Ferrando will thematize how Boccaccio’s understanding of the Earth as radiantly divine was drawing upon the tradition of Arcadia will emerge as the pictorial space of the artists to disclose the vibrant sense of a necessary freedom (Ferrando 43). This means that living among the gods is not reducible to panentheism, if understood as oppositional to monotheism; rather, it was the opening to the event that gathered forms of life, creations, affections, and territories. In other words, there will always be gods whenever the world is not enclosed into the homogenous surface of a unified planetarity. And is not painting the quasi-originary activity of human anthropogenesis (the event of being in the world as such) the sensible evidence that negates any conceptual and political translation directed towards action and justification? After all, painting is, among other things, the business of depicting mute things, as Nicolas Poussin famously claimed.

But muteness must be qualified and expanded, since Arcadia is no asylum or final refuge of man. Titian’s “The Flight into Egypt” depicts a rite of passage, but also opens to a set of rhythmic connected activities that lead to the landscape. Thus, as Monica Ferrando reminds us, building from her previous Il regno errante, Arcadia is also the material experimentation of acoustic energy; music, or the the nomos mousikos, no longer guided by the command of political service, directed by attunement of the lyre and the syrinx, will speak the unwritten language of the human soul. Painting and music convergence at the nonsite of permanent formlessness. And it is rhythmic music allowing improvisation and experimentation that reimagines a different conception of the polis; a transfiguration of political life, in which the principle of civility in all of its complexity (citizenship, objective transference and negation, civilizational fortitude) will no longer articulate the principal axis of the human commonwealth. Neither a source of higher natural law nor a mere expansion of positive norms, the nomos of Arcadia for Ferrando entails: “inalterabile a unire intimamente musica e legge, entrambe ágrapha, non scritte, se non nel cuore. L’interdipendenza tra modi della musica e nomoi della città, che sarebbe vano interpretare secondo un rapporto causale, trova nella stessa parola nomos un compendio inesauribile, ribadito nella Politeia: «Non si introducono mai cambiamenti nei modi della musica senza che se ne introducano nei più importanti nomoi della polis” (Ferrando 54). The separation of law from music – as Ferrando will say for poetry and philosophy in later pages – will ultimately lead to the moral struggle towards the rise of the fictitious (and whoever can impose it through their effective hegemony) against the emergence of the “love of thought” (l’amore del pensiero) (Ferrando 57). In this sense, the moralization of justice and its conversion into a specific historical grammar (lex scripta in the juridical apparatus) will ground the order of the polis in which the human will be absolutely sacred so that the sacred nearness between existence and the world – the atopia where the promise of happiness can take place – will vanish forever. As Carlo Levi saw clearly during the postwar years, the rise of the political administration of fear will coincide with the decline of painting as the source of being in liberty within the senses [4]. And, in our days, the historical termination of secularization can only be felt like an unending glacial interregnum (it is no surprise that Disney’s epochal blockbuster is precisely a defense of alienation of a cold being in a Frozen castle) in which the prehistoric reminiscence of the garden can only appear as an afterthought or mere representation, always out of reach, and viciously grazed by wild beasts before our own eyes.

But seeing is already an exercise in prefiguration of a world that returns where painting stands as the medium for a mediation between the formlessness and the soul. This is why, above all, pictorial space is a privileged surface from which to flee our condition of unworldly inmates of our times. In a certain way, painting does not just bring to bear truth against the regime of calamitous fictions; it is also bears witness, as Ferrando states towards a high moment of Arcadia Sacra (2024), to the rediscovery of a new mental space that revives the attunement to a state of the world no longer reduced to the depredatory practices of civilizational extraction and consented servitude (Ferrando 77). The tradition of painting is not just a collection of forms and artistic conventions, but the ongoing concert that facilitates our movement (and being moved) towards happiness.

This is the promise of the itinerant Mary’s passive and inclined face in Titian’s early masterpiece. It does not come to surprise that for Ferrando, the mother dwells among the gods of peace, in contrast to the figures of the commander or the inquisitorial or priestly judge that monitor an endless narrative of intra-species civil war (Ferrando 63). It should not go without saying that at the same time that some contemporary scholars in the face of a historical crisis of legitimation attempt to revive the aura of the homini militari, the precepts of the ragion di stato and the technical virtues of the charismatic Prince; it has been the work of Monica Ferrando, in fully in display in Arcadia Sacra (2024), that invites us to turn to the counters of eros of painting that, almost stubbornly, transmit to us the infinite possibilities of life among the green blades of grass in Pan’s spiritual land (Ferrando 82) [5]. The sacredness of Arcadia resides in this unbounded exteriority that thanks to the mystery of the mother, is always commencing; and, having achieved happiness, it wants to know nothing about bring the world to conclusion. Beneath the arcana imperii (Rome) and the bylaws of the polis (Athens), the landscape of Arcadia remains a harmonious passage of our cohabitation.

Notes

1. Monica Ferrando. “Editoriale”, De pictura 3, 2020: https://www.quodlibet.it/rivista/9788822011643

2. Theodor W. Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Verso, 2005), 73.

3. Martin Heidegger. Acerca de Ernst Jünger (El Hilo de Ariadna, 2013), 113.

4. Carlo Levi. “Paura della pittura” (1942).

5. I am thinking here of the works of several American historians of political thought and legal scholars in recent years that have mobilized efforts to restore a “neoclassical”, Renaissance centered political tradition, as a response to the crisis of modern liberalism. The most prominent list includes, although it is not limited to James Hankins’ Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard U Press, 2020), Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (Cambridge U Press, 2023), and Adrian Vermuele’s endorsement of Renaissance imperial categories such as Ragion di stato, Lex Regia and the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, see his “Sacramental Liberalism and Region di Stato” (2019) and “The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia” (2023). The pastiche of this neoclassical investment made possible by rhetorical and hermeneutical deployments of instrumentalized myth, it is something that I have taken note of in “¿Revival de la tradición legal clásica?” (2022). Drawing a parallel to this classical absorption in American political thought, one could say that this is a reiteration of what Monica Ferrando herself has analyzed in her chapter on German Romantic Neoclassicism and the Winckelmann aesthetic project in her L’elezione e la sua ombra. Il cantico tradito (Neri Pozza, 2022), except now that it lacks aesthetic meditations (there is no Dichter als Führer), thus culminating in the direct exercise of applied executive force.

archeology Freedom Gianni Carchia modern revolution Orphism philosophy of history polis political theology Rodrigo Karmy sacrifice sovereignty transfiguration Unidad Popular voice

Three notes on Rodrigo Karmy’s Nuestra confianza en nosotros (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Transfiguration. Towards the end of Nuestra confianza en nosotros: la Unidad Popular y la herencia del por venir (Ufro, 2023), Rodrigo Karmy suggests that the experiential texture of Salvador Allende’s political years amounted to a sort of corporeal transfiguration of historical time, but also of the political subject within modern architectonics of the inter-state sovereign system. The death-martyrdom brought a new world into order, radically transforming the sense of historical assumptions and its immanent refutations and accelerations. For those of all that know Karmy’s philosophical investigations working through this intuition, it is impossible not to see that ‘transfiguration’ does not entail ‘sacrifice’, but rather it implies the figure of the martyr [1]. And we also know from Erik Peterson that martyrs are absolute witness to truth of an irrevocable event; in other words, those that transcend the core materiality of the mere opinions and matter-of-factness as to remain faithful to the unfathomable to a world brought to abrupt change (and at times, this means also despair). Karmy writes:

“Se produce así una transfiguración radical de Allende que trastoca enteramente el juego de la teología política, tal como ha sido planteada bajo los avatares del fantasma portaliano: si en esta última, el cuerpo físico termina desmaterializado en un cuerpo institucional, tal como ocurrió con el devenir del general Pinochet, en Allende termina desmaterializado en una potencia por venir (no en cuerpo institucional), aquello que Walter Benjamin llamaba lo «nunca sido»: «Siempre estaré junto a ustedes», dice el presidente usurpado por el golpismo esa triste mañana de septiembre” [2].

The truth of transfiguration – and in a sense every event of truth is always carried by the energy what is transfigured – marks the incommensurable distance between the eternal persistence of the word and the historical movement guided by the precepts of civilization. Whereas the political grammar organizes itself through an indiscriminate institutional corpus and a set of moral binding obligations upon its citizens; the truth of transfiguration is the keeper of the night of the soul that, like the myth of Er, signals the passage between the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead. When transfigured, the dead can become even more lively than those allegedly “alive”; where those alive become embodied and rigid statues or mummies. As such, the energy of transfiguration remains outside the cloisters of history and its memory sites, since its realization takes place whenever there is a drift outside and beyond the suturing of the world as mere stated and enclosed fact.

Voice. The “we” (Nosotros) in Karmy’s thesis does not signal the constituent political unity of the People nor a partisan form that can exert force towards the inversion of the sedimented historical order. In his archeological endeavor, the ‘nosotros’ indexes a non-numerical instance through the vocative raises its own question to the past. This does not imply that there is a “collective voice” that must enact its point of annunciation through representation and mediated forms; the voice emerges as an exception to the grammaticalization of the constitutional order and its statuary production as expression of legislative will. The voice is the exteriority to every scheme of reproduction. But, what is a “voice”? Following Emilio Recabarren, Karmy connects the voice to the very act of creation: in other words, a voice to the truth implies the vocative of what has truly never been there before. Like the chorā, the voice is both at the reemergence of its origin and medium rather than substance; and this is why the voice, unlike the written language, cannot be subsumed to the reification of mimesis and generative substance [3]. The voice is what every time remains irreducible to the order of discourse difference, historiographical narrativity, and the original letter and spirit of the law. And even in traditions without “Constitutions”, law cannot escape its written and grammatical framework; this is why in Common Law, the Constitutional authority is supplanted by the historical absorption of habits, manners, and tradition into the force of legal codes and binding statutes. It is a high merit of Karmy’s Nuestra confianza (2023) to reminds us that the happiest moments (and perhaps the only moment worth saving, that infinitely returns against the grain of historical progress) of the revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century are to be found in the evocation of the voice and its popular music (something that can also be said of the Cuban Revolution, for instance). This esoteric orphic thread evidences the disjointed relation between the polis and the mythic transfiguration when facilitated by the prophetic overtones of the musical nomos in the genesis of the West [4]. Hence, whenever there is a voice, the suture of politics to the theology cannot amount to the continuous transaction upon the survival and agony of the living.

Freedom from revolution. Unlike the reverential or formalist accounts written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean Unidad Popular, Karmy’s essay invites us to dwell about a political experience after its epochal exhaustion: the collapse of the horizon of the philosophy of history implies the internal implosion of the modern revolution’s infrastructure (constituent power, moral justice, militant subjectivity, sacrificial energy). For Karmy to arrive at a certain nearness to the well lighted tradition of the UP is to abandon once and for all the civilizational eon of sedentary political hegemony (“a revolution in world history” bringing about the age of the nomads to an end, claimed historian Edward Gibbon) that has now paved the way for the unlimited forms of planetary government exerted through the rationality of the management of population and the distribution of the economy [5].

The farewell to the revolution and its reverse – it is well known that De Maistre claimed in the wake of the French Revolution that the opposite of the revolution is not a counter-revolution, but what is all together contrarian to it – means to put a halt to the paradigm of force (positive and immanent hostility) that has oriented actions, expectations, passions, and even dreams taxed at the fictive illusions of an abstract Humanity devoid of any possibility of happiness in the world. It is only after we can leave behind the revolutionary metaphysical mimesis that a new sense of freedom could emerge away from the dominion of the land-surveyors of the Earth. Abandoning any clamors oriented towards the future, it is now for us to attune to the everlasting traditions that are unrelinquished to the endless rubble of time.

Notes

1. Rodrigo Karmy. “The Absolute Gift: Martyrdom as Destituent Power”, SAQ, 122, 2023, 157-170.

2. Rodrigo Karmy. Nuestra confianza en nosotros (Ufro, 2023), 183.

3. Ibid., 102.

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

antiquity clergy Edward Gibbon Enlightenment erudition Freedom Hölderlin irony Persuation rationality rhetorical style universitas

Gibbon on the university and erudition. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his posthumous Memoirs from my life (1827), Edward Gibbon writes something quite striking about the modern English university in order to defend his alignment with the érudits. Now, to be an erudite was never something to be achieved at a university or academic discipline, it was something quite different in both style and form. Gibbon was quite crude when he writes:

“The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted with the vice of their origin. Their primitive discipline was adapted to the education of priests and monks; and the government still remains in the hand of the clergy, an order of men whose manners are remote from the present world, and whose eyes are dazzled by the light of philosophy. The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of public instruction; and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy and oppressive. Their work is more costly and less productive than that of independent artists; and their new improvements so eagerly grasped by the competition of freedom are admitted with slow and sullen reluctance in those proud corporations, above the fear of a rival and below the confession of an error” [1].

It is worth noting that Gibbon’s defense of erudition – the same erudition that will make him undertake the genetic project of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – is at least indirectly opposed to the reorganization of the university as infused by the ecclesiastical culture of priests and canon lawyers, which dominated the institution through the dogmas and platitudes legitimized by the currency of stable philosophical categories or doctrines. The university was always already an institution designed by the moral outsourcing of the intramural clerical rivalry among different levels of the administration and academic chairs. In a way, the future administrative clerk will be an impoverished version of the clerical denomination (homo homini clericus now realized through leading ‘cultural benchmarks’).

It is only at this point that Gibbon’s skeptical and ironic stance against “philosophes” – the secularized figure of the ecclesiastical priest – becomes quite clear, since the rational philosopher occupies the role of the judge in the internal institutional validity, conceptual arraignment, and liturgical enactment of the self-sufficient subject of knowledge. Gibbon reacted against this specific “Enlightenment” that harbored a universitas drenched in the undercurrents of barbarism against the ‘freedom to understand’. Or more precisely: freedom to land the sublime height of personal style.

Under the sign of erudition, Gibbon understood tradition as a stylistic transmission that did not differ much from Hölderlin’s archeological suggestion in regards to antiquity; mainly, that formation only takes place when “we give ourselves our own direction determined by impure directions”; only this way truth-seeking can commence without prejudice and obscurantism [2]. In this light, the object of happiness must abandon the hubris of priestly academic knowledge in order to pursue the “love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplying research each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure” [3]. It almost goes without saying that the fact that the contemporary university must justify every project, initiative, and prospect on behalf of current soteriological needs and values speaks to its organized alliance with barbarism against any possible form of personal erudition. But erudition, as something bestowed upon ourselves, will always persuade and humble men against the unreserved rhetorical force of the present.

Notes

1. Edward Gibbon. Memoirs of my life (Penguin Books, 1990), 77.

2. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The standpoint from which we should consider Antiquity”, in Essays and Letters (Penguin Books, 2009), 442.

3. Edward Gibbon. Memoirs of my life (Penguin Books, 1990), 98.

Cézanne creation eternity ethos experience Freedom Mystery painting passions pictorial analysis style world

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

In his Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague (Thames & Hudson, 2023), Christopher Neve ponders whether there is something like an “experience” of late style in painting. He immediately sets up himself to the task in the last works of great modern masters, from Cézanne to Soutine. The notion of “late style” can only be raised at the definitive end of the artist’s path. The old age style is an aspotilla no longer dependent on approval and excellence; it favors inner capacity and dexterity of seeing. This is why late style is, probably, always self-transformative: it poses the notion of work under erasure as it comes near the zenith of retraction. For Adorno late style registers the failure of synthesis as well as the force of dissociation in the permanence of the catastrophic. Neve will perhaps agree this much: painting is not about fixing temporality (the density of the history, the vulgarity of the contemporary, the monumentality of the past); rather what remains is the fugitive scene of depiction. If the question of “late style” is immensely difficult to raise, that is because it resists conceptualization: it merely seeks to denote achievement and the ruinous; appearance and retreat; unlearning schematics and producing “from life” itself, to put it with Poussin’s pictorial vocabulary. Late style is not about the moment of judgement and recapitulation – it is what depiction can achieve in the twilight of creative powers. As Goethe once defined old age: “Old age is gradual retreat from appearance”. But this retreat animates the space that had remained secluded in the order of temporal abstraction.

There is no theory (and there will never be) of late style of pictorial representation. It is a question that merits the weight of description – which Neve combines, quite successfully, with that of emblematic instances of the artists’ form of life. In other words, late style does not require conceptual renditions; it demands the elaboration of strong descriptions that can grasp the resonance of a fundamental ethos. Neve glosses Delacroix’s ethical imperative: ‘only in old age does a painter finally know what sort of artist he should have been all along’. In late style there is coming to conclusion because there is a path for homecoming. This ethical dimension of the artist is neither regulated by form nor by epistemological conditions. Late style implies a stripping away of things; it bares a specific nudity: it can reveal interiority (the invariant) without argumentative absorption. If anything else, it is the non-knowledge of the gesturing hand. Neve points calls this “statement” when offering a treatment of Rembrandt’s old age: “…technique and the process of getting older, and that this was somehow done all in one, summed up and expressed undeniable and in confidence of one blow and as a single statement. And I wished that all painting could be like this” (46). We suppose Neve’s desire as hyperbolic, since painting under a single statement also implies the moment when the picture approaches the abyss between the hand and the order of reality.

Painting gravitates towards a single statement when it surpasses life by taking death seriously. There is much truth in reminding that the work of art aspires to its bare lyrical moment of decline and unworking of itself – this was also Cézanne’s moment of “not being able to realize!”- in order to flee from the objective fixation of the “thisness of nature”. Painting assembles a transfigurative force against the temporal succession of the pro-duction of a specific work on a surface. As expressed by the old Pisarro from the window of his studio quoted by Neve: “A little more work before dying” (54). True, nothing else but painting mattered to Pisarro, as Neve reminds us. Now, does this mean that he is holding on to the unchanged and muted essence of things as a “metaphysical solace” in the face of the whirling of a world in chaos? Perhaps there is something to this suspicion that must be reckoned with – painting comes close to theological presuppositions insofar as creation unsettles a disenchanted world and its fictitious mimesis. Alas, this is a question not fully posed by Neve, but it is also one of the ways in which his book could travel without much effort. The question of immortality of a picture has a point of departure here. But is immortality conceivable as a form of solace and fallen piety? One should refuse to ask this question in the form of generality. The works Titian, Goya, Cézanne, the dreary and posthumous glory of Velázquez or the suffering Soutine during the Nazi occupation are all efforts to pose the problem of late style painting as the ethical attunement of each artist.

In the most elevated and charged moment of Neve’s efforts to grapple with the notion of style he recurs to Soutine (and it requires us to turn to the picture “Children playing at Champigny” from 1942): “What you are seeing, when Soutine paints the Auxerre trees, is what I think happens in the work of most of the artists I haven written about here. This storm of temperament is true painting, an inexplicable combination of seeing, feeling, memory, response, imagination, and profound oddness. And so he turns away in exhaustion” (122). Late style registers the collapse of a possible fulfillment with the world by indexing a detour to the point where realization seeks to “return to simplicity and order”. Truth indicates the literal thereness on the surface devoid of illusions. So, solace does not have the last word; this is not how a painting subsists under a single statement. And that accounts for the ultimate risk: the ethical presupposition of painting exposes the artist to the “terrible freedom” as the distance between the passions (temperament) and the gesture within profound disorder and arbitrariness of nature.

Someone like Carlo Levi will find himself at home: true freedom cannot begin by the suppression of the passions in the name of interests; rather, the burden of freedom is the caesura of passions that displaces the otherwise inexorable fear of civilizational progress. Painting as the event of truth dethrones fear as the primary attunement in reality. Through our emperament one finds the exit from alienation, gathering the moment of depiction into order. There is a gentleness of freedom in the mutual self-supporting carrying of things, as Kurt Badt saw in Cézanne’s old style. And this might be the tragic element of painting and its fundamental antinomy.

For Neve this means nothing shorter than “the world reduced to a series of prodigious impulses, the revelation of the inner intact, the change taken to see the universe in a new light at the risk of failing utterly” (130). Late style is what reveals inner intact to the fruition of exteriority – this is the compass of visibility. A failed world followed by decline – two terms where mythic transfiguration moves painting to the eccentric luminosity of altering the jarring relation with the world. Old style enacts a catastrophe that refuses the insolvency of pulsation that binds character to the harmony of form. One might add that it could very well be that painting is, as revealed in the abyssal caesura of a late style, a stated mystery: a passionate life that profoundly perturbs the world, a transcendence that falls into an irrevocable eternity.

distance existence figure Freedom idea Kurt Badt Nihilism painting Paul Cézanne realization sensation temperament thing world

On Cézanne’s pink stripe tablecloth. by Gerardo Muñoz

The title of the painting is “Still Life with Apples” (1894) housed at the Getty. Like many of Cézanne’s pictures of the 1890s we have a sense of immediately entering into an space warped by distance and nearness that lavishly seals the scene. We feel that something has taken place; after all these are pictures of an event, but only concealed to us. We are given the sense of that experience, which is the fundamental thing to depict for Cézanne. Now, if Clark is correct, then it is true that Cézanne’s still life painting was meant to annihilate the objectivity of the world through a study and stubborn simplicity; although simplicity never amounts to synthesis. On the contrary, what preserves sensation over absorption remains at a distance: this is the narrowing act of simplicity as a fact of style [1]. The depiction of appearance is a problem for Cézanne precisely because painting now stood (late nineteenth century), as Kurt Badt well observed, as the last metaphysical activity in the face of Western nihilism [2]. There is nihilism, an unbridled chaos – and thus painting aspired to accomplish a different form of order, a transfiguration through sense. A higher order subtracted from representation. Thus, the outpouring of sense was everything to Cézanne; nothingless than the attunement of the relationship between depiction and nature. Thus, nearness and distance stands a problem in the picture itself: what is most apparent is what Cézanne seeks to qualify through depth and singular brittle rigidity.

As he would write to his friend Émile Bernard: “In order to make progress in realization, there is only nature, and an eye educated by contact with it….I mean that in an oregon, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point, and this point is always the closet to our eye, the edges of objects recede towards a centre placed at eye level. With only a little bit of temperament one can be a lot of painter. All you need is an artistic sensibility. And doubtless this sensibility horrifies the bourgeois” [2]. This is Cézanne’s permanent struggle (a non-subjective position, that is, anti-Romantic) struggle: the impossibility to “realize” and to complete a picture as the heart of the mysterious vortex of the execution of depiction. This clears the entrypoint to the problem of the “last metaphysical activity in the wake of nihilism” that Badt consigns to the activity of painting: pictorial art can reveal the unrealizable in every work; but it is no less true that all works fundamentally have an asymptotic inclination to the potential of realizing the idea. The achievement of that impossible nearness attest to the achievement of painting (or to its consummated failure).

The unrealizable in Cézanne’s painting, however, is not merely indexing the unfinished gesture of the brush in a scene or a series of selected objects; rather it is the condition of possibility for entering into the world through a medial common existence between things, however fragmentary within the whole. The unrealizable dimension is never a conscious attempt for a spatial unity to be fulfilled; it is alienable by a stylistic reduction at the moment in which it ceases to belong to the painter’s cognition. This is why Cézanne’s pictorial project – more so than Pisarro’s anarchic affinities and political flirtations in the late nineteenth century – has radical consequences for an opening of freedom that is grounded on the senses (and what it means to be ‘free in the senses and the passion’, in each temperament), allowing experience to decompress the formalistic representational conditions of bourgeois civility. Indeed, Cézanne’s work – and the world it depicts, the opening towards things as a whole but through separation, having in common precisely alienability – does not aspire to be legible in the social, which is the ideal space of exchange and metaphorization, recognition and reification as image. The social is the limitless spatiality in which anything can enter, as anything can stand for any other thing. Or, to put it more concisely: painting seeks to let things be things in their interchangeable nature (without the anxiety over fixing an image of Nature).

Paul Cézanne. “Ginger Pot with Pomegranate and Pears” (1893), Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

Cézanne inadvertently knows that whatever fate in the wake of nihilism awaits “painting” (soon to be utterly destroyed and displaced by the conceptual and object driven monstrosity of the modern vanguard), the effort to “realize” in painting meant holding to experience of depth as the only guarantee of an existential freedom. Surface and depth will remain on the side of the insistence of an appearance without predicates proper to theatricality. Kurt Badt poignantly captures this in Cézanne’s “old age style”: “There is no longer anything in our sensory experience of seeing which corresponds to what thus becoming visible; what is shown nis rather the visible picture of the concept of freedom. For the thing common to all these forms of the “style of old age” is two-faced: negatively it is a ligeration from isolation and resistance, possibly a liberation to the serious gentleness of freedom” [4]. And gentleness means letting things be: the serene elevation to irreducibility, upholding them only in the proclivity of its contact; never fully absorbed by surrounding and revealing its state of harmonious composition. The task of depiction in painting is the impossible task- but the task nonetheless thoroughly achievable through the hands of the painter – of coming as close as possible to what has actually been experienced. Having affirmed (not necessarily achieved) something like a fate-like divine temporality in painting is able to ground worldliness as transcendent only to let it fall immediately after. And what fate is to character, for Cézanne ‘that which is preserved unchanged’ is the supreme tonality of the pictorial task realized by the restraint of the artist [5].

But precisely to depict immobility, the forever permanent, the befallen weight of the conatus essendi (what preserves itself as such), painting has to mobilize a minimum motion for the confluence of objects, planes, and emergence of depth. The pink stripe tablecloths that appear in several of the 1890s still life paintings with fruits can be very well taken as a multum in parvo of the declension in every realization. In a sense, then, the pink strip is a signature, as if were, of the gathering of things and depth at the price of unrealizing the closure of integral depiction. It is precisely the pink stripe in which it becomes realizable in a single brushstroke that the place of the line appears otherwise, crowning the mystery of painting as the clearest manifestation of a different musical order. It is the mysteriously nature of painting, which barely introduces itself as a line substitute for a color (the color of the tablecloth as a thing) that, while remaining visible to the viewer, cannot but reveal the invisible; that is, the temperament of the artist attuned to the muteness of painting, to say with Poussin. And perhaps this is the highest moment of depiction in the search for the “integrity” of “wholeness” that, in turn, grants the instance of the unconcealment of truth. A lace plotting what has already been validated in the irrevocable thereness of the most inapparent existence: an eternal state in the world.

Notes

1. Maurice Denis. “Cézanne II”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Feb, 1910, 279.

2. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 181.

3. The Letters of Paul Cézanne (Getty Museum, 2013), 342.

4. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (University of California Press, 1965), 313-314.

5. Ibid., 161.

anarchy barbarism civilization domination dwelling Ernst Jünger existence Freedom landscape modernity Nihilism novel world

The unperishable. On Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs (NYRB, 2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

On the Marble Cliffs (1939), which appeared for the first time in Nazi Germany in 1939 (the new NYRB has just been published) offered a narrative of a thorough civilizational collapse of the West. I will side with many of the commentators that have reminded the readers that this novel doesn’t simply amount to an allegory of the rise of National Socialism or the reemergence of indirect powers of civil war in the European interwar years. By underlining “just”, I also mean to say that it is also very much about its epoch. Jünger was an insider of the German elite, and one of the most astute interpreters of his time as his theses on the dominion of the worker and the force of total mobilization were fully realized. It happens that On the Marble Cliffs introduces the civilizational collapse not through the allegorical reduction of the narrative procedure, but rather through a weaving, never truly resolved (much to Jünger’s own intentions), of temporalities that do not land in historical form. Circumventing the meanderings of a dreamlike stage and that of a thick and sensorial description, the novel diachronous movement resembles the stage of a vigil that retrospectively looks from page one at the advent of the disaster: “Only then do we recognize how fortunate we humans are to live from day to day in our small communities, under peaceful roofs, engaged in please conversation, and with the effective greetings morning and night. Alas, we always recognize too late that these simple things offered us a cornucopia of riches” (Jünger, 3). Granted, the vigil is an incomplete assessment of how (not so much as to why, which speaks to Jünger’s separation between his critico-politico essays and his narrative universe) the luminous community of brothers at Grand Marina entered the stage of destruction. During their peaceful time at Grand Marina, the brothers dedicate themselves to studying plants: a contemplative activity through an herbarium that becomes an exercise in clearing the mind and “draining time”. Botany has always stood as a minor activity to escape the realization of death, even if inevitable the cycle of temporal caducity.

But the ruinous time begins with the dominion of the Head Forester, an old governor of Mauretania region whose territorial ambitions are rooted in the domination of world affairs, and the willful defense of its doctrine Semper Vitrix (Jünger, 23). For those familiar with the worldview of Jünger, it is not surprising to find that domination does not begging at the original act of taking, but rather in the scheme of disposition that prepares the liquidation of the originary depth of the world’s opacity. Hence, imperii vitrix is always cartographical, and thus concerned with the the procedure of legible reduction: “For them [Mauretaninas] the world was reduced to a map like those thare engraved for amateour using little compasses and polished insutrmentions that are pleasing to hold. And so it seemed odd to come upon figures like the Head Forester in these clear, perfectly abstract realms freed of any shadows” (Jünger, 23). To dominate the world, one must first dominate over the ideals and images that unify a world. This is why Jünger, just a few years earlier in The Worker, had ended his treatise pointing at the passage from the classical social contract theories of social cohesion to the efficiency of planning of production in order to weaken any possible resistance [1]. This is another reason why On the Marble Cliffs fails at any allegorical instantiation, since allegory hinges upon the unfulfilled stage of historical consciousness, whereas Jünger levels his narrative with the metaphysical disposition that is accomplished in modernity. One could call this the triumph of nihilism and anarchy; the never-ending triumph of ‘barbarism and religion’ of the West since at least the Roman Empire to put in the terms of historian J.G.A. Pocock. This is the “line” of modernity, but it is also the line that is breached at the collapse of modernity staged On the Marble Cliffs.

Anarchy and nihilism – for Jünger these are for two routes for prompting a relation with the epochal collapse. More than clearcut positions to endorse, these are unbreachable counters of the limitless epoch. Jünger distinguishes them well through the character of Braquemart: “Suffice it to say that there is a profound difference between fully formed nihilism and unchecked anarchy. The outcome of the struggle will determine whether human settlements will become wasteland or virgin forest. With regards to Braquemart, he was marked by all the traits of full-fledged nihilism. His was a cold, rootless intelligence with a penchant for utopias…On seeing him, one inevitably thought of his master’s profound saying: “The desert grows – woe to him who carries the deserts within!” (Jünger, 76-77). The nihilist suffers from a rather coldness of intelligence, and what Jünger qualifies as the ill-fated adventure of the theorist, always unmatched with that of the pragmatist (Jünger, 78). Granted, everything depends on the internal capacities to react against the growing systematic devastation. On the other side, the anarchist cloaks his accomplice condition within the corruption of the law, where nothing is sacred. This is why the anarchist transforms the forest into an enclosed land for hunting and predatory practice where “cadavers left to rot in the fields spread pestilence, wiping out the herds. The downfall of order brings good to none” (Jünger, 62). On the Marble Cliffs is at times too emphatic with the reiteration of the order in opposition to terror: ‘Terror establishes its reign behind a mask of order” (Jünger, 38). And this speaks to National Socialism antipositivist attitudes to the rule of law, which Jünger seemed to have perceived clearly.

However, it is also true that Jünger’s insistence on order is not just about conservation in the abyss, but rather about how the civilizational collapse is expressed in the puncturing of indirect powers that will ultimately unify the anarchy of domination. To insist on nihilism means to de-hegemonize the indirect powers and factional domination against the visceral hatred of the gratitude of language and the mystery of beauty that burns the inside of demonic spirits (Jünger 39). The luminosity of Jünger’s style and symbolic nakedness speaks, in turn, to an attempt at a mythologization of beauty that emerges in a language devoid of parody. In this sense, Jünger displaces Gianni Carchia’s important thesis about the narrativization of the parody of mystery into the form in the bourgeois novel. Jünger’s beauty is mysterious because it exceeds signification and conceptual closure of the novel conflict, as what language does (or seems to do) on the line of nihilism. For Jünger the revocation of anarchy implies taking a distance from the subsumption of prose into narrative order. Thus, Jünger’s order is a primary order, one of retaining the reserves of sacred and the unfathomable character in the face of barbarism and the destruction of the world.

“We take leave more easily when things are in order” (Jünger, 59). This is the primary order of a plain state of the world, which does not presuppose the obsession with organization and management; it is what allows for the flourishing of contemplative life and the possibility of retreating to the density of the forest. But we know that this is, precisely, what comes crashing down in the rise of anarchy and nihilism, both working in tandem in modernity. Attaching oneself to primary order amounts to “concrete dreaming” at best, as the narrator says early in the book. And it is at this point that On the Marble Cliffs solves this conundrum: the idea of order must not be reduced to a nomos of the world, but rather the possibility of an outside from thinking that there is a finite and finished work of the world. This is where Jünger’s genius shines with usual intensity. It is the moment, towards the end, when the narrator admits: “the beauty of this world now enveloped, I saw, in the purple mantle of destruction” (Jünger, 102). The conflagration of the world, however, only undoes a new capacity for seeing that which had remained in the dense fog of consciousness and aesthetics. In other words, the total collapse brings forth the unperishable element between existence and the world. Jünger achieves the highest point of condensation in this elaboration:

“The harvest of many years of labor fell prey to the element and with the house, our work returned to dust. We cannot count on seeing our work completed here below, and happy is the man whose will is not too painfully invested in his efforts. No house is built, no plan created, in which ruin is not the cornerstone, and what lives imperishably in us does not reside in our works. We perceived this truth in the flame, and its glow was not devoid of joy” (Jünger, 108).

This is not joy or appetite for destruction, but more a joy about what remains unperishable in every destructive act that realizes itself just so that everything could be renewed more or less the same. At the narrative level the unperishable of every work is the mystery that cannot be fully captured either by the deployment of historical allegory or by the mimetic translation of the work of narrative. On the Marble Cliffs remains stubbornly an open novel, but in a very precise sense: it gestures to the divergence between life and the world is barely touched parabolically at a distance. This is why the character of On the Marble Cliffs reaches the end by stressing “the sight of it [an old oak grove] made us feel at home…”(Jünger, 113). Whereas sight is an index of landscape, of seeing beyond the abyss. This is a condition for living among the dead once again. Perhaps this is why Jünger felt the need to record in his French war diaries that Pablo Picasso had asked him if the novel was based on a real landscape [2].

Only a painter that had witness the crisis of modern space (beginning with the “Blue Room” of 1900) could directly engage with the trope of the ‘marble cliff’: it is here that the altar of a sacrificial history and political domination turns into the site of theoria. Now the faculty of seeing grows outside of itself, “to manifest freedom in the face of danger” (Jünger, 117). On the Marble Cliffs is an invitation to this interior unperishable landscape that removes us from idle fictions in the face of anguish if only we do not turn our back to it (in the name of science or technology or new idols). Given that the desert of nihilism can only grow, I wonder how many today could even stand on the cliff. I fear that the effort of raising the head and looking beyond is already too much to ask.

Notes

1. Ernst Jünger. The Worker: Dominion and Form (Northwestern University Press, 2017), 173-178.

2. Ernst Jünger. A German Office in Occupied Paris: The War Journal 1941-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2019), 78.

Carl Schmitt Carlo Levi civil society conatus essendi form of life Freedom Giorgio Agamben passions the political

Second thoughts on Giorgio Agamben and civil war. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a recent entry in his Quodlibet roster entitled “Sul diritto di resistenza“, Giorgio Agamben takes up once more time the question of civil war, but this time tested against the “right to resistance” (diritto di resistenza) as included in many Western constitutions. What is interesting in this note is that the for the first time – as far as I know, although it complements superbly an old intervention a propos of the publication of Tiqqun, along with Fulvia Carnevale and Eric Hazan – Agamben lays out quite explicitly how the “planetary civil war” tips the enumerated constitutional right of resistance on its head, making it indistinguishable from the management of civil war and the blurring of the category of formal enemy and that of the terrorist.

Indeed, the very notion of “planetary civil war” in an unified society without a strong discriminatory principle of enmity turns politics, as Carl Schmitt noted in his prologue to the 1971 Italian edition of The Concept of the Political, into something like a world police [1]. And the historical present has given Schmitt his due. Following Schmitt’s sound diagnosis, Agamben says nothing different, although this is the thesis that marks the limit of Schmitt’s modern categorical delimitations as well. In other words, if the unity of friend-enemy collapses, and now there is only the stratified value of association based on moral justifications, how can one speak of the “political” in this scenario (it is no longer about war, as we commented in a previous occasion). Is there even one?

And, if the political collapses so do the total sum of actions oriented as political resistance, and even resistance to the collapse of the political. For Schmitt it is very clear that it is even the internal exhaustion of the juridical order (ius publicum europeum) insofar as positivism is concerned, leading the way to the rise of what he called a world legal revolution consistent with what Karl Loewenstein already in the 1930s had termed “militant democracy” (1937). Once the modern state loses its monopoly on the legitimacy of authority, then anyone can establish an authoritative force; while, in turn, every enmity becomes a potential absolute enmity (even more so in legality, as we clearly see in the American context). In this sense, it is a misnomer to call a state “the state” if its function becomes a full equipped instrument of the optimization of civil war that rests on a sort of dual structure: on the one hand there is civil war at the limit of the collapse of legitimacy, but also the total domination that incorporates stasis as a functioning vector of its regulatory order.

In this sense, the advent of civil war after the collapse of the state is not a return to the confessional civil wars of early modern Europe, but rather the total unification of state and society without residue. So, if “right to resistance” presupposes not just the formal limitation of enmity but also the separation of society and state, it only makes sense that this category becomes defunct once the social emerges as proper site of the total administration: “the reunification gave us a new tyrant: the social” [2]. This entails that proper civil resistance is already subsumed in the process of civil war in the threshold of the political. In the context of civil war, resistances can mean both administration of the stasis, and the embedded position of a sacrificial subject, which has been costly (and it remains so) for the any calls for contestation, striking, or insubordination. Resistance here could only amount as a shadow apocalypticism. And sacrifice insofar as it is the fuel of any philosophy of history, merely relocates the energy of hostilities as measured by the factors of optimization.

It is only implicitly that Agamben concludes by suggesting that any “true resistance” must be imagined as a form of life in retreat from the social and its sacrificial idiolatry, from which one must draw its consequences or effects. This is the grounds of an ethical life, but also the way of reimagining another possibility of freedom, which in the brilliant definition of Carlo Levi, it means to live in freedom within our passions instead of being free of passions (precisely, because no principle can determine the true object of our passions, this demands a total reworking of modern notions of liberal and republican determinations of liberty) [3]. The time of the civil war, then, is best understood as a time of the affirmation of the conatus essendi, which rediscovers freedom through the sense of the event insofar as we are capable of attuning to the separability from any principle of socialization.

Notes

1. Carl Schmitt. “Premessa all’edizione italiana”, Le categorie del politico (ll Mulino 1972), 34.

2. Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War (Semiotext, 2010), 61.

2. Carlo Levi. Paura della libertà (Neri Pozza, 2018), 45.

accumulation class cybernetics expression form of life Freedom governmetnality Hegemony theory Ivan Illich neoliberalism principle of general equivalence Service economy subjectivation Use

Going nowhere: on Jason E. Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work (2020). by Gerardo Muñoz

Jason Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work (Reaktion Books, 2020) provides us with a renewed cartography of the labor transformations in the wake of automation and the cybernetic revolution, which has ultimately created a “vast service sector” (9). Although at first sight Smith’s book seems to be preoccupied with questions of technology innovation in the post-fordist epoch, the central vortex of the book sheds light on the notion of “servant economy” that has become the fast-evolving segment of today’s job-market. Smith notes that the expansion of the servant economy propelled by automation “poses special obstacles to organization and action in a fragmented workforce. The rise of the “servant economy”, increasingly forces workers into smaller, spatially dispersed workplaces, where they carry out labor-intensified production processes…. deemed low-skill occupations and therefore poorly paid” (14). The new region of the service economy is an effect of the exceptionality of capital form self-abdication where unemployment becomes an existential problem for the social fabric.

The nuanced analysis undertaken by Smith shows how the fragmented spatialization of labor has become the byproduct of the automation in which control, optimization, and feedback ensemble a new regime of total calculation. Already in 1956, Friedrich Pollock warned of a potential “totalitarian government” that could lead to mass unemployment. Pollock’s Cold War predicament was not off target: the fear of totalitarian unemployment (Habermas would call it crisis of legitimation) was answered with a total (service) economy that compensated for the paradox of stagnation of profit growth. The encompassing force of real subsumption through compartmentalization of services rendered effective James Boggs’ “nowhere to go” in the final dispensation of historical capitalism.

The phase of stagnation announces the “productivity paradox”. Smith writes glossing Mason: “If ours is an age defined by monopolies, cheap credit, rent-seeking and asset bubbles, it is not due to the concerted efforts of elites keen to forestall or smother in the cradle a new, sustained period of productivity gains….despite claims to the contrary, the weather of stagnation and drift that has settle over the advanced capitalist economies since the 1970s, and special since the turn of the century is attributable in no small part technological inertia” (41). The boom of “diversionary gadgets” are on the side of unproductiveness; and, as Ure argues, “do nothing towards the supply of the physical necessities of society” (43). But perhaps diversion usage accounts for the mobilization of the medium of the new phase of automated capitalism. In other words, precisely because traditional form of political legitimacy has crumbled, zero value technology becomes the compensatory psychic equilibrium within the process of abstraction of profit. The subjective dimension of the “medium” in the new phase of automation operates to drive dynamism in the “historic low” of labor productivity growth and the disjointed structural relation between economic growth and rise in wages (64, 69).

One of the conclusions that one can derive from Smith’s rich political economy empirical analysis is that the expansion of the service economy is fundamentally an anti-institutional phenomenon, both at the level of social forms (unions, movements, legal grounds for disputes) as well as in terms of mediations of exchange (intellectual labor, shadow-work, spatial relations to urban centers, etc.). In this sense, the absolutization of the regional “service economy” is the reallocation of reduced labor. In the same way that all ‘originary accumulation’ is an ‘onging accumulation’; the “crisis” of the economy is always already the recurrent stagnation of growth. But Smith notes with precision: “services therefore appear to obscure more than it clarifies” (80). This new process of rationalization mobilizes the valorization of the outside, that is, of every non-market sphere. This process draws a specific ordo rationality: “The true “advances” such as they are, have been in the domination of the labor process by employers: their ability to coerce more labor out of a given hour by means of refinement in supervision, oversight, and workplace discipline” (112).

Mirroring the optimal logistics of cybernetic and automation processes, one could claim that the expansion of the service economy initiates a regime of governmentality that allows for the attenuation and cost-benefit management of flows. Now I think one can clearly see that “service” is not just an avatar to formal processes of value, but also, as Ivan Illich showed, a secularized theological concept of the Christian notion of hospitality. According to Illich, hospitality was transformed into a use of power and money to provide services and needs [1]. For the ex-Catholic priest, this meant nothing less than the corruption of human freedom, which became tied to the logistics of equivalence. This is why, more than an economic theory, neoliberalism needs to defend an ever-expanding freedom of the subject. In the context of deep social atomization, the service economy self-legitimizes itself as absolute freedom in the social (141).

At the end of the book, Smith notes that in the wake of automation the relation between political struggles and the new economic composition begin to diverge. There is on one side the model of the teachers and that of the expendables (146-147). In a sense, the “nowhere land” registered by Boggs in the 60s has only intensified, as modern politics forms no longer seem up to the task in the face of total extraction and exclusion. If we think of arguably the most successful leftist political strategy in the last decade or so (the strongest cases have been in Latin America and Spain), the left populism rooted in the theory of hegemony; it becomes clear that after the empirical analysis of Smart Machines, any set of ‘equivalential demands’ is already a demand for exploitation within the regime of the service economy. During this months of pandemic the right has been calling for the immediate reintegration into the economy, bring to bear the internal production at the heart of the project of hegemony. Rather than thinking about a new multitude or unified subject of class, the expendables that Smith situates at the outskirts of the metropolis (the ‘hinterland’), constitute perhaps a new experiential texture of life that is no longer moved by representation but rather expression; it is no longer defined by class, but consumption; it is not interested in negation, but rather in “discovery” (148). Indeed, the new marginalized surplus population does not constitute a new “subject”, but an energy that seeks an exodus from the ruins of the political given the collapse of the whole framework of leftist hegemony [2]. It seem reasonable to think that it is precisely in the threshold of Boggs’ call for a “discovery” (a movement of anabasis), devoid of place and time, where the unfathomable stagnation of our epoch is defied.

Notes

1. Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future (Anansis, 2005).

2. “Onwards Barbarians”, Endnotes, December 2020: https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians