In his Lives of Ten Orators, Plutarch dedicates an entry to the sophist and rhetorician Antiphon who, among other things, allegedly possessed a technique to deal with distress of the human soul (techne alupias) [1]. We know from historical sources that anxiety was already a common psychotic malady in the life of the polis, and it is most probable that Antiphon’s discourse treatment was reacting to this general phenomenon of his time. In the testimonia of Suda and Lucian there is agreement that Antiphon was a sort of language magician, a “speech-cook” (sic), who derived his powers from the interpretation of dreams, and in the words of the second, could unlock “the office of Sleep” [2]. Although his so-called pain-removing lectures have been lost, there is enough evidence that suggests that these rested on the archaic notion of “persuasion” (Peitho), whose main object was neither human psychology nor bodily somatic terrain, but rather psyche or the soul in the state of being. It is an art that has been lost – if something like “techne alupias” can be counted as a technique is plausible, given its irreducibility. In other words, what survives is only a lacuna of a philosophical ascesis that we should locate no so much as a conceptual problem, but as an ethical one. This is a task that today seems more needed than ever if we can agree that the fundamental tonality of social existence today is, precisely, the reproduction and endurance of pain, or what has been called the self-inflicted deaths of despair.
Much of the reflective work in this direction has been lacking, however in 1958 there was a publication entitled La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica by the Spanish physician and historian Pedro Lain Entralgo, which dedicated a whole section to Antiphon’s “techne alupias” as a fundamental strategy to treat an existential affliction. Recasting the opposition between nomos and physis as a general structure of Antiphon’s teaching, Entralgo seems to advance the hypothesis that the technique to alleviate affliction seeks to revoke the primacy of the normative conventions of the nomos towards the natural consension and causation of physis. In the most elaborate moment of his reconstruction of Antiphone’s techne alupias, Entralgo seems to project unto the opposition of nomos-physis, the rationalization of the sensible and the sensation of the corporeal through language: “Antifonte cree que para tal fin hay una «técnica» (tékhne alypías); más aún, práctica esa tékhné, informándose acerca de las causas de la aflicción y hablando al paciente en consecuencia. Actuando según las causas, la persuasión verbal logra eliminar la pena del alma: el pensamiento y la palabra del retórico sanador —su lógos— ordenan y racionalizan la vida anímica y corporal del afligido” [3].
But Entralgo stops short of elucidating what the language of persuasion entails in this specific elaboration. Is it just a form of compensatory mediation between nomos and physics, between soul and body dualism? The German classical philologist Julius Stenzel in an article dedicated to Antiphon in the 1920s had taken the contrary view; mainly, that the sophist’s treatment of pain does not aim at naturalizing the logos, nor at rationalizing nature (physis) for the event of affliction; it was rather an opening through language creating a new reality principle beyond all opposition, an undercurrent in which the taking place of language could only serve as the anemic nutrient [4]. Taking into account Stenzel’s intuition it becomes evident why Entralgo, as he concludes his gloss on Antiphon, seems to be skeptical of an existential techne alupias fully deprived of normative content, that is, situated outside the nomos that founded the polis so lavishly celebrated by Pindar.
This was totally unconvincing to him, since it would seem to shake a bit the foundation of Western political civilization that needs to maintain the hylomorphism between soul and body, nomos and physis, happiness and deficiency towards a well balanced organic life. The prefix –*lup that derives from –luk should be understood as a lightening of human appearance converted into something ominous that must be contained and differentiated into a political program [5]. In this way, and if “techne alupias” is to be understood as the event of language, it is also the eruption of the involuntary form of language that “can prevent the autonomization of ethical action: pain is the “grace” that is communicated by acting. And it is, at the same time, the muteness that permits the realization of authentic communication: not that of abstract or arbitrary signs, but between souls. The obstinate, irreducible enigmaticity of pain is precisely what prevents Persuasion from falling back on the Christian morality of “sacrifice”, or of acting towards the direction of an end” [6].
This picture drawn by Gianni Carchia should reveal itself as fully contemporaneous, since today the two poles being offered (replicating the nomos and physis duality in updated versions) are on the one hand the moralization of a neo-Christian acceptance towards salvation; and, on the other, the secularized version of salvation in the form of the highly sophisticated techno-medical field. If both positions have as their central aim an offer to end pain, it is also true that they both renounce the ethical dimension of the sayable in language, which renders impossible a techne alupias to come to terms with our current abysmal sentiment. This means that no amount of prescribed pain-killers and medicalized strategies can come to terms with the soul’s angst. By choosing to erase pain from life of the soul, religious-medical integration univocally accepts the triumph of a living death.
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Notes
1. Plutarch. “Lives of the Ten Orators”, in Plutarch’s Morals, V.5 (Little Brown and Company, 1874), 18-21.
2. Antiphon the Sophist. The Fragments (Cambridge University Press, 2002), ed. Gerard J. Pendrick, 96-97.
3. Pedro Lain Entralgo. La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica (Revista de Occidente, 1958), 149.
4. Julius Stenzel. “Antiphon”(1924), in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen, Stuttgart, 33-43.
5. Hermann Usener. Götternamen (F. Cohen, 1896), 198-199.
6. Gianni Carchia. “Tragedia y persuasión: nota sobre Carlo Michelstaedter”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Técnos, 1990), 38.
We must welcome that Michele Garau has written the first monograph on Jacques Camatte’s thought in any language, although the book, Lo scisma da un mondo che muore: Jacques Camatte e la rivoluzione (DeriveApprodi, 2024) it is also more ambitious than a mere philological reconstruction of the thinker of Invariance. Of course, not that there is anything particularly wrong with philological or archival work; rather, it is also that Lo scisma da un mondo che muore (2024) tries to think with Camatte (and also beyond some of his potential impasses) the historical bifurcation of a watershed moment in the history of humankind through the realization of the “capitalist revolution” as an autonomous colonization of every form of exteriority (Garau 7). If Camatte’s work has been only selectively considered in our ongoing discussions – while completely ignored at large by the so-called contemporary theory, which I guess it is an uplifting symptom – is precisely because he poses a challenge for a possible breakthrough in times of stagnation, while firmly announcing a much needed farewell to the modern revolution. But who would want to jump on that wagon when precisely voluntarism, prosthetic revolutionary cosmetic, and fictive communitarianism are all necessary platitudes to hold on to the illusion of ground right above the abyss? It is a rhetorical question, of course, but also one that Camatte move passed it in the in the decades of sixties and seventies observant to the material transformation of the working class, and the overall lesson of Amadeo Bordiga’s communism of the human species, which has also been rendered opaque and fossil-like by the victorious force of cultural hegemony and the whole grammatical structure of Gramsci’s thought in postwar political thought (and some will say well into our very present in the most recent cycle of failed left-populism). We said ‘farewell’ and this act, for Camatte after Bordiga’s teaching, means that the revolution has already taken place and must be perceived in the perspective of the crisis of negativity and the inception of the real absorption of capitalist development (Garau 14).
Hence, new challenges lay ahead, which implies the abandonment of the historical and temporal productivity of revolutionary time – and Garau does an excellent mapping of bourgeois revolutionary thinking from Abbe Sieyès to Saint Just to later formulations of the Leninist paradigm of the dictatorship of the proletariat – which in the grand scene of modernity oriented the economy between form and function, but also between thought and action. If the epoch is said to be ‘anarchic’ is mainly because all these mediations and exclusive autonomous spheres have collapsed unto each other, and to favor one over the other is to work within the fiction of ideological reproduction at best. After Bordiga – Garau claims glossing Camatte, although there are nuances that I cannot consider in the space of this short commentary – the temporalization of the ius revolutionis can only bear in mind the crisis of presence (De Martino) as a suspension of exteriority that liberates right unto real subsumption. This means, following the recently polished phrase of Bordiga from his article “Tempo di abiuratori di scismi” (1965), that all revolutions are born and deployed as the affirmation of the schism. “Schism” or “scisma” — and one is reminded or taken back to a theological terrain, and not just as mitigated by the old ecclesiastical memories of the “Great Schism”, but because “schism” is also the “stazion” that fractures the visible-invisible legacy of form of the Church’s Trinitarian doctrine, and which is still the esoteric boiling point of the myth of political theology. This is a detour around Garau-Camatte-Bordiga’s intuition, since none of this is explicitly thematized in the book, nor should it be. It suffices that it opens to this question, given that Camatte’s own grammar of exhaustion – “extinction”, “inversion”, “autopoiesis”, “critique of organization”, “wandering” (erranza) – distill the echoes of an apocalyptic movement proper to the modern anthropological crisis, to put in terms of Ernesto de Martino.
Be as it may, the longue durée of civilizational development of Western revolutions (Edward Gibbon would claim at least since the reconstitution of the Christian Empire) there has been a process of adequation to invariant processes of capitalist accumulation that its substrate (whether permanent, uneven, natural law justified) becomes isomorphic to the structural needs of capitalist autonomization. In a cogent reading of Sieyes with Saint-Just in the framework of the French Revolution, Garau demonstrates how the genesis of modern politics and its categorial scaffolding (localization, constituent power, social unity, subject of rights, and representation) presuppose a thoroughly new vision to make the human community a clean slate for surface legibility (Garau 42). If the civil concept of the ancient polis was measurement and exchange; the crafting of high-modern state politics that took off in the eighteenth century was much thicker and spatially robust dynamics so that the ‘laws of commerce’ and population disciplining could come to fruition with its necessary infrastructural support. The schism was always a perturbation of the “sphere of politics” (and also of politics as a translucent sphere that can be observed, stabilized, and managed), and thus a great scandal.
Hence, the critique of political economy in the history of marxism was never able to untangle this mutual correspondence. For Garau at this point one can locate the difference between Camatte’s thought and Italian operaismo; given that Italian workerism at mid-century was never able to overcome the dialectic between the valence of value form and the theory of the production of capital. Whereas for Mario Tronti the struggle was still to be inscribed in to confrontation between the proletariat qua labor power; for Camatte the “invarianza” is not an permanent stage within the history of class struggle or Marxism, but of the human community and its resistance against the real subsumption of the material community (Garau 48). Decoupling the history of the working class as constitutive of productionism from the human community, allows Camatte, in the wake of Bordiga’s communism, to register the subsumption of capital as it collapses into dialectical negativity. Hence, communism is neither produced nor organized as operaismo always thought (Garau 26-27). And citing a passage from “Against domestication”, Garau argues that for Camatte the history of the proletariat struggle after 1945 is only the struggle to maintain the myth of the proletariat as the subject of a historical breakthrough (Garau 73). This is a staggering affirmation, and one that most definitely produces a theoretical schism. But the schism is also against the fictionalization of a subject of history, which has also been integrated into the emptying of social reality as we have come to know it in the final triumph of the fictive unto itself (Garau 93).
There is the triumph of the fictive and expansive force of capital despotism, and then there is the struggle for the originary community (Gemeinwesen), which as Gianni Carchia argued in his “Glosa sull’umanismo” (1977) was still enmeshed in the contradiction between humanism and anti-humanism obstructing the vascular movement of non-identical fragments imploding the social. Is this getting at an impasse of Camatte’s own effort of thought to find an exit route? As an intelligent book, Lo scisma da un mondo che muore (2024), refuses to give an essay in the last three pages of the essay, although this difficulty is an object of attention. For instance, Garau writes in one of the clearest elaborations to tackle the problem directly: “La comunità deve allora essere riscoperta in una memoria della specie che finisce per radicarsi, questo è il rischio, esclusivamente in un bagaglio biologico. Nell’esaurimento delle strutture sociali preesistenti, dei linguaggi e degli schemi culturali, delle intelaiature rappresentative e cognitive, nella colonizzazione delle capacità psichiche, affettive, simboliche, è davvero possibile individuare un resto intoccabile dall’antropomorfosi del capitale che non debba essere, invece, creato dal nulla? C’è una «parte irriducibile», come scriveva Bataille, rispetto alle unità di misura del dispotismo economico? Non è semplice rispondere” (Garau 124).
In light of this rumination, Garau also attends to the cycle of contemporary revolts, which might stand as an instance of linguistic and existential struggle against domestication and the crisis of presence (Cesarano), and that might be capable of “absorbing the sky of politics into the most simple and elements components” (Garau 124-125). This is a great image, and one that has pictorial density and durability for thought even if it lacks specific elaboration. To absorb the open sky is to confront the exteriority of the world only as transfigured and brought back as a gathering of experience. The great German critic Kurt Badt comes to mind when writing about Constable: “the sky’s the organ of sentiment”. The embarrassing loss of the world today is fundamentally the destruction of the right attunement to our relation to the opening registered by what gleams above our heads. And perhaps this is a way to measure the capacity for non-movements rather than thinking that movements can disclose the sky. To this end, what could it mean to absorb the sky of politics – which is also a way to refuse the politics of sky, that is, the total planetary grand designs of geopolitical Tianxia? The irreductible may not be reduced to a substance, nor an ontological science nor a vitalist return to an originary community (if only mediated by the restriction of the archaic myth); but precisely that positionality of contact between what is exterior to life itself. To dislodge thought from all political plotting of objectivation and its plastic ligament of social adaptation. A life beyond itself that endures, and perhaps will outlive this dying world.
The rhetoric of “decadence” now prevalent in United States has reached such heights that, regardless of political orientation, it is clear that it has become a pretext for a desired take off and accession from the objective stagnation and paralysis. Paradoxically, the assumption that there is “decadence” is revered as a moment of forthcoming light and rejuvenation; and, thus, as a “crisis” that can be identified and managed through the end. As it is well-known, for some critics of decadence the Golden age of American life was the landing on the moon and the population boom of the 1950s; technology and family. The elements are self-serving: to accelerate the reproduction of the human species, and to lead technological gigantism against new geopolitical competitors (AI, chip wars, Green economy, etc).
In the early twentieth century Americanism was a benefactor of private Fordism (everyone could enjoy his or her car, that is, their increasing isolation), but in principle things have not changed much a century later in terms of the outlook and the techno-administrative power. But the one thing that has changed is that the age of increasing productivity and formal production is no longer the objective coordinates of social relations; rather, depopulation and stagnation are the new variables that public powers that must be governed through its effective processes. Ultimately, this also implies that the waning of the high-modern state is no longer effective, and so the established discussion about “race to the bottom” fails to understand that there is no bottom. Hence, the only race is toward planetary destruction.
And what is curious to note is that even those that have identified the epochal crisis of Liberalism can only exacerbate and contribute to the acceleration of the ongoing destruction with cultural and rhetorical veneers notwithstanding. The ‘postliberal’ commitment to the fantasy of a “new policy of re-industrialization” cunningly allows the autonomy of state-sovereign capacity as the main orientation within the growing desert of administrative functions. In fact, this is a fort da moment in which policy makers can be in favor of empowering the nexus between executive power and the federal bureaucracy; while, at the same time, the mouthpieces of these policies can promise a dismantling of the administrative state in a post-Chevron era. This schizophrenic position is not a symptom of mere anachronistic derailments of a political movements, it is also an expression of the desperate attempts of American failed (and to a large extent non-existent) political elites to find a formal mediation between state, administrative coordination, and constituent power, precisely because this nexus is broken and in shackles.
And truth be told, no piecemeal or nudge-driven re-industrial protectionism is “enough” to cure the social angst and despair of contemporary American subjectivity at all levels of human experience. It has been two honest economists, Anne Case & Angus Deaton in the book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2021), who taken noted that what they call “deaths of despair” is the central social affection of contemporary America, which fuels the slow but steady self-annihilation of the life that no longer truly lives (and paralyzes the economic framework as well). And, in turn, what outlives the hegemony of social domination is the regulation of pain and despair as the last dispensation of this unliving.
The necessary oblivion of the social production of the deaths of despair is what remains necessary so that a pseudo-theological framework of imperial “decadence” can retain its competitive narratives in the abyss. The end of real forces of autonomous production have led the way into the production of pain, which as Gianni Carchia clearly saw in his reading of Michelstaedter (Retorica del sublime, 1990), is a form of active ethical communication between souls. For all the alleged talk about spiritualism, theology, and instrumentalized Christianity in times of “decadence”, the high point of Americanism remains a techno-administrative apparatus that can only produce and conceal the prolongation of social pain. Precisely, “the parabola of the impossible so that any notion of the ‘good’ fails to be affirmed in this world”.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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).
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” (beweglichund 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.
Towards the end of his life, poet José Lezama Lima will mysteriously begin to sign the letters to his friends and family as “the Trocadero Etruscan”, a “member of the Etruscan religiosity”, and even the “man who lives in the Etruscan village” [1]. Why call himself an “Etruscan” in this particular moment of his life, and what could it possibly mean? The question about the meaning of the Etruscan authorial mask has been so thoroughly ignored by the literary critics that commentators at their best have noted that “being Etruscan” merely stands for his “cosmopolitanism” and “well-learned Europeanism”. Of course, this explains little to nothing. A sophisticated poet such as Lezama Lima, who ruminate over every single word he would write, could not have ignored that the Etruscans, unlike the civilized Romans and the Latin authorities, was a remnant to the very civilizational enterprise; a prehistoric people poor in written culture, achieved expressivity by the whole outlook of their form of life. And as in the case of Hölderlin’s adoption of different nom de plume (Scardanelli, Killalusimeno, Scaliger Rosa, etc), Lezama’s becoming Etruscan points to something so fundamental that if underscored we would fail to grasp the endgame of his vital poetic experience. The transfiguration of the name does not merely stand as a metaphor; rather it points to a distant figure that will finally dissolve him so that his immortal voice could continue to live on.
Indeed, the self-identification as an Etruscan for Lezama became a subterfuge to flee a political reality – his political reality, entirely structured by the revolutionary gigantic productivism and subjectivism – through a poetic refraction that would free an ethos from the overpowering of alienated autonomous space of the linguistic reproduction of social life. If at first glance it seems like a paradox that Lezama will adopt the Etruscan figure for his antisocial ethos – a civilization lacking written records or high literary achievements, a religious community known for its necropolis – this strangeness will ultimately prove that behind the Etruscan name there was no poetic exclusivity of the poet’s genius, but rather, as he claims in “A partir de la poesía”, the possibility for a divinization of reality to retreat from the historical epoch. In fact, Etruscan culture for Lezama was not a mere archeological ornament, but one of the “imaginary eras” of the West; that is, a stage of condensed and unnumbered imaginative possibilities resistant to griping subsumption and totalization of values. The Etruscan was the mythic remnant through the pantheistic divinization between language and the world. As Lezama writes glossing, in passing, Vico:
“Vico cree que las palabras sagradas, las sacerdotales, eran las que se transmitían entre los etruscos. Pero para nosotros el pueblo etrusco era esencialmente teocrático. Fue el más evidente caso de un pueblo surge en el misterio de las primeras inauguraciones del dios, el monarca, el sacerdote, y el pueblo unidos en forma indiferenciada … .les prestaba a cada una de sus experiencias o de sus gestos, la participación en un mundo sagrado. […] Pues en aquel pueblo, el nombre y la reminiscencia, animista de cada palabra, cobran un relieve de un solo perfil” [2].
The divinization of the Etruscans stubbornly insisted on the wonder of things. The human participation in divinity is no longer about founding a new theocracy or a “theocratic politics” in the hands of a ‘mystic accountant’ that would finally put the nation back in track (into the res publica), as Lezama would solicit out of desperation in the 1950s diaries [3]. On the contrary, for Etruscan people the fundamental tonality was the divine music of experience. Of course, we know that D.H. Lawrence captured this when claiming in his Etruscan Places (1932) that “the Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience. An experience that is always spoilt” [4]. And this experience (like every true experience) needs to be necessarily spoiled, which ultimately means that it cannot be mimetically rendered, arbitrarily modified, or subsumed into the order of idealization. But all of this is merely redundant, since the Etruscan inscription is what accounts for the limit to civilization, becoming the impossibility of the destruction of myth in the arrival of modern aesthetic autonomy. Thus, for Lezama the Etruscan way had something of a persistent cure against the ongoing civilizational disenchantment, even if it does not cease to appear in the modern attitude. In fact, Lezama writes that: “Rimbaud is the best reader of the Etruscan liver” (“hígrado etrusco”) to describe the dislocated position of the poet in the modern world of technology [5]. In the Etruscan cosmology, the liver was a symbolon of the vision of the cosmos registering the divisions of the spheres in the sky through the divine naming of the gods; it is the figure by which the poet guards the desecularizing remnant of the prehistoric inception of myth [6]. But this does not mean that Lezama will look at himself in the mirror of Rimbaud’s symbolist alchemy.
Rimbaud as an Etruscan is the poet who descends into hell because his lyricism can bear the pain in the disruption of language after the archaic peitho. Does the possibility mean a travel back in historical time? Not the least, as Lezama knew how to let go of storytelling and historical necessity. This is why Etruscans stand for an image or a sort of handwoven picture (the hand will make a comeback, as we will see) to gain vision. And this is one case on point: the Etruscan stands paradigmatically to the “sufficient enchantment” (“la cantidad hechizada”) , which discloses a higher knowledge of the soul (psychê) in the taking place of poetic errancy: “Sabemos que muchas veces el alma, al escaparse de su morada, tripulaba un caballo inquieto, afanoso de penetrar en las regiones solares” [7]. To wrestle against the historical reduction of autonomy of the modern age means to find this enchanted sufficiency necessarily for myth remnant to elevate itself against the aesthetic mediation that, in the words of Gianni Carchia, had become a consoling surrogate of the emptied historical time [8]. An entirely other conception of freedom is firmly implicated the Etruscan way: the gathering of the enchanted poetic dwelling to dissolve a reality that had become too thick in the business of brute force purporting to call ‘what’s out there’. The Etruscan reintroduces a divine nominalism of pure exteriority.
However, the Etruscan way does not commute with things of the world; rather, his soul unbinds the empirical limit of death to overcome death, and learn to live as if it were already dead. The trespassing of death through the poetic enchantment – which Lezama will also call an ‘potens etrusca’, or the Etruscan potentiality- will multiply the invisible possibilities against the rhetorical closure of reality legitimation. By accepting the thick of the dead as an illuminated presence, the Etruscans draw out the most important consequence: learning to live among the dead as the ultimate form of a dignified life. This is why D.H. Lawrence reminds us that the underworld of the Etruscans – their refusal of reality, the embrace of their dead, the augurium – was after all “a gay place…For the life on earth was so good, the life below could but be a continuation of it. This profound belief in life, acceptance of life, seems characteristic of the Etruscans. It is still vivid in the painted tombs. They are by no means downtrodden menials, let later Romans say what they will” [9].
If civilization is a construction that takes place at the crust of the Earth as some have claimed; the way of the Etruscan is a downward declination away from the architectural reduction of world sensing [10]. For Lezama the Etruscan dreams of a civilization submerged in the depths that only an acoustic totality that bear witness to its sensorial gradation: “Esas civilizaciones errantes por debajo del mar, sumergidas por el manteo de las arenas o por las extensivas exigencias…reaparecen, a veces, en los sueños de los campesinos” [11]. Hence, the fundamental dignity of poetry resides in the mythical homecoming that guards the possibility for what remains inexistent: “this is why the poet lives in the Etruscan world of the birth of fire” [12]. And although the Etruscan stands as one of the worlds in possession of an imaginary epoch (the other two for Lezama being the Catholic world and the feudal feudal Carolingian Empire), it is only in the Etruscan where the resurrection had taken the transubstantiation in the name itself; even if the price was its own liquidation as a historical people that refused to be incorporated into the doxa of postmythical order [13].
The fiery force of the mythic peitho outlives and predates the political epoch of the nomos of fixation organized as “One People, One State, One Language” [14]. As Lezama explains in “La dignidad de la poesía”: “…el odio en la polis contra el daimon socrático, hizo que la nueva doxa no logra sustituir a cabalidad el período mítico….Si por lo mitos, los dioses se irritable con la felicidad de los de los mortales, pero al menos, se interesaban por sus destinos; en la nueva doxa, la poesis se extinguía – el daimon individual reemplazando al destino individual liberado de la polis” [15]. The primacy of myth as orientation to happiness should make clear that for Lezama the poetics of naming follows the overflow of its permanent modalization [16]. The Etruscan way marks the path for the irrevocable retreat from the space of the polis where civilization will be erected on the grounds of deliating ethos and daimon, polis and poesis, and ultimately life and death as a rubric of a new science of separation. The fact that the civilization of social reproduction has been erected on the basis of the destruction of the chthonic underworld speaks to the systematic erasure from the dead as a vital extension of life [17]. The poetic natality of the Etruscans will only be cultivated, as Aby Warburg suggests, from the assumption of deep superstition in the face of the placement of political autonomy, which allows for the persistence of the image as inseparable from the needs and uses of the living [18]. And only persistence could prepare the final triumph over death.
[19]
Towards the later phase of his work, the poet seems to never want to abandon the Etruscan inframundo. Lezama returns to the Etruscan scene towards the end and unfinished novel, Oppiano Licario (1977), in which the central character Fronesis describes at length the mutation of reality following the footsteps at a distance of Ynaca Licario slowly merging into the Tarquinia necropolis painted wall, which is accompanied by a visual reproduction of the Etruscan tomb:
“El sacerdote, en el lateral izquierdo, hace gestos de ensalmo en torno a una espiga de triga. Un pájaro que se acerca queda detenido sin poder posarse en el ámbito hechizado de la hoja. En el lateral derecho, el sacerdote repite idéntico rito, pero ahora de la raíz colorida hace saltar la liebre que cavaba en las profundidades. El aire cubría como unas redes de secreta protección en torno de la mutabilidad de las hojas y de la inmovil jactancia de los troncos. Una indetenible pero resguardada evaporación alcanza aquella llanura con los muertos …La conversación subterránea era el símbolo del vencimiento de la muerte. [20]
The ongoing conversation (the shared word koina ta philōn) in a mysterious divine language had triumphed over death because it had overcome death and the sight of death. It is no longer the transposition of a historical sublime that must protect experience from the fixity of the human corpse, since the soul can escape the limit of form. In passing through and embracing death, the Etruscan validated their passions for mirrors and the palm, which according to Lezama is the true keep of the appearance of the uttermost revealing of the face in its own irreducible ethos. The possibility (potens etrusca) of defeating death while in life finds in the Etruscan appearance Lezama’s most intimate poetic arcana: the persistence of the anima renounces symbolic legibility as too innocuous and ornamental; where the flags of victories now resembled an accumulation of well settled defeats nurtured in the name of the muteness over “life”.
The Etruscan distance mysterium validated myth as the affirmation of the cosmos as based on the potentiality of contemplative imagination [21]. Lezama will call this distance the “eros de la lejanía” (Eros of distance) in the experience of the inframundo that will break through by affirming the possibilities of divine naming as a correlative causation in the world [22]. As Lezama tells his sister in a letter from 1966, he had already assumed to have crossed the bridge between the dead and the living: “Para mi ya ha sucedido todo lo que podía tocarme….Pues creo ya haber alcanzado en mi vida esa unidad entre los vivientes y los que esperan la voz de la resurrección que es la supresa contemplación” [23]. Or yet again: “El que está muerto en la muerte, vive, pero el que está muerto en la vida, es la única forma para mi conocida de la vida en su turbión, en su escala musical, en su fuego cortado” [24]. To scale up life to the higher music is the final trope of happiness as already dead. The Etruscan dirita vía of descension – “a weight going down” of stepping into the Earth, as Ruskin would have it – achieves the arrest of the divine contact between the voice and the dead [25]. It is for us to raise this mirror before our impoverished and fictive unswerving reality.
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Notes
1. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (1939-1976) (Verbum, 1998), 230.
2. José Lezama Lima. “A partir de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 831.
3. José Lezama Lima. Diario (Verbum, 2014), 87.
4. D. H. Lawrence. Etruscan Places (The Viking Press, 1957), 90.
5. José Lezama Lima. “La pintura y la poesía en Cuba”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 968
6. Gustav Herbig. “Etruscan Religion”, in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume V (Dravidians-Fichte, 1912), 533.
7. José Lezama Lima. “Introducción a los vasos órficos”, Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 861.
8. Gianni Carchia. Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019), 81.
9. D.H. Lawrence. Etruscan Places (The Viking Press, 1957), 31.
10. Amadeo Bordiga. “Specie umana e crosta terrestre”, in Drammi gialli e sinistre della moderna decadenza sociale (Iskra, 1978).
11. José Lezama Lima. “Estatuas y sueños”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 449.
12. José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 774.
13. Ibid., 776.
14. Erich Unger. Die staatslose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922).
15. José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 777.
18. Aby Warburg. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Getty, 1999), 189.
19. Image included in Chapter VII of Oppiano Licario (Cátedra, 1989), 375.
20. José Lezama Lima. Oppiano Licario (Cátadra, 1989), 374.
21. Aby Warburg’s treatment of the symbolic mediation between myth and distance appears at the center of his essay on Pueblo Indians. See, Aby Warburg, El ritual de la serpiente (Sexto Piso, 2022), 66. And also, Franz Boll, Vita Contemplativa (Heidelberg, 1920), who connects contemplari to the augur’s spatiality of the templum.
22. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (1939-1976) (Verbum, 1998), 411.
23. Ibid., 109.
24. Ibid., 266.
25. John Ruskin. The Letters of John Ruskin (George Allen, 1909), 133.
The last mail that I received from my friend, the philosopher Emilio Ichikawa (1962-2021) before passing away stated the following: “Eres clemente, creo que esa palabra ya ni se usa”. Being clement (or ser clemente) has fallen in disuse, both in English and Spanish. One can only guess the reason as to why being clement or clemency has disappeared from a world governed primarily by force. It is notable that for Seneca in his treatise De Clementia (55 A.D) thought of the scope of this notion as precisely the preservation of the human political bond (vinculum) in moments of social disintegration. Speaking directly to the Roman rulers, Seneca argued that state power is never enough; there was also a standing requisite of clementia needed when dealing with weakest members of the social bond (membris languentibus) [1]. In modern legal discussions, clemency has not only disappeared as a practice, but been fully incorporated into the administrative function of the “pardon powers”; which, as we have seen in the last years in the United States, it has become a mere political token in favor of the powerful and not the weakest members in society.
On the contrary, it seems that the decline of politics and the full emergence of social administration presupposes a necessary forgetting of the principle of clemency. Perhaps a current Supreme Court case will suffice to bring this to light: a 94 years old lady, Geraldine Tyler evaded interest rates and property taxes for some years and ended up being expropriated from her home, which was immediately sold by the State of Minnesota for forty thousand dollars in order to charge her the fifteen thousand dollar fine, while keeping the equity surplus of the sale. The fact that the SCOTUS judges were not fully convinced of Minnesota state action and its lawyer (Neal Katyal), matters little to one fact that no one seems to have noticed: mainly, that the legal process has become main vehicle for injuries. In this framework, clemency has no place in in the statuary structure of public order.
Indeed, the main trait of the Americanization of ‘force’ is not just limited to physical or electoral stasis; rather, it is the motorization of legality without restraints. For every action that circumvents from public administration there is no possibility of clemency, but only subjection to legal rationalization through abstract principles of “equity” (passive exceptionalism mandated by costs and benefits models). And so, the clementia juris (the sweetness of law) as once imagined by Quintilian has been expelled from law, leaving behind only an obsessive legality that preserves an increasingly inclement schism of social life.
Perhaps “clemencia” as used by Ichikawa had nothing to do with politics; and, in a way, Seneca’s term in his treatise was already inflated by rhetorical functionalism at the service of the axiomatic order of socialization. There is a more originary sense of clemency – as the prefix *klei indicates – which is the clinamen that names the encounter (the Peitho) between the disinterested souls that freely subtract themselves from rhetorical force [2]. I would like to imagine that this is what Ichikawa had in mind when, instead of defining a concept, he appealed to an ethical disposition: being clemente.
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Notes
1. Seneca. De clementia (Oxford U Press, 2009), 74.
2. Gianni Carchia. “Eros e logos: Retorica antica e peitho arcaica”, in Retorica del sublime (Laterza, 1990).
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.
There is a painting from the early sixteenth century at the galleries of the University of Bologna that depicts the gruesome death of Saint Cassian of Imola at the hands of his own students. The story goes that Cassian was a fleeing Christian in the Roman Empire who found a teaching position in the town of Imola, until he was discovered and exposed. In the saints’ hagiographies, it is emphasized his passion concerning reading and writing for his students. This would confirm the high price of Cassian’s punishment: torture and death at the hands of young students (some allegedly even brought their sharpened styli). The Bologna painting is, in fact, a miniature of about five by seven inches, and it depicts eight young students striking at a naked and tied up Cassian. The anonymous painter has chosen carefully to have all of the figures turn away from the spectator, except for a student in the far right corner of the painting who seems to be holding a sort of bowl in the air. He seems disengaged from the frenzied mob. And yet, there are no wounds or bruises in Cassian’s body, which could be an allegorical statement by the painter about the martyrdom condition, or, more literally, the plain fact that the cruel feast has just begun. Cassian’s face is monotone, and one of disbelief, but not yet of someone consumed by the ecstasy of bodily suffering. He is definitely humiliated amidst such violent and naked act. This is highlighted by the stage-like setting of the assault, which does not seem to be taking place somewhere outside, but rather in a strange room whose only way out is a dark and ominous black counter to the left side of the painting.
This black square immediately recalls martyrdom. And yes, in modernity this means David’s Death of Marat (1793) floating figure who stands as the secularized martyr at the year zero of modern representation. In the early modern bolognese painting we are far from there, but the resources at the painter’s disposal (myth, depth, and figure) speak to a postreligiousity at the threshold of a new historical time. Strangely, the figure of Saint Cassian as represented here by the anonymous bolognese painter throws a shadow to our present, given that the teacher or professor has been sacrificed, not so much the literal violence of his students, but by the an even greater disposition towards a shameless nakedness driven by value and a complicit abandonment of its mission. In the United States at least, the long dispensation of the “closing of the American mind” – driven by competition, ranking, placement, mentorship, cultural wars, and identity politics – entails the uttermost collapse of the teacher into the administrator and facilitator of a rather unknown enterprise.
Even in 1983 Carl Schmitt could identify the martyrdom of Saint Cassian as an emblem of the professor betrayed by his former students: “I have also been stabbed by my students”, he will confess to Lanchester [1]. So, just four decades ago the teacher could still stand as an object of fidelity and betrayal. It would be hard to make the case for this hypothesis today, since the pain of the teacher is no longer of betrayal, but of indifference insofar as he can be disposed of. In this sense, only something that possesses a certain aura can be said to be betrayed; while something that can be discarded altogether is something that has seen better days and no longer has value. And if universities and schools today have become larger centers of monotony and alienation of the most basic activities (such as discussion, reading and writing), this is because both students and professors have been, for the most part, replaced by “mentors” and consumers” under the holy contract of hypocrisy, the true and last ethics of the enlightened metropolitan class.
Anyone that has ever had the good fortune to encounter a good teacher or professor will know that his example springs not from what he knows or professes to know, but rather from what he can transpire unto others: to search of a form of one’s own path. The ethos of a teacher has little do with specialization or success, and everything to the incarnation of a gestalt that is not accidental or transient, but perpetually springing from its myth, as Carchia suggested for the work of art [2]. And myth is the sensorial mediation that resists to be instrumentalized into the endless amassing of value by the powerful administrative subjects. This amounts to saying that the teacher finds self-legitimization in its capacity to inspire the shared sense of wonder of the inaccessible.
Or, at least, this has been the teacher at its most groundbreaking moments. The eradication of teaching – which like mostly every other area foreclosed by the crisis of the human experience was unveiled during the years of the pandemic – and its complete abdication to models of “leadership” and “training” (under the fictitious rubric of the syllabus as an economic contract) is the bleakest of the futures that Cassiano could have taken. A nihilist future that, it goes without saying, will be void of martyrs and myths.
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Notes
1. Carl Schmitt. “Un jurista frente a sí mismo: entrevista de Fulco Lanchester a Carl Schmitt”, CSS, 1, 2017, 220.
2. Gianni Carchia. Il mito in pittura: la tradizione come critica (Celuc Libri, 1987), 155.
Infrapolitical Reflections 