Hermann Usener – Infrapolitical Reflections

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.

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.

Jan Van Eyck’s 1432 Portrait of a Man has the Greek inscription, and rendered in transliteration, that reads “Tum Otheos” (ΤΥΜ ωΘΕΟς) that has baffled art historians and specialists on the painter for a very long time. It is well known that Van Eyck, the pioneer of oil painting, was fond of leaving all forms of writing in his pictures in Greek, Hebrew, and trilingual idioms that through the centuries have become incomprehensible jottings [1]. At a time when Van Eyck was painting in Northern Europe, the magical efficacy over names and naming was a dominant cultural and religious belief, and the expanded arts of the ‘names of god’ were used to heal and relieve pain, and protect against potential enemies and keep demons at bay [2]. Following Hermann Usener, one could see how the original act of the naming of the gods was no longer tied to ‘momentary divinities’ (Augenblicksgötter), but rather they were functionalized to specific anthropological needs for survival. Nonetheless, it is quite ashtonishing to witness how the painting at year zero that Van Eyck embodies – the very birth of oil painting and the “coming to life” of the figure in depiction – coincided with a divinization itself of the expanded field of the arts [2].

In Erwin Panofksy’s early interpretation the inscription “Tum Otheos” should be read in light of the musical revolution that had taken place between 1420-1440 in the Netherlands, where the ars nova meant a thorough musical renovation towards a new expressive energy and “exquisite sensibility” nourished by the myth of Timotheos, who was taken as the ancient model of sublime harmony of the new arts and style of bringing life into depiction [3]. Overtly dependent on the transmission of the ancient figure of sound, for Panofsky the inscription “Tum Otheos” pays homage to the lyre Timotheus of Miletus as creator of the “new music”. But, could the same be transplanted into painting? Could painting at “year zero” be taken as precisely this new tonality of the arts?

A second possible rendition of “Tum Otheos” is one what has been merely registered, although not elaborated, by art historian Alfred Acres, for whom “tum otheos” is not indexing the ancient musician but more importantly, it is registering an event or what is taking place [4]. Thus, for Acres “Tum Otheos” should be read as “and then God”; as if the relationship between painter, depiction, and spectator was the very taking place of a minor and invisible god of creation that painting facilitates. It is not difficult to recall here what Luca Giordano said of Velazquez’s painting: “this is the Theology of Painting” [5]. Although directed at Las Meninas, one could perceive that in the early stages of the secularization of the forms of the modern, the nexus between theology and painting becomes a clandestine partnership that resists its full integration into the autonomization of forms of representation. In other words, there is always a theos reminder in the act of depiction that is irreducible to the general economy of forms, as if the dissonance of the soul endured underneath at the nearness granted by the concrete realization of a picture. “And then God”, as proposed by Acres, should not be taken merely as the eruption of the divine in the symbolic structuration of the world, but rather as the very act of naming that allows divinization to continue in spite of the closure announced by the flight of the gods.

Just one year after Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (1432) where the inscription “Tum Theos” appears, in Italy Alberti will write in his De Pictura that the gesture of painting “possess a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with please and deep admiration for the artist” [6]. And if Postel is right that Van Eyck’s Arnolfini masterpiece is one in which the picture reconvenes the dead bride and the rich merchant into pictorial space, then one could deduce that for the Flemish artist the divinity of painting is defined as the only passage left to the moderns to negate the world of the living and inhabit the invisible world of the dead against the coming of the monothematic world-image and its material crust of Gaia [7]. “Tum Otheos” – and then God – is literally registering the transfigured and expressive dimension of painting; that is, the taking place of depiction and its secret fidelity to what appears only to banish and become forever unfathomable.

Notes

1. Susan Frances Jones. “Jan van Eyck’s Greek, Hebrew and Trilingual Inscriptions”, in Van Eyck Studies, September 2012, 294.

2. Noa Turel. Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (Yale University Press, 2020).

3. Erwin Panofsky. “Who Is Jan van Eyck’s “Tymotheos”?, Journal of the Warburg Studies, 1949, 88-89.

4. Alfred Acres. Jan van Eyck within His Art (Reaktion Books, 2023), 177.

5. Daniel Arasse. Take a Closer Look (Princeton U Press, 2013), 134.

6. Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting (Penguin Classics, 1991), 60.

7. Jean-Philippe Postel. El affaire Arnolfini: Investigación sobre un cuadro de Van Eyck (Acantilado, 2023).