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The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

The central question that “The Aleph” raises is as banal as difficult to answer: who is Beatriz Viterbo? For one, she is dead. Borges’ Leibnizian experiment with the infinite point of the universe is that even assuming that we account for all the possible predicates of this person we still cannot exhaust who lurks behind “Beatriz Viterbo”. In a way, Beatriz remains encrypted in a house soon to be demolished, remaining unattainable and mysterious in the passing of the world. As we know, there have been critics that have taken up the detective task to understand the significance of the name Beatriz Viterbo by probing the story’s dedication to Estela Canto, who later became the rightful owner of the original manuscript, and that connects to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of its cantiche structure as well as the figure of Beatrice [1]. However, as Giorgio Agamben once said regarding the Italian poet, it is utterly senseless to attempt to identify a subject behind Beatrice, since what is at stake in Dante’s poetics, perhaps of all poetics, is the experiment of language as an experience of love [2]. What the name Beatriz Viterbo enacts is no different. 

Indeed, in Borges’ Beatriz Viterbo this experience of love is one that fundamentally lacks images and predicates of this world; which means that love, if to be held as an intensity of the living, in the name harbors the region between life and death, between memory and forgetting. These distinctions are not oppositional, but rather an angular index that defines erotic intensity; and, as we know, the name is the supreme vehicle of the impropriety of oneself because it precedes it. As Borges writes in “The theologians” also included in The Aleph: “There are some that look for love in a woman in order to forget her; in order to cease thinking about her” [3]. The fundamental formlessness of love does not depend on neither images nor acts, but on the enduring vocative or song (canto) that shines forth in the open secret of the name. 

This is why the portrait of the deceased is insufficient for the narrator of the story. In a moment that is the clearest parallelism to the concatenation of “things seen” in the aleph, the name appears four times in repetition: “Beaitriz, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre…” [4]. If Osip Mandelstam once remarked that the “eye is an instrument of thought”, one could say that the the voice of the name is the instance where language and thought coincide without remainder; a convergence of Heaven and Earth, of the dead and the living in the grain of the voice. There are no static images of Viterbo because her mysterious life, the unlived life with the narrator, is precisely the missing image guarded by the name. In the basement, facing upwards to peek into the aleph, we are told that he, Borges, will be able to “establish a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz” (“podrás entablar un diálogo con todas la imágenes de Beatriz”). But what the aleph cannot yield is the missing image that is only the event of his irreducible linguistic contact proper to his memory. Once again Maldelstam: “The word, the name, is a psyche…does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten” [5]. But what is not forgotten is not that quality or that image of a person, but the enduring rustling of a name that recalls the oldest human experience: the mystery of the voice.

It might also be for this reason that Beatriz Viterbo recalls not just Dante’s divine and eternal Muse, but the world of the dead; the vetus in ‘Viterbo’, that is, the oldest or ‘most ancient’ life that dwells in the underworld, because its direct provenance is the archaic Etruscan civilization [6]. If Beatrice, as the trope of transcendence beyond the Earth has been a repeated object of literary interpretation, Viterbo as the vetus burial has rarely generated any interest (if the house of Viterbo is being demolished, this also means that in her proper name is the burial site at the end of remembrance). 

In the cadence of the name “Beatriz Viterbo” we can hear the transit between the living and the dead, the invisible and the present, the possible predications as well as the defaced; a work of oblivion in virtue of its own caducity. “Me trabajó otra vez el olvido”, writes Borges towards the end evoking the erosion of forgetting in the void of nonpresence: the working of eros pushes to the end, towards absolute oblivion through the very accruing of remembrance. Life is this immemorial that is encrypted, as if were, in a handful of names. 

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Notes 

1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges : A Literary Biography (Paragon House, 1988), 414.

2. Giorgio Agamben. “No amanece el cantor”, in En torno a la obra de José Ángel Valente (Alianza Editorial, 1996), 49.

3. Jorge Luis Borges. “Los teólogos”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 50.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El Aleph”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 189. 

5. Osip Mandelstam. “The Word and Culture” (1921), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1975, 531.

6. Adolfo Zavaroni. Etymological Dictionary of Etruscan Words (2024), 310.

Acies animi pictura. On Victoria Cirlot’s Taüll (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

Victoria Cirlot’s vibrant short book, Taüll: liturgia y visión en los ábsides románicos catalanes (Mudito&Co, 2023) focuses on the well-known apse fresco panels of the Romanesque Saint Climent Church (Lleida) dating back to the twelfth century now housed in the Museo Nacional de Arte de Catalunya (MNAC), whose central figure is a Maesteis domini elevated to representation of the highest celestial cosmos. In another sense, Taüll should also be read (and perhaps the obligatory accent here is necessary) as a synthesis of Cirlot’s own work on the theological infusion of visuality and what it means to “see” and “being seeing” in a world that strives for legibility. Cirlot has no ‘presentist’ anxieties about the Romanesque period – its iconographic and overtly enigmatic depiction – but it is not difficult to think of the Christian temple as an aesthetic laboratory, or artist studio, in which the liturgical dimension functioned not much so much as a private space for the faithful, but rather as a site of encounters and vital experience (Cirlot 11). 

The liturgical performance depended on visual arrangement that opened visions of the inner sense, which Cirlot quoting Saint Augustine calls acies anime — transcendence through a sensible awakening that encompassed all the senses. Following Pavel Floresnky in his study about the Church as the synthesis of the arts, Cirlot attempts to portray the impossible experience at Tüll as the site of the life of the spirit; that is, where the spirit is transformed and released (Cirlot 12). Before there is acclamation and synthesis, there is an unfathomable experience facilitated by the liturgical imagery which is a passage or a preparation of sorts. 

It is almost impossible for us today – situated at the threshold of the autonomization of the arts and the division of its practices – to grasp the antecedent image (imago) through figures of what will only later be seen. Cirlot quotes Saint Paul to anchor this difficult chiasmatic movement of veiling-unveiling: “Now we see through a mirror, an enigma, but later we will see face to face (Cor.1.13) (Cirlot 22). Is the pictorial unveiling, or rather veiling, the juxtaposition of the image in space what will ultimately solve the enigma of unmediated appearance? And could appearance be released without its dependence on the mystery that prescribes the image making and destruction well into the totalization of modern pseudos at the art of depiction? There are conscious echos of Carchia’s thinking (in my reading of Cirlot, that is), which I think help to grant a bit more breathing space, as it were, to Cirlot’s unelaborated suggestion that “Pero la pintura es el fruto, no de una percepción sensible, sino del ojo visualiza eso que tiene que ser despertado en la interacción de los sentidos físicos” (Cirlot 23). 

To paint, or the painterly activity, is the gathering of an inner vision, where there is no more separation between the autonomous senses (visions, touch, flavor). Cirlot notes how the detailing of the querubin angel having small eyes painting on their hands would confirm this thesis. The movement of the hands registers a vision that touches the proximity of the specular Glory of transcendence. Following Henry Corbin, Cirlot can remind us that the angel for the mystical tradition is an entity whose “being is only vision” (Cirlot 28). In turn, the all-seeing angel is not a bird’s view (I guess today we will also say a drone commanded from a computing application) that has total vision over the terrestrial grid; it is more a vision that is able to see each thing — given that his divine vision he can see God in everything, and things in themselves because the painterly eye can only look outwards through the inner eye of the heart (Cirlot 38). In fact, the heart’s eye is a retreat from the world of countable and visual things, as transcendence becomes the mere contact of the senses with the divine. 

Part of the difficulty of grasping what is taking place at the Saint Climent of Taüll apse resides in a gesture that is the inversion of pictorial verisimilitude, if one is to take up Michael Fried’s thesis in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) as a reduction of disenchanted pictorial representation. In other words, the pictorial manifestation at Tüll is neither theatrical nor figural absorption for the spectators, but it was rather an experience with the liturgical mystery that strived in the liberation of the soul at the uncharted height of God itself (Cirlot 40).  And perhaps of being a mode, among many, with the presence of God in things, and things and names as already expressing the unavowable nature of the divine. Cirlot’s thesis gains traction and depth  at this point, since the central task of pictorial creation at Tüll is to find the means of granting visible to what must remain invisible (the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist mysterium) that breaks away from the implementation of imitatio naturae (Cirlot 44). This also speaks as to why Cirlot, with prudential reasons, never speaks of an aesthetic sublime that this pictorial commitment with the theos and experience clearly appears to reject. In the sublime construction, sense has been subordinated to the negative position, by which the return of representation will reveal itself in its erasure. 

The seemingly absorptive theatricality does not stand up to the highest music of the aspirations at Tüll. Once again Florensky appears as a central interpretive key for Cirlot: the iconomic and atmospheric opening of Romanesque art frees contemplation to a degree in which vision and the outside of life entangle to such a degree that no autonomization of the ‘aesthetic experience’ can formalize the sensorial gathering of the invisible upwards where “el alma no podía descansar”, or where the soul knows no rest. One can also recall Kurt Badt when writing about Constable meteorological landscape: such opening in the picture is the true organ of sentiment. But “that world is long gone” – the world of visual liturgical at Taüll – concludes Cirlot, and something similar could be said of the practice of painting. The minimal lesson at Taüll is as simple as it is difficult: any access to the world today requires to divest from the hand of technē so that the hand of pictura can take hold of the fleeting mystery of a life experienced. Such is the enduring vital vision at Taüll.

The Etruscan bona lux in Paradiso. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gloss on the “element” of love. by Gerardo Muñoz

It might be the case that the self-evident nature of love as an affection proves itself lacking mediation in thought, insofar as it is a resource of mediation between thought and the world. In this sense, it is true that what one “loves” resists to be grasped as an object of representation or exposition; it is a question of limits, and those limits posit the question of the world. Now, love gives form, but it is not in itself a form or a mandate or an object. This means that love is outside of reality; indeed, it is the absolute indifference between object and world.

The question perhaps is one regarding proximity and distance. The problem of “nearness”, which is why in the text one reads the orphic inscription: “When we are in nearness to which we love we then go through the other side of the mirror.” Of course, what is interesting it not the “other side”, but rather to have become transformed by something without ever being entirely dissolved. Amor fati? Perhaps. In the transient path of the night one is opened to the condition of the “moon hunter”, in which one path reveals itself as the question of destiny (“one life”). The trick is that no path is ever ‘obligatory’, but rather validated by an access to an experience. Now, it is obvious that love cannot exhaust an experience, but there is no experience that is not affected by love, since it is this affection what inscribes the limit of a world without the fantasy of possession and abuse. 

Another moment: “In abusing something we no longer love; and even in the pleasure that were invested in we do not love”. Here the exotic (extemporaneous) nature of love becomes visible: no love is exhausted in materiality and form. Love is ex-scription: it demands exodus as homecoming. However, no fundamental fantasy of love can validate what is granted to us by the irreducibility of an experience. Perhaps this is after all what Gianni Carchia, reading Schelling called the “transfiguration with the divine”. Or, as I would like to call it, the intromission with the invisible [1]. In the invisible we carve out the limits of our deconstitution with our world in which our existence is possible through separation. 

There might a rebuttal, although it might not be one after all. It is a recent suggestion by a friend who claimed in a psychoanalytic speculation that: “Perhaps after all ‘love’ is a Christian invention, a compensatory and necessary one for the fact that we do not communicate”. There might be a few ways to respond to this claim; the first one being that the task of the transfiguration of love responds, precisely, to the subordinated status of love as mere compensation to the subject of sin and thus of the pleasure principle. The existence that can traverse the pleasure principle of the subject could be said to have gained reentry into a happy life capable of outsourcing the succession of infinite deaths while in life. 

Contrary to life or death, love might be another name for the orphic passage between the two states of potentiality; that is, of pure affection and the opening of the impotential in every life. To experience the death of what is possible as transient to the time of existence opens the path towards a “life to come…in underground streams” (Auden). If love is to be taken as compensatory to the impossibility of communication, then there is a love of thinking, but not necessarily a thinking of love. It is strange that philosophy – just as “liberty” for political thought – fails when measuring itself up to a thinking of love, a vertigo before the immemorial attunement to the state of mousikos. Such is the taking place among the things that we have surprised in the world, but only accessible to those who “seek” outside reality. 

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. “Indifferenza, eros, amore: la critica dell’essere spirituale nella “filosofia della libertà” di Schelling”, in L’amore del pensiero (Quodlibet, 2000), 101-121.

Photogenesis and the invisible: on John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959). Notes for a seminar presentation. by Gerardo Muñoz

i. What is your name? Every time that I have watched John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) I end up facing the same question: what is taking place in this film? Perhaps it is the incorrect question insofar as Shadows (1959) is, first and foremost, a film about the event; about “what takes place”. Unlike Hollywood’s telic form over conflict, the whole premise of Cassavetes’ method of improvisation is a way to liberate the event in the moving image. This is what I would like to call here a photogenic event. The whole structure of Shadows is, to this effect, the bringing-fourth of appearing without narration or naming. Hence, what takes place is the way in which characters or figures emerge from light, retracting from the plunge unto theatricality. The photogenetic effect in Cassavetes is a way out of the logic of naming: remember “what is your name?”, as Bennie asks very early in the film (the café sequence). Indeed, the naming is always what emerges after the event, once boredom has kicked him and the separation from light and shadow, human and animal, theater and theatrically have taken place. The taking place in Shadows is a return to an abysmal site predating naming, faces, or intentions: it is absolute proximity.

ii. The vocation of the quotidian. The photogenetic image works through the texture of life: this is why in Shadows nothing truly happens in virtue that everything takes place. The difference between happening and taking place is an irreducible distinction; mainly, what happens is not provoked a mediation between subjects and objects, but rather at a moment when both subject and object coincide only to immediately suspend each other. What takes place is life’s destiny, which ultimately entails that we are figures of exposure before we are subjects of narrative and causality. As in a diary or a midnight party, what takes place is the clandestine life once it enters in relation with other bodies, languages, and gestures. In this sense, Shadows remains faithful to one and only one principle: how to transfigure the boredom of factical life into a vocation of a clandestine life. It is not too clear that Cassavetes arrives at a successful answer to this problem; almost as if, indeed, to remain clandestine is to insist on the “invisible” image that is always missing from every life. The promiscuity between shadows and light transpires the possibility of the living all the other invisible and nonexistent lives that are scarified within that which we call “life”. 

iii. Under the glorious sky. If the task of vocation opens to the invisible in life, then this means that there is always a dimension that is exterior the anthropological determination. In the solitude of the nocturnal splendor of the late modern metropolis – as in the instance in which Lelia is outside of a Manhattan theater lost in thought or contemplating the shimmering lights above – the existence of the human shines along with the embers of the sky. This most definitely an inherence of paganism in the sense of the medium in life as a mode of appearance without judgement. As one can still contemplate it from the frescos at Villa Fernesina, the pagan gazing towards the sky is not a flight towards abstraction or transcendence, but rather a releasement of life’s destiny as affirmed in the terrestrial presence [1]. Paradoxically, at the moment of the total subsumption of life into the Spectacle, the medium frees the possibility of the deconstitution of life into the modes and resources of appearing. From the photogenic perspective, this entails full saturation on the horizon; from the pagan perspective, the onwards unfolding of existence becomes a fragment in the exploration of the common sky. 

iv. Inharmonious tonality. Now, fragmentation opens a heterochronic disassociation between images and events. Indeed, all of Shadows unfolding bears witness to the way in which the tonality of life is always at odds with the attunement of the rhythms of the world. It is in this threshold where interiority of the self and exteriority of music point to the peak of prophecy. For one thing, because music is the medium through the residual mystery of the “inexpressive” becomes the process of traversing the ecstatic formlessness of the event [2]. This disharmony dislocates the homogenization vis-à-vis the sky of cinematography. Bresson says something very beautiful about this disharmony: the image of cinematography must be such that it puts in relation the voice and the steps of a person in a way that the protagonist themselves have not foreseen [3]. This nocturnal knowledge between image and sound, rhythm and tonality of life, becomes the triumph of the photogenic medium in which life dissolves in a kinetic outburst without recourse.

v. The invisible and intoxication. At a very superficial dimension, Shadows is about alcohol consumption; hence about what happens to a life under the stage of intoxication. The only knowledge is that of the oblique pedagogy in which the way of the flesh becomes a pathway for language, friendship, and violence among other bodies. There is no transgression as an intoxicated subject, since intoxication is already the violence against the substance of the subject. In other words – and this was suggested to me by the contemporary artist and designer Claudia Patricia – the logistics of errancy is being able to do otherwise from a site in which no other possibility could have emerged. This absolute necessity moves against reality and the future planning of the metropolis. And here I must return to the beginning: what takes place is what allows a relation with the invisible. Already in 1959, Cassavetes understood that intoxication redeems an ethical life against an epochal phase in which total anthropological exposure would become the concrete utopia of the socialization of capital. 

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Notes 

1. Fritz Saxl. La fede astrologica di Agostino Chigi. Interpretazione dei dipinti di Baldassarre Peruzzi nella Sala di Galatea della Farnesina (Bardi Edizioni, 2017).

2. Gianni Carchia. “Dialettica dell’immagine: note sull’estetica biblica e cristiana”, in La legittimazione dell’arte: studi sull’intelligibile estetico (1982). 

3. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983 (NYRB, 2016).