There might very well be an internal affinity between painting and love that at some point it becomes indistinguishable. A painterly picture can become love unquenched for that which remains persistently fixed and unrealizable. In one of the short essay books of his Big Sur period, Henry Miller asked this very question of painting. For him panting had a wondering origin that crosses the hand, undoing what we can easily enact. The erotic dimension of painting, thus, has nothing to do with the image or figure of the beloved, but rather with a specular limitation staged in the ability to allow the unseen to be incorporated in the visible scheme of the world. Only if we are able to see – and by the same token, only if there we are facing an event of painting – can something like use can be liberated from the constraints of mimetic compulsion. Miller writes in To Paint is to Love Again (1960):
“To paint is to love again. It is only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to a certain manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat or unpalatable unless it is our power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see .See into and around. Or, as John Marin, once put it – “art must show what goes on in the world” [1].
The place of painting for Miller is an imperturbable state that refuses to be fixated on objects, but in the invisible region (as in the figure of the chora) that allows for the thing in the world to be used. This is why Miller considered Japanese watercolor and prints an absolute primer of the pictorial: it taught him the appearance of worlds within the world, regionalizing the surroundings never logically stated unto itself, which in modernity it became the catastrophic horizon of autonomy towards its posterior liquidation. This is why Miller, very much like Carlo Levi, understood that the crisis of painting in the Western tradition ultimately signaled a general sense of social terror as a new phase of human desperation attenuated by the circulation of social fictions.
At the height of the the closure of civilization, painting reemerged, if Kurt Badt’s axiom is correct, as the last metaphysical activity of human praxis. A metaphysical activity that holds on to the experience of belief in suspended appearance of originary anthropogenesis. For Miller, in painting as much as in love “one must be a true believer” [2]. And this assertion must be understood in the backdrop of Miller’s experiential retreat in the landscape of Big Sur: an experience away from the closure of American city life in research of a “feeling of aloness as spiritual achievement”, as a relation of oneself towards disclosure [3]. In this sense, the painter is a counter-social figure that, refusing to make stir in the world, turns to serenity, silence, and to the pressing contours of the unfathomable beyond any prefiguration. The believer in painting – who is a figure of belief in the desert, after the flight of the gods in the nocturnal vigil of history – is the thrust to the experience of things without barristers or shortcuts to what is revealed.
The age of automation in mid-century transformation of American industrial production serves as the historical backdrop of Miller’s indictment regarding the poverty and eventual disappearance of painting due to the autonomization of human praxis and the gigantic scale in spatial organization. Following Georges Duhamel’s prognosis in America: the menace (1931), he shared the intuition that the crisis of dexterity meant the impossibility of realizing painting, now situated beyond the grasp of human absorption [4]. A land without landscape that, as Adorno noted, bears no traces of the human hand. And this was seen already in the 1950s when the rise of abstract expressionism in North American announced not just the end of easel painting, but the funeral of the whole pictorial tradition. The barbarism of gigantic and unlimited Americanism would run counter to painting as a sensorial activity that embraced the vital limitations of its region.
Miller’s insistence on painting was an eulogy to a life as experience – painting is indistinguishable from the hands and souls of the painters that he encountered and shared his life – and the value of poverty as absolute necessity for a life that regionalizes our contact with the world. It was through the love of painting that humanity could only restore its divine presence without rest.
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Notes
1. Henry Miller. To Paint is to Love Again (Cambria Books, 1960), 17.
2. Ibid., 39
3. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34.
4. Georges Duhamel. America: the menace (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 85.
In the late summer of last year, the painter Baruj Salinas (1935-2024) passed away at age 89. I was saddened to learn about his death many months after, and only because I had meant to write to him about a future encounter. For over fifteen years, I had contact with this extraordinary painter, and looking back into the past, my first visit to his studio in sunny South Florida when I was only a college student has become quite vivid and unforgettable. It was a rather small and unpretentious atelier filled with some cans and areca palms, and canvases everywhere. I remember that during my first visit he showed me an illustrated commemorative Torah on the five hundredth mark of the expulsion of the Jewish from Spain, of which only a few handmade copies were made (one of them was gifted to late Pope Francis). He was a painter that carried with him, very much like Edmond Jabès, a sort of clandestine culture of the sacred Book.
In fact, the last letter that he wrote to me in April of 2022, Baruj candidly recalled his early collaboration with the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente in Tres lecciones de tinibles (La Gaya Ciencia, 1981), for which he illustrated the pages with splattered Hebrew letters in magenta. I open one of the pages to “Guimel”: “El movimiento: exilio: regreso: vertigo: el solo movimiento es la quietud” writes the poet as if describing the pictorial gesture of Baruj. A life in double exile, Baruj’s painting oscillates between movement and repose, discharge and emptiness, figuration and the uttermost disintegration of the line.
If Baruj was arrested by the clandestine culture of the Book it was also due to his interest in the possibilities of language. This is a challenge whenever we confront a picture by Baruj: how can we assert in language what the picture is enacting without falling into the allure of ornamentation or the prescription of images in Jewish art? When I wrote about his work back in 2011 this ecstatic tension seemed attractive, but now I can only see it too emphatically invested. The truth is that language betrays what the movement of his painting resists time and again. And there is no such a thing as “Jewish Art”; in fact, whenever the topic came up (during those years I had taken a course on this tradition), the painter remained unaltered and quiet, keeping silence regarding its meaning, but insisting on the expressivity of his pictures.
Baruj’s abstraction befriends the persistence of everything living and thinking. The foam-like shapes levitate towards concrete forms of withdrawal and clearing of the pictorial space. This is why his friend María Zambrano, who wrote about his work, had suggested that in Baruj’s paintings emancipate “un pensar que se hace, como se hace aqui vida en su modalidad propia que es la pintura”. In Baruj, painting is an event that coincides with an image of thought, while the image of thought, stubbornly withdrawn from mimetic representation, materializes a proximity that only painting gives the world.
It is almost as if painting allows thought to breathe – and, in breathing, becoming extension, and thus a corpus in the world. This could perhaps explain why Baruj’s recurrent pictorial obsession was the landscape seen from high above, encircled by the aura of a clouded space. As Kurt Badt observed regarding the pictures of Constable, in painting the sky is the organ of sentiment; transcending the earthy attachment of our heavy footed existence. Before language, the light of painting circumvents the invisible space where all forms will fall into place accordingly. The hand of Baruj Salinas teaches us to orient ourselves in the divinity of appearance that is only eternal because it manages to be invisible between us.
A good place to start on Tetsuro Watsuji’s Climate (1935) is by considering how the very notion of the Japanese fudo as it appears defined in the first pages of the text, as a “structural element of human existence”. Augustin Berque has proposed a slightly different translation: the “structural moment” that speaks semantically to the prefix *-med, that also recalls mediality, metaxy, and also the French ‘milieu’. In any case, “fudo” discloses an expressive instance of existence, but it is not overtly determined cultural or historical teleologies; rather fudo like Heidegger’s fourfold (das Geviert), brings into gathering wind and earth in which existence can only appear to exist in between as exteriority. Watsuji writes: “The structure of “ex-sistence” is, thus, something rather than to exist in the reality of the cold; it is rather to exist within other persons. To designate this reality we prefer the technical relation of intentional reality, used by phenomenologists, the Japanese expression term aidagara (interpersonal)” (†27).
Unless we know the language, we can only take Watsuji at his word when it comes to the Japanese, but all things considered it is at least obvious to say that fudo is not strictly a descriptive objective reality, but a relation of Being. Watsuji calls it a few pages later a “movement of negativity”: “…this is a ‘movement of negativity’. This is how the spatial-temporal structure of human existence comes to being like that of the climate and that of historicity” (33). The notion of existential transcendence that Watsuji wants to hold on to dwells between reality and existence, generating kimochi, or tonality / stimmung (38). The first question here is what to make of Watsuji’s typology of regional climate setting if these are not to be taken geographically or culturally as expressing locational structures for specific kimochi?
There are three types of climate regions for Watsuji: monsoon, desert, and meadow. One could imagine that these three ideal types as environmental arrangements in the disclosure of kimochi. Each region has its surroundings. For instance, the monsoon is defined by its humidity (47). For Watsuji each of the climatic regions will fundamentally generate different forms of social organization, and it is from this perspective that he interprets the civilizational rise of the West beginning in Ancient Greece. The emergence of the polis is understood as a direct relation with harvesting and later to a social bond determined by production and struggle (war). In the most clear elaboration of his interpretation of the polis, Watsuji writes: “With a slave system as through-point as this, the small number of people who comprised the polis were freed from the labours of the herdsman-farmer. […]. With the building of the polis one may begin to use the word ‘Greece’. If this be correct, Greece began with the conversion of the farmer-herdsman gained freedom from the restraints of nature” (82, 113). This restraint of nature is not just productive in the practical sense (attachment to agricultural life), but it is also of the order of the sensible: this is why Watsuji claims that the Greek classical culture possessed a commitment to a visuality of clearing that is ingrained in their architecture and temples in the open (115). And being in the cleared visual spaces demands the question of technique: “The life of the polis has at its center the artificial-technique in order to dominate the Mediterranean. The emergence of this form of life was the powerful instance that determined the destiny of the “West” (116). In this line, modern science is nothing but a consequential reduction of technique for the Greeks (117).
There is definitely some ambiguity here, since later on and following Komei, Watsuji claims that the emergence of machines in the West was only possible as a retreat from cold weather in the North, and thus a product of interiority (130). Could this mean that the all-clearing established in classical Greece – with its vantage point and all too visible sculptures without oblique point of view – contributed to the later historical production of reserved interiority? Watsuji seems to contrast the clearing in classical Greece with the opaque and gloomy clime of the Germanic lands. In fact, Watsuji says later that only in the shrouds of Germany could pure music be created, where light is not so keenly embodied (141, 111). Returning to the question of existential tonality, or the kimochi, I wonder if Watsuji’s subtle yet recurrent positioning of Western destiny has to do with an originary ethical deficit that is maintained from the depths of fudo as within and outside the clearing of nature. There might be a clue about this in “America’s National Character” (1943): “The true hidden reserves are in ethical strength and not in the power of quantity” [‡]. Is living proportionally in the fudo the ability to master this ethical orientation?
Session 2 (continued)
Having laid out his climate interpretation of the West, I think it is fairly easy to grasp the orientation in Watsuji’s monsoon specificity as a sharp contrast to the condition of its “structural moments”. In particular, the political contrast is implicitly established – and I say implicit because Watsuji never confronts it as the guiding principle of differentiation, although it bends that way. It caught my attention that, following the scholar Kateke Fumio, Watsuji will note at the outset that Chinese (Asian) subjectivity refuses any positing of the legitimacy of the state, and especially the fiscal state (we know from Schumpeter that the modern European state is the fiscal state), and they can only flee from such submission, although they are submissive in other ways, to force (shoguns, for instance) (157). The monsoon structure, hence, has primacy over the political sphere projecting a sort of permanent stagnation for historical development. The notion of akirame or “no bearing, nothing we can do”, a sense of overwhelming resignation, becomes the social tonality of the monsoon surrounding, which ultimately (Watsuji does not say it like this, but perhaps we can push the text in this direct) entails enduring stagnation. This perhaps highlights, quite convincingly, of a certain caducity in Watsuji’s monsoon type in our present epoch.
In the order of the political register, one could read Watsuji’s emphasis on the Japanese home in this direction; that is, the monsoon resignation leads to permanent homecoming. The monsoon region is the region where the oikos triumphed over the polis (180-181). If in the Greek world, legibility and the transparency of the grasping logos made the domestic space an exception to the social life, for Watsuji the Japanese dwelling space is not just a space of familiar gathering, it is also a cosmology and an ecology: “The Japanese consciousness took shape in the totality of the home” (184). (As a side note, I cannot but read this in light of Xi Jinping’s notion of the ‘ecological civilization’ as the master key for the planetary relevance of the CCP). Elevated to the rank of cosmology, the monsoon retreat into the home, does not become an all too easy path towards natural domestication?
In the Japanese home there is no separation – there are no locks and keys – says Watsuji, which introduces as a paradigm for a different form of sociality that differs from Western individuality around appropriation, assignation, and separability (201). This is true to some extent if we think about a spatial figure of Western civilization and enclosure, such as the castle. This is fundamentally different from the tokonama. For Watsuji, the structural moments of ambiance and surrounding generates specific mentis types, and thus concrete organizations of said space. I derive from Watsuji’s second part of the book that Western civilization revolved around the movement of total legibility and clearing (Greeks) that unfolded to separation and thus control over nature, resulting in a machine utopia as Adolf Caspary rightly called it. What about the monsoon specificity? There is retreat and resignation over the surrounding, which allows another mediation or in-betweenness with the natural world and exteriority, although this will entail stagnation in world historical terms.
The contrast between the West and China was already well established during the Enlightenment in the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other luminaires according to Federico Chabod. In fact, Chabod claims that the civilizational divide between the West and China is crucial to understanding both [‡ ‡ ‡ ]. Asking why an ancient civilization like the Chinese had made such little progress in two centuries (XVII-XVIII), Montesquieu for instance claims that an explanation is to be found in the sacred respect of this civilizational mentis for the transmission of its tradition. It is easily inferred from Watsuji that the monsoon ambient allows for a civilization of “Wisdom” in the deep sense that it “thanks” all the elements of the tradition that it receives. This is also a form of “resignation” proper to mezuru, a form of wonder and surprise that adds nothing new. When Kojeve referred to the end of history in the form of American animality and Japanese snobbism, I think he was crediting this inner Wisdom in the wake of stagnation and released resignation. Of course, we also wonder what Watsuji will say about the “ecological civilization” driven by China’s modernizing planetary project that, if we are to believe Adam Tooze, possesses the master key for world transformation in the notion of “development”. If true, this can only entail the triumph of Western machination through the labor of its others.
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Notes
† All pages are referring to the Spanish edition, Tetsuro Watsuji, Antropología del paisaje: climas, culturas, y religiones (Ediciones Sígueme, 2016). All English translations rendered are mine.
The common Spanish verb “desvivirse” resists obvious translations. Could one translate “desvivirse” as “unliving”, “constructing by destroying”, or “fulfilled life”? It seems that none of them capture the full meaning of an expression that is anchored in practical use. It is important to note that when the term emerged in the intellectual discourse of Spanish twentieth century, its depth was intimately connected to its meaning (life, living, vocation) that it immediately took the life of a concept for cultural milieu and national character. In his lecture “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, Manuel García Morente suggested that “vivir desviviendose” was the singular form of life of Hispanic being that attained eternity while on the terrestrial world:
“Porque lo típico del hombre hispánico es, por decirlo así, su modo singular de vivir, que consiste en “vivir no viviendo”, o, dicho de otro modo, en “vivir desviviéndose”, en vivir la vida como si no fuera vida temporal, sino eternidad. El hombre hispánico no considera la vida eterna. O la salvación del alma como el remate, término y fin de la vida terrestre, sino como remate, término y fin de cada uno de los instantes y de los actos de la vida terrestre. La salvación eterna no es para él solamente un objeto de contemplación; ni tampoco solamente una norma de conducta, sino que es, ante todo y sobre todo, lo que da sentido y finalidad concreta a cada uno de los actos en que se descompone la vida terrestre” [1]”.
For García Morente, the specific meaning of “desvivirse” entails a tension between interiority and exteriority; and, by extension, between life and death, and in fact of death in life that leads to resurrection and a new life. He writes: “La vida del alma hispánica es un constante morir y resucitar para volver a morir; hasta que la última resurrección” [2]. “Desvivirse”, quite literally, happens at the level of the soul when life continuous through finitude and concrete death. This is why the notion of “desvivirse” has a clear theological underpenning that one can pair with the divine apocatastasis in intramundane life. “Desvivirse” is never about personal salvation and the economy of election, which is why Americo Castro would emphasize that this vocation does not align well with modern individualism, because the “vivir desvivido” experiences its own ruin like a joyous and exuberant Saturnalia” [3].
As in the indication by García Morente, for Castro “desvivirse” entails something like an external perspective in which life can ultimately only take place from its transcendence with a relation to what’s outside ofitself. This outside is neither determined by politics nor rhetoric [4]. To live “desviviéndose” entails an intensity that persists not just as an interior affirmation of self-preservation, but as an erotic relation with what is most desired and venerated (many Spanish thesaurus of the nineteenth century would define desvivirse as “to love or desire with eagerness”, “amar con ansia”). If extracted from the cultural and identitarian historical context, “desvivirse” appeals to the object of passion that overflows the senses of human life.
This overflow is embedded in the word itself. The great Spanish scholar of Benedictine monasticism, García Colombás, in his book El monje y el Misterio Pascual (1984), made a simple, and yet remarkable lexicographical observation about the word “desvivirse”. Colombás noted that while in most of monastic literature the prefix “-des” donates privation and deficiency, the function of this prefix in “desvivirse” suffered a complete inversion, since now it entails to love intensively and thoroughly, as in “se desvive por complacer a todo el mundo” [5]. As a theologian, it should not have passed Colombás that the term in question is a triad of three linguistic units: -des/vivir/-se. This means that it is not just that the prefix exerts the meaning of privation of “life”, but also makes room for the reflexive “se”. It is curious that in in Spanish grammar “vivirse” is often used in relation to location (i.e. “el va a vivirse al campo”), and never as a conventional reflexive action (i.e. “él quiere vivirse solo”, “el se vive solo” = this would be incorrect). Taking this cue, one could perhaps say that the inversion so keenly perceived by Colombás acts upon the living so that they can repeatedly making space for the unfolding of life, rendering possible the soul’s crossing the inside and outside in every form of life.
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Notes
1. Manuel García Morente. “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, in Idea de la Hispanidad (Espasa-Calpe, 1947), 215.
2. Ibid., 216.
3. Américo Castro. España en su Historia: Cristianos, Moros, y Judíos (Editorial Losada, 1948), 45.
4. Ibid., 279.
5. García M. Colombás. El monje y el Misterio Pascual (Ediciones Monte Casino, 1984), 132.
In his old book The Art of Cézanne (1965), the German art historian Kurt Badt makes a remarkable affirmation in dialogue with Hans Sedlmayr’s indictment about the crisis of modern art: “In him [Cézanne], in fact, painting ‘emerges as the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism – Nietzsche’s view of the great art of his time in general” [1]. Badt’s affirmation must be first understood contextually as a response to Sedlmayr’s thesis laid out in Verlust der Mitte (1951) that argues that the post-impressionist painter was the last attempt at visual order within the convoluted modern crisis of art, still committed to “represent what pure vision can discover in the visible world…without adulteration” [2]. The subtlety of Badt’s disagreement with Sedlmayr is notable, since for him Cézanne does not stand for a painter of chaos and subjectivity; on the contrary, the painter unequivocally enters in relation to nihilism. At that instance painting and nihilism are positioned polemically face to face. So, what could painting as the last metaphysical activity mean after all? Why is it that painting obstructs or stuns the total exposure of nihilism? Instead of retracting painting to an ‘origin’, what if we understand its ontological contour as an excess within and beyond nihilism?
In his recent book Tiempo roto (2024), Alberto Moreiras returns to Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor Seminar of 1969 to emphasize how in the epoch subsumed by the Gestell, and thus nihilism, the fundamental opening that exceeds the frame is an übermass, or overabundance of presence [3]. This might be a productive way to think about ‘painting as the last metaphysical activity’ in the era of Gestell, because it inscribes a relation to the visible always in relation to the appropriation of its excess. In the Zähringen seminar (1973) Heidegger will call this relation a phenomenology of the inapparent, which one could very well extend to the praxis of painting as the relation between unconcealment and concealment in the way that Daniel Aresse discusses it in the pictorial world of Vermeer (a polarity that in Cézanne no longer pertains to play of optic illusions but of the disclosure of the world). This cojoining of the inapparent is more beautiful than any possible world visible ordering, because it exceeds the frame of the visible [4]. In this way, Cézanne is not just a painter that exchanges roles with the thinker (as in the relationship between dichter and gedanke) it is rather that he remains the most faithful exponent of painting as the ontic region of the phenomenology of the inapparent or übermass.
In a session of the Zollikon Seminars (May 1965), Heidegger introduces Cézanne’s landscape as a counterpoint of the hermeneutical circle of perception and calculative intuition. Heidegger writes quite succinctly: “For instance, a painting by Cézanne of Mont St. Victoire cannot be comprehended [erfassen] by calculation. Certainly, one could also conduct chemical research on such a picture. But if one would like to comprehend it as a work of art, one does not calculate, but sees it intuitively. Is the painting, therefore, something psychological, since we have just heard that the psychological is what can be comprehended intuitively? No, the painting is not something psychological. Obviously, the above-mentioned “simple principle” for distinguishing psyche and soma is not simple at all” [5]. This is so because for Heidegger the figure of the mountain (a figure among others) in Cézanne’s work is not the cause of the decision of painting; it is rather the ground (Grund) that orients a certain disposition towards the opening of any given form. One could say that the motif of the mountain is the ground that dispenses the relation to the excess or the inapparent while being entirely visible.
As such, the activity of painting is not just a capacity or disposition that allows representation; on the contrary, the pictorial praxis qua praxis remains attached to the notion of truth as unconcealment and concealment in the hegemonic structure of Gestell and the objective sciences for which there is none. This allows to throw light into the rather underworked suggestion advanced by Badt that painting remains the last metaphysical activity of the arts, which does not presuppose understanding the “painterly” as a quality or autonomous sphere of human action, but rather an original gesture of presencing the non-presence, and in this way to remain in what I am willing to call the imperturbable.
It has been registered that at one point during the sessions at Le Thor, Heidegger also made the curious assertion that only Cézanne had taken a path towards thinking (in painting) similar to his own turning away from Western ontotheological dispensation into another beginning [6]. This might be because painting is neither the archaic residue of the human hand, nor the pictorial index of image; its fulfillment lies in the excessive proximity to truth that eternally reveals the permanence of the invisible.
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Notes
1. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cezanne (University of California Press, 1965), 181.
2. Hans Sedlmayr. Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (Transaction Publishers, 2007), 131.
3. Alberto Moreiras. Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024), 113.
4. Martin Heidegger. Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2003), 8.
5. Martin Heidegger. Zollikon Seminars (Northwestern University Press, 1987), 79.
6. Giorgio Agamben. Il tempo del pensiero (Giometti & Antonello, 2022), 57-60.
*Image: Mont Sainte-Victoire, by Paul Cézanne. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph from personal archive.
The fourth issue of the journal De Pictura (Quodlibet, 2024) has just been published, and among a dozen of illuminating articles there is a very substantive and rich conversation between Monica Ferrando and the art historian Michele Dantini on theology and painting that solicits required attention, and that I can only emphatically recommend. As the very title suggests, the conversation is about the unity (and posterior historical divorce?) between painting and theology in the Western tradition, but it is also about another problem that never goes out of fashion, if ever rarely attended by a handful of scholars: mainly, the light of the genesis of modernity vis-à-vis the aesthetic mediation with Antiquity. (Is it fair to say that this is an undeveloped path in post-Nietzschean thought? For now this is a broad question that we can only bracket, and it is needless to say that Ferrando’s own work already amounts to an indispensable barrister to take up this very concern). Be it as it may, there are two problems that I want to flag from this conversation — these are idiosyncratic concerns, as perhaps all attempts to condense a vast area of study obviously are.
First, there is an important moment in the exchange where the problem of “perfection” is discussed as a watershed schism between the politics of representation in the wake of post-Renaissance development of painting. A notion of “perfection” that derived from the theological sphere was unequivocally different from technical mastery; it was understood as a problem of distance and proximity of pathos inherited from the great tradition of Antiquity and its canons of beauty and virtue. How else to read Poussin’s one of a kind theory of the modes of the Ancient in his famous letter to Chantelou? Of course there is also Hölderlin’s gaze towards the Greeks and Pindaric poetry decades later in the dawn of the nineteenth century only to succumb into madness. The theology grounding distance is the condition of possibility of ‘aura’, but also what Ferrando, at the highest point in the conversation, superbly defines as: “…pura della differenze temendo di riconoscere e irriducibili” (137). The liquidation of perfection into mastery of the “work of art” (and perhaps work should be overly stressed, which is linked to all the metaphysical dispensations over creation) implied that “distance” would become standardized, homogeneous, autonomous to regulated form, and finally absorbed unto the objecthood of creator and spectator in the coupling the force of secularization. Whether it is the vicarious image of the Hollywood spectacle, or the factorization of the socialized art object in the Russian avant-garde, the movement towards absorption is one-directional and open to the validity of an external justification of truth.
What I find interesting is that the emphasis on perfection allows us to say that painting clearly put into view the history of an error about representation and its negation. As it has been noted, in the outset of Protestantism – for instance in Noa Turell’s excellent Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (2020) – there took place a new struggle over representation of perfection oriented towards “bringing painting into life”. The Northern superiority hinges upon the effectual perfection of a new legibility of the world that suspends the distance between thought, hand and the idea of pictorial praxis. The valorization of justified truth in perfection is paid by the occlusion of the truth of unintentional appearance. And the consequences are catastrophic: Ferrando at one point claims that the painting is about retaining the invisible; an argument that she has also displayed in relation to Poussin’s landscapes in her L’oro e le ombre (2015). In other words, the development of the dialectical autonomization of the very unit of pictorial space is integrated only be rationalized as an obstacle to be wrestled with and eventually overcome (an endpoint being Jackson Pollock’s outpouring of the line into a vanishing mist over white space). Prometheus unbound. Indeed, über die linie. The “farewell to modern painting” (so elegantly trumpeted by T.J.Clark at the turn of this century) remains right on track with the only caveat that it did not began in the “age of the machines”, but at the outset of the secularization polemic over the impasse of the responses to the crisis of transcendence and the eclipse of myth.
Now, the second point can be stated briefly: the extension of autonomization implied turning away from what the tradition has offered; especially a tradition that is “pre-historical”, according to Ferrando, since painting is previous to historical consciousness and not the other way around (painting is always without a grounding principle). In the words of Stevens, this tradition can be understood as the “love ascending the humane” that attests to the authenticity of what appears-there in the disclosure of the world. A definition of painting emerges here, although not pursued in the dialogue between Ferrando and Dantini. However, for Dantini this means that the whole history of art / pictorial representation needs to be rethought and reorganized and possibly returned to its proper theological sphere. Of course, it will depend on how we understand the vertical axis of theology converging with the horizontal axis of appearance.
A counterexample here comes to mind, a sort of historical false exit: the Baroque, as a post-Renaissance paradigm of response to the crisis of the erotic and pagan image of the Renaissance paid the price of its exuberance, elliptical contortion, expenditure, and ornamentation through a reified and excessive field of self-ordered theatricality. As shown by the exemplary study of the Jesuit discipline in light of the modern state, La política del cielo: clericalismo jesuita y estado moderno (1999) by Antonio Rivera, the ascesis of the counterreformation Company required the split between director and practitioner that already presupposed the modern autonomization of spheres of signification. The baroque supra-theology (imago naturans notwithstanding) was also a reified theology whose anxiety about annihilation and total absorption of the community of the faithful would further drain the invisible outlook of the theos. Or to use the image favored by Carlo Michelstaedter: “the lamp burns out by the insufficiency of oil, but it drowns by having too much oil”. It is no coincidence, then, that the polarity of absorption and theatrically, used to understand the revolution of French modern painting, can only bring to life anything and everything under the sun of pictorial representation except its own sense of distance between appearance and what always remains unfathomable in the world.
Paying a visit to a painter’s studio is a rare experience, but definitely gratifying. Or at least, it has been for a long time even before I could put it to words. At her studio, I confirm that Laura Carralero’s commitment to painting as a practical activity has an unfathomable dimension, and I was pleasantly surprised that she shared the same sentiment that our current epoch is not one in which painting has a minimal breathing space. And whenever painting emerges in the official market circuits of art, it seems that it is always already parasitical to some verbose rhetorical apparatus or heteronomic planning that distortions the painterly sentiment. But was not painting the task of speaking the engagement regarding “mute things”, as Poussin would have it? There is little doubt that rhetorical inflation that thrives in mechanisms to legitimate art continuously devalorizes the mysterious proximity of painting with things in the world. We should reflect – or we should continue to reflect – about what it means to be in a point in the history of humankind where the obsolescence of painting and the disappearance of the dexterous achievement of the hand has thoroughly been realized (Focillon’s praise of the hand remains as actual as when it was first written: “The artist that cuts wood, twerks metal or rock keeps alive a very ancient human past that without which we would immediately cease to exist. Is not admirable to see in the mechanical age this stubborn human survivor of the ages of the hand?”) [1].
The task is immense and abnormal, and it defies (because it exceeds it) the theoretical concept and the absolutism of the philosopher. The engagement of the painters – a secret community that still exists here and there, in different geographies of the world – is precisely a keeping of the divine vortex of the human in the abyss without higher pretensions. And there is something stubbornly strange about painting against the mounting force of destruction. Although perhaps ‘resistance’ here means nothing but to hold on to the originary instance of appropriation of experience in the wake of the epochal mutation of anthropogenic composure; as if the end of the species is also pulsating its commencement.
Holding to painting is not just a substitute to the act of refusal (something that I have recently mapped out); rather, it refuses the very negation of the anthropological erosion in its soulful interaction with what it remains outside of language. To hold on to painting means to engage in the imperturbable: what discourse cannot mold and relocate; what previously is poor in language so that a new language, and thus a new world, could emerge anew among the rubble. In his forthcoming book Those Passions, T.J. Clark states, quite forcefully, that no political transformation or epochal breakthrough can emerge without a preliminary transformation in language; and, I am tempted to say, that practice of painting is the topoi in which eye, world, and hand come together in the very act of separation of said renewal.
The terror of painting – only aggravated in the last decades or so, although a process that took off the postwar years and continued into schools of art where militant pedagogues can only shout “don’t bother to paint!” – is the general stimulus of the reified world; a world in which the paradigm of “objethood” now stands as the compensatory empty experience for poignant idolization of nothingness and “mere stuff”. Sure, there is no return to painting in its grandiose historical sequences – Renaissance, French modern painting, the European Baroque, Van Eyck’s optical discoveries – which ultimately means that painting’s instantiation with the tradition is also bare and unexplored; or, absolutely uncharted whenever there the event of true painting. While I glance at Carralero’s diminutive wooden oil paintings I have this in mind at least. There is a return to the divinity of the icon, but it is not a restitution of its theological investiture and its purported liturgy; the pictorial exercise takes into account the structural void in which painting finds itself resisting, for better or worse, representationalexcess.
And this speaks, I take it, to the muteness of painting as such, which is also Carralero’s silence about the import of medieval icons into the present. In a way, the painterly operation (I realize that this expression is awful) is executed in a paradoxical redemption, since space always calls forth presentism, a here and now. One is reminded of Stevens’ verses in “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “To say good-bye to the past and to live and to be / in the present state of things as, say, to paint / In the present state of painting and not the state of thirty years ago”. The emphasis of the verse declines towards that injunction “as say, to paint”, which fixes a current state of being in the world where we are in it but outside of it. Is not this, precisely, another description of the “Just”? I am eager to work through painting’s stubborn position to this description, which means to hold on to the imperturbable.
The imperturbable seems to me like a fitting term to grasp what Carralero is doing in her pictures, although with no pretensions to exhaust her pictorial adventure. The solemnity of the icon and its inverted gnosis yields something palpable as well as unattainable. What is being held is the vortex of painting’s mystery going back to Lascaux and ancient burial paintings. Carralero rationalizes her interest in medieval and Eastern European religious painting as a retreat from the unbreathable decay of contemporary pictorial practice as a general tendency. Here the renewal of painting is only possible through the sensible dimension of an integrative imagination. Hence, to live in the present, in the hour Stevens’ simile, is also to dwell in the flashes of painting’s general economy of sensible forms. A new history of freedom can take this as its point of departure; that is, to posit no longer the social functionalization of norms and rules for relations, but to expand the sensible space of the innumerable symbols of existence.
In the well-known essay “The Pathology of Freedom”, Günther Anders says something significant about painting’s imperturbable nature: “Painting that fixes the aspect of a man or a thing in a picture seems as it were to repeat the act by which each thing is already condemned to itself” [2]. This “being-precisely-this” could be taken as the closure of contingency in relation to all possible forms; although it is also painting in which the contingency of the non-visible in the visible what arranges the possibility of what is precisely absolute contingent as absolute in each picture. This is why in great pictures we tend to feel that the consummation of form reveals as a necessary tradition that, by virtue of being thus, it assume the thisness of the particular rendition. This commitment that weighs heavy in each of Carralero’s paintings is a testamentary to the imperturbable even if we are already entering (or already in it) the eclipsing world of the mystery of the senses, a world that can no longer see the redeeming and unassuming vision that painting can offer.
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Notes 1. Henri Focillon. Elogio de la mano (UNAM, 2010), 131-132.
2. Günther Anders. “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification”, Deleuze Studies, Vol.3. 2009, 283.
The European Union elections this spring restate what otherwise is already felt almost everywhere; mainly, that the destiny of politics has ceased to mean anything historically, and that political representation stands as a compensatory preamble and veneer to planetary conflagration, in which Europe has become a minoritarian and bystander actor. This also means that the histrionic reaction to this reality can only bring out its counters more sharply: both pro-nationalist sovereignty political platforms, and abstract administrative pro-union coalitions are junior partners of the current geopolitical planetary regime, and they merely differ in mild policy nuances, social spending allocations, and rhetorical probing that can also be as flexible as needed (such is the case of Italy’s Giorgia Miloni who one morning can be in a Vox Party Congress in Madrid, and later in the afternoon receive orders from Ursula von der Leyen and the White House).
The passage of destiny politics to the gigantism of geopolitics entails not just the erasure of the modern boundaries of enmity recognition, but also the introduction of an administrative plasticity that responds to ad hoc organizational and infrastructural planning, as symptomatic of the collapse of the subject of history into the dominance of the objective. The final stage of the “disenchantment of the world” that characterizes bureaucratic legibility finally appears as the reign of objectivity and the objective. And the concrescence of objecthood as the last avatar of the colonization of forms of life allows us to see how the compensatory constructions of ‘community’ – both the “European Union” and the multiple sovereign communities as reactions to it – repeatedly oscillate between communities of fictive identitarian belonging, and formal political communities devoid of constituent authority. Regardless of their contrasting designs and contrasts, both defenders of national sovereignty and the supra-national EU share the same allure of communitarian integralism: a community for the living, that is, for those integrated into the social apparatus of a well lighted and funded administered world. Respectively, we can see that the debate that took place in the late 1980s about negative community in Europe among philosophers (Jean Luc-Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben) has not lost any of its poignant relevance, as the compensatory communitarian options multiply and spread without ever retreating from the summoned shadow of politica arcana. In a certain sense, the confabulation of communities of belonging and communities of faith are dispensable painkillers to the effective disintegration of the immanence of the social bond. This explains why “people” can only assent to them.
Both community form and political empire are united by a legislative political principle that today remains chattered in the final stage of intrahistorical collapse. There is no communitarian option today that does not end up living negatively on the hinterlands of the nexus of Empire; an exception to the nomic organization of the globe incapable of taking into account the inmates of community form. What is at stake is access to the world; an excess beyond communitarian identification and the administration of the waning politics of Empire.
One can, I think, read Josep Borrell’s words in a speech given at the European Diplomatic Academy in 2020 in this direction, where he calls Europe a well cultivated garden [1]. Obviously if we read it in a political key, Borrell’s address maintains the perennial framework of civilization and barbarism, and in his head the role of the ‘gardener’ is only a metaphoric deployment to exalt the morality of the squalid and humiliated European diplomats on the global stage. However, we know that there is much more to the earthly garden, which retreats already at the moment it is enunciated, since it is a mythic-poetic trope that colors the sensibility of concordia rather than elevating itself as a sociological category of political orientation.
As Italian historian Flavio Cuniberto notes in his beautiful book Viaggio in Italia (2020), for a poet like Dante the meridional Mediterranean region was the garden of empire (“che’l giardin de lo imperio sia diserto”) which attunes itself to the measureless relation between earth, landscape, and life. Is not this what is preparatory – that is, what must be posited in sensibility and in imagination through style – before any reduction of life into community and political mediation? Have not we felt this dissolving transport before a landscape in the outskirts of Tuscany or Orvieto? And is not this what political ecology (Green New Deals) are after in their effort to foreclose the world? The garden unworks empirical objecthood through its very refusal to be integral to devastation, usurpation and destruction of loci. This is why for Henry Miller the only “ideal community” would have the garden as its evanescent topoi, a “god filled place” even for those that have no gods:
“Even if it lasts for only a few moments, the privilege of looking at the world as a spectacle of unending life and not a repository of persons, creatures and objects to be impressed in our service, is something never to be forgotten. The ideal community, in a sense, would be loose fluid aggregation of an individual whole elected to be alone and detached to be at one with themselves and all that lives and breathes. It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believe in (a) God. It would be a paradise, even though the word had long disappeared from our vocabulary” [2].
Looking at the world as a spectacle – of course, this brings to mind Petrarch’s specular heights at Mount Ventoux, in which the possibility of seeing, for once, has the upper hand against the mastering the worldly phenomena at our “service” and proportionality. There is no utopia without this attempt to grasp the spectacle in its taking place, infinitely exceeding the rationality that vests reality into amorphous abstraction. Perhaps the garden is a figure of this necessity of irreducible outlook, which in Marvell’s language touches the ungraspable as it is inwardly felt: “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade” [3]. The promise of a new life takes resource in the abode of that green shade.
For anyone familiar with the delicate thought of Monica Ferrando, the short book just published, Arcadia Sacra (Il Molino, 2024), makes it impossible not to read it in light of her the two previous works, the ambitious Il regno errante (Neri Pozza, 2018) that reconstructs the political paradigm of the nomos of Arcadia, and L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), which brought to light the corrupted meaning of a theopoetic understanding of “election” and its appropriation by an effective economic theology apparatus that governs over the destiny of the modern edifice. Arcadia Sacra continues Ferrando’s highly original reconstruction of the unforgettable myth of Arcadia within the obscure setting of secular modernization in which painting itself has come into crisis to the point of utter obsolescence. We might be the first epoch in the history of humanity (or even prehistoric, since painting goes back to the non-original origin of the caves, as Ferrando has argued) in which painting itself is lacking and almost non-existent [1]. And although Ferrando does not allude to the present directly, it goes without saying that by choosing as her focal point Titian’s early picture “The Flight into Egypt” (1508), the vision deployed in the essay can only speak to us as urgently, where the thematics confronted by the Renaissance of Venetian painting returns to our present in a fractured flash: imperial conflagration, unlimited deployment of force, usurpation of territory and multiplication of legal checkpoints, and the accelerated disconnection between architecture and nature, color the ongoing devastation of the vantage point of the landscape now eclipsed by the radiant artificial confinements of the contemporary metropolitan designs.
Already during his postwar years in the United States, Theodor Adorno observed how the unbounded sadness of the American landscape has nothing to do with an inhuman romantic sublime; it was rather that the landscape feels as if it bears no traces of the human hand [2]. If Americanism configures the long lasting night of planetary nihilism; this is so, not only due to capitalist subsumption and production of human life, but fundamentally because of the inherent obliviousness of the landscape that forecloses dwelling in the world. But the myth of Arcadia, as Ferrando will insists, is no utopia nor crafted rhetoric (the bucolic genre as an aesthetic compensation to the normative grid of the social bond); it is also the question about the earthly ground of existence, and the necessary attunement with the things that have been domesticated into order of the metaphysics of idolatry and objectivity (Ferrando 28). In this sense, Arcadia does not name another world to come; it is a world that has been registered many times, reappearing whenever the hand reaches out in proximity as if caressing the landscape’s skin.
The mytho-poetical deployment of Arcadia returns amidst a world in conflagration, and for Ferrando this has fundamental political implications insofar as it shows a way out from the grammar at the service of force and political dominion of commanders and soldiers – which is always already exercised as legitimate to coerce and to become a tool for the regulation of abstract mediations – into the voice of poets, painters, and shepherds (Ferrando 51). Arcadia reveals that the human species is a ductile animal that can sense by the ability to touch and use. This is why Arcadia stands as a third space outside the political dichotomy of empire and republicanism, between the struggle of usurpation and conquest, and the techno-political administration of common goods of social distribution and institutional delegation. The abstract humanism of the Renaissance, as Heidegger once claimed alluding to Machiavelli’s political thought, is also the commencement of a specific political technology rooted in certainty and justification that can only conceive representation as the ground for the production of an “effective truth” [3]. The virtuous homini militari of the Italian city states anticipate the neutralization of force as legitimate rule that will prepare the stage of modern political realism based on fear and normative rule of law. The final efficacy of force is to transform the sense of the world into a mere object, as Weil clearly understood it in her essay on Homer’s Iliad. One of the key insights of Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024) is that it shows that, parallel to the revolution in political technologies taking place in Renaissance Humanism, the image of Arcadia was being rediscovered in treatises and paintings in order to remain faithful to a different attunement of the nomoi, in which the philosophy of history of sacrifice, endless civil wars, and destruction of the Earth do not constitute true destiny (Ferrando 14). In an exoteric way – and it is so, because the craft of the painter is, precisely, depiction and figuration of the nakedness of what appears before our vision- painters like Titian, Veronese, and Bellini, became witnesses to the acquiescence of the nomos mousikos, which far from soliciting the conceptual density of a theory of Justice; it registered the preeminent condition of poetizing nature of living in the vanishing world. Indeed, it was in the musical nomos where the soul could establish the communication between exteriority and interiority within the gleaming order of things.
If Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art suggests that the erection of work occupies the open space of this clearing; Ferrando will thematize how Boccaccio’s understanding of the Earth as radiantly divine was drawing upon the tradition of Arcadia will emerge as the pictorial space of the artists to disclose the vibrant sense of a necessary freedom (Ferrando 43). This means that living among the gods is not reducible to panentheism, if understood as oppositional to monotheism; rather, it was the opening to the event that gathered forms of life, creations, affections, and territories. In other words, there will always be gods whenever the world is not enclosed into the homogenous surface of a unified planetarity. And is not painting the quasi-originary activity of human anthropogenesis (the event of being in the world as such) the sensible evidence that negates any conceptual and political translation directed towards action and justification? After all, painting is, among other things, the business of depicting mute things, as Nicolas Poussin famously claimed.
But muteness must be qualified and expanded, since Arcadia is no asylum or final refuge of man. Titian’s “The Flight into Egypt” depicts a rite of passage, but also opens to a set of rhythmic connected activities that lead to the landscape. Thus, as Monica Ferrando reminds us, building from her previous Il regno errante, Arcadia is also the material experimentation of acoustic energy; music, or the the nomos mousikos, no longer guided by the command of political service, directed by attunement of the lyre and the syrinx, will speak the unwritten language of the human soul. Painting and music convergence at the nonsite of permanent formlessness. And it is rhythmic music allowing improvisation and experimentation that reimagines a different conception of the polis; a transfiguration of political life, in which the principle of civility in all of its complexity (citizenship, objective transference and negation, civilizational fortitude) will no longer articulate the principal axis of the human commonwealth. Neither a source of higher natural law nor a mere expansion of positive norms, the nomos of Arcadia for Ferrando entails: “inalterabile a unire intimamente musica e legge, entrambe ágrapha, non scritte, se non nel cuore. L’interdipendenza tra modi della musica e nomoi della città, che sarebbe vano interpretare secondo un rapporto causale, trova nella stessa parola nomos un compendio inesauribile, ribadito nella Politeia: «Non si introducono mai cambiamenti nei modi della musica senza che se ne introducano nei più importanti nomoi della polis” (Ferrando 54). The separation of law from music – as Ferrando will say for poetry and philosophy in later pages – will ultimately lead to the moral struggle towards the rise of the fictitious (and whoever can impose it through their effective hegemony) against the emergence of the “love of thought” (l’amore del pensiero) (Ferrando 57). In this sense, the moralization of justice and its conversion into a specific historical grammar (lex scripta in the juridical apparatus) will ground the order of the polis in which the human will be absolutely sacred so that the sacred nearness between existence and the world – the atopia where the promise of happiness can take place – will vanish forever. As Carlo Levi saw clearly during the postwar years, the rise of the political administration of fear will coincide with the decline of painting as the source of being in liberty within the senses [4]. And, in our days, the historical termination of secularization can only be felt like an unending glacial interregnum (it is no surprise that Disney’s epochal blockbuster is precisely a defense of alienation of a cold being in a Frozen castle) in which the prehistoric reminiscence of the garden can only appear as an afterthought or mere representation, always out of reach, and viciously grazed by wild beasts before our own eyes.
But seeing is already an exercise in prefiguration of a world that returns where painting stands as the medium for a mediation between the formlessness and the soul. This is why, above all, pictorial space is a privileged surface from which to flee our condition of unworldly inmates of our times. In a certain way, painting does not just bring to bear truth against the regime of calamitous fictions; it is also bears witness, as Ferrando states towards a high moment of Arcadia Sacra (2024), to the rediscovery of a new mental space that revives the attunement to a state of the world no longer reduced to the depredatory practices of civilizational extraction and consented servitude (Ferrando 77). The tradition of painting is not just a collection of forms and artistic conventions, but the ongoing concert that facilitates our movement (and being moved) towards happiness.
This is the promise of the itinerant Mary’s passive and inclined face in Titian’s early masterpiece. It does not come to surprise that for Ferrando, the mother dwells among the gods of peace, in contrast to the figures of the commander or the inquisitorial or priestly judge that monitor an endless narrative of intra-species civil war (Ferrando 63). It should not go without saying that at the same time that some contemporary scholars in the face of a historical crisis of legitimation attempt to revive the aura of the homini militari, the precepts of the ragion di stato and the technical virtues of the charismatic Prince; it has been the work of Monica Ferrando, in fully in display in Arcadia Sacra (2024), that invites us to turn to the counters of eros of painting that, almost stubbornly, transmit to us the infinite possibilities of life among the green blades of grass in Pan’s spiritual land (Ferrando 82) [5]. The sacredness of Arcadia resides in this unbounded exteriority that thanks to the mystery of the mother, is always commencing; and, having achieved happiness, it wants to know nothing about bring the world to conclusion. Beneath the arcana imperii (Rome) and the bylaws of the polis (Athens), the landscape of Arcadia remains a harmonious passage of our cohabitation.
5. I am thinking here of the works of several American historians of political thought and legal scholars in recent years that have mobilized efforts to restore a “neoclassical”, Renaissance centered political tradition, as a response to the crisis of modern liberalism. The most prominent list includes, although it is not limited to James Hankins’ Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard U Press, 2020), Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (Cambridge U Press, 2023), and Adrian Vermuele’s endorsement of Renaissance imperial categories such as Ragion di stato, Lex Regia and the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, see his “Sacramental Liberalism and Region di Stato” (2019) and “The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia” (2023). The pastiche of this neoclassical investment made possible by rhetorical and hermeneutical deployments of instrumentalized myth, it is something that I have taken note of in “¿Revival de la tradición legal clásica?” (2022). Drawing a parallel to this classical absorption in American political thought, one could say that this is a reiteration of what Monica Ferrando herself has analyzed in her chapter on German Romantic Neoclassicism and the Winckelmann aesthetic project in her L’elezione e la sua ombra. Il cantico tradito (Neri Pozza, 2022), except now that it lacks aesthetic meditations (there is no Dichter als Führer), thus culminating in the direct exercise of applied executive force.
It is not until the last third part of Marguerite Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) when the reader encounters a mention to the Etruscan relic alluded by Jacques, one of the characters in the circle of friends that vacation in Italy, who passes the days drinking ‘bitter camparis’ and complaining about the nauseating and scorching presence of the summer heat. And if it were not for the title of the novel the reader could easily dismiss it as a contingent regional reference: “I looked at the map last night…After leaving Rome, I could stop at Tarquinia to see Ludi’s little Etruscan horses. After all the time he has been bending our ears about them” [1]. The ‘little horses’ are brought out a few pages before the end of the novel where Ludi, their Italian friend, goes back and forth whether to go and show them the horses figurines or not. It goes without saying that it would be an enormous distaste to press on the Etruscan reference for any deeper meaning, or to claim that Duras deployed the ancient piece as a tongue in cheek symbol for the bunch of friends roaming around the beach shores. It clarifies very little or too much as an generic reading hypothesis.
In any case, what is relevant is that their trip to encounter the horses of Tarquinia never takes place stressing the real lacuna of the narrative, which is not so much paying a visit to an ancient civilization, as much as underlying a possibility, an afterthought, a pulsating desire towards its displacement; or, in a way, the outside of life that part of the real texture of existence. A reminder that life (a happier life?) is always somewhere else, and definitely away from the excruciating heat of an Italian summer in which no compensatory activity (drinking campari, chatter among friends, having food, meeting new faces) can wrestle the desire for exodus. In The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) very little happens in terms of the organization of the narrative, and that is precisely because the domain of the possible might have been Duras’ central commitment when writing the novel: nothing will happen, not even the fleeting thought of paying the visit to the tombs of the Etruscans. Thus, the heavy weight of a narrative without events opens the incandescent proximity between life and nihilism in a strangely accommodating setting. It is summer after all, which means tranquil life of boredom, repetition, serene gazing, and the monotonous. Children catching lizards or sleeping through the night, and very little else.
According to Laure Adler, Duras’ sea novels (The Sea Wall, Gibraltar, Little Horses) wanted to persist “in search of an adventure. But afterwards everything comes together to form a whole” [2]. This holds true only at a very rudimentary and superficial level, but it does not hold to any serious scrutiny. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) is a novel in which the writing of adventure takes a very specific form: life detached from the event of the adventure. This is the reason why the adventure is not only missing from the sequence of contingent incidents, but rather it is alien to the character; as if the radical separation from character and destiny would be transplanted into a self-reflective consciousness arrested in time and space. The adventure at the closure of modern sensibility and its dialectical valence around a “worldview” is precisely that there is a coming to presence of the fact of this poverty of adventure has become its uttermost inexistence: “For a long time I had bright colored dreams of imaginary cities, where I could do what I liked, and look for adventure. But the dreams were not enough, and no I’ve turned a little mean” [3].
The end of the texture of adventure between world and existence marks the commencement of the self-autonomous subject that can narrativize the concrete order of his dreams precisely because he is convinced that they will never be accomplished in this world. After all, as Lukács claims in his Soul and Form, the adventure is no epic for epic’s sake, but a “communion of feeling, of experience, an infinitely powerful experience of the world’s many colored richness expressed in a varied series of endless adventures” [4]. In the adventure one freely becomes who one will be. Hence, the adventure named the freedom of sensible experience between language and world, coming to near convergence only so that its final separation could set to start the inconspicuous ethos of life. In this sense, the longing for adventure in Duras’ The Little Horses of Tarquinia could be said to allegorize the chattering of experience, whose tiny pieces are ultimately picked up by the synthetic apprehension of the dialogue of chatter among friends. The empty chatter takes place once the path of language as transformative of a life becomes separated from the course of the human species. The extreme comedy of the rhetorical dialogue is that it functions as a cure for the abyss of its own separation from life.
Hence, the “dia-logos” ends up suturing that dregs of the fictitious waste required to translate the language of meaning (logos) into practical action at the expense of a life that begins to move, inadvertently, across a groundless world [5]. This is why the central character in The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) calls the boundless dialogue that they are engaged in as “a confusion of voices…from open windows, and was dissipated in the sunshine” [6]. It is not that there is never continuity between what is being said; rather, it is that dialogue is always a re-statement of either the case, the command or the subjective piety that in the suppression of real pain proper to a alienated life can only engage in the melodramatic gossip over the accessories of life. In other words, dialogic communication can only speak in the name of quotidian vulgarity. Language becomes, as Duras writes in one of the most memorable lines of the novel: “an endless chain of reciprocal waiting” [7]. It does not take much to apprehend at this point the signifier rotation in every dialogue. Waiting, but towards what? The waiting is eternal and illusionary, since the capture into the sedentary surplus of “dialogue” has already taken you to the final destination where everything is sufficient; what remains is the generalized effect of unhappy consciousness from the irrevocable sense of abstraction.
The expressivity of the dialogues of the French bourgeoisie of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) was already the indication that their wordlessness differs a whole lot from the musical infraworld of the Etruscans horses and tombs. Yes, something very precious was lost once civilization becomes entangled with the infinite realization of a schizophrenic subject that is the effect of endless chattering and utterly silence. In other words, the character of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) talk quite a lot – they never stop talking – but they are not towards a path of language in search for a missing word that marks every true adventure. And this is the adventure where thought and language bind with one another in search for the unfathomable exteriority that is always unknown. And we know that for Duras the encounter with exteriority is the imprint of intelligence, the coefficient of real and enduring thinking. As one of the characters says at one point: “Possibly it may be that there is nothing that cuts one off from the unknown so much as friendship” [8]. I take it that for Duras the Party form (and even the obligations of fictive intellectual communities and all forms of political dilettantism) was very much her preoccupation here: the militancy of friendship could very well stage the last character in the play of historical nihilism. At the expense of avoiding being “nobody” anyone could assume the faceless “friend”, as soon enough cybernetics will end up promoting in their contactless subjective networks. The agonizing sun of a vacation (exclusive in its temporality) is already foreshadowing artificial radiation and nuclear reserve as the sole container of life on earth. In this scenario visiting Tarquinia is an escape of sorts – downwards to the night but also to a vita nova – although, ultimately, it does not take place. And Duras seems to tells us: true experience falls catastrophically on the other side of writing, on the unlived.
Against the therapeutic community of friendship, one can juxtapose the unpredictability of encounter in which no friend will be crushed by the rhetorical compression of the dia-logos and its discomfort. In friendship I can embrace and release without obligations. And if friendship exists it is through a negative community that is never one with allocated leisure time; and; like love, it does not solicit holidays: “you have to live with it fully, boredom and all, there is no holiday from it” [9]. In such scenario “we would not want to change the world”, but perhaps begin inhabiting it away from the sun of exposure and recognition that clears a menacing landscape without horizon. And if according to Kurt Badt, the sky is the organ of sentiment, then one must come to the conclusion that the characters of The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), as pathetic as they are, are congenital witnesses of this truth; even if they could only carry it for a moment in order to instantly betray it [10].
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Notes
1. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Riverrun Press Inc, 1985), 54.
2. Laure Adler. Marguerite Duras: A Life (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 187.
3. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 139.
4. Georgy Lukács, “Richness, Chaos, and Form”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 167.
5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Sobre el lugar del lenguaje”, in La palabra hendida (Ediciones del Serbal, 1990), 164.
6. Marguerite Duras. The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 149.
7. Ibid., 87.
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Ibid., 213.
10. Kurt Badt. John Constable’s Clouds (Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1950), 101.
Infrapolitical Reflections 