language

Youth and Old Age. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a moment of the Conversations with Eckerman, Goethe tells his interlocutor that there is always a particular arrogance to youth, and goes on to add that “indeed, everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake” [1]. In fact, the illusions clustered around the ideal of “Youth” promotes repeated recommencement, as if world historical progress would depend on the fictional origin of a segment of life in the promising rise of the youth. It does not come to surprise that in our times, youth is elevated and cherished, while social relations undergo an accelerated path of constant rejuvenation and infantilization in clear hostilities with past generations and old age. In fact, in recent m attempts at providing the correct diagnosis of the crisis of West once and for all – and by doing that promoting the final and ultimate cures – we have seen political theorists insisting on gerontocracy as the root of economic inequity , as well as a necessary coming of internal civil war or class struggle between generations. These arguments, along with the new technologies that delegate the sensible dimension of the event of language, are obviously working on the denigrating premise well understood by Goethe; mainly, that starting from scratch must commence from the glorious defense of the youth. In its radically voluntarist assumptions, this defense of the youth adopts the futurist aspiration of the old romantic revolutionaries, for whom all that smelled of the past was understood to be already within enemy lines.

It does not take too much to understand that the defense of the youth as a beacon of the “new” – as the origin of generations that will “bring about a new world” – is very much in the spirit of an epoch that eternally dwells in the present without any relation with the past. In this sense, the metonymic attack on “gerontocracy” (that puts the blame on older generations by taking specific figures of governing political elites) is only a ruse that works in tandem with the ongoing techno-economic anxieties about the necessity at all costs to overcome stagnation and the end of growth. Old Age can easily be just disposed and discarded in our societies, because what is “old” brings about the possibility of a human destiny that can contemplate itself as a form of life that ceases to be functional to the regime of production. This is why, as Goethe suspected, the beginning is not to be found in Youth but only at the end of life, where character is gathered in destiny in a sort of appropriation of a life’s temporality.

This is why in his extraordinary essay on artists and old age, Gottfried Benn could write that “Face to face with the Western world, I did my work; I lived as if the day had come — my own day. I was the man that I shall be. And so at the end I take my stand on all the church fathers, all those ancient men with centuries behind them: non eonfundar in detention — I too shall not be condemned eternally.” [2]. Or when Elias Canetti in a gloss in The secret heart of the clock (1985) writes: “Finally I have become what I have always been, an authentic old man”. Canetti does not mean that he finally reached the end of his life and thus he is ready to die; rather, he hints at the fact that in coming of old age, he is able to discern the authentic figure of what constitutes the bond between your life and the world, something like his true harmony where he can be at peace. It is only in old age, once our eyes are almost closed and seemingly unattentive and astray, that we can truly “see” the inner figure of life. This is what Plato understood so well in a moment of The Laws: “Yes, when we’re young, we’re pretty blind to them [ideas]; old age is the best time to see them clearly” [3].

And of course, to see is to contemplate the movement of thought as it is taking place, beyond the partitions and separations imposed by “generational breaks” and their embedded hostilities. But what is this figure of thought that is finally contemplated and discerned with such clarity? Cowper Powys will also insist on the realization of proportion that is only grasped in Old Age: “Well, then, where in heaven’s name lies the grand advantage of old age? To be near extinction, near what may easily prove everlasting extinction? What advantage is that? I will answer you in one world and that word is proportion. We get for the first time in life when we grow a sense of proportion” [4]. Old Age is the beginning of a sense of proportion not because a “new” historical epoch can recommence from its ‘origin’, but rather because in its nearness to death, staged in the time of irreversible stagnation, it can contemplate what it has loved and overcome in order to be of a certain way.

Nowhere is this more beautifully thematized as in Titian’s “The Three Ages of Man” (1512), where Old Age seated on the grass of an uninhabited meadow medidates not such on his personal death and immortality, but on the proportion of love as symbolized by the two skulls that he holds in each hand. If old age is the keeper of proportionality, this is due to the fact that it can finally contemplate the events that have been absorbed in life. The idea of proportion is nothing else but the invisible weavers of a destiny that transports us to the secret love of youth, which in Titian’s picture is represented by a single lover that holds two flutes at once. A clear parallelism that reveals ultimately the belated sense of proportion: the supreme eros is ultimately can put in tonal communication youth and old age, carrying the embodied memory of the two, whether these are the two skulls or the flutes once enjoyed at each other’s company.

It is only in old age when proximity becomes proportional to what has transformed the texture of life, because all predicates naturally correspond to truth of being. In the summa of the emblematic tradition, as Panofsky once observed, old age is represented as a “Wise Council” that conquers haste; it is founded on industrious nocturnal study, and it must be directed towards Prudence” [5]. It goes without saying that Old Age is wise not because of rigorous knowledge or expertise, but because it can now realize the authentic study of its own figure beyond any heroism. The vigorous, and at times overwhelming and presentist depreciation of Old Age, facing the social question of the “aging population” endures the mutilation between the ‘ages of men’, instead of listening to the music that animates the living. Now human experience is left with the impoverished chatter of private and arbitrary necessities among distinct and fragmented generations that no longer have anything to communicate or remember to each other.

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Notes

1. Johann Peter Eckermann. Conversations of Goethe (Capo Press, 1998), 333.

2. Gottfried Benn. “Artists and Old Age: An Essay on the Creative Personality”, The Atlantic, March 1957: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/03/artists-and-old-age-an-essay-on-the-creative-personality/642213/

3. Plato. The Laws, ed. T. J. Saunders (Penguin Books, 2004), 715e, 128.

4. John Cowper Powys. The Art of Growing Old (Jonathan Cape, 1944), 206.

5. Erwin Panofsky. Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic (New York University Press, 1969), 107.

The city of pigs. by Gerardo Muñoz

When describing the ideal archaic and primitive polity of basic needs at the beginning of The Republic (371e-373), Socrates willingly accepts Glaucon’s definition that this society will amount to a “city of pigs”. In the English translation of F.M. Cornford, just after Socrtates says that “(these people) lead such a healthy life in peace, they will naturally to come to a good old age, and leave their children to live after them in same manner”, his interlocutor responds that “That is just the sort of provender you would supply, Socrates, if you were founding a community of pigs” [1]. That the ideal of the polity resembles a community of pigs is bathed in an important irony here, since as Leo Strauss once noted, this animal community is one in which there are no pigs, since this a community that is strictly vegetarian (the influence of archaic Orphic culture should not be ruled out from this passage).

But just like sluggish and stagnant pigs that roam a piece of land, this archaic form of city life is a proto-form of the kallipolis or the beautiful city, whose enchantment does not derive from external garments, but rather from a mediation of Justice that maintains social stasis or harmony within the passions. In this sense, the city of pigs is beyond a regulatory meditation of production understood as accumulation (although there is some exchange between goods and services), and for that matter it is a form of life that is beyond poverty and wealth. In fact, it is absence of a cycle of inequality either in the form of abundance or scarcity that defines the first communities in The Laws. Thus, we read in Book III 679c:

“Because of all of this, they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the provining lack of gold and silver. Now the community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally produce the finest characters, because tendencies to violence and crime, feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise. So these men were good, partly for that that very reason, partly because of what we might call their ‘naivete’ [2].

The kallipolis that characterizes the beautiful city is thus the memory of the retreat from the machinery of legal expansion – the “too much law” syndrome that according to the Judge Neil Gorsuch characterizes the current state of empire of the administrative state – that for Plato took the form of continuous lawsuits and party strife in order to “hurt each other by word and deed” [3]. This means that the Beautiful City where pigs roam in the open is oriented towards Justice because everything is under the constraint of proportionality that mediatites between the soul and the body, and between actions and the good inherent in things due to their limitations in use. In other words, the city of pigs is an early emblem of the paradigm of the “rule of proportion”, a condition in order to nurture a healthy politeia. Thus, proportionality is a notion that allows not just for the metabolic organization of social life, but perhaps more fundamentally to the sensible understanding of nomoi as revolving around the territory, the attunement to music, and to the lawgiver’s institutional design to preserve a form of life.

If we can understand the city of pigs as a memory rather than as a construction of a future utopian society, it is because only in accounting for proportionality can the nomoi asymptotically enter in relation to Nature that has long been severed from the experience of human beings and the gods. This is why for Plato the truth of the kallipolis staged by the city of pigs belongs to the memory of the ‘Age of Cronus’ and not to that of Zeus. As the Athenian says in Book IV of The Laws: “The story has a moral for us even today, and there is a lot of truth in it: where the ruler of a state is not a god but a mortal, people have no respite from effort to imitate the life men are said to have led under Cronus; we should run our public and our private lives, our homes and our cities, in obedience  to what little spark of immorality lies in us, and dignify this dispensation of reason with the name of ‘law’” [4]. In this determination, the nomos is a memory of the happy life that strives to organize the community beyond the purpose of hostility and strife, abstract quantification and normative obedience (even though there might be necessary elements of these in the polity). Yes, it is true that law is always backwards looking – the process of adjudication needs a prior norm or principle to consider – but the sense of nomoi here is accounting for a priori of proportionality between separate regions of human experience.

The laws or nomoi as justice is not defined by the attempt to construct morally rational norms for adjudication, but rather to coordinate the proportionality dispensed (dianomē) between reason (nous) and the sensibility of the soul (daimones). Rather than thinking of the good as substance and fact, what is good is only in the proportion between soul and reason. Hence, the possibility of naming (eponamazo) of nomos cannot be understood as mere force of adjudication of any given legitimate authority, but as the mediation that guards against the unrestrained force of sad passions (greed, jealousy, resentment), as well as the disastrous consequence of political injustice through mere the exercise of public force that has been understood as the enactment of police powers to curb illicit actions.

What Plato calls the “little spark of immortality in us” is the very memory of the city of pigs; that is, a nomoi that refuses to conflates the community with the world, and that for this very reason it can imagine life beyond the regime of predatory and service driven social reproduction. If according to Oskar Panizza in his mythopoetic treatise, the pig in Western culture has stood as as paragon of fear, power, and untamable desire, it is not less true that the mythological animal was first and foremost symbol for what appears and shines first: “the pig is the Sun” [5]. And yet, for Plato there is a need for the nomoi because there is an archaic memory of the life beyond time and strife, which is the life of pigs that freely roam the perimeter of a space (a correspondence to the Gemeinwesen perhaps). It is this paradoxical emblem of archaic illumination and obscure remembrance that Plato registers as the “little spark of immortality”, where Justice survives not in the form of the restitution of a debt or injury (the principle of “owing what is one’s due”), but in the measureless proportion that binds soul and reason in order to keep on playing the music score of justice on Earth.

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Notes

1. Plato. The Republic of Plato, ed. F.M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1945), 371e-373a, 60-61.

2. Plato. The Laws, ed. T. J. Saunders (Penguin Books, 2004), 679c, 78.

3. Ibid., 679d, 79.

4. Ibidl., 714a, 126.

5. Oskar Panizza. The pig in poetic, mythological, and moral-historical perspective (Wakefield Press, 2016), 4.

Liturgical senses. On Cristina Campo’s Diario Bizantino (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Cristina Campo was a modern mystic who gravitated towards the liturgy of the poetic word. Now thanks to the scholarship of Victoria Cirlot, the Spanish reader is able to read her complete poetry in the bilingual edition Diario Bizantino: Poesía (1945-1977) (Siruela, 2026), which serves the missing companion to the essays collected in Los imperdonables (Siruela 2020). It is difficult not only to differentiate modern genres in Campo’s writing scene, given that both essays and poems (and also her letters, published in multiple volumes by Adelphi, but not yet collected in Spanish) revolve around the same concern around the liturgical depth of the word and the image as indispensable units of raising to the divine transcendence lodged in a treasure chest of secrets. For Campo modernity is the temporal movement that laceration this longing for the mystery, where language insofar it serves the purposes of justification never ceases to participate in the spectacle of imagery and the tradition of the rite that grants access to the experience of the senses. Hence, mutilation does not seem a harsh verb: to slash and separate becomes a misnomer for the closure of “this world”, which is not only the material world of immanence, but one in which the autonomy of imagery – and thus the passive act of imagining – enters into a terminal pauperization elevated by fictitious, at times melodramatic, ornamentation of meaning. 

To leave the reduction of meaning implies a sense of the liturgical. As Cirlot notes in her brief, yet lucid introduction to the volume, it is impossible to not read Campo’s poetic word within the coordinates of her understanding of the liturgical praxis as a mode of artistic development. In fact, in her essay “Note on the liturgy” (1966), Campo would claim that liturgy was a celebration of the divine mystery that is instantiated by the charity of language as an “ecstatic mirror of creation” [1]. If liturgy is a mode of an ongoing work of art in the shadow between the living, the dead, and language it is because, as Florensky also noted – another figure revered by the Italian writer – it is the abyss of a sense of freedom raises to the freedom of the senses beyond fixity of mimetic representation through objective spatial groundness. Around the same years that Campo was meditating on the need to alleviate modern poetics from the maladies and the self-inflicted wounds of the Ego, the Catholic poet Octavio Smith, a member of the Orígenes group, would also celebrate the liturgy as the condition of an image that carries forth folded in the vocative, the offices and rites made possible by pure charity [2]. The partition and participation of poetic language is not just an abstract entelechy of the koine for human language; but, more importantly, it is the charitas that saves language because it appeals to the extasis of beauty. Campo will write that the liturgical scene: “…as in poetry is a splendorous charity, more on the side of necessity than of the useful. It is regulated by harmonious forms and rites that, inspired by creation, surpasses itself in extasis” (Campo, 17). It is the excess of language beyond language that finds dwelling space in the abyss that enacts as witness of a comprehensive cosmic reality. 

And charity will be less than nothing if it would not carry in its interiority the nexus with the dead and the transmigration of the soul that are now joined with the living. The examples abound: “…se nel mio trachea / contemplarai di un’altra migrazione….nessun vincolo univa questi morti / nella necropoli deserta” (Campo 38). In Campo’s poetry the liturgical charitas is not an event of absolute faith overturning, but what is already occurring, a rhythm, that is both fixed and suspended between actual presence and the non-present, “the destiny between the hand and the flower” (como il destino tra la mano e il fiore)”, that has clear echoes of Coleridge romantic dream (Campo 48). And yet in Campo’s poetic liturgy there is no moment of awakening, but realization that existence is transnatural, never hidden in the order of the natural world, but in the “perfumed cloud of language” (nell’odorosa nube della lingua) (Campo 84). If language participates in the flaming and enduring rite of the living and the dead, it is because it keeps track of the pure absence and the negative of the voice, that is both present and absent in the mouthing of every prayer, and as the symbol that longs to devour language itself: “la Tigre Assenza, ha tutto divorato, di quetso volto rivolto a voi!” (Campo, 92). In the praxis of liturgy, the highest celebration through hymns and chants seem to permanently reveal – and perform its revelation – of the abyss that cross language towards its own rebirth and pulsating elucidation. This passion for absence that devours speech becomes the transport of Campo’s poetic dwelling from beginning to end. 

Obviously, the major poem in the collection is “Diario bizatino”, that is structured around four parts and published posthumously in 1977, and whose first verse can easily become the vortex of the poetic exploration: “Due modi – e io vengo dall’altro” (“Two worlds – and I come from the other one”) (Campo 94). The poetic word assumes the reality of the gnosis as a threshold that is no longer between the past and future time of salvation, but the very schism that allows the passage from the living and the dead to resurface. It is a threshold that cuts through the soul itself: “…è il taglio vivente ed efficace / più affilato della duplice lama / che affonda sino alla separazione dell’anima veemente dallo spirto delicato” (Campo 94-96). To come from “other world” and to transit into “this one” is perhaps to be a little bit dead or undead among the living in the whirlwind of the names. As Campo writes in a defining verse of the long poem: “…al centro del Sole là dove il Nome! Rapisce in vortice immoto alla vita del mondo, zampilla nuovi sensi dal mondo della morte” (Campo 96-98). To be with the dead is no theatrical imposture of a void ritual that questions the meaning of “this life” – perhaps the most commonplace Hamletian condition inherited by modernity – but it is the instance that allows the senses of the world of the dead to creep on us as an unexpected ambush.  

This is why the mirage of the Byzantine becomes the new Sun in the middle of the darkest Night, and the moon soon gives way to eventual coming of the Sun (Campo 99). The liturgical plane of the senses extends to what language can receive in both giving and receiving through the analogical being that is lacking in sequential time. Here Campo’s East is in sharp contrast with Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”, where all that lives is “caught in that sensual music / all neglect monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing” [3]. If for Yeats Byzantium is a site of alchemical rejuvenation and rebirth, Campo’s ageless Byzantinism nourishes the dead in which language finds beauty and pain as the supreme witness. In all accounts of what is invested in a language that cannot speak of the unfathomable revelation, for Campo the poetic word is weighted as a song to “testimonaire, a ferire / a insolibuilmente saldare / a inguaribilmente  separate” (Campo 118). The influx is the ultimate liturgy of separation, between language and being, the idea and reality is never completely lost. Or it could very well be lost, but only in what remains merely visible in this world.

This is why Campo never felt the need of the production of writing, not when the liturgy brings closer the excavated eyelids of pavid “gazes ingrained to the memories, to the ground, and to the dying psyche”, as she writes in the last verses of “Ràdonitza” (Campo, 120). In the way of “Burnt Norton” well-known bird – “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, and that is about right when it comes to what can be abandoned from the viewpoint of language. Between this world and its other – the triumph of Manichaeism outlives in the celebration of the fluvial depth of poetry – the divine apokatastasis of what remains unsaid, and yet well kept in the form of a diary. 

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Notes 

1. Cristina Campo. “Note sopra la liturgia” (1966), in Sotto falso nome (Adelphi, 1998), 129-135 

2. Octavio Smith. “Liturgia, Poesía, Mundo”, Islas, N.2, January-August, 1960, 485-492.

Riverrun. On Catalina Porzio’s Ensayo del agua (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

A hymn to the overflowing currents of water and language, Catalina Porzio’s Ensayo del agua (Mundana Ediciones, 2026) opens with a pindaric scene of celebration: “Una vez que la mano se ensambla a la copa olvida la autonomía que las rige….en esa comunión indisoluble, chocamos los cristales con estridencia y porfía por la satisfacción repetitiva de oírlos tintinear. Descontando que un exceso de entusiasmo haga estallar en mil pedazos la escena” (Porzio 12). Water is the pouring of wine and liquor; but it is also the mystery of oceans and the human necessity of quenching one’s thirst. It is all of this, sure, but a series will not do given that water is formless and defies the mimetic faculty that has allowed humans to draw associations high above in the sky. Porzio’s prose defies this temptation of crafting a topoi of water, opting for a dance of forms, descriptions, and enchantment brought together and dissolved by the sargasso sea of her own prose. To claim that writing is like swimming or paddling in water is a poor description to pin down what Porzio achieves in this essay. Her gesture is more versatile without stepping into an abyssal onanism, and this means that to begin to understand water, a certain levitation prose might be in order. A levitation that brings water both near and far. And this is because water escapes the metaphorical reduction of language, and it is always the event as such (just like the title insinuates it: it is not an essay about water, but the essay of water or a water essay). 

I am tempted to write “splash!” but this brings to mind David Hockney’s visual world, which is always frozen and imperturbable, at times undisclosed; whereas Porzio’s prose is agile, elegant, and strangely inviting, and thus uninterested in the mute surroundings of the West Coast. Perhaps it is much better to enact Joyce’s lexicon: riverrun down by the waters forms of Viña del Mar, coastal central region of Chile, and into the fragments of infancy and balnearios, and finally making a turn at Tolousse-Lattrec’s La Toilette. As Porzio tells us while making a stop: “Parece imposible hablar del agua a secas, pues dada la fluidez de su naturaleza, cambiante y escurridiza, invita continuamente a la deriva, haciendo inevitable los desvíos, las disgregaciones” (Porzio 44). A riverrun from a certain attachment – uninterested in the play of signifiers and graphism – of writing, which means that Porzio’s poetic prose is highly engaged in vivid synesthetic imagery. In fact, this overflowing prose is accompanied by the light of painting, and most importantly of the hand that orients the voyage throughout the book. 

The experience of the prose, in this sense, is not just an exercise in writing, but one of absorption, because it is only after being arrested that jubilation triumphs over reason (and one could also add: over grammar). “La algarabía desconoce la razón”, we read about halfway (Porzio 64). Of course, it is silly to say that good prose needs pictorial supplementation and artifice; what I am trying to say is that, while reading Porzio’s essay, absorption is the hand that discloses the world of sensorial celebration. The hand retains in the overflowing currents of riverrun downstream. Painting is both an instance of the light that absorbs and that renders imperturbable the errant topography of experiences. And this is why Porzio is right in reminding us that “y es que navegamos gracias al olvido” (Porzio 66). If there is a work of memory it is because we are deep in the waters of Lethe, and perhaps the unfathomable image of experience is what gives us a hand in the dangling spiral motion. 

As we know, this is at the heart of Hölderlin’s “Andenken”, where the verse “But it is the sea that takes and gives remembrance” validates both memory and oblivion of a human experience that quenches its thirst in the mystery of time (ultimately only a letter separates “sed” from “ser” says Porzio towards the end of the book). At the risk of vulgarizing Porzio’s essay – although her writing is not fully disconnected from the handles of the present – I would claim that precisely the ongoing barbarism of our technological epoch is precisely that it has failed to endure its voyage to Lethe, which is why it is committed to untruth and permanent lies at the same time that forces the human species to permanent memorization, while drying up its once opulent rivers of the West. And if rivers have become a scarce resource in our times, it only makes sense that the same can be said of human language, which is increasingly devoid of dialogic interlocution and the possibility of naming now replaced by automatized coding (some scholars have noted that Finnegans Wake’s “riverrun” also lodges “-ren” might be referring to the name). What happens when riverrun, which is the speculum of human experience in both language and water, dries up? This is the central question that arises from Porzio’s beautiful experiential essay.  

In the last pages of Ensayo del agua (2026), Porzio tells us that when an old man of her acquaintance was asked what he will miss most of this world he responded with great conviction: talking (Porzio 104). And as it is also quite obvious for Porzio that the necessity of conversation is not just an intrinsic institution of our social life; it is also the cave (to recall here Porphyry’s reading of the nymphs water caves in Homer) where the living and the dead enter into the purest of conversations, because “…ambos gesticulan, y en la fantasía de encontrarse, transporatados ilusoriamente en la cámara del tiempo, no cabe duda, se entenderían” (Porzo 105). If  language is always downstream, at the riverrun outlet, it is because it is both the communicating vessel as well as the immaterial gesture that flourishes without beginning and beyond the imagination of the end times. Avoiding the self-assigned role of the doctor of civilizational decay, Catalina Porzio’s  Ensayo del agua (2026) ultimately unfolds a unique choreography: a gesture of language that allows us to move throughout the epochs in order to feel at home anywhere.

Memory and hell. by Gerardo Muñoz

If a possible definition of hell is the incapability of finding an exit or escape, then it is tempting to say that the artificial construction of memory as perpetual remembrance is the ultimate hellish condition for human beings. This was the fictional nightmare in May Sinclair’ old gothic short story “Where their fire is not quenched”, in which the permanent condition of being stuck in a single active memory is called the ‘last hell’.  As we read towards the end of the story:

“There can’t be anything worse than this. This isn’t the worst. We are not quite dead yet, as long as we’ve life in us to turn and run and get away from each other; as long as we can escape into our memories. But when you’ve got back to the featherest memory of all and there is nothing beyond it – when there is no memory but this – in the last hell we shall not run away from any longer; we shall find no more roads, no more passages, no more open doors. We shall have no need to look for each other [1]”. 

It might have been possible that this story inspired Borges’ “El Zahir”, which tells story of a magical token encrypted in a twenty cent coin that becomes impossible forget to the point that present and past memory becomes one with the zahir, and the zahir becomes all that there is to one’s memory and remembering. An absolute and available memory without forgetting not only absorbs the possibility of forgetting, but also that of the love only achieved thanks to the foreign or strange. This is why the character in Sinclair’s story tells the lover that all that remains is loathing – a loathing and a loathing spirit, “loathing each other” – which appears as an inverted transfiguration of love. Yes, memory is essential to enter into what remains loved, but if the object of eros is absorbed without any distance or oblivion, then there is no tenor of affection, since exteriority is suspended and folded in pure interiority.

This is why in Hölderlin’s “Andenken” we read that “But it is the sea that takes and gives remembrance / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed…” [2]. It is in the temporal existence crossing the world where there is a poetizing, thanks to language, that allows for both the flourishing of remembrance and forgetting. It is in this trembling sea of life where love that can ‘pin’ or hold on – which is closer to Höderlin’s heftet – that which crosses our path as a mystery of the irrevocable. It makes all the sense that in Sinclar’s story reliving a single remembrance implies the specular suspension that pin our distance with the world: “We shall have no need to look for each other”. There is no more ‘looking for’, but also not ‘looking at’, as in the gaze that mesmerizes before a human face. 

Because every-thing is already visible and penetrable without reminder, there is no heftet that appropriates what is improper. This is a different sort of hell: not one defined by eternal punishment or damnation, but of the privation of sensation can only emerge in the contact between life and language. What is still disturbing in May Sinclair’s gothic story, and which makes it completely contemporary and realist, is that there is a humanity that can adapt, even after their death, to the confinement of an eternal memory without forgetting, and in doing so it can infinitely endure this last stage of hell. 

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Notes 

1. May Sinclair. “Where their fire is not quenched”, in Uncanny Stories (Hutchinson & Co, 1923), 36-37.

2. Friedrich Höderlin. “Remembrance”, in Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Books, 1998), 253. 

Painting in the evening of the world. by Gerardo Muñoz

That painting was an activity at the end of its long tradition – a tradition that perhaps coincides with the very genesis of anthropogenesis – appears explicitly in Cézanne’s late conversations with Joaquim Gasquet, which is full of rambling thoughts and anxieties. At some point in the dialogues, Cézanne says in context of the pictorial tradition: “Rubens…that is another age, all that. We are in the evening of the world. Painting, like everything else, is vanishing….” [1]. Cézanne’s work is already the painting of the evening of the world, which is the closure unto itself, not so much a deprived world of certain elements or things, but a privatized space of intelligence and logic. This structure is alien to the painter who only pledges alliance to what is seen and revealed: “The painting owes allegiance to that lone. Never to the logic of the brain…and if he abandons that logic, he is lost. Painting is first and foremost an optical affair” [2]. 

What the essence of technology enhances in its computational and logical capacities to make the world legible, it loses in the optical capacity for the thinking of vision, that flickering and always novice opening to the world. The calamity of the automation of the world resides in the blinding legibility where thinking-eyes, as in Cézanne’s expression, are rescinded and a thing of the past. Of course, in the name of the present legibility of blinding lights, the past will also be reduced to a pile of stuff that can be assembled and registered – as in the vulgar poet Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ “The Aleph” – but in exchange for abandoning the truth and sensation. 

Well before the argument of Veblen on the centrality of engineers in this new world, Cézanne was aware that the future belonged to the engineers of nature, who can both bend and straighten the crooked lines of the world, and whose final realization is the nuclear organization and the pacing of energy distribution. It does not take too much to see an overtly furious Cézanne around 1890s: “Nature abhors a strain line. And to hell with engineers! We are not road surveyors. A lot they care for color, whereas for me sensation is at the root of everything” [3]. The personal outcry ‘to hell with engineers!’ is still being heard today, although we are less convinced that such an imperative has any chance at halting the ongoing vanishing sensations of the world. 

Michael Fried has argued that Fraggonard’s The Swing and Blind Man’s Bluff are two pictures that appear to us as also harbingers of an extinction of a world (the world previous to 1789 that is) [4]. Whether it is Fraggonard or Cézanne, there is an imperturbable core in painting in witnessing the moment that the world is vanishing, and retaining whatever remains of the “world” for generations capable of seeing and feeling. Borges’ aleph (a supreme optical affair) once again comes in handy when faced with the vision of the infinite: “Algo, sin embargo, recogeré”. In other words, something remains imperturbable at the end of the world. Is this what painting stood for in late Cézanne? To gather something from the world, to make it imperturbable appears as the supreme task of painting.

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Notes 

1. Joachim Gasquets. Cézanne: A Memoir with conversations (Thames & Hudson, 1991), 170.

2. Ibid., 161.

3. Ibid., 166

4. Michael Fried. Collected Writings, Volume II (Eris, 2026), 281.

You are the task. by Gerardo Muñoz

Out of all of the Zürau aphorisms of Kafka there is one that reads as follows: “You are the task. No pupil far and wide (Du bist die Aufgabe. kein Schüler weit und breit) [1]. It resonates profoundly in our days as the idea of “education” and its inherited traditions are liquidated by the essence of technology. What Kafka could have meant by the idea of “task” (in German Aufgabe or in Spanish tarea) is to be deciphered in the intellectual context of the time. In his gloss to this aphorism, Reiner Stach has emphasized something elementary and yet quite essential; that is, that the task is not an action of the subject, but the meeting place of both subject and object. There is only the task of existence, and only to this extent we are always students of life before everything else comes into being. In a later aphorism, Kafka seems to return to the question of task by adding: “Two tasks at the beginning of life: to keep reining in your sphere, and to keep checking whether you might have gone into hiding somewhere outside your sphere” [2]. Something escapes, and that which is other than what is appropriate in life might just be the infinite work of the task of existence. 

If there is a “theology” in Kafka it is something other than one conditioned by an efficacious action directed towards God. Again, these questions were up in the air in Kafka’s milieu at the time, and it suffices to remember Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (1915) as an emblem, when the old astronomer tells his pupil Kepler: “One thing alone: carry out my work; do not let this tremendous labor utterly perish…” [3]. Writing in close proximity to Felix Weltsch’s theology of transcendent action in Freiheit und Gnade (1920), Brod understood that humans are only legitimate and participating in the “good” if it assists in the poetic energy of God. Here the notion of the task corresponds to the higher and more geometrico order of God. For Kafka, on the contrary, there is no task that is oriented as a supplement to a divine order that must be realized; it is rather a sensible education that had no beginning and no end, learning without texture because it has no fixed object. This Kafka’s task is an exilic (galuth) practice that cannot be territorialized in a promise of nationhood or state authority. The paradigmatic figure of “this task” is Sancho Panza, because as a lucid and sensible fool he is able to enjoy life to the very end. To experience the task without a destiny is to be able to stretch experience to the end of life. 

This is precisely why Sancho Panza stands the paradigm of the task of a life that dwells in freedom. Let us recall carefully what Kafka writes in his short parable “The truth about Sancho Panza”: “Sancho Panza, a free man, maybe out of a certain feeling of responsibility, yet imperturbable, followed Quixote on his adventures and from them he had a grand and successful entertainment to the end of his days” [4]. The condition of ‘freedom’ that is proper to the task is imperturbable (gleichmütig), in which the pursuit of struggle and conflict is abandoned in order to complete and follow the task. But this “following” is not one of submission, but of segundear or sekundiere: “In the struggle between you and the world, second the world”, as he writes in another mysterious Zürau aphorism [5]. We remain in a state of the pure imperturbable when we second the world, because nothing appears to inflict us existence with the force of submission or obedience. Thus, freedom is not a substantive political category, but a lived and almost painterly instance in language that puts us closer (or apart) from our task. 

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Notes 

1. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 42. Translation modified.

2. Ibid., 186.

3. Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (Northwestern University Press, 2007),  124.

4. Franz Kafka. “The truth about Sancho Panza”, in The Complete Stories (Schocken Books, 1971), 610. 

5. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 106.

Excess and solitude. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is a commonplace to think that populations feel ‘lonely’ and ‘alienated’ from society, but perhaps this diagnosis is more of a prefigured talking point than the description of the state of things. In our present, solitude and retreat is a scarce good, as the chatter of automatized languages and images revolve without a moment of pause. In a recent book, the vice-president of a major technological software company, in fact, argues that “mobilization” extends to all aspects of the temporality of social life, which makes his “technological security” system unavoidable for the very motion of living’s one life. This is why in this configuration, the notion of “creation” as poesis has waned, and its institutional inertia is increasingly delegated to machines and market values. Precisely, the promise of “Artificial Intelligence” all things considered is not just productivity growth, it is also grounded in alleviation of a postpoetic social bundle where every form of self-possession – writing and singing, reading and painting, just to name a few – are slowly replaced. And this “replacement” – which is the only true replacement of our epoch – is an absorption of our relation to our own excess of existence. 

This is what Kafka understood with outstanding clarity more than a century ago in his well known letter to Felice dated February 1913: “‘Writing means revealing oneself to excess … This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why even night is not night enough. I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once” [1]. 

What does it mean that ‘writing means revealing oneself to excess’? For one, it does not mean to create a well crafted story or essay, but something much harder: to appropriate the relation with exteriority of life that makes the truth of writing to emerge, at least for a moment. This appropriation is what solitude guards and treasures, not as a “good” that can be administered and shared, but as a form of life where language and the idea connect in an instance of time. If the total mobilization of technology succeeds wiping this relationship, we should be reassured that the nocturnal excess of writing will be transformed into a white night of inert knowledge, which is contrary to the very practice of writing. One never writes what one “truly knows”; what attempts to write in order to know that which we did not know that already knew. And only this can be called a relation of excess. 

In her beautiful book A horse at night (Dorothy, 2022), the writer Amina Cain similarly says that: “To write, to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing. Of course there are those whole collaborate, but even then there must be moments of retreat. We retreat to read. We retreat to think….There is life that finds each one of us that one else should enter, lest they drive it off” [2]. The closure of the self-sufficient subject of technological mobilization is precisely the one that, by giving up his solitude and retreat that is constitutive of language, has ceased to have the creation and by extension the time of life. What is given up in the name of  a faustic “Intelligence” is the most sacred, the access to oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Franz Kafka. Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1988), 156.

2. Amina Cain. A horse at night: On writing (Dorothy, 2022), 35.

The last tzaddik. by Gerardo Muñoz


According to the Talmudic tradition there is a certain number of just persons, called the tzaddikim, that exist in every generation. Their divine and singular existence is known only to God, and according to the tradition if the world continues to exist it is only for their sake. They live in the desert of the world without ever being known by anyone in the public eyes. In this sense, the tzaddikim could be anywhere and everywhere as long as there is a nuance of humilitas. It is not clear, however, that the tzaddik is an ethical being in the polarity of thinking and action; but it is precisely this depth that renders him an opaque and mysterious figure. How many tzaddikim are there in each generation? 

Although Borges directs our attention to Max Brod as a modern source regarding the tzaddikim, it is actually Gershom Schlem who in an illuminating essay of this tradition records that it was the fourth century Babylonian teacher Abbaye who attached a number to these “saviors of the world” to thirty-six: “The world is never without thirty just men who daily receive the Divine Countenance” [1]. The world is not saved by the promise of redemption alone; what the tradition of the tzaddikim teaches future generations is that there is only redemption whenever something like a depth of existence is treasured as an embodied mysterium. In other words, it is almost as if in the tzaddikim the idea that “life is always elsewhere” is not only confirmed on the basis of faith, but on the inconspicuous existence that is divine in virtue of ceasing to be public and translucid. As Scholem says later on in his essay: “…these hidden just men belong to a higher order because they are not subject to the temptation of conscience which is virtually inseparable from public life”.

In a world pushed into full transparency, absolutely transformed into a reservoir of energy extraction and dispensation like the one that we are currently living, it is not all too difficult to imagine that even the secret lives of the tzaddikim are at risk of survival. And if the apocalyptic tone of our current gnosis has become predominant within the accelerated technological development, one could imagine that the opacity of the tzaddikim is slowly drying out, very much like the way that major rivers in the American desert are continuously being pushed to planned obsolescence and slow extinction. 

In fact, one could go further and say that there  is a clear analogy between rivers and the tzaddikim insofar as they are both pathways of generational communication of the human species with the world whose mouths that for millennia have made the condition of life possible. This means that in the same way that river mouths dry up, human language, with the advent of the barbarism of “Artificial Intelligence”, also becomes a new phase of desperate muteness, losing its capacity to pass forward its traditions and memories. Who is the last tzaddikim today? He or she will be the secret agent of language itself, the keeper of a divine surge that erupts even in the meanderings of a world out of tune. 

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Notes 

1. Gershom Scholem. “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men”, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schoken Edition, 1971), 252.

Language as a garbage heap. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is an extraordinary description in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes el memorioso” that depicts his state of absolute nominalism as literally a landfill, a pile of trash. We read the following: “Y también hacia el alba: mi memoria, señor, es como un vaciadero de basuras”, which James Irby translates as “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap”. The absolutization of memory without oblivion and forgetting renders all the possible and imaginable names as already present, but also useless to the point that they cannot be voiced, let alone retained at a distance. The world of Funes is analogous to that of the advanced world of technology that we are currently experiencing at an accelerated pace: the so called Artificial Intelligence remembers every name and all entities as if it were picking up items from a landfill container. It does not really matter if the names picked are correctly or falsified; it is precisely that naming as such no longer has any enchantment that is only granted by the divinity of the voice. As language becomes contained as a “heap of garbage” any relation between remembrance and the human voice that for centuries had been the source of affection is eliminated. 

Exactly two decades after the publication of Ficciones (1944) in his Seminar of Le Thor, Heidegger will also take note of Heraclitus’ Fragment 124 in relation to a heap of garbage as a definition of the cosmos: “…in its complete appearing as fire, “the most beautiful ordering of all is surely comparable to a heap of randomly spilled garbage. This means that the innaparent joining together is superior to every visible ordering, even if it is the most beautiful possible (fragment 54)” [2]. The emphasis is placed on the order of the random that in its inappearance discloses appearance as order (κόσμος). Immediately Heidegger notes that the archaic notion of “world” in Heraclitus, his “heap of trash”, is radically different from the standard of the world today that secures all possible predictions and calculation, where there is room for everything insofar as every-thing is taken as an extension of energy. 

This garbage heap realizes itself through the force of “speaking” in the name of technological orderability, efficiency, and promises of economic growth. The new order of the world as trash is proportional to the slow erosion of language that in its accelerating caducity loses its capacity to remember and forget. It goes without saying that in our present, and especially in the United States, the educational and academic institutions have been at the helm in the process of facilitating this compulsive destruction of language and memory, which evidences the intimate liaison of the technician and the pedagogue in the configuration of the immonde. 

Borges’ Funes will ultimately die from a pulmonary congestion, which is a testament of death in spite of the horror of a language incapable of naming and letting go. And in his lecture, according to the transcription of one of his students, Heidegger concluded with this recommendation: “What remains essential is to continue along the same path without having concern for any of the publicness around us”. A hidden and conjured language would be the only last standing order, a keeper of truth and beauty, because unlike the machine it voices the names while also exposing itself to the possibility of forgetting them.

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Notes 

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “Funes el memorioso”, in Ficciones (Emecé, 1958), 76.

2. Martin Heidegger. “Seminar in Le Thor 1966”, in Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2012), 8.