Longing for prose. Reflections on Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Every book has a history of its own, its subterranean itineraries, and oblique paths that are only disclosed when entering in contact with its future readers. There is no question that Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) has plenty of merits that we cannot begin to elucidate. For one, it is a monograph that should be of interest to students of Latin American studies, but also to any fellow travellers wanting to confront and think through the problem of writing at the wake of the epochal crisis of the state form and the exhaustion of the historical subject. Can thinking overcome the deficiencies proper to cultural studies and populist hegemony to understand the ongoing fragmentation visible everywhere? One can start by saying that Le Calvez’s books points to a positive direction from this impasse, avoiding the shortcomings of sociological epistemology and the auratic reflexes of subaltern subjects as the master oppositional category to State form in the becoming of modernist development and global neoliberalism. In Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) the object of study is the irruption of EZLN or Zapatismo, and more specifically the scene of writing of the Zapatistas through the genealogy of their declarations, public letters, gestures, and signatures of all kinds that speak to the persistence of a writing of defacement; a scene of writing beyond the propriety of the social function of the author, and on the margins of the legitimacy of the “lettered city” of the Latin American criollo uneven modernism. In the space of this commentary, I would like to list three levels of Le Calvez’s arguments that hope will further contribute not just to the themes proper to her study, but more fundamentally to a constellation of problems that exceed Latin America as a region of studies.

First, Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) withdraws itself from understanding Zapatismo as a sociological political phenomenon of the late Mexican State, or a belated product of the shortcomings of the Mexican Revolution and its process of modernization. Unlike other studies of Zapatismo in Latin American studies Escrituras sin rostro (2025) is not invested in the restitution of new political subject of resistance in the face of global war and the anarchy of political action; rather, what is presented is the redrawing of a genealogical scene of writing subsumed by its excess and dislocation, stubbornly out of place that evidences the negativity of the collapse of the autonomous spheres of actions that once defined the apparatuses of historical development and legibility. As Le Calvez convincingly points out, the defaced and non-authored writings of the Zapataistas are neither literature nor political manifestos, and they also refuse the autonomy of literature and its incorporation into the objective ornaments of the Avant Garde projects. The defacement of writing for the Zapatistas is neither Avant Garde nor kitsch, because it is no longer interested in weighting itself on the rhetorical scale of social compartmentalization. In my terms, which are not those of Le Calvez, one could say that “escritura” or writing in this study is the vortex of flight from rhetorical submission; that is, what cuts through the enthymemes to refuse ossification and reproduction of language. The freedom of writing is always measured by the possibilities that is able to generate against rhetorical abstractions.

Secondly, because there is no justification in social or political principles, Le Calvez argues that Zapatista writing and negative gesture is a refusal of hegemony, and thus properly posthegemonic. If “escritura sin rostro” makes no demands, seeks no identification, and avoids the prefiguration of rhetorical subsumption, it means that Zapatismo openly rejects the articulatory nature of hegemony as the last avatar of the administration of identity at the end of metaphysics. As Le Calvez claims succinctly, the dispersal of writing cannot adequate itself to Laclau’s theory of hegemony and its “rhetorical foundations” of the social (Le Calvez 67-68). In this sense, posthegemony is not merely what interrupts the closure of politics in the neutralization of a new social consensus, but what transfigures language into its autographic, experiential, and faceless excess that overflows every identity and every place of enunciation. In very subtle and elegant ways, Le Calvez’s hermeneutics of the Zapatalistas’ Declaraciones confirm that the solicitation of hegemony in both discourse and political practice is an inversion, almost an hallucination in political form of the money form and the general equivalent in the historical process of real subsumption of capitalist value. If Zapatistas are indeed a “realist” political formation it is not because they parody of modern guerrillas or enact a new communal organization; the realism at its best is grounded in the capacity to discern that hegemony in the wake of end of the modern liberal state only serves to deepen the ongoing process of the capitalist utopia.

Thirdly, and more surprisingly, is the fact that Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) does not just reconstruct moments of the Zapatista inscription, it also considers its intensity to its very end. And to think something to the end means to reveal its limits, disclose its fissures, and open a site to move pass the object of reflection. This maximum point of reflection is when philological exploration outlives itself in the intensity of an uncharted path. Thus, the story that Le Calvez tells us about Zapatista writing concludes with a series of aporias and contradictions that announce a certain “decline” and eclipse of its poetic intensity. This is a moment where its poetic elevation begins to deflate; and, in its decline we are confronted a persistent drift to “civil society”, “self-critique”, the appeal to plurality of “indigenous people” (what Gareth Willimans once called “fictive ethnicity” as representational ruse), or an internationalist appeal in order to generate a “counterbalance” to global neoliberalism (Le Calvez, 106-108). And we are putting aside the nomination of Marichuy for the 2018 Mexican presidential election. Does not this recomposition of social recognition, both global and national, seek to replenish the void in representation as it appears in the third Declaración that evoked “para nosotros nada”? (Le Calvez, 93). The waning of the poetic moment of Zapatista appears to project a flickering shadow of its dependency to political movements.

Does this mean then that the “rise and fall” of Zapatismo ends in a tenuous archē embedded in the ‘movement’? In his Latinamericanism after 9/11 (2011), John Beverley projected his unfiltered Leninism towards antiquity and Ancient Christianity when stating that the central political question for our times in the face of Empire, is to find ‘who are the real Christians today’ [1]. But ideological Leninism distorts the past, since as we know well, the central question for the Christians of the Early Church of the desert, such as Origen, was not who was going to mobilize the masses in the material world, but rather in what way to retreat and avoid worldly political power [2]. Zapatistas as the new and last Christians, then? It is a tempting question, but one that will only contribute to the Leninist reduction of historical political fictions. Our times is not one for Leninism and the Vanguard Party to carry a breakthrough. But perhaps Zapatistas are residually Christians in another country way; that is; in the internal dynamics of its own language. I would like to suggest that this language can be understoodX especially in the last phase of the Declaraciones, a late rhetorical style of the sermo humilis. As Erich Auerbach has shown, the sermo humilis was the rhetorical innovation of the early Christian community at a moment of the political decadence of the Roman Empire, at the entrance of the interregnum. The sermo humilis appeals to a low or popular style, seeking legibility and pathetic understanding of the difficult mysteries of faith. The humilis also designates the ground level of the land, the humus, which elevates through the persuasion for the humble and the humiliated common men of this world [3].

In other words, the sermo humilis could be said to be a sublime of the everyday life that is refractory to the mystery. It is obvious that if we now turn to the Zapatista late writing, something like the sermo humilis codifies a symptom that is no longer the mystery of revelation, but rather in its secularized form of the revolution. Does not the sermo humilis functions as a secularized artifice to guard and elevates hopes (all too human, alas) on behalf of the “revolution” to come? However, it is precisely political revolution, just like hegemony, what cannot longer account to the effective revolutionary force of the autonomization of capital. If according to Le Calvez the formation of the Zapatista is analogous to an “artificial movement” (masa artificial) like the Church, then one could say that the rhetorical construction of the sermo humilis functions as a linguistic prayer for the revolution whose only certitude is the apophatic metaphorization in the name of the “people”, the “homeland” (la patria), or the antagonistic and oppositional “we” (nosotros), or any other compact grouping. Of course, this is the terrifying question for the sermo humilis in its secularized form: to what extend the communitarian and autonomous ideal, through its appeal to the humiliated and subaltern class, does not transform itself into an apotropeic instrument devoid of true redemption? [4].

Is writing, and witnessing through writing the practice where the possibility of redeeming human experience is lodged? This is the fundamental question that Le Calvez’s book puts forth to us as readers, without entirely coming to an effective resolution. And yet, in the last part of Escritos sin rostro (2025) seems to offer us another possibility through the writings of Cristina Rivera Garaza, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Sergio Gónzalez Rodríguez in the face of a fragmented and disarticulated social body and the night of history in which social protection and protracted civil war become indistinguishable (Le Calvez 186). This writing is no longer tailored in the Christian shops of the sermo humilis, but in an open plain where the voice becomes “un anhelo de prosa”, or a longing for prose, crossed by the finitude of being and the collapse of mediating forms of totality (Le Calvez 174).

This longing for prose as it appears in Cristina Rivera Garza’s work – in the Spanish anhelo one can also hear the echo of breathing that is constitutive of life’s exteriority with the world, to conspire – is not the letter of the law as in Hegel’s spiritual prose of the world (“in the slave prose begins”, we read in Aesthetics), but the clearing of a voice that can register the world because it speaks from the witnessing of the ruins of representaiton, and the conviction that there is no political mystery high above, but only the irreductibility of writing in spite of it all. In the shipwreck of perpetual global war, writing’s redeemable elevation is the caritas that puts us in a permanent exodus from the order of representation (Le Calvez, 186). Writing, escritura becomes the passage of the chiasmatic and breathable imagination that, because it has cleared a via poetica, it can name what can also be properly inhabited.

Notes

1. John Beverley. Latinamericanism After 9/11 (Duke University Press, 2011), 26.

2. David Nirenberg. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2014), 108.

3. Erich Auerbach. “Sermo humilis”, in Literary Language & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1993), 39.

4. Gianni Carchia. “Eros y Logos: Peitho arcaica y retórica antigua”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1990), 29.

contact dead destiny encounter ethics experience language life literature new life Nihilism Osip Mandelstam passion Roberto Bazlen song space voice writing

Bazlen’s acoustics. On Roberto Calasso’s Bobi (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Roberto Calasso’s short and epigrammatic posthumous book Bobi (Anagrama, 2026) on the opaque figure of Roberto Bazlen has just appeared in Spanish. It is a nebular autobiographical book that does not attempt to render legible the subterranean and oblique figure of Robert Bazlen, but rather to filter some of his obsessions and tonalities, many times through his own voice. Calasso is well qualified to write such book as a frequent stroller companion of the anonymous man of Trieste. There is no aura of the detective mystery about the person’s auratic psychic life, establishing a sharp contrast to Del Guiudice’s polyphonic narrative in Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983). But in this short memoir book, I am particularly intrigued by a moment when Calasso inscribes Bazlen’s vortex of thought and life as an affinity for the acoustic.

Calasso quotes Bazlen (we assume that from his own memory): “Bazlen used to say regularly: “This does not sound too good”, and immediately we knew what he meant. His capacity to recognize sound was thorough” [1]. Calasso tells us, moreover, that he cared little about cultural or intellectual polemics of his time. All that matter was sound, the grain of the voice. His meridian crossing was the song and rhythm of another. It is this proximity to the light of the voice what allowed Bazlen to conceive life and writing as a unified sensible reality; mutually interdependent, and always intertwined like the threads in a rigged tablecloth. To inhabit the world without judgement – of History, of morality, of punishment and guilt, of retribution – means to secure an aperture to an acoustics that will remain close to us, albeit incomplete, in the dissonance and impropriety of meaning.

To be able to attune oneself to the voice is a practice that retreats from the order of the world; that is, to descend into anonymity in order to inhabit a subterranean region, which speaks to Bazlen’s insistence on tugurios or spelonche, which Calasso does not hesitate to render as naked spaces, miniature deserts or caves to immunize oneself from the chatter of the world: minima chôra where something could take place or not. It is hard to define them but we know perfectly well what these are. Perhaps we can be more emphatic: to listen to the voice is already the encounter. And very much like Osip Mandelstam’s figure of the interlocutor, true poetics (and first and foremost that of life) “is ever moving toward that more or less distant, unknown addressee, whose existence the poet cannot doubt without also doubting himself. Only a reality can bring to life another reality” [2].

Bazlen’s notion of writing as the writing of life, experience as writing, very much like Mandelstam’s dialogic poetics, finds a tugurio so that language can emerge in absolute presence. And this is precisely what Bazlen understood in the becoming of life against the metabolic strain of survival, since the repression of the voice will result in the annihilation of what is most alive. Calasso recalls Bazlen’s affirmation: “In a world of death – there was an epoch where one was born alive and would later die. Today, on the contrary, one is born dead – and only a few are able, little by little, to be alive” [3].

For Bazlen there is no community of the living granted in immanence, because to live means to conquer the putrefaction of the culture of death, which is only permanent revolution and hostility. But one cannot conquer death from death; that is, by means of the beautiful soul’s literary prose of the world. It does not take Hegel to say that this is still unwarranted insubordination and permanent bondage. What is then to be alive? It is a resurrection that takes place as an existential decision, that is “at a point in life when a fundamental decision has to be made. I believe that was his passion, and his masterpiece” [4]. This is Del Giudice’s indictment, although surely not fully at odds with Calasso’s autobiographical sketch of Bazlen. In the melodic contact the possibility of a vita nuova is transfigured in not-knowing because the Western modernity is devoid of any notion of ethical destiny. Indeed, “et tout le reste est littérature”, as Verlaine famously wrote. For Calasso’s spectral portraiture in Bobbi (2026), the adventure is to remain alive well beyond completion and needs, as evidenced in our encounter with his languishing voice and memory.

Notes

1. Roberto Calasso. Bobi (Anagrama, 2026), 83.

2. Osip Mandelstam. “El interlocutor”, en Gozo y misterio de la poesía (El Cobre Ediciones, 2005), 71.

3. Roberto Calasso. Bobi (Anagrama, 2026), 55-56.

4. Daniele Del Giudice. A Fictional Inquiry (New Vessel Press, 2021), 123.

autonomy of the political Dionys Mascolo Elio Vittorini experience friendship Hölderlin humanism language literature Marguerite Duras Maurice Blanchot Robert Antelme writing

The Rue Saint-Benoît Group. Introduction for a 2024 seminar. by Gerardo Muñoz & Philippe Theophanidis.

The Rue Saint-Benoît Group, organized by Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme, and Dionys Mascolo and other fellow-travelers of the interwar years can hardly be defined as a political movement, a literary school, nor an intellectual community with a direct orientation or aesthetic program. In fact, the Saint-Benoît Group (transnational in its composition) understood itself as a shared experience of thought that gravitated under the words of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “The life of the mind among friends, thought is formed in the exchange of the written word and for those who seek”. It is also known that Hölderlin was the quintessential poet dwelling in the fracture between tradition and modernity, the flight of the gods and the eclipse of the poetic in the wake of a consummated technological Prometheism. To affirm Hölderlin’s words entails to confront the difficult questions of language and the voice as conditions for thought. How can we think of an intellectual experience in which friendship becomes inseparable from thought; and, at the same time, when thought becomes a condition for the endurance of friendship? And to what extent could this double register allow for a reinvention of the autonomy of politics in the wake of the crisis of Humanism?

These are the enduring questions that the experiential setting of the Saint-Benoît Group bequeaths to us today. If the Saint-Benoît experience has remained opaque and invisible even within monumental historiographic narratives of twentieth-century ideas, it is because only seldom have these problems been rightly posed. Under the sign of a “friendship of thought” – a transfigurative plane that immediately resonates with the immaterial common intellect, the Heideggerian incursion on the task of thinking, and the revival of a sensible Platonism – the members of the Saint-Benoît Group witnessed the catastrophe of modern politics in real time; such as, although not limited to, the concentration camp, the postcolonial wars of liberation, communist totalitarianism, and the exhaustion of the fundamental categories of political Liberalism. Taking distance from the elaboration of a normative political theory, the Saint-Benoît Group favored the heterogeneity of stylistic endeavors and expressive acts in order to grapple with the crisis of experience. And it is to their specific scenes of writing that we must attend to in a systematic and careful way.

In this eight-week course we will explore the diversity of the writings of the group, including figures such as Dionys Mascolo, Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Elio Vittorini and other fellow-travelers to explore questions concerning the nexus between experience and creation (both of us have worked on some of these writers intermittently in the past couple of years). To the extent that we still live among the ruins of the legitimacy of modern politics, the contestatory style of Saint-Benoît Group still raises the question about the human species within our civilizational collapse.

What type of authority emerges from their writings, communication, and imagination of a fractured humanity? And how could the concept of ‘revolution’ be transformed from its moral and technical elaborations that hegemonized the twentieth century? We are aware that the Saint-Benoît Group has no “lesson” to be extracted and made “actual”; rather, we are interested in what we would call a “gesture of thinking” that prepares the condition for a life in freedom within and beyond the contours of the polis.

*For those interested in registering for the eight week seminar beginning in February 2024, please consider signing up at 17/instituto de estudios críticos: https://17instituto.org, or by writing to extension@17edu.org.