Mystery

The vanishing horse. On Federico Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Federico Galende’s most recent essay El mínimo animal (ediciones metales pesados, 2025) is freestyle mediation on the singular animal that is the horse. When we say ‘horse’ we immediately dispense a bulky package: it is Pech Merle cave paintings and Franz Marc; it is Kafka’s parable of the racing red Indian, the agonizing horse in Picasso’s Guernica, as well as Juan José Saer’s mutilated horses in Nadie Nada Nunca (1980). Galende’s tiny mare, however, is first and foremost a memory of his childhood in the green grasslands of Córdoda that, we are told, had a big white spot in her muzzle. The first pages are spectacularly bucolic in a sedative language that retrieves a descriptive pollination of events and figures. But immediately the book gains depth and surprising detours. Galende notes that the relationship between humans and the horse differents slightly from that of pets, not as a question of scale, but primarily as complicity in language that shares the solitude between species: “…porque la del animal es una compania ofrecido a la soledad de lo humano en cuanto especie” (Galende 23). Avoiding the humanist temptation that makes the animal into a fantasy of the human, Galende’s situates the horse an experience beyond language. Is not this common solitude – that a few pages before Galende refers just in passing as ‘nocturnal communism’, in an esoteric allusion to his book on the cinema of Akis Kaurimakis – what has been usurped by the total domestication of species in a world that walks towards extinction? Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025) is an exercise in retrieving this innocence abode of man and animal in their reciprocal, and yet intransigent, mutation between worlds.

As a painterly writer, Galende is in full awareness that he must first interrupt the heraldic density of this animal. Because we know that the horse is an emblem of St. Paul’s way Damascus as much as it is one of modernity’s energy and mobilization. Galende is quite aware of it: the notion of “horse power” registers the unity of measurement of potential power for engines and motors. And just like the steamboat and gaslight, the horse stands a figure that unleashed a civilization defined by development and domestication of the world. The horse entered history through the main door of modern spiritualization (Galende does not elaborate on Napoleon’s famous horseback riding entrance in Germany, avoiding an image that is perhaps too obvious, already “manoseada”), allowing for social stabilization and homogenous time; the arrow of progress that underpins subjective historical consciousness. Galende writes, for instance: “De ser una masa abstracta que rodea la tierra, el espacio se convertía en una línea delgada, con la historia estirando un hilo la materia cósmica de la simultaneidad. Ahora, gracias al caballo, se tenía acceso a los lugares más retirados, solo que a causa de la velocidad de se los pasaba por alto de modo que lo que hasta allí había reinado de la imaginación comenzó a ser parte de lo accesorio, de lo circunstancial” (Galende 82). 

The unification of the planet under the nomoi of depredation would not have been possible without the domestication of the horse to coerce the acceleration of time as the index over space. As a cypher of time, the horse started to pop up everywhere progress made a violent incursion. This is perhaps why Galende, in a poetic style that seeks no conceptual scaffolding for self-assertion, claims that in its mystery the horse is not embedded in an ideal of freedom – which will be the freedom already fallen prey to the tribulations of civilization and the political world – as being in the world as such, without the pretensions of overcoming it; remaining a witness to permanent discontent in the open distance of some meadows (Galende 61). Can a notion of freedom be rethought from the figure of the horse at the end of history? Galende does not provide an answer, and his muteness is an attempt to resist transforming the horse into an apodictic symbolon of human anthropology transpiring meaning where there is none. The horse – and perhaps all animals are – stands for muteness and companionship without the burden of proof.

Perhaps the ultimate meaning in El mínimo animal (2025) can only be grasped in those silences, in what remains unthought and unsaid, which is another way of saying that Galende has provided the essay not only of form but of a soul. All things considered, the mystery of horse is a passing memory of the modern: speed, total mobilization, energy dispensation, the unity of a compact and legible world. What remains of the horse after the watershed of modern times; literally its exhaustion? Ultimately, the horse as species recalls the “specio”, which means to see, and to have the visibility for discernment; to be able to see with a sensible eye that blushes at the world before it crumbles into despair and conflagration at the threshold of the Anthropocene. And in many ways we are already there. Galende’s musings speak to an abundance trimmed by a trotting horse that only reappears in a poetizing that is capable of thinking and loving what has passed, like the epoch of horses. For Galende the horse is thus always sub specie aeternitatis. Towards the end of the book, and condensing Gottfried Benn’s argument on style as ranking higher than truth, Galende makes an open apology for appearance, that is rigorously eternal because it is concrete and unforgettable (Galende 91). 

Of course, the same can be said of Galende’s serpentine, courteous light prose – like a horse, that is, “una elegancia contenida” – that refuses the monumental and sterile retrievals of sedimented and dusty knowledge on the horse or any other animal (Galende 43). In this sense, Galende’s horse differs fundamentally from Blumenberg’s lion in its refusal to make of the species an anthropological metaphor, that is, a mere creed for the human bonum commune to stabilize social reality. Departing from the offerings of a meandering memory, Galende’s tiny animal is a vanishing horse that interrogates what it means to inhabit the space of non-relation that opens up when the modern scheme based on production, progress, and energy comes a halt. It is this “nothingness” what the vanishing horse reveals beyond itself, as Galende writes:

“Retirándose, el caballo le estaba advirtiendo a todo el siglo XX que la historia de retira con ellos y el mundo también, y todo lo que siguio 4 después de que por inercia ese siglo hiciera desfilar frente a sus narices las profecías más disparatadas…Pero no esperar nada no significa estar consciente de no esperar; puede ser al revés, que la nada sea una intersección invisible entre un sinfín de velocidades insustanciales. La aceleración de la vida – para decir lo con una expresión manoseada -…sirve para compensar este vacío que dura…” (Galende 87). 

In the stretched historicity of boredom and nothingness, memory awaits and assaults like an incoming galloping horse. And when Galende speaks of the “nothingness” that mediates between the temporalities of human action he is indexing the fabric of life; since authentic life only happens, as Don Delillo claims at the opening lines of Point Omega (2011) not when words have been spoken or inventions patented, but in the self-awareness of microscopic fragments of facticity. It is at this moment, when history unravels as a farcical script of putative norms of human action, and imagination can begin to gather species outside itself; in this way, perhaps once and for all, leaving behind the atrophies of nihilism already deposited in a language of strange instruments and recyclable data.

Just like Marguerite Duras’ Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), where the Etruscan sculpture of a winged horse fails to enter the plot of a community of friends at a beach-town; Galende’s horse also disappears in the concluding pages of the book. In fact, there are two disappearances: first, the equestrian statue of Baquedano in Plaza Italia after the October social revolt of 2019; and, more importantly, that of his childhood mare in the hills of Córdoba. The vanishing horse at the limit of prose recalls the reality of the living for which there is no tropology: “…nunca conocí a ese ser, así como no es possible – nunca jamás – conocer a los seres ni tampoco el fin de ninguna historia” (Galende 110). As the horse makes his exit, we can only be sure that life has taken place elsewhere. Only because it has been transfigured in thought, Galende is able to seize a glimpse of it; a glimpse that is imperceptible and diluted before vanishing forever.

Florenski/Schmitt, 1922. by Gerardo Muñoz

The legend of modern political theology is well known, and it has received extensive research and documentation. Less so is the legend of the theology of the visible as it relates to the problem of liturgy. For some time now some of us have pondered on a curious historical coincidence: the fact that in 1922 Pavel Florenski and Carl Schmitt, two epigonal figures that confronted head on Western modernity with its theological substratum, wrote parallel texts with strong positions regarding the same problem. I am of course referring to “The liturgy as a synthesis of the arts” (1922), and Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1922). From the strictly philological point of view, even the genesis of these two programmatic texts have a parallel development that go back to 1918, as can be seen in Schmitt’s only theological text entitled “The visibility of the Church” and Florenski’s “The reverse perspective”.

Why would two distinct thinkers confront the theological-pictorial in this specific historical dispensation of Western secularization? And, why does liturgy in the early twentieth century become a central problem for thought well beyond the walls of the Church and its ministries? What are the relations and divergences between theologia and visibility in the wake of the rise of European nihilism? If we press on the year 1922, it begs to ask why the problem of the “synthesis of arts” – theology as nothing more than the visible and a mode of seeing, to put it in Florenski’s own words – becomes so medular in European thought; and, under what conditions this emerges, given that already since the time of Johannes Vermeer, as Gregor Weber and Daniel Arasse have studied, the theological was already a fundamental topological injunction of specular understanding. These are questions that we hope to elucidate by closely examining  both texts side by side with the working hypothesis that the theos – not theology as a science of Church dogmatics, which has little interest in the wake of the death of the unitary God, heis theos – but rather as a topological or choratic expression of facticity, as well as mediation with the disclosure of the world. 

Almost parallel to the developmental height of the autonomy of art, it seems that both Schmitt and Florenski sought to come to terms in their own ways with the lagging energy of a specific topos of the theological trace: liturgy. It is then our task while reading these texts to ask why did liturgy become the site of inscription necessary to render legible the mediation, and possible transfiguration, of the theological as a first order question for the West. If theologian Laurence Hemming in Worship as a Revelation: The Past Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy (2008) is correct in saying that our age sees everything in terms of manufacture and efficacy mimicking the notion of “sacred worship” in liturgy, it becomes necessary for us today to understand the theological assumptions, as well of the possibilities, of the theos and the mystery at the very granular level of desecularization.

We thus propose a minor pictorial-theological legend of 1922 between Florenski and Schmitt – that is also that of the proximity and separation between East and West, theology and the pictorial, the visible and the invisible, revelation and authority – that could shed light on some of these concerns that continue to nourish discussions that have yet to find its proper treatment and productive assessment.

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*This short text is meant as a working hypothesis for a forthcoming reading / study on Florenski/Schmitt and the question of the pictorial and liturgy set to begin in November 2025.

God behind painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

In one of the glosses in Marginalia on theology, Erik Peterson provides a remarkable pictorial image of thought of death and resurrection through the activity of washing a bowl. Peterson writes: “When washing a dirty dish, our thoughts may turn to the dead, to the dead as a genus, as an inferior genus that perhaps unconsciously influences our actions, as angels and demons do in another way. This probably happens because the dead have something in common with dirty, unclean dishes. Imagine this cleanliness however you like: perhaps we can say that death as such is an act of purification. To think of death in this way, endowed among things – like a bowl – gleam just like the voice of god in the bush” [1]. It is a fragment where Peterson comes closest to the specific nature of painting: what is painting if not the transference of muteness to the gleaming of the visible that opens before our very eyes? And like the divine voice in the bush in Exodus, what does it take to grasp and see the divine between or behind a dirty bowl as it lays on our hands? If washing a dirty dish entails receiving the dead in our thought, the passive act of painting seems always to lay a claim about the mystery of presence outside language. 

If I elevate Peterson’s remarks to a terrain that the one that he intended, is connected to two Vermeer’s pictures exhibited these days at the Frick Collection gathered around the theme of “letter writing”. In both pictures there is a lady seating at a table drafting a letter – one of them has already concluded it fully attentive to the visitor on her right side; the other a maid gazes at an open window  – but what is always unnerving in Vermeer’s work is the sense of the ineffable and impenetrable in the disclosure of the picture (an exposure that that is usually aided by a side curtain that welcomes us in). What is this impenetrable divinity that lurks in Vermeer picture in pure presence? Although we do not have a name for it, it is like the god that dwells in the dirty bowls or in the nocturnal bushes of Peterson’s gloss.

The painting does not speak in revealing, it only bear witness of the absolute fall of language as it becomes imperturbable in the picture. Contesting the vulgar interpretations on Vermeer’s Catholic conversion in Delft, Daniel Arasse notes that the vortex of his pictorial theology is bounded to the threshold in which images become alive (in the tradition of au vif) outside itself: “Vermeer’s painting are constructed such a way as tho render this life equally present inaccessible, near and impenetrable. What is seen is not a crete of nature observed, but a mystery within the painting itself” [2]. In Vermeer’s pictures, presence and the invisible collapse not through the inception of a metaphor of nature, but rather through the painting’s light when it casts a shadow beyond any instance of closure.

This is why in Vermeer’s paintings surfaces mandate an order of theatrical presence, while simultaneously making room for a perturbance that is forever barred from the conceptual. Unlike Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers”, Vermeer’s pictures are not endowed by the mysterious force of an alienated nature that man can measure and master; rather, the mystery resides in the whispering of the invisible that cosigns the amoris causa of the appearance of painting. If for Peterson what gleams in the dirty bowl is the cleansing of resurrection; what befalls Vermeer’s pictures can only be understood as the faith in the painterly emergence of appearance dependent on the path opened by its light.

The question of god as appearance is always posited as a challenge to the meaning of reality as totality no longer as what emerges in the open, but as what which retracts lagging behind. And we know that only appearance is seductive enough to stand for faith well beyond the fact of being visible [3]. Hence, a way to supreme subtlety of painting (picturae summa subtilitas): no longer a matter of perspective and contour, but of the mysterious indiscernibility that mounts depth between vision and the divinity of presence.

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Notes 

1. Erik Peterson. “Fragmentos”, in Tratados Teológicos (Ediciones Cristiandad, 1966), 251-252.

2. Daniel Arasse. Vermeer: Faith in Painting (Princeton University Press, 1994), 75.

3. Consider Heidegger’s response to a question in the Zurich Seminar, 1951: “If I were yet to write a theology then the word ‘being’ would not be allowed to occur in it. Faith has no need of the thinking of being. If faith has recourse to it, it is already not faith. I believe that being can never be thought as the ground of God”. Séminare de Zurich (Paris, 1980), 60-61.

Antelme’s smiling angel of Rheims. by Gerardo Muñoz

Among Robert Antelme’s posthumous writings the short text “L’ange au sourire” has a decisive place if we are to explain the transfigured theological experience of the French writer. To anyone familiar with French  architecture history the title should sound familiar, since the ‘l’ange au sourire’ was already a common expression used by French scholars of architecture during the interwar years. Charles Sarazin, arguably the most important scholar of the architecture of Reims, penned a separata titled “Le Sourire de Reims” (1929), in which he celebrated the mysterious smile of the angel Gabriel that was severely damaged due to shell fire of the Cathedral during the fall of 1914 [1]. But a decade prior to the destruction, art historian Arthur Gardner, in a detailed essay on the sculptures of the facade of the Rheims Cathedral, also took note of this angel’s gaze writing that: “…the angel Gabriel of the Annunciation in which the French smile has almost become a grin, the beginning of the contorted expressions frequently found over the border in Germany.” [2]. The particular aspect of this unique angel’s face that Antelme undresses from the cloak of authority is also wonderfully documented in the photographic book by Pierre Antony-Thouret, who also showed pictorial interest in the way that angel Gabriel was chipped in a large area of the right frontal relief (image 1) [3]. 

Image 1. Reims au lendemain de la guerre (1928), plate 52.

This curatorial context informs the historical background of Antelme’s reference to destruction and what he references as the crushed: “But not crushed by this building, or by that event, or by some power. It has always been crushed, crushed forever” [4]. For Antelme the tenuous, almost imperceptible, smile of the Angel of Rheims is what outlives absolute destruction because to be destroyed cannot be executed absolutely. It is the soul of existence that, because of its exteriority to history, is powerless “to have forever to be”.  Even if this being has become petrified and immobile from its original plastic appearance auf vif of sacred art. This is what Malraux captured in his brief mention of the  “L’ange au sourire” in The Voices of Silence (1951), where he also compares it to the Buddhist faces of Oriental sacred art (image 2): “The Smiling Angel of Rheims is a statue whose “stiffness” increased with every century; but at its birth it was a similar incarnate, a face that had suddenly come alive – like all faces sponsoring a discovery in the field of the lifelike” [5]. In order words, to see in the muteness of the face the nothingness that allows expressive relations to emerge in the open. This holds for Antelme’s description as well: “Radiant or hidden, inevitably it is there. Word, image, music: everything expresses it, and nothing. It lies at the heart of that realm where all relations are born. Forever starting anew. Possessing nothing, capable of nothing, it must be there, forever”. 

Image 2. Angel of Rheims in The Voices of Silence (1964).

But what Antelme was able to capture through the smiling angel of the Rheims Cathedral was not a problem of iconology of art forms, but rather the very essence of the theological problem of angels as it relates to the poetics of life itself. The angel is not a promythical figure scaled to a specific historical moment, but an instantiation of the divine appeals to the withdrawal the possibilities and modes of the human being. This is why Antelme can state that “the only transcendence is the relation between beings”. Even in its muteness, the theologica depth of the angel is the poetic speech of divinity through a surge in language that has no end, but only celebration or hymnology.

This is why Erik Peterson writes towards the end of  “The Book of Angels” about the intimate relation of angels in human existence: “A human being can draw near to the angels because the angel too – as its name already indicates – can draw near to humanity. […] The angels are more than poetic ornamentation left from the storehouse of popular fables, they belong to us. For us, they stand for a possibility of our being, a heightening and intensifying of our being – but for the possibility of a new faith…as a passion for mental clarity and an authentic existence” [6]. It is fair to say that, although the figure of the angel does not show again in Antelme’s work, all of his vision and witness accounts in the face of political horror must be placed in the endless vigil of a nocturnal life that is shared with the ethos of angels (utirur vigilis, angelorum vitam procul dubio meditatur). 

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Notes 

1. Charles Sarazin. “Le Sourire de Reims” (s.l.n.d, 1929). 

2. Arthur Gardner. “The sculptures of Rheims Cathedral”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, V.26, 1914, 64.

3. Pierre Antony-Thouret. Reims au lendemain de la guerre: la cathédrale mutilée, la ville dévastée (Jean Budry, 1928). 

4. Robert Antelme. Textes inédits sur l’Espèce humaine (Gallimard, 1996), 14.

5. Andre Malraux. The Voices of Silence (Secker & Warburg, 1964), 317. 

6. Erik Peterson. “The Book of Angels”, in Theological Tractates (Stanford University Press, 2011), 139.

Worldly animism. Prologue to Josep Rafanell i Orra’s Spanish Edition of Petit traité de cosmoanarchisme (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Anyone somewhat familiar with the writing of Josep Rafanell i Orra knows that we are in the company of a wanderer and itinerant in an infinite pursuit of what the experiences of worlds might offer [1]. A mad endeavor for a groundless epoch oriented towards planetary reduction and confinement, so obsessed with infrastructure and security, most recently through the reiteration of the politico-theological program of national sovereignty, one more desperate reaction to unrestrained planetary decline. We can say with Hölderlin that we are vagabonds in a destitute time, a poet who figures prominently at the entrance of Josep’s Traité. In our posthistorical epoch we are confronted with the thicket over the dominion of life, which means that the question of exteriority becomes pressing as existence enacts a path beyond the endless rubble of representation bestowed upon the human species in every point of the globe.

The book that the Spanish reader now holds in his hands thanks to Luciole Ediciones will immediately let in a dimming light of a singular style or maniera that dislocates the modernist assumptions of political thought into what one could what I am willing to name an analytics of sensible hybridizations between languages and thought. This analytic of the sensible refuses immediately Social normativity as well as the melancholic hangovers of the modern revolutionary tradition (always caught up between constituent and constituted power, representation and humanism, growth and production). This is why Josep will redefine communism as the nonprogramatic event that irrupts through hybridization of surrounds and regions capable of overcoming the ontotheological adequation of subject and object that has led an entire civilization astray (33). The project of the critique of metaphysics finds in Josep’s Traité a powerful schematic cartography that raises questions precisely in those spaces where the rationality of the science of political economy has never dared to enter. 

If the critical projects of High Modernity were fundamentally temporal (including that of Messianism and its overemphasized trance towards absolute immanentization), Josep’s writing also has the virtue of displacing the focus to the spatial formation and the thinking of the creation of spaces understood as dwelling, once populated by the gods of the events and which modern ontotheology obliterated through integrated objectivation and technological positionality. We know that the greatest nearness of the last god eventuates only when the event is elevated into refusal, especially when it manages to become too near [2]. As a shorthand, this drift towards objectification in the liquidation of modern politics is domination of the Social totality; ultimately, it is through the plasticity of the social bond that the reproduction of biopolitical life is temporalized, legally ordered, and rhetorically subsumused into an apparatus of predatory accumulation. It is the Social (not the State, or this or that concept of the modern grammar of political thought, or even fascism) that we must refuse. The collapse of the modern secular state and its moral guarantees, is the beginning of an autonomized social bond that now coincides with the total administration of world forms. The hegemony of the Social reduction is what allows Josep to claim that the opposition is no longer between Society and the State; but rather between community as a process and praxis against the static formation of the Social. Thinking today drifts from social domination to communities of encounters, heteronomic relations, communication, and interdependence in a web that characterizes the exotic movement of the imaginative possibilities of exteriority for manifold worlds. 

The notion of community in Josep’s thinking is neither about ecstatic groups or “little platoons” of identitarian belonging (as once famously defined by Edmund Burke); nor referring to filiation and propriety reductions that can subsist quite nicely under the heatwaves of the ongoing conflagrations of Empire. For Josep communities insofar as they are exposed to their excess (ubermass) are processes of external contact between souls as rites of passages. The community is formless, and in this sense it ceases to be a problem of Chistological stereology in order to become one in the order of ethics and language (50). In this sense, very much like the late Mario Tronti looking at the collapse of the modern revolutionary experiment; for Josep the ruinous fragmentation of the worlds has a silver lining: that all human, and non-human, souls are dwelling on the outside world calling for worldiness, and thus potentially sharing a sense of intimacy that re-enchants the appearance and knowability of the world through the invisible attunement to the outside (un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro) [3]. 

Beyond the subject and the narcissism of the Ego, the light of a “spark of the soul”, in the words of Meister Eckhart’s memorable sermon, a new animism returns not because there is a transcendental revelation to be asserted, but because the encounter between souls brings forth the concatenation of worlds that are entangled with other worlds (68). If Jünger described the epoch of planetary machination as “soul murder” (seleenmord) it was because there was no longer any contact with the unfathomable opacity between the soul and any possible worlds [4]. Josep with an elegant mannerist style enhances this intuition: “We are no longer exiles on Earth, as the romantic moment freighted by the loss of world. We ended up forcing the Earth into exile after so many deadly abstractions (108). The modern age has not ceased accumulating abstractions against the human species until becoming a whirlwind of soul murdering that has extended into the current ecocide of the worlds.

It does not come as a surprise that throughout Petit traité de cosmoanarchisme (2023) Josep appears more than skeptical about political critique (and to say skeptical might be an understanding). There is a clear imperative that is mobilized in the book and that it should not be taken for granted: political critique should evolve into the negation and abandonment of politics, which also includes the always anachronistic anarchist politics. We know that ever since the Greek polis the autonomy of politics partition and distribution was waged against the incommensurable topos of the chora, the ungovernable and infrapolitical hinterland of the new substantive community of rights and obligations posited by the logistics of representation [5]. As we know, this is what forced Heraclitus to resolutely remain playing knucklebones in the temple of Artemis: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the polis?” [6]. The knucklebones of the ancient anecdote of the presocratic philosopher is symbolic to what Josep demands of existence: the liberation of environments and surrounds for multiplicities of experiences. The experience of gaming always starts in the middle, expressing the ineffable ethics of how I become what I am already on my way of becoming (142). The maximization of politics into the very thicket of life (this is biopolitical administration) have increasingly defaced the experiential practice of existence that now extends over the course of the historical dispensation of civilization. This is the vortex of the struggle against the realist validations in the interregnum. 

Against and beyond the force of abstraction and the prison of individuality, Josep situates the stakes: “It is there, where the fierce struggle we can lead today: to find the intimacy of our soul in the welcome of other souls to hear their silences and their voices. To participate in the animation of the world is to perceive the outside. And gently find the inside of the outside” (145). And between the process of the community and the soul there is no longer struggle or enmity, but only solvent philia; the influx of creation that, insofar was enmeshed in solitude, allows pain to speak in the time of transition, in the skirmishes between worlds. Ultimately, the experience of the itinerant is not that of learning to live in places; rather, it is the one that intensively yearns the presence of encounters. This remains the only ethopoetic imperative [7]. As Carlo Diano observed in an erudite study on the notion of the chora, the attunement of the soul with the world is not a conceptual entelechy; it runs materially through the sensorium of this body as it traverses the world towards its renewal [8]. To grasp this chiasmic region that dispenses the harmony of the soul as it flees the prison gates of an objective world, is the enduring letter and spirit that Petit traité grants to the ongoing task of thought. 

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Notes

1. Gerardo Muñoz. “Escuchar las llamadas del mundo: diálogo con Josep Rafanell i Orra”, Disenso: Revista de Pensamiento Político, N.3, July 2020, 134-158. 

2. Martin Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2012), 329.

3. Mario Tronti writes in “Disperate speranze” (2019): “È necessario trovare un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro. Io posso farlo nel solo modo in cui so farlo: tirando l’arco al punto che permette di cogliere il bersaglio più raggiungibile. Realistica visione.”. CRS, October 2019: https://centroriformastato.it/disperate-speranze/ 

4. Ernst Jünger. The Forest Passage (Telos Press, 2003), 93.

5. Julien Coupat. “Dialogo con i morti”, in Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019). 

6. Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic (Bloomsbury, 2018).

7. Josep Rafanell i Orra. Fragmenter le monde (Divergences, 2020), 70.

8. Carlo Diano. “Il problema della materia in Platone: la chora del Timeo”, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, V.1, 1970, 335.

Introduction to José Bergamín’s For Nothing in the World (1937). by Gerardo Muñoz

The essay “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, by Spanish poet and essayist José Bergamín, should be read as a wartime reflection on the historical impasse of the Spanish Civil War. First published in Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic journal Esprit in the 1937 April issue, the essay in its final version featured in Bergamín’s Mexican exile collection Detrás de la cruz: terrorismo y persecusión religiosa en España (Lucero, 1941). While on the surface Bergamín is responding to the struggle between secular political anarchism and traditionalist Spanish Catholicism intertwined at the heart of the civil war, the essay is also highly idiosyncratic in laying out the poet’s theological vision that permeates his entire body of work, and which can already be found, in nuce, in the fragments and aphorisms of his first book El cohete y la estrella (Índice, 1923). “Reality is the spirit, imagination, and thought…there is religiosity when it claims space positively”, he would write in the first pages of that book. 

The 1937 essay, along with his defense of illiteracy in “Decadadencia del analfabetismo” (1933), Bergamín argues for a living theology of the Spanish people (pueblo) that is neither imperial nor clerical, but rather always an excess to the imperial political theology that dominated the long historical narrative of Spanish modernity since the Reconquista. It was thanks to Bergamín’s genius that Catholicism appears connected to a habitual form of life of everyday people, their shared language, symbols, and experiences; and, ultimately the common imagination that grants them access to the world through the mystery of living and dying. In fact, as in “Decadencia” (1933), it is important to highlight the centrality of the term “pueblo”, which although translated as “people”, it coincides neither with the “People” of the unity of civil society nor the common historical identity of the Nation. For Bergamín, these determinations, in fact, were corrupted notions of pueblo. The pueblo is always the event that remains from the abstraction of political theology, and always pueblo minoría, a ‘minor people’ that dwells in the house of God within and beyond the mundane. This is why Bergamín would claim in the text that the pueblo is always ancilla mundi. In this light, Bergamín thought that political anarchism incapable of a revelation to the divine, and an imperial Church in charge of the administration of the “nothingness”, were two poles of the same vectorial force of modern nihilism. That was the color of his corruptio optimi pessima with clear echoes of Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris. 

In “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, Bergamín’s theological position emerges as a third way to exit this historical poverty of relating to the theos. As Giorgio Agamben observes in a 1973 entry of Quaderni (Quodlibet, I, 2024, 46-47), for Bergamín the divine entails a corporeal cohabitation of a demon and an angel that expresses appearance of life, and thus the sensible and poetic mediation with the world of forms. In this sense, Bergamín’s theology differs fundamentally from the rational and canonical traditions, fostering the sensorial path of dramatic and divine beauty. This goes to the kernel of the 1937 essay: the rise of the Totalizing State (historical Fascism), was a corrupting form of theos insofar as it aimed at regulating the “nothingness” against the possibility of appearance and truth. But the word of God and the angelic hymns linger in the time of wreckage and devastation in its impatient drift towards anger in the world, which is still very much our own. Ultimately, Bergamín was convinced that the pueblo’s mute voice, resurfacing from the depths of pain, could dodge the abysmal fall into the tribulations of radical evil always too congenial with the survival of ‘this world’.

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* This gloss was written to accompany the English translation of Bergamín’s “Por nada del mundo” forthcoming at New Personalism, summer 2025. 

Nuclear deterrence and Christian silence. by Gerardo Muñoz

Almost at the end of the Cold War, arguably the most important natural law jurist of the West, John Finnis, published a very acrimonious and provocative essay in dialogue with the Christian theological morality and dogmatic tradition entitled “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988). In many respects, this essay speaks volumes to our present, but it also solicits new questions around limits that have been severely traspassed in the current atomic age headed towards extinction. It is worth noting that from the outset, Finnis reminds us how a fellow Catholic liberal theologian, Jacques Maritain in a lecture of 1955, claimed with surprising conviction that “America is today the area in the world in which…the notion of Christian-inspired civilization is more part of the national heritage than any other spot-on earth. If there is any hope for the sprouting of a new Christendom in the modern world, it is in America…” [1]. If this sounds completely analogous to the current program of “national conservatism” that today animates American political elites, defined by the ruthless attempt at the convergence of instrumental Christian vocation and political imperium, it is because these prophetic words have been thoroughly realized. 

Finnis does not hesitate to put his thumb on the theological monstrosity maintained by Maritain at mid century – although he does not say it explicitly, it is a concrete restitution of imperial Eusebianism decades before denounced by Erik Peterson in his famous essay on political monotheism – that by accepting nuclear deterrence as a form of uncontested ‘minor evil’ in face of the Soviet menace Christians were endorsing heretic positions at odds with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. As Finnis argues, the logical structure itself of nuclear deterrence, precisely due to its affirmative promise to exclude “target populations”, fails to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants in an endgame that promises the potential massacre of innocent human beings [2]. This means, first and foremost, that nuclear deterrence (as well as its new preventive forms that have become normalized among global hegemonic powers) terrorize human communities as a direct public act of forthcoming devastation [3]. 

Even though Finnis does not stop to reflect about the notion of “public act”, it is very clear that this action, insofar as it is a linguistic act, aims at the effective cancellation of the possibilities of language and communication. Nuclear deterrence and proliferation are instruments that speak publicly, and that by doing so, it contributes to the atrophy of human language. As a rebuttal to Maritain’s celebratory artificial gnosis, Finnis sees in the language of nuclear deterrence coincides with the language of ‘utopia’ as a new absolutization of morality. This means that Maritain’s philosophical error – which Finnis calls the “theologian’s position”, since it also implicates an official sector of the Church – is to abandon practical reason of allocated goods (including human life) in the name of a comprehensive aim of building a civilizational “Christendom” coupled in a national community [3]. But whoever fully identifies the spiritual-providential realm with the political-legislative order is already at the mercy of an utopian project embedded in the sacrificial structure promoted by nuclear deterrence.

Towards the end of his essay, Finnis laments (implicitly repeating Karl Barth’s well-known 1930s essay but in an opposite direction) that the relationship between Church and State from the point of view of the atomic age and nuclear deterrence has now been completely altered. From now on, the atomic age demands a Christian vocation based on conscience. Specifically, Finnis calls for a position of refusal and minoritarian observance against the general options of radical evil: “The choice to reverence human life by refusing to participate in public choices to destroy it, is thus a choice is material of the Kingdom and has real and truly lasting effects…even when worldly wisdoms understand it only as a choice of greater evil’ [4]. And citing Cardinal Ratzinger, Finnis endorses the position of Christians as “belonging to a minority” finding courage in nonconformity within the normative order of social space [5]. The Finnis-Ratzinger’s position was still oriented by a Catholic commitment to dogmatics and public reason and virtue, which depends on the luminosity of the subject of religion. 

But the objection of conscience is a subjective reduction of modern secularization. In this sense, it might be pertinent to compare Finnis’ position to Ivan Illich’s own stance in the wake of nuclear testing in Germany in the 1980s, which he witnessed in “horrified silence…in order to make the horror visible” [6]. For Illich, who had come to see the triumph of civilizational mysterium iniquitatis in the institutional deformity of the conspiratio of the human species towards controlled subjectivity (conjutario) amounting to “intolerable realities”. The language of Christian prophecy is not the same as the language of silence, because only in the second we can become witnesses through the voice of pain and experience, because pain can uplift a contact with the world without redemption. As Illich made clear in his text “The Eloquence of Silence”, it is through the condition of silence that the word can become flesh and prepare a new life. It is very telling that in a later footnote to the essay in the 2011 edition, Finnis appears doubtful about the religious ground stating that: “Over twenty years later, the unsatisfactory state of Catholic teaching on the matter remains just as it was in 1988” [7]. What changed? At the end of the eighteenth century Novalis had noted that for any orientation of public reason in the West to materialize there needs to be a substrate of the divine mystery, but this is precisely the substrate that desecularization has effectively untied and obliterated from the public. A public where general annihilation percolates without restraints.

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Notes 

1. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), in Religion and Public Reasons, Collected Essays: Volume V (Oxford University Press, 2011), 

2. Ibid., 280. 

3. Ibid., 286-287.

4. Ibid., 288.

5. Ibid., 289.

6. David Cayley. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journal (The Penn State University Press, 2021), 80. 

7. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), 290. 

Prados Such’s Dormido en la yerba (1953). by Gerardo Muñoz

Emilio Prados Such’s postwar book Dormido en la yerba (1953), long out of print since its publication, is the most clear and straightforward literary document of a poetic voice that stands as one of the foremost attempts at thinking the nexus of existence to the divine in the tradition of the twilight of the gods. Dormido en la yerba (1953), albeit its direct Lucretian overtone, does not enact a metaphoric appeal of a return to the physis of nature; rather for Prados, to dwell, imagine, and inhabit language is only possible in coexistence with the caducity of the natural world including life itself. In the poem that names the book, “Dormido en la yerba”, Prados writes that “La vida se te va / y tu te duermes sobre la hierba”, at first sight claim on appearance that seems to endorse the tempus fugit motif of the Spanish Renaissance verse. However, the temporal course in the poem is immediately redirected to a mysterious proximity that befalls existence in nature’s shadows, plunging the voice into the depth of the abyss that colors the caducity in a place. At this point, we note that Prado’s poetics is traversed by a mystical register that transfigures the temporal continuum with that of making of space that is eternal because it has neither end nor beginning. 

It is in this sense that Emilio Prados’ theological drift in his poetry is neither about making transcendence palpable through the animation of the world; nor does it imply the absolute immanence of the divine presence towards a new reenchantment of the world. The status of the liberated theos in Prados, like in the mythic understanding of the platonic “gods of place” (theos aisthetos), is an event that can only take place once existence is attuned to the minuscule surrounding of the world. This means that there is never a “God” as a matter of a divine economy that orients a moral predicament; rather, as Maria Zambrano argued in an essay on his work, Prados’ instantiation with the divine is always expressed in the most diminutive melody of the common things as they are. A way of multum in parvo such as the “diminuta yerba”. Hence, God is not the agent of creation of individuation, rather God is an “idea” that expresses in each thing that we are affected to, such as every blade of grass, the spacing of the clouds, the invisible direction of the wind, a human face.

The event of the divine, thus, is not a matter of mental or international faculty between objectivity and consciousness, existence and the natural world; the irruption of the divine names the genesis of appearance and disappearance. And this means that the divine (Dios) is ultimately an affection of the soul, that animation that provides birth and death as relations that move world. It is for this very reason that Zambrano could claim that the opaque sun irradiating Prado’s work is disclosed by the “dios que está naciendo”, or the god that is birthing [1]. Of course, the birth of God is far from being a transcendental revelation that weaves the history of salvation; in the manner of Meister Eckhart we can say that the god is nothing else but the affection that makes his birth take place in the soul like a harvest; that is, leafy, bright, and green [2]. God is the possibility of sensation in the world that is ineffable because it is always on the path of natality. For Prados, the eternal dimension of the birth of gods is only temporary because it presupposes spacing; it presupposes being thrown somewhere, like in the lucretian trope of lying happily above the grass. Above the grass and infinitely outside the world, dwelling and world are irreductible whenever they come into its uttermost nearness. To dwell – which is the central meaning of laying on the grass – on the crust of the Earth is to liberate God, and the liberation of God is what allows us entry into the world. 

As Prados wrote in a remarkable letter to his friend Zambrano in March of 1960: “Un cielo sin reposo” que es Dios: Dios no quiso morada y nosotros, como tú dices: edifica que te edifica… Y Dios, sin reposo. No buscamos reposo para Dios y nunca lo tendremos… En la guerra, me acuerdo, unos campesinos prendieron fuego a una iglesita en lo alto de un monte. Cuando bajaban, lo hacían como iluminados y decían: “¡Hemos libertado a Dios!” ¿No es hermoso eso?” [3]. To liberate God from dogmatic commands is also the liberation of world as detachment. There is dwelling for us, but never for the unresting divine presence of god. 

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Notes 

1. Maria Zambrano. “Emilio Prados”, Cuadernos Americanos, Vol. 126, 1963, 165. 

2. Meister Eckhart. “Sermon 2”, in Selected Writings (Penguin Books, 1994), 116.

3. “Un cielo sin reposo. Emilio Prados y María Zambrano: correspondencia” (1998), El Colegio de Mexico: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/320/oa_edited_volume/chapter/2584791 

Vladimir Lossky’s third way. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his war diary Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (2012), which recounts his itinerant vicissitudes in occupied France, the Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky makes an explicit case for the emergence of a third way beyond conservation and destruction, and its modern ideological avatars that led astray into the modern catastrophe; that is, the social revolution and conservative reaction cloaked under “traditionalism”. As it has been recently glossed, Lossky was not the only person from the East to be preoccupied with putting a halt to the eternal dialectical movement of destruction and conservation only fueling historical abstraction. Indeed, immediately in wake of the Russian Revolution, the poet Alexander Blok, in an epistolary exchange with Vladimir Mayakovsky, and anticipating the bewildering enthusiasm of the revolutionary energy, also demanded an effective exit from servitude so that “a third thing appears, equally dissimilar to construction and destruction” [1]. It matters little whether Lossky knew about Blok’s “third figure”, although it is at the same time impossible not to have it in mind when reading his own annotation in the June 16th entry of his diary, which does seem to offer a answer to Blok’s proposal:

“Nonetheless, revolutionaries are always in the wrong since, in their juvenile fervour for everything new, in their hopes for a better and a way of life built on justice they always base themselves on theories that are abstract and artificial, making a clean sweep of living tradition, which is after all, founded on the experience of centuries. Conservatives are always wrong, too…for in their desire to preservice ancient institutions that have withstood the test of time, they destroy the necessity of renewal and man’s yearning for a better way of life. Is there, then, a third way? Another destiny for society than of always being subject to the threat of revolutions which destroy life, or reactionary attitudes which mummify it? Or is this the inevitable fate of all terrestrial cities, the nature of their existence? In fact, only in the Church can we find both a Tradition that knows no revolution and at the same time, the impetus towards a new life that has no end. Which is why she is in possession of those infinite resources upon which may draw all who are called to govern the perishable cities of this world” [2]. 

It is no surprise that for both Blok and Lossky, the fundamental tension in the amphibology between conservation and rupture rests on the problem of “tradition”; given that, as Blok had also eloquently written in his letter to his fellow poet: “a breach with traditions is a tradition”. This is something that an artist like Kazimir Malevich understood well in his programmatic text about museums in the wake of the revolution (“On the Museum”, 1919): the turn into ashes of all the works of art altered their aura, but it left in place the topological frame and it still produced an image; in order words, the destructive artworks still demanded a museological space for storage, thus enacting new principles of the triumphant revolution. Understood in this sense, tradition is merely the retroactive accumulation of practices by the archē that orients its development retroactively from the point of view of the present with provisions towards the administration of the future. But, how did Lossky understand by the notion of “Tradition”? Rereading the fragment of his war diary entry, it would seem that this notion merely rests on the dogmatic transformations within the Church, and in this sense, a conceptual elucidation similar to the doctrinal exegesis not very different from John Henry Newman’s An essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845). However, in his important essay “Tradition and Traditions”, Lossky attempts at defining the site and tension of the tradition, which he notes that in the language of theology it has been a term left vague and repeatedly undefined [3]. Lossky writes with sharp precision: “Tradition sometimes receives that of a teaching kept secret, not divulged, lest the mystery be profaned by the uninitiate” [4]. Thus, Tradition is the positive and textual scripture that registers the Word, but it is not exhausted in the positive scriptural authority. 

At the heart of Lossky’s argumentation about the theological meaning of Tradition, is the fact that it exceeds both textual sources and narrative mastery and transmission. In fact, the theology garment of Tradition belongs to the mystery of revelation shared in conspiracy, rumors or whispers [5]. And although, in his essay Lossky reaffirms himself that Tradition is the invisible intertwined with the Church – what keeps the “critical spirit of the institution” for the incorporation of new dogmatic definitions – it is nonetheless important to note that for the theologian, Tradition as “opposed to the reality of the word, it would be necessary to say that Tradition is Silence” [6]. In this sense, Tradition is that which is created and transmitted but that no one has the right nor the authority to speak through its incommunicable name. Is Tradition transmitted at all? If it is not through the written word, how can there be any continuity? This is the ultimate lacuna of the theological underpinning of Tradition for Lossky: Tradition can only be properly understood as the crafting of a “unique mode of receiving truth”; in order words, it names the contact between revelation and the witness who receives its ‘fullness of knowledge’, which far from mastering the totality, it points to “the external limit…the narrow door which leads to the knowledge of Truth” [7]. As Monica Ferrando has recently glossed from Plato’s philosophical corpus, any robust conception of Tradition should be understood as that which maintains an absolute inseparability between wonder and salvation, as well as bridging invention and received grace (charîs) [8]. One step at a time, we invent traditions whenever we are thinking through the abyss that separates our language from the inheritance bestowed upon us. Tradition moves in every ethical position of thought overcoming the pseudo-authorization of alienated and metaphorical knowledge of the past.

But if  the Church is no longer the institutional site for the keeping of the impossibility of the transmission and renewal of Tradition and revealed Truth – subsumed to the mysterium iniquitatis that works against the possibility of the rendition of the eternal life of a permanent vita nova  – it entails that one can still hold on to Lossky’s assertion that the task is to be attentive to the ossified expressions and reified appearances of Truth against the “living Spirit of Truth”. Hence, to insist on the restitution of the Church in our current predicament, would place us on the side of instrumentalized and subject-oriented salvation that turns away from the active kingdom that is the only passage from the world of the living to that of the dead. The traditionalists or integralists are incompetent representatives of the Tradition in this sense: as Von Balthasar once argued, they lack the humor and contact with the invisible to apprehend the mystery that arrives without solicitation, as pure depotentialization [9]. In a godless world of the secularized gnosis of political force – that is, after the fleeing of the gods – perhaps theology could only be understood as the path of Tradition of uncountable wonders and the event of speech that produces an unworldly sensation within this world. Tradition brings the world beyond its shape and legibility. In this sense, we are always participants of Truth that the world cannot retain, and thus keepers of an enduring secret that will ineluctably outlive us. 

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Notes 

1. Philippe Theophanidis. “Alexander Blok: ‘A breach with traditions is a tradition'”, October 13, 2024: https://aphelis.net/breach-with-traditions-alexander-blok/ 

2. Vladimir Lossky. Seven days on the roads of France June 1940 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 54.

3. Vladimir Lossky. “Tradition and Traditions”, in In the image and likeness of God (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 141.

4. Ibid., 144-145.

5. Ibid., 146.

6. Ibid., 150.

7. Ibid., 162. 

8. Monica Ferrando. “La libera grazie della tradizione”, in Un anno con Platone (Neri Pozza, 2024), 424.

9. Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The Office of Peter And the Structure of the Church (Ignatius Press, 2013), 403.

The soul of things. On Alice Rohrwacher’s Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption.  In a certain sense,  Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of  immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In  the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the  moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.  

Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema  (2023), she admits that  any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles –  presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33). 

As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema. 

The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the  cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye. 

No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.

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Notes 

1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.

2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.