name

The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Certeau’s untold night. by Gerardo Muñoz

The highest poetic moment in Michel De Certeau’s La culture au pluriel (1974) appears in the concluding pages where the historian resorts to a hunting image: “Culture is an untold night in which the revolutions of earlier times are dormant, invisible, folded into practices – but fireflies, and sometimes great nocturnal birds, cutting through it – as thrusts and creations that trace the promise of another day to come” [1]. This is De Certeau’s trope that stands for culture as opening of possibilities, the shoreline where administrators and technicians (his own terms) do not dare to cross and will probably never adventure. This is the site (the night, la noche oscura, which has a ringtone of the mystical tradition that the author knew perfectly well) where De Certeau wants to posit the possibilities of new struggles of cultural alterities [2]. A book in 1974 means many things, but for De Certeau it is an incursion into the collapse of his historical present, already showing full fledged signs of the crisis of legitimation, erosion of institutional trust, and the decomposition of social forms across Western symbolic realities. It is the nascent confirmation of the ascent of real subsumption, a term that does not appear in De Certeau’s book, although it informs it, even if negatively (the Italian Fiat wildstrikes makes a surprising cameo in the last paragraphs). Where to look, then?  

De Certeau’s answer read today does bring much naivete: cultural alterity. But this notion, which is reworked and contested in concrete fields of human activities (the university and schools, the new technological society and communication, social practices intertwined in popular and elite culture, power relations and post-statist configurations) do not appeal to the identitarian cosmopolitan horizon prima facie anchored in the diversity administration of a well integrated, albeit exploited planetary humanity. One senses that for De Certeau the nineteenth century “Social Question” has become the “cultural question” as the unit of the national sovereign state wanes and reacts. With the crisis of legitimation as backdrop, De Certeau sees the rise of a new subjectivity that he calls the new “militants without a cause”, a battalion of “exiles” that will only tacitly accept credible cultural imprints [3]. He wants to work with “culture” because at bottom De Certeau is both a historian and a realist. This new erosion of civil society-State relations entails a “new exile is in the works” [4]. And for De Certeau the exile, since biblical times, is seeking a new Earth where to “land”. 

In 1974, De Certeau’s invitation was to create the conditions for pluralist cultural landings that will foster, in the night of waiting, a new politics. But, could the same be said today even assuming concrete situations and the infuriating image of migration as a token for the workings of hegemonic politics? Does Gaia not alert us that we must “land” somewhere else on Earth? The anger and dissatisfaction that De Certeau cautiously predicated head on is already here in the form of what some of us have theorized as ongoing social stasis that is integrated in every social mediation. In the global metastasis of the 1970s De Certeau could claim that “behind anger there is the desire to create a polis and a politics; there is a desire to organize the conditions of life….” [5].

We are far removed from this desire, and even the most prominent cycle of revolts of the decade have refused in the solicitation of a new politics or a political horizon; and, even if, almost like weeds in cracks of piled urban ruins, we see again and again the last residues of the desire for hegemonic representation of the totality (the People, the Movement, the Class). In this light – now it is our own epoche – culture can only be compensatory, and still very much a symptom of the closure of exteriority. “Where there is no longer an imaginable outside we lose the possibility of an inside”, Moreiras wrote at the turn of the century against every form of culturalism [6]. Of course, De Certeau was well aware of it, which is why his proposal to cultural alterity retains zones of hermeneutical ambiguity many decades later [7]. For instance, he writes when commenting on neo-nationalist regional movements (Quebec, Catalonia, Occitania) that “cultural claims appear to be a reminder and a compensation” [8]. 

And recent events have proven De Certeau correct: what is Catalan nationalism – whether left or right, although ideological division is not a substantive difference – if not a compensatory rhetorical ruse to mobilize regional political elites to feed off the stagnant resources of a waning state form? The rhetoric of “political foundation” in the Catalan case created an “cultural alterity” that depended on the high illusion of hegemonic politics; a politics solely based on the “bad faith” of escalating and superposing values (“Spanish” v. “Catalan”) as the combustion of a fractured political social contract that ultimately deepens its fragmentation. De Certeau noted – cited with the long Augustunian tradition of political liberalism – that politics cannot bring happiness, but only create its conditions. However, today even this liberal ideal fails to account for its true source: our metapolitical collapse at the twilight of secularization means that the revival of the “social bond” is not to be found in the demand of new political principles, however narrowly or broadly defined. De Certeau in 1974 aspired at giving politics one more chance pulling it to the facticial heterogeneity of culture: “a politics that discovers in the diversity of the sky a generical….linked to the ambition of beginning over again, that is, of living” [9].

And indeed, we must begin all over again, but is really the only possibility? I believe that there are symptoms elsewhere in La culture au pluriel, and these concern language. In the second chapter, referring to the crisis of speech, De Certeau refers to the “denaturing act” of speech, as communication enters the regimen of commercial language and new computational masteries (what Jaime Semprún called neo-language) [10]. The crisis of language in the ascent of a new expressivity renders communication obsolete and obtuse; parasitic, or mushroom-like, as Hugo Von Hofmenthal had already noted in his Letter to Lord Chandos. Speech becomes a new form of blasphemy, something confirmed in recent years in the United States, which takes itself also as the homeland of “Free Speech” is increasingly under heavy surveillance by constitutionalism of codified parameters of “time, place, and manner”.

De Certeau shows himself highly consternated about blasphemous language, which is also conspiratorial language; the language that dwells on the reverse of social normativity and legal codification. But this perhaps the only language today can properly speak of pain without recurring to the transactions of violence; especially of the numbing violence of a neo-language that can communicate “everything” insofar as it ceases to communicate to no one. Could the “untold night”, that is also the night of the “unthought”, be the site of the preservation of another use of language, of nurturing language, descending into the hymnic sources of the sayable – thus, inverting the denaturing of historical severability – a language embedded in silence, in the protofigure of the mystic, assuming “the immediacy of nature and experience, to contact of things, one by one, in their primal disorder”? [11]. Ultimately, whatever the night will tell will only be possible through and in language. 

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Notes 

1. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 138.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. Ibid., 7.

4. Ibid., 8.

5. Ibid., 11.

6.  Alberto Moreiras. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Duke U Press, 2001), 21. 

7. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78.

8. Ibid., 70. 

9. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100.

10. Jaime Semprún. Defensa e ilustración de la neolengua (Ediciones El Salmón, 2018). 

11. Nicola Chiaromonte. “An Age of Bad Faith”, in The Paradox of History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 148. On the hymnic dimension of human speech, see the study undertaken by Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022).

“An angel passed by”. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the Spanish language there is a wonderful idiom that has gone out of fashion in our times to express a sudden silence: “ha pasado un ángel”, or an angel passed by. The phrase is commonly used whenever a sudden silence imposes itself in the middle of a conversation, which leads to obvious discomfort and embarrassment among those engaged. It is almost as if the invisible angel reminds human beings that conversation rests as much in words as in silence; and that the shadow of silence sooner or later interrupts any communicative practice. According to historians and lexicographers, the inception of this idiom into Spanish remains a curious enigma, since although used in early modernity it does not have a Latinized version, and its origins can only be traced to classical Greek antiquity. In fact, Plutarch notes in his De garrulitate that whenever silence is introduced in a meeting it is said that Hermes has joined the company [1]. The angel thus stands for the nonpresence of language in language, just like an icon is the sublimation of presence in pictorial representation. 

We know that in Antiquity the angel as a minor divinity (angeloi) was a mediator between heaven and earth, only that in that moment that an ‘angel passed by’, it is not all clear on which side is there heaven and where earth [2]. In his beautiful book Angels & Saints (2020), Eliot Weinberger reminds us that for Saint Augustine the angels were first and foremost original gardeners of Paradise – given that they are free from felix culpa and sin – and that they are messengers between the living and the divine, as documented in the beggar Lazarous carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham [3]. Here it seems that the invisible inception of the angel relates fundamentally to the dead and conclusion, which also carries its aspiration in the lacunae of a conversation that reaches an impasse, and that for a moment effectively dies. 

The angel that accompanies the dead and the poor – and thus our structural poverty in language, being in the language that always lacks a grasping signifier – is also confirmed by lexicographer Alberto Buitrago, who in his entry on the idiom writes that the expression has its origins in the fact that in antiquity whenever a dead person was mentioned or brought up in conversation there was a silence held, because it was thought that his “spirit” (his angel) had become present in its nonpresence of language [4]. Although Buitrago does not provide any documentation for his assertion, it does bring to bear that whenever we are in communication, whether we like it or not, we are in the communion of angels that are expressing the soul of the dead through the litany of their names. 

This is why Antelme could suggest the similar enigmatic notion that being powerless and in poverty means to ‘have to forever be’ in a silence adjourned so that language can continue speaking. This is why perhaps the irruption of authentic silence has the effect of a certain petrification of the human expression, as masterfully captured in Velázquez’s Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630). It is through silence that we encounter the divinity that for a moment places itself outside of language in order to contemplate it, letting the angel make his entrance. The language of computational machines is not only a language that has renounced its poetic and ethical instance; it is also a form of gated communication that has expelled itself from the angelic visitation of its own contemplation. 

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Notes 

1. Plutarch. “Concerning Talkativeness” (De garrulitate), Moralia 6 (Loeb Classical Library, 1939 ) 502F.

2. Paula Fredriksen. Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 54.

3. Eliot Weinberger. Angels & Saints (New Directions, 2020), 30. 

4. Alberto Buitrago. Diccionario de dichos y frases hechas (Espasa, 2007), 333.

Thrasymachus, the paradigm of force. by Gerardo Muñoz

Few characters are more memorable in the first book of Plato’s The Republic than the sophist Thrasymachus, whose shadow is still very much looming around us given that it is obvious that today everything in our contemporary world is optimized through force. Thrasymachus’s strict identification of reserve power (potentia) with justice (ius) is in many respects prophetic, since it already subordinates the ideal of justice with practical reason and effective norms, a crowning achievement of modern political power. This is why Leo Strauss could claim in The City and Man that Thrasymachus’ position is ultimately a defense of the thesis of “legal positivism” that brings to fruition the legitimate order and the police powers of the city. In other words, Thrasymachus discovered that the requirements for the permanence of an active social order of a police entails the mediation of the two dimensions of legal authority: obedience and the internal recognition of a secondary rule that liquidates the possibility of raising the question of what is “just” (now internal to the organization of internal powers). If the aim of “justice” becomes the optimal application of effective rules and norms that provide the services of the city, then political rule becomes an infallible and uncontested logic. Politics is ultimately force, and force is the energy organized by politics in the city. 

As Strauss writes: “Thrasymachus acts like the city, he resembles the city, and this means according to a way reasonably acceptable to both…Thrasymachus is the city. It is because he is the city that he maintains the thesis of the city regarding justice and that he is angry at Socrates for his antagonism to the thesis of the city. Thrasymachus’ rhetoric was especially concerned with both arousing and appeasing the angry passions of the multitude, with both attacking a man’s character and counteracting such attacks, as well as with play-acting as an ingredient of oratory” [1]. Well before the general equivalent of contractual commercial relations, Thrasymachus’ rhetorical deployment functioned as a techne alupias against the unwarranted passions of human beings. And, contrary to the common opinion that separates the craft of sophistry from the unity of rational discourse (logos), Thrasymachus’ defense of force presupposes the autonomy of language in the rhetorical construction (very much like modern poetry centuries later) to serve as the hospice of rational pondering in the polis. To make language the exclusive battle ground: even in antiquity it was said of Thrasymachus, “you are just like your name, bold in battle”. And Plato wanted to hold on to this picture. This ultimately means – and it is still at the center of our contemporary predicament – that the coming of the “Social man” in the city is only possible on the condition of a primary transformation of the event of language and the speaking being. This is why if Thrasymachus was the “pioneer of rhetoric and elocution”, as it has been claimed, it is only because his appeal to the pragmatics of political power was mediated by the invention of the ‘mystery of the prose style’; that is, of reducing the non-grammatical mediation to the orderability of a prose adjusted as an instrument to the world [2]. The enslavement of the passions is the commencement of the social prose in which we are forced to act in our alienated roles.

Only when language becomes rhetorical communication it is possible to grasp the world as a case of an entity of legibility and knowability, where reasons (inclusive and exclusive, that is, as what can be delegated for my own interests) and political rule converge without residue. What will become obvious through the cybernetic dominion over “information”, it was first elaborated as the pressure of rhetoric where the logical force of predication took its force to disclaim myth as the unappropriated experience of worldly phenomena. The art of rhetoric does not render “truth” obsolete; it rather incorporates theoretical and systemic deductions – a flattening of logos without myth -, so that the event of truth can no longer stand as the unsurveyed horizon of the intelligibility [3]. The consolidation of force means this much: that Thrasymachus’ prose of the world is not just an exclusive political program of the “fictitious”, as much as a program for the total attainability of the world; a world that by becoming fully accessible and objective, it pays the high price of eclipsing the presence of things, and the event of truth and naming in language. A world without kallipolis that will only distribute and perpetuate ad infinitum injustice as the corollary for the triumph of immanence of force.

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Notes 

1. Leo Strauss. The City and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 78.

2. Bromley Smith. “Thrasymachus: a pioneer rhetorician”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1927.

3. Gianni Carchia. “La persuasión y la retórica de los sofistas”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 60.

Name and Liberty. by Gerardo Muñoz

Back in the fall of 2020, we discussed a book entitled Intifada: una topología de la imaginación popular (2020), written by Rodrigo Karmy, which considered the implications between the forms of contemporary revolts for the common imagination. It has been said with good reasons that the health-administrative controls deployed during the COVID-19 brought to a halt the high tides of revolts against the experiential discontent in the social fabric. The wearing out and domestication of experience has proved, at least for now, its stealth efficacy and unilateral success. However, what some of us did not see at the time was that this energy over protracted containment was also being waged at the very substance of language. This has now come forth in the wake of recent events at university campuses where administrative authorities, opinion writers, and legal analysts have suggested that a particular word, “intifada”, should be proscribed and effaced from campus life. One should not waste time considering the etymology, semantic reach, and political deployment of this term – for this there is already Karmy’s elegant and dense articulation of the term.

What has completely gone unnoticed in the current chatter about “intifada” is the fact that the full realization of a “rhetorical society” entails, necessarily, an ongoing preventive civil war over what is perceived as “sayable”. This means that containment does not only reach to the moment the realization of action (and its reason or justification of an act); but rather that it fully extends about what might be said potentially. The various calls – on the left and right, from the legal analysts to the pundits and some of the academic administrations – against “intifada” is not merely substantive (or at least it does not stop at this specific threshold); it is a preventive reaction against the very possibility of the name and naming. The act of naming is intimately related to the exterior events in the world; therefore, the proscription of naming is one more step in the domestication process in which the human specie is tore not only from establishing a contact with the world, but also incapable of accessing it through the specific density of naming.  

The paradoxical situation of this interregnum is that, on one hand, the collapse of modern political authority that founds the Liberal State (non veritas facit legem) as an overcoming of language and truths, has led straight into the rhetoric inflation where naming is sacrificed and language codified into a second order normativity that imposes arbitrary obligations on what is licit and illicit. This is why the First Amendment of the United States Constitution – and total constitutionalism writ large – becomes the construction zone that allows the contingent justification of “time, place, and manner” under the civil right of “freedom of speech”, which turns naming into an ominous and terrible shadow; an unwarranted apostrophe. The almost anecdotal proscription over “intifada” reveals the heteronomic dominion over interiority; that is, over the possibility of saying.

I can recall how Quentin Skinner told some of us at Princeton years ago that a fundamental characteristic of unfreedom, broadly considered, begins when you think twice about whether it is convenient or prudent to say what you think. Of course, I do not think he favored a position of imprudence and generalized cacophony. I take it that he meant that the end of liberty begins when the possibility of naming disappears: “Between the motion and the act falls the shadow”. Fixation and transparency is the evolving grammar of the day. Can language subsist in such an impoverished minimum overseen by the general governmental logistics? As a preamble, one can say that in the current moment any conception of liberty begins with the opaque exercise of naming.