new beginning

L’illusion comique of politics. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the November-December issue of Revista Sur in 1955, Jorge Luis Borges famously published “L’illusion comique”, an indictment against Peronism as a form of social theater, where melodramatic and overacted public liturgy energized the orchestrated pace of the modern mass politics. But unlike in Cornille’s baroque play, for Borges the political ensemble of the l’illusion comique is one in which social actors have become autonomous and fully aware of the script of their acts, and if they would play along fully conscious and in “willing suspension of disbelief” (the expression is cited directly from Samuel Coleridge) [1]. This secularized form of the l’illusion comique is one in which theatricality is ever-present and unabsorbed, since its ultimate purpose is to conceal and justify a “terrible reality” (una realidad atroz) even when it aims to invert or dislocate it. It is clear that in our time, the l’illusion comique is an extension of a political agency that has convinced itself that the street topos is in radical opposition to the crisis of modern state form. No greater l’illusion comique than that which imagines that one more rush of goliardic spirituality will produce the dawn of a new beginning.

The order of the sentimentalization and pathos was the way that Borges described the l’illusion comique of the 1940s, the era of the high modern state conducting the social masses; however today the illusion is flat and rhetorical, always assertive of its metonymic mediation. In just one example of rhetorical inflation, the Prime Minister of Spain recently constructed a analogy that stopped short of a full personification: “It is time for the Parliament to have the appearance of the streets”. If Parliaments or legislatures bodies cannot truly provide legislative acts any more on behalf of those that they allege to represent, what follows is the last gasp of the legislative state that appeals directly to its naked constitutive sources as “streets that speak”. We are thus in a strange and bizarre world in which streets act and speak, and parliamentary houses become mute and sterile. And yet, what does it mean that the streets speak or have spoken?

It is obviously nothing like the coming to the possibility of a unison voice, but rather the form that politics undergoes once cybernetics becomes effective through its optimization of public opinion. If Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” would write facing Van Gogh that the “painting speaks” (it is that which speaks), it was because truth is disclosed in the proximity of what is being shown. Obviously, this disclosure has little to do with intentionality or the function of a commodity or utensil that tries to drag the viewer into the mirror of semblance. The proximity to a voice or picture severs us from the common place in which we are customarily gathered, which is why painting remains an exclusive site for unmediated truth.

Hence, when we are told that “streets speak” there is nothing being disclosed except what is already enacted by the theatre of the l’illusion comique: the management of opinions to be decided on the plane of force and struggle, submission and rhetoric, hegemony and the cheap thrills of affection later absorbed in representation. As Pedro Sánchez has told us in the open, streets and parliaments today are not in opposition, on the contrary, they are the two poles that hold up the l’illusion comique that energizes whatever little remains for what we call “politics” under the defunct notion of social mobilization. It has been said that the machinery of the modern sovereignty revolved around tripartite structures of ‘crown, parliament, people’ oriented towards election, debate and statute. In the waning of modern politics, we are left with the dual structure of executive power and streets that act in place of the void of statute and the legislative state.

Any attempt to escape the undisclosed world of opinions needs to break free from the illusion comique that continuous to parody both reason and comedy. The verses from Ciaran Carson’s The Irish for No (1987) obviously come to mind: “Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. In the ruins: obliterated streets, the faint impression of a key” [3]. There are no real exits when there are only ghastly impressions that lead us to the penumbra of the l’illusion comique, merely enough to survive in nihilism.

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Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “L’illusion comique”, Sur, N.237, Noviembre-Diciembre 1955, 10.

2. Ciaran Carson. “Smithfield Market”, in Collected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 99

At the threshold. By Gerardo Muñoz

Just a few days ago there was an esoteric exchange between Giorgio Agamben and Alberto Moreiras on the difficulty of the ‘other beginning’ and the ‘via di uscita’, a propos of a recent meeting on desecularization and theology that took place in Granada, Spain. The notion has been in the air for some time now, since two years ago this was the central problem in a 2024 meeting in Berlin. That the exchange was esoteric is not in question, since it presupposes undertaking the conditions of the conversation and papers of the meeting as well as multiple books from both Moreiras and Agamben, and I do not think that the nuances have been taken into consideration. But it must be noted that there is an exoteric dimension to the contention as well: Giorgio Agamben has favored the ‘via di usicita’ in different figures (mainly Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Hölderlin; and we know that Agamben’s overbeckian urgeschichte is a clear cut rejection of an epochal beginning); and, from his end, Alberto Moreiras has also thematized the other beginning of thought and aleotropic excess in his most recent Tiempo Roto (2025), which cuts through Heidegger’s thought, and thus not limited to what is understood as heideggerianism. I want to reject the idea that these two notions – ‘via di uscita and other beginning – are just two forking paths in postheideggerianism, as complicated as it is to go beyond Heidegger’s end of Western metaphysics. And I think – and in fact I am convinced- that both Agamben and Moreiras are soliciting something that radically escapes Heidegger’s thought even when it emanates from it; a bit like what Derrida says that the chôra escapes the categorial order of Plato even though it emerges from the Timeus.

There is no doubt that at stake is a breakthrough in thought. Of course, stating this puts a finger into something fundamental; but, alas, the devil is always in the details. I am in no position to unravel the implications of the two options – new beginning and via of exodus – and to that extent I am still taken by Moreiras’ interpellation in the first day of the meeting about my own position regarding the new beginning, which I am in no way ready to respond. Of course, Nicolas Poussin comes to mind (I cite from memory his epistolary words to Chantelou): “I am in the profession of mute things”. A claim of silence that in no way refrains from language and writing. Yes, I am no painter, although I am interested in painting and what painting can offer and donate to thought and philosophy. And we live in an epoch at the end of painting, and yet painting outlives everything as in a metaphysical remnant, as Kurt Badt reminds us in his great work on Cézanne.

Giorgio Agamben notes in his little Il tempo del pensiero (2023) how Heideger declared his Le Thor seminared that he always thought that Cézanne was the other figure of the tradition that resembled his own path. It is a curious analogy to a painter and the painterly praxis in the age of technological subsumption. Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, since I am working on a small book on the communication between painting and thought, and I want to understand what painting has to offer.

As a preliminary response to the difficulty that emerged in the ‘new beginning’, I am left wondering if the threshold is an intermediary space to arrest the jump beyond nihilism, which is ultimately what is at stake. This has been my way- I am all for changing that – of reading Agamben’s work: to remain at the threshold in order not to force the overcoming of nihilism, even if that anti-nihilism takes the force of antiphilosophy or thought of the unthinkable (Moreiras). Can thought breathe from the rest and imperturable dwelling in the threshold, if understood as mediated by the hand and the eye at a distance? This is for me the problem of painting as the last activity at the end of metaphysics – a theological remnant that intercepts the reduction of a historical cosmos. A duration that escapes the regime of the ontic but that does not dare to point to transcendence nor does it accept the inevitability of anthropological struggle. Yet, duration is the condition of breathing in a landscape: if we face it, is there even the need to begin or retreat? 

From the beginning (after a Berlin meeting). by Gerardo Muñoz

I am sure that others will draw their point of inflection, but for me the stakes of a recent Berlin meeting (already commented here) was laid out during the very first session when one of the “non-participants” – let’s call it like this to embrace the spirit of the meeting – spoke audaciously about the current predicament: there has been a thorough loss, nothing but defeat that is both irreversible and consummated at the level of subjectivity. Some of us remembered that T.J. Clark more than a decade ago in the pages of New Left Review took a similar position and was grilled for it. This tends to happen to any gesture that dares to push thought forward. In any case, the non-participant went further and called for a “new beginning”, a start from scratch, alluding to the underrated Revolution and counterrevolutionary in Germany (1851) by F. Engels, in which in fact this language is very much present. Engels wrote in the first article (the book is a collection of pieces published anonymously in the wake of the 1848 revolutions): “If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations” [1]. 

Of course, “social or national conditions” are not “trapped in amber”, and I think that today one cannot take the national, local, or even regional contexts as sufficient to explain failure. The failure is civilizational, and raising the question of the “beginning” (or new beginnings) has a heideggerian overtone that is not facetious, but it is consistent with any exploration in the quadrant of critical-metaphysical commitments for thought (infrapolitical reflection has thematized it) [2]. This elaboration could be very well idiosyncratic, but I think it provides “grip” to the problem by not making concessions to well known junior partners of abstract politicization and ideological backlogging that like the Tortoise in the parable still fantasize with a breakthrough via yet another “textualist interpretation”; one more sophisticated mapping of political ecology or a collective hegemonic political theory department; or even a policy redistribution of a new Green Deal towards a new accumulation regime [3]. Perhaps they themselves do not believe any of the lies – for my part I think that they do not – and they endorse it for the sake of “bad faith”. But just in case, I think that raising the threshold at the highest point (ontotheology, civilization, the constitution of the polis) is a litmus test of separation against the new secular priests. These negative conditions already open a door to go through.

But there are also positive conditions for this “new beginning”: reopening the ethical intensity in retreat of political subjection; rejection of public chatter and freeing fugitive marranos; elaborating strong descriptions of the metamorphoses of domination; and avoiding the “revolt” as a compensatory category for of ius revolutionis in the epoch of real subsumption [4]. At the end of the day, it should not be forgotten that an-archy also means the turbulence of phenomena, in which every fragment moves in the direction of experience poking through the objectification of the world. This is “inapparent”, but it is for this very reason what is fundamental and invariant. 

The ‘new beginning’ in the wake of collapse can only conquer life to traverse the hunger of meaning that propels the fictional machine of ongoing nihilism, as Giorgio Cesarano warned. There is no historical or moral beginning; there is only the beginning in which existence is able to expand the originary accumulation of a sensible ethos. And it is at the very end, or almost at the end of everything, that true beginning commences. Whoever does not start from the beginning is either understudying the epoch, or mastering the evermore painful social roles. It is only in the direction towards beginning that can avoid the crushing weight of the post-neolithic condition (Métraux) that calls for a divestment of what reality can contrive for us. 

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Notes 

1. Fredrich Engels. Revolution and counter-revolution in Germany (FLP, 1977), 3.

2. Alberto Moreiras, “La cuarta vía” (2022): “¿No se hace necesario hoy pensar, por lo tanto, otro comienzo del pensamiento, proponer otro comienzo que nos sustraiga al peligro del colapso mismo del mundo?  Quienes se oponen a ello, llamándolo arrogancia o presunción, llamando veneno a la propuesta misma, no son para mí ya distinguibles del avestruz que hunde la cabeza en la arena al verse atacada”. https://infraphilosophy.com/2022/02/18/la-cuarta-via-entre-parmenides-y-la-obligacion-reflexiva-conferencia-para-la-universidad-de-arizona-spanish-and-portuguese-department-borrador-3/

3. Zeit Der Ökologie. Das neue Akkumulationsregime (2024).

4. Conspiracist Manifesto (Semiotexte, 2023), 341.