Nihilism

The strain of waiting in the desert. by Gerardo Muñoz

How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the “new”, even though the price to be paid is always on the side of an overachieving cynicism and hypocrisy mediated by discourses of all kinds. At one moment of his dialogue Eupalinos or the Architect, Paul Valéry claims that whenever deep reflection is pushed by raw force, this unnatural attitude almost always misses truth: “The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced…we must do or suffer violence to see better or differently” [1]. The claim to see clearly beyond the immanent veils of the rhetorical commonplaces is still our question, although rarely posed. If our suspended epoch is that of formless rubble and extinction, one way in which this question could be reformulated today is to ask what does it mean to envision and live in the desert? Is not the desert condition, its suspended and dead temporality that gathers existence in the void, the only authentic event of posthistorical time? 

This is the problem that haunts Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari, (1940), in which the waiting for an invasion and hoarding armies is conflated to the event of a wait that is infinite and excruciating, very much like the video art of Douglas Gordon at the end of the century. The steppe is a form of deserted land without forestation and depth; it is the very triumph of the symbolization of time stretched into a unified surface that recalls the emptying momentum of every form. It is nothingness as an absolute event, as Buzzati writes:  “….the ramparts, the very landscape, breathed an inhospitable sinister air…At this moment Drogo was looking at the northern world – the uninhabited land across which, or so they said, no man had ever come. No enemy had ever out of it; there had been no battles; nothing had ever happened” [2]. How to account, and how to live, beyond mere survival, in a world nothing happens; that is, where the “nothingness” is the very schism between existence and world? When speaking hyperbolically of the Fortress in the steppe where the protagonist Drago is stationed, Buzzati will refer to this mundane condition as a “thankless world”. 

It goes without saying that a world beyond “thanking” is a world that is unworldly in its sensible and intelligible mediations, because it no longer appears to grasp the irreductibility of presence; it needs to repress what appears figuratively in its disclosure. This is why in the vast openness of the steppe, in its blinding clearing of legibility, there is only blindness and hallucinations that are always compensatory to the pain endured by the nihilism of a disjointed time. The waiting of the barbarians does not longer hold the concept of prefiguration once held by situated or concrete politics (Turgot’s high-modernist axiom comes to mind: “we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present”); it is rather the impossible, contingent and retroactive narration that fictive communities need to elaborate to endure the ongoing pain at the end of the social bond. This is the price to be paid to survive in the glacial habituation of nihilism.

It might be very well that what can be glimpsed in the temporal wreckage of the steppe is nothing but the mute language of pain that brings presence near without political translation, because it is always an excess to the stabilization of forms. In an interview published in Milan’s Il giorno in 1959, Buzzati referred to the landscape of the steppe as “Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier…it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting”. But this strain of waiting is the thrownness of existence and its absolute distance from the world. In fact, towards the end of the novel we read a condensation of this inconspicuous tonality: “It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are from their affection for reach, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence, the loneliness of life” [3]. 

What remains is language not because it can describe or narrate, but because only the voice can measure up to the tonality of pain. In his short prologue on the Spanish edition of the novel, Borges claimed that Buzzati’s desert is both real and symbolic of the void, although the symbol no longer transmits any legible sense of totality; it prefigures a certain exhaustion of symbolization. The truth of language in the absence of form can no longer adequate itself to events or situations; it is now the voice that gathers the turbulence of pain in the waiting of the coming of presence already inhabited. Whenever that voice fails to speak, as René Daumal observed in his unfinished Mount Analogue (1952), life amounts to an empty carcass and a restless cadaver of oblivion. As presence fails to materialize in the world of forms and events, the only realist position is the conjuration of life as a form of expressive self-exile refusing to participate in the hallucinatory social pressure that desperately masks the serenity of a static and inapparent landscape – it is the passive eye that contemplates the plain silence of the steppe while preparing the schism for a possible transfiguration [5]. It is perhaps this passive contemplation what Andrew Wyeth’s faceless Christina laying on the grass has always been yearning for.

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Notes 

1. Paul Valéry. “Eupalinos or The Architect”, in Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1989), 75. 

2. Dino Buzzati. The Tartar Steppe (Canongate Books, 2018). 31. 

3. Ibid., 220-221.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El desierto de los tártaros”, in Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos (Alianza Editorial, 1988), 22.

5. Endnotes in the recent essay on Jacques Camatte, “Time is an invention of men incapable of love” (2025) express it in the following way: “But it is not enough to feel foreign to this whole; one must break with it, create an irreductible discontinuity and schism”, Endnotes, December 2025: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jacques-camatte/time-is-an-invention-of-men-incapable-of-love

Aladdin’s lamp and world domination. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his 1982 novel Aladdin’s Problem (1982), Ernst Jünger defined planetary domination through the actualization of the trope of Aladdin’s lamp. Whenever a symbol of this sort is used, we know that it always carries weight of ambivalence more than that of synthesis. The mythic lamp is a trope for magic and enduring power; of countering visibility and invisibility, but it is also made from a material that has been extracted from the Earth. In other words, raw materials are manipulated as a reservoir of energy that dispense the world of forms. In the most succinct moment of the novel, Jünger writes: “Aladdin’s lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay. The lamp guaranteed domination as far as the frontiers of the traveled world – from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming towards us titanically” [1]. Aladdin’s lamp is no longer a tool deployed by governments and armies, it is rather the autonomous commanding force that opens to human domination and technological catastrophe that generates calculable objectivity in the world. 

In his conversations with Julien Hervier, Jünger stated that the “problem of Aladdin” is not a political problem, but rather one that involves the administration of energy and intelligence that is already beyond our hands, because it has been set loose by ongoing compulsion necessary to meet the indexes of production and transference of technology [2]. Of course, energy defined the broad design of modernity as the necessary condition to amplify historical forms and mediations (and deform, since it was always dialectic) of worldly events and relations. One should only be reminded that in the beginning of the 1920s three major texts by European thinkers – I am thinking of Pavel Florensky, Carl Schmitt, and Aby Warburg – saw the necessity to allude to the settled hegemony of electricity as the defining feature of the dominion of the world. 

As Warburg understood it prophetically in his lecture on the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians: “But myths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world, create space of devotion and scope for reason which are destroyed by the instantaneous electrical contact – unless a disciplined humanity reintroduce the impediment of conscience” [3]. And it goes without saying that this “instantaneous electrical contact” has become so thoroughly engrained in human existence, that it is now clear that life on Earth, as advanced by the latest phase of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is no longer point to the destruction of space but of the total disruption of electricity and energy that exceeds any sensible contact. Electricity as the paradigm of artificial mediation can only liberate the spiritualization of ongoing decline. 

It is no historical accident that empires and nations have always been driven by the accumulation of energy, although at its historical exhaustion, there is no longer a veneer of development and production between energy and empire, but only a unified empire of energy in a lamp that quenches and overruns itself towards extinction. This means that what defines the darkness of our times is neither disorientation nor political violence (although there is much of that too), but the blinding darkness of a translucent expropriation of the world of the living and the dead. It is through this assumption that Jünger makes the last business of the epoch of Aladdin – extractive energy as domination of objects and objecthood between worlds – as a large necropolis called Terrestra, financed by a banker named Jersson, where there is no longer any need for the liturgy or cults proper to myths, but naked exchange between gold and the material corpse that suppresses, via technological titanism, any possible relations to the irreducible. It remains to be thought whether the moment when the lamp goes off in the drained excess of its energy will also lead to the end of this world.

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Notes 

1. Ernst Jünger. Aladdin’s Problem (Marsilio Publishers, 1992), 118. 

2. Julien Hervier. Conversaciones con Ernst Jünger (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 100.

3. Aby Warburg. “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual”, Journal of Warburg Institute, V.2, April 1939, 292.

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.

The idea of a world state. by Gerardo Muñoz

As a theme for his 1949 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, an American scholar, Robert Hutchins, decided to titled his conference “St. Thomas and the World State”. It is obvious that Hutchins had fresh in his mind the fact that the long European Civil War of the twentieth century, which included two World Wars, was a direct consequence of warring nationalisms and militarized nations that in our times it is once again has lavishly returned with even higher lethal consequences. There is a major historical difference, however; and that is the fact that whereas the nationalisms of the twentieth century were distinct territorial struggles in the wake of crumbling empires, the emergence of the new nationalisms are concerted, nourished, and aligned to the global commanding American imperialism. The techno-political ideal of an influential figure on American elites such as Peter Thiel takes the form of warring nations and firms against the possibility of a global world state to secure peace, interdependence, and free movement of populations across borders and communities [1]. It is fair to say that contemporary technopolitical dominance is a combination of imperial and national forces through the perpetual administration of anomia or lawlessness. 

What is striking about Hutchins’ 1949 lecture is that although Aquinas’ philosophy of law has been traditionally understood as the most important source of natural law, in his proposal Thomas’ actuality is able to fulfill positive law against the instrumental morality of nationalist empires (the United States and the Soviet Union then) that “in the absence of positive law; they may be expected to break the peace” [2]. For anyone that knows the emergence of the European state as coterminous with the secular authority of legal positivism will find this emphasis contradictory at best. The very notion of positive law requires principles of sovereign authority and normative internal recognition of its command coordination in order to consolidate a stable political form over time. This is a contradiction that Hutchins was aware of throughout his lecture. Consider, as an example, when he claims that: “The origin and meaning of the saying that a state has the natural right to sovereignty therefore, is that one state may not forcibly impose its will upon another. It means that Catholicism should oppose the foundations of a world state by force” (36). 

Or, when glossing over the obvious tension between the right of national sovereignty and a potential international federal state in the views of popes and Catholic thinkers: “I think they know that the national state is no longer the perfect community and that positive law is required to make the world community an effective political organization. I believe that they are making two points that are of the utmost importance: first, they are saying that any world government must be a federal government; and second, they see that world must come into existence by consent and not by conquest” (34). However, any student of modern political thought knows that consent and coercion are two internal modalities of governance for legitimate rule. Hutchins’ notion of “consent”, along with positive law, remains not only unthematized, but dependent on a circular of definition of law; that is, the “common good”, which is not a political concept, but a theological and moral notion extracted from the philosophy of history of Christian salvation. 

Towards the end of the lecture, Hutchins goes beyond strict positive law as if searching for some substantive ground: “…the West should not only survive, but also revive and rescue a deeper conception of human civilization than the one recently current, which enters around a religion of progress by resourceful greed and technological mastery of non-human nature” (42). But Hutchins’ plea for the retrieval of a past memory of the West runs astray when it relocates Church and State into a dual predicament of a new world state for peace on the conditions of the same structure of political theology that are no longer operative, but that actually make up the very ground of the modern collapse into nihilism – nihilism that political form does not remain immune to, quite the contrary. In fact, it is the most salient symptom of civilizational collapse. In the same way that Ernst Jünger immediately after the war called for the subsidiary spiritual assistance of the churches in the face of technological power- “the true conquest of nihilism and attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches” – Hutchins will also repeat that only the conjointment of Church and State “must now work together for world peace founded on university charity…and universal democracy” (44) [3]. And the same thesis has found a clear expression in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aetenae (2021): “To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil…Church and Empire are called to operate in harmony” [4]. This speaks directly to what we have recently called the plasticity inherent in the historical adaptations of thomism in social life [5].

This plasticity amounts to the administration of desperate souls from the structures of the state and Churches, without ever transforming the mere survival of life on Earth. This leaves us with the notion of kingdom, which Hutchins introduces in opposition to the political community of city life (polis), but only to reabsorb it into the order of political theology. And it is at this threshold, that we can claim that the kingdom is not a political theological category, but an experiential allowance in which life, the dead and languages occur beyond and before political determinations. It is no surprise, then, that Ivan Illich called the kingdom primarily a mystical experience: “I will dare to formulate a hypothesis: the kingdom is what constitutes the authentic mystical experience, if the mystic knows what experience is really constituted by. The mystical experience of the believer is the conscious experience of the kingdom before the parousia. The mystical experience is the fruit of love, and, therefore, it is also accessible to every lover. The awareness about its meaning is the fruit of faith…” [6]. 

We tend to forget that both national units and the contemporary empires of world building and destruction have been first and foremost enemies of spoken living languages and idioms. On the one hand, the historical grammars to build the unity of people’s official language, and in our days the rise of Artificial Intelligence has clearly become the last stage through which power abandons languages to computational and rhetorical obsolescence. This opening towards awareness is not an article of faith through consent nor a moral predicament that can be adequate prima facie into a political register; it is fundamentally a linguistic experience that allows for the delicate cultivation of peaceful coexistence taking place not in a world, but between them: “To learn a language in a human and mature way way is to accept the responsibility for its silences and sounds. The gift a people gives us in their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than its system of sounds…The greater the distance between two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love” [7]. 

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Notes 

1. “Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel On Ancient Prophecies And Modern Tech,” in conversation with Peter Robinson, October 2024, Hoover Institute: https://youtu.be/wTNI_lCvWZQ?si=M8-qrBh-G7bYZPfw

2. Robert M. Hutchins. St. Thomas and The World State (Marquette University Press, 1948), 15. 

3. Ernst Jünger. The Peace (Henry Regnery Company, 1948), 69. 

4. Pope Francis. “Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aeternae (2021)”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20210325_centenario-dante.html 

5. Gerardo Muñoz. “The social efficacy of thomism”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/31/the-social-efficacy-of-thomism-by-gerardo-munoz/

6. Ivan Illich. “Concertning Aesthetic and Religious Experience”, in The Powerless Church and other selected writings, 1955-1985 (University of Penn State Press, 2018), 86.

7. Ivan Illich. “Missionary Silence”, in The Church, Change, and Development (Urban Center Training Press, 1970), 121.

Zoning and the inalienable. By Gerardo Muñoz

The notion of “zoning” in American public law refers to the compartmentalization of land use (residential, governmental, industrial, among others), as well as the “zones” of the administrative framework that dispenses its delegated power. It is a common fact that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which includes the “Taking Clause”, states that taking territory must always be equitable compensated. The Fourteenth Amendment included during Reconstruction implements a non-discriminatory standard into zoning as division of space for political representation, and what is usually referred as “redistricting” in any given state. This means that the operative semantic and legal field of “zoning” refers simultaneously to both land as property, and territory as a spatial index of political representation. Of course, modern revolutions, whether in 1776 or in 1789, were stealth transformations of space into these two tier units of alienated property and representation, as we know from the territorial census in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Likewise, the framework of Americanism as a political civilization is that of landsurveying, which ultimately means not just to make coterminous sovereign authority to territorial limitations, but to make transactions between world forms (territory and its inhabitants). If “zoning” has become a fundamental point of contention in all spheres of American life – from housing to development, from political representation to governmental “taking”, from wildlife sites to the circulation of good and services of the metropolis – is because the essence of Calvinism was fundamentally a settler cosmos that reduced life to usurpation of territory. In this sense, Bruno Maçaes is right that in the age of planetary Americanism the predominant form of domination is world-building and world-destroying. The perpetual social war over “zoning” is precisely the movement of building and destroying life-worlds through the linguistic justification of the administrative legal apparatus. 

In his forgotten book Nomos and Physis: Origin and Meaning of One (1945) on the severability of the two notion of “order” in Ancient Greece, Felix Heinimann notes that the triumph of nomos over physis implied a separation from the world of “reality” and “deeds” from that of rhetorical language that came to dominate it (nomos). In the present, the separation between nomoi and physis is the void that is perpetually governed by the attenuation of zoning: the creation of artificial worlds, but, at the same time, the composition of artificial languages. But the paradox is the following: the world of nomoi ceases to have any contact with that of physis; and physis, the natural world, becomes an artificial life world only responsive to irreflexive and undetermined practices of social exchange. This means that zoning is the vector of force that constantly separates human beings from both the world and language, and ultimately stripped its “humanity” from the species-being. 

As the zoning process plunges extensively into all spheres of practical and intellectual relations of human beings, an increasingly grouping of unalienable life emerges in a polar night. Here solitude in language brings forth the warmth of the unalienable. Perhaps it is in this night, where a trivial amor mundi will be cultivated for other generations, as beautifully suggested by Tim Ingold. A vita nota that will only commence on the lines that are invisible and opaque to the shining surfaces of zoning.

Hypocrisy as last refuge. by Gerardo Muñoz

In an entry of Dopo Nietzsche (1974), Giorgio Colli states that after the overcoming of all values and taboos, the contending moral strife finds its highest value in hypocrisy. Colli goes on to say that “hypocrisy is the last bastion where moral forces have found their refuge” [1]. One can clearly see that for Colli hypocrisy as the highest value is quite distinct from morality, since it is the “refuge” where the contending moralities invest themselves in rhetorical encroachment. That hypocrisy has become – as Colli saw with clarity in the 1970s – the last alcove of humanity, means, for one thing, that the human species have ceased to have any faith in the language that they use, and that for this very reason there is only an estimation of rhetoric, procedure and technical terms abstracted from the sensible world. If understood as such, it would come to no surprise that the majority of public institutions in advanced societies are embracing, and for the most part promoting, the incorporation of Artificial Languages and Intelligence to organize the interactions of their lives. Ultimately, the order here is clear: it is not that new technological advances will lead to a rise in untruthfulness; rather, these instrumental mutations are a consequence of the deep hypocrisy that runs through the social bond.

In fact, one can only assume that Colli was pointing at something more profound and obscure in his gloss when he referred to hypocrisy as the last refuge, and in this sense he was pointing beyond Nietzsche. After all, Nietzsche understood hypocrisy as mimesis and appearance that if incorporated over a long period of time ceases to be hypocrisy to become real [2]. A series of good acts and deeds in the spirit of friendship makes a person benevolent. In the same way that Miguel de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno Martir through his public faith and habits, was a symbol of Catholic faith for all the believers of his tightly knit community in spite of his interior doubts (this is the Knight of Faith). Now, Colli is pointing to a second degree hypocrisy that is no longer explicated by mimicry, but by its dependence to an ethereal value that governs and justifies any set of given actions. The actions are no longer in relation to faith or non-faith, but are properly acts of “bad faith”, since they make belief captive to the justification of the highest moral value. This will be consistent with Nicola Chiaromonte’s description that the end of secularization is not an epoch lacking faith, but one that dwells in “bad faith”. 

And what is ultimately “bad faith”? It is the realm of hypocrisy that, due to its impossibility of communication, understands its mission waged on the petty negation of one value over another. It is a mutation of Goethe’s nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse into the sphere of prevailing forces. The civilizational stage of enlightened hypocrisy prepares the human being to renounce the use of language and unmediated appearance. This means that the triumph of the technoadministration of the world would not be possible without the alluring refuge of hypocrisy that conquers reality through the very means that renders inaccessible the real presence of the world. It is not that politics and politicians have become hypocritical; it is that politics can only subsist thanks to its refuge in hypocrisy. The hypocrite is the last figure that steers in unworldliness.  

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Notes 

1. Giorgio Colli. Dopo Nietzsche (Adelphi Edizioni, 1974), 50.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human (Cambridge U Press, 1996), 39-40.

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.

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. 

Painting, the last metaphysical activity. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his old book The Art of Cézanne (1965), the German art historian Kurt Badt makes a remarkable affirmation in dialogue with Hans Sedlmayr’s indictment about the crisis of modern art: “In him [Cézanne], in fact, painting ‘emerges as the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism – Nietzsche’s view of the great art of his time in general” [1]. Badt’s affirmation must be first understood contextually as a response to Sedlmayr’s thesis laid out in Verlust der Mitte (1951) that argues that the post-impressionist painter was the last attempt at visual order within the convoluted modern crisis of art, still committed to “represent what pure vision can discover in the visible world…without adulteration” [2]. The subtlety  of Badt’s disagreement with Sedlmayr is notable, since for him Cézanne does not stand for a painter of chaos and subjectivity; on the contrary, the painter unequivocally enters in relation to nihilism. At that instance painting and nihilism are positioned polemically face to face. So, what could painting as the last metaphysical activity mean after all? Why is it that painting obstructs or stuns the total exposure of nihilism? Instead of retracting painting to an ‘origin’, what if we understand its ontological contour as an excess within and beyond nihilism? 

In his recent book Tiempo roto (2024), Alberto Moreiras returns to Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor Seminar of 1969 to emphasize how in the epoch subsumed by the Gestell, and thus nihilism, the fundamental opening that exceeds the frame is an übermass, or overabundance of presence [3]. This might be a productive way to think about ‘painting as the last metaphysical activity’ in the era of Gestell, because it inscribes a relation to the visible always in relation to the appropriation of its excess. In the Zähringen seminar (1973) Heidegger will call this relation a phenomenology of the inapparent, which one could very well extend to the praxis of painting as the relation between unconcealment and concealment in the way that Daniel Aresse discusses it in the pictorial world of Vermeer (a polarity that in Cézanne no longer pertains to play of optic illusions but of the disclosure of the world). This cojoining of the inapparent is more beautiful than any possible world visible ordering, because it exceeds the frame of the visible [4]. In this way, Cézanne is not just a painter that exchanges roles with the thinker (as in the relationship between dichter and gedanke) it is rather that he remains the most faithful exponent of painting as the ontic region of the phenomenology of the inapparent or übermass. 

In a session of the Zollikon Seminars (May 1965), Heidegger introduces Cézanne’s landscape as a counterpoint of the hermeneutical circle of perception and calculative intuition. Heidegger writes quite succinctly: “For instance, a painting by Cézanne of Mont St. Victoire cannot be comprehended [erfassen] by calculation. Certainly, one could also conduct chemical research on such a picture. But if one would like to comprehend it as a work of art, one does not calculate, but sees it intuitively. Is the painting, therefore, something psychological, since we have just heard that the psychological is what can be comprehended intuitively? No, the painting is not something psychological. Obviously, the above-mentioned “simple principle” for distinguishing psyche and soma is not simple at all” [5]. This is so because for Heidegger the figure of the mountain (a figure among others) in Cézanne’s work is not the cause of the decision of painting; it is rather the ground (Grund) that orients a certain disposition towards the opening of any given form. One could say that the motif of the mountain is the ground that dispenses the relation to the excess or the inapparent while being entirely visible. 

As such, the activity of painting is not just a capacity or disposition that allows representation; on the contrary, the pictorial praxis qua praxis remains attached to the notion of truth as unconcealment and concealment in the hegemonic structure of Gestell and the objective sciences for which there is none. This allows to throw light into the rather underworked suggestion advanced by Badt that painting remains the last metaphysical activity of the arts, which does not presuppose understanding the “painterly” as a quality or autonomous sphere of human action, but rather an original gesture of presencing the non-presence, and in this way to remain in what I am willing to call the imperturbable.

It has been registered that at one point during the sessions at Le Thor, Heidegger also made the curious assertion that only Cézanne had taken a path towards thinking (in painting) similar to his own turning away from Western ontotheological dispensation into another beginning [6]. This might be because painting is neither the archaic residue of the human hand, nor the pictorial index of image; its fulfillment lies in the excessive proximity to truth that eternally reveals the permanence of the invisible. 

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Notes 

1. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cezanne  (University of California Press, 1965), 181.

2. Hans Sedlmayr. Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (Transaction Publishers, 2007), 131.

3. Alberto Moreiras. Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024), 113.

4. Martin Heidegger. Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2003), 8.

5. Martin Heidegger. Zollikon Seminars (Northwestern University Press, 1987), 79.

6. Giorgio Agamben. Il tempo del pensiero (Giometti & Antonello, 2022), 57-60.

*Image: Mont Sainte-Victoire, by Paul Cézanne. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph from personal archive.