pain

The bruised souls. by Gerardo Muñoz

Whenever a professional politician today evokes the ‘soul’ one must be immediately suspicious, as it tends to be an automatic lullaby for “national unity” or a dormant metaphor in a flowing stream of empty chatter. What could the soul mean to anyone – say, those millions that have now for the second time voted fairly and squarely Donald J. Trump to the Executive branch of the national government – only capable of giving attention to a series of onomatopoeic pop-words that are now ingrained in the linguistic acoustics of the American lexicon (“Bitcoin”, “Tiktok”, “Woke”, “Prime”, and the list could go on). The ongoing catastrophe is first and foremost within the texture of language, which is ultimately why it is also an ethical decomposition in which all other spheres of practical action (first and foremost, politics) amount to business as usual with its corresponding rhetorical bravura.

Suggesting continuity might perhaps be an understatement: it is now a business that does not need any sumptuous or veiled mediation; refracted upon its own absorption of its hyperproduction of fiction, the defeat of the communitarian salvation of Calvinism can only be expressed as a self-serving an ongoing destruction and self-annihilation. True, it could be claimed that ‘Americanism’  has always been this; the only difference is that today, already well into the century, it moves in a vector that directly rejects the world while making a full fledged program of its own making. Only a Society that has become fully moribund can celebrate its own death and decomposition; while the emancipated and well scripted villains of the act now have no shame but to reveal how the ultimate object of their conspiracy was the obliteration of the Earth.

“It is the time of the assassins”, TJ Clark writes echoing Henry Miller’s unjustly forgotten book on Rimbaud and the legitimation of the social bond, in which the homo homini lupi discloses itself from any all possible contact in the metropolis solely dependent on ad hoc hyperproduction of justifications required to fully commit to the illusion of legitimate action. Only that now the time of the assassins is perhaps an uncanny dark night of those without souls, as in the deranged characters of a McCarthy’ novel: they are willing to kill and be killed; they are beyond any contact with language, and “what do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? I’ve thought about it a great deal” [1]. And indeed, there is nothing to say and nothing to face: in the soulless dark night there are only hunters and those that are hunted; there is integration or pulverization; there is killing and there is humiliation before an ever increasing legal nexus coordinating the acquiescence of force. But perhaps this is the real arcana of the American soul that is only shimmering through in all of its glory.

Someone like D.H. Lawreence definitely thought so when writing about the novels of Finimore Cooper: “[The white american] lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth…All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the flooring into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” [2]. But in our days it has begun to melt, to fragment, and decompose in a heavy storm of pain and despair. And it continues to stand in the long winter of American civilization (the castle of Frozen is the allegory of the epoch) that now finds itself at the epochal threshold of the end of growth, only left with rampant nationalist impulses of self-affirmation that can only deepen the nihilist tonality of anguish and self-destruction, and the emergence of the bizarre as Jamie Merchant notes in his recent Endgame (2024). 

In his Reflections on America (1958), Jacques Maritain maintained that the spiritual patrimony of Americanism is that of being “bruised souls”, a community that came into being by double exclusion (hunted by their religion and rejected within a national polity), which in turn allowed to be compassionate to human suffering, and thus the hidden meaning of the wound was to be seeing in the “role played by immigration and poverty suffered in the Old World” [3]. Hence, for Maritain the condition for the healing soul of America resides in its opening to ongoing suffering of migrants, the dispossessed, and those in exodus from the psychic pressure of a social metabolism gone sour in every subject of civilizational decay as Erich Unger had proposed in his Politics and Metaphysics (1921).

 It comes to no one’s surprise, thus, that the decomposition of the American soul departs from the overt opposition to migration, as a figure of the grazing over the Earth, that must be vanquished and condemned by a planetary gnosticism undergoing in front our eyes. The Chrisitian modern state enters in this way into a concrete and visible process of artificial desecularization showing that “the Christian relation to the State…is in mad hostility to all of them, having in the end, to the destruction of them all. […]. And it is, simply, suicide. Suicide individual and en masse” [4].

The stakes are extremely clear: it is for the bruised and the brute (some have called it the barbarians, proprietors of strange tongues, keepers of the clandestine lacunae of language) to retreat from the fictive proliferation of appearances, the artificialization of reason that can promise success as the ultimate pinnacle of self-destruction. Inclined beneath the shadow of archaic Penia, the bruised and incurable souls might not find redemption in the American wasteland, but they will land somewhere between language and world. Not a program but a moving conviction.

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Notes 

1. Cormac McCarthy. No Country For Old Man (Vintage, 2005), 8.

2. D.H.Lawrence. “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels”, in Studies in Classic American Literature (Thomas Seltzer, 1923), 92. 

3. Jacques Maritain. Reflections on America (Scribners, 1958), 84-85. 

4. D.H. Lawrence. Apocalypse (Penguin Books, 1995), 148.

Techne alupias. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his Lives of Ten Orators, Plutarch dedicates an entry to the sophist and rhetorician Antiphon who, among other things, allegedly possessed a technique to deal with distress of the human soul (techne alupias) [1]. We know from historical sources that anxiety was already a common psychotic malady in the life of the polis, and it is most probable that Antiphon’s discourse treatment was reacting to this general phenomenon of his time. In the testimonia of Suda and Lucian there is agreement that Antiphon was a sort of language magician, a “speech-cook” (sic), who derived his powers from the interpretation of dreams, and in the words of the second, could unlock “the office of Sleep” [2]. Although his so-called pain-removing lectures have been lost, there is enough evidence that suggests that these rested on the archaic notion of “persuasion” (Peitho), whose main object was neither human psychology nor bodily somatic terrain, but rather psyche or the soul in the state of being. It is an art that has been lost – if something like “techne alupias” can be counted as a technique is plausible, given its irreducibility. In other words, what survives is only a lacuna of a philosophical ascesis that we should locate no so much as a conceptual problem, but as an ethical one. This is a task that today seems more needed than ever if we can agree that the fundamental tonality of social existence today is, precisely, the reproduction and endurance of pain, or what has been called the self-inflicted deaths of despair.

Much of the reflective work in this direction has been lacking, however in 1958 there was a publication entitled La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica by the  Spanish physician and historian Pedro Lain Entralgo, which dedicated a whole section to Antiphon’s “techne alupias” as a fundamental strategy to treat an existential affliction. Recasting the opposition between nomos and physis as a general structure of Antiphon’s teaching, Entralgo seems to advance the hypothesis that the technique to alleviate affliction seeks to revoke the primacy of the normative conventions of the nomos towards the natural consension and causation of physis. In the most elaborate moment of his reconstruction of Antiphone’s techne alupias, Entralgo seems to project unto the opposition of nomos-physis, the rationalization of the sensible and the sensation of the corporeal through language: “Antifonte cree que para tal fin hay una «técnica» (tékhne alypías); más aún, práctica esa tékhné, informándose acerca de las causas de la aflicción y hablando al paciente en consecuencia. Actuando según las causas, la persuasión verbal logra eliminar la pena del alma: el pensamiento y la palabra del retórico sanador —su lógos— ordenan y racionalizan la vida anímica y corporal del afligido” [3]. 

But Entralgo stops short of elucidating what the language of persuasion entails in this specific elaboration. Is it just a form of compensatory mediation between nomos and physics, between soul and body dualism? The German classical philologist Julius Stenzel in an article dedicated to Antiphon in the 1920s had taken the contrary view; mainly, that the sophist’s treatment of pain does not aim at naturalizing the logos, nor at rationalizing nature (physis) for the event of affliction; it was rather an opening through language creating a new reality principle beyond all opposition, an undercurrent in which the taking place of language could only serve as the anemic nutrient [4]. Taking into account Stenzel’s intuition it becomes evident why Entralgo, as he concludes his gloss on Antiphon, seems to be skeptical of an existential techne alupias fully deprived of normative content, that is, situated outside the nomos that founded the polis so lavishly celebrated by Pindar. 

This was totally unconvincing to him, since it would seem to shake a bit the foundation of Western political civilization that needs to maintain the hylomorphism between soul and body, nomos and physis, happiness and deficiency towards a well balanced organic life. The prefix –*lup that derives from –luk should be understood as a lightening of human appearance converted into something ominous that must be contained and differentiated into a political program [5]. In this way, and if “techne alupias” is to be understood as the event of language, it is also the eruption of the involuntary form of language that “can prevent the autonomization of ethical action: pain is the “grace” that is communicated by acting. And it is, at the same time, the muteness that permits the realization of authentic communication: not that of abstract or arbitrary signs, but between souls. The obstinate, irreducible enigmaticity of pain is precisely what prevents Persuasion from falling back on the Christian morality of “sacrifice”, or of acting towards the direction of an end” [6].

This picture drawn by Gianni Carchia should reveal itself as fully contemporaneous, since today the two poles being offered (replicating the nomos and physis duality in updated versions) are on the one hand the moralization of a neo-Christian acceptance towards salvation; and, on the other, the secularized version of salvation in the form of the highly sophisticated techno-medical field. If both positions have as their central aim an offer to end pain, it is also true that they both renounce the ethical dimension of the sayable in language, which renders impossible a techne alupias to come to terms with our current abysmal sentiment. This means that no amount of prescribed pain-killers and medicalized strategies can come to terms with the soul’s angst. By choosing to erase pain from life of the soul, religious-medical integration univocally accepts the triumph of a living death.

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Notes

1. Plutarch. “Lives of the Ten Orators”, in Plutarch’s Morals, V.5 (Little Brown and Company, 1874), 18-21.

2. Antiphon the Sophist. The Fragments (Cambridge University Press, 2002), ed. Gerard J. Pendrick, 96-97.

3. Pedro Lain Entralgo. La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica (Revista de Occidente, 1958), 149.

4. Julius Stenzel. “Antiphon”(1924), in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen, Stuttgart, 33-43.

5. Hermann Usener. Götternamen (F. Cohen, 1896), 198-199.

6. Gianni Carchia. “Tragedia y persuasión: nota sobre Carlo Michelstaedter”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Técnos, 1990), 38.

Dumb pain: Magris’ reading of Michelstaedter. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is only towards the end of his novella Un altro mare (1991) where Claudio Magris deploys a philosophical synthesis on the character and lesson of Carlo Michelsteadter. In the narrative, this occurs when historical time accelerates, and we cross from the crumbling of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to the rise of Italian fascism and the confrontation between the German military occupation and the partisan forces and the postwar years. For Magris’ Gorizia characters this threshold leads the way into the historical epoché of a long civilizational decay and existential fatigue, where even the attempt to carve a ‘hide out’ (a community of salvation?) seems rather defeating. This is where Magris deploys his philosophical thesis – it must be quoted in full: 

“This too is dumb pain, a weight that falls and crushes, the delirium of believing that life is redeemable, the illusion of the “I” which finds liberation from the world’s madness by sinking to the level of brute existence. Fortunately life is a short, painful negative adverb – “non-being” – and not something everlasting. The eternal scorches that “non, that tiny, ferocious sting. To keep to oneself and to turn to flame – that is true liberation from every single changeable thing. And nothing is more changeable than man.” [1]. 

A dumb pain that crushes humanity forever. And where Magris writes in lapidary tone that nothing is “more changeable than man”, one can also read – it is impossible not to hear it – what Blanchot says of Antelme’s camp testimony: that man is indestructible because he can be infinitely destroyed. But for Magris the enduring (it might not be the proper word) lesson of Michaelsteadter’s thought is that it accounts the refusal of a trascendental delegated life on the side of the redeemable and the messianic, always too functional to the same historical – rhetorical architecture of Western rationality. Could the perspective of persuasion be an alternative to the outlook of redemption (Adorno)? We can leave this question hanging for the moment. Perhaps one of the “fundamental lies”, to put it in Nietzschean overtone, is to believe the political legend of contractualism in which the compensation for “fear” of the state of nature is solely cured by the entry to the historical time of the civilizational principle can overcome the sense of pain. 

The price to be paid for the Hobbesian logic is high: in other words, it is the dumbing of pain in life, which entails the course to optimize, suppress, and perhaps, in our contemporary vocabulary, to “medicalize” its symptoms (is not not health afterall the secularization of salvation). In English language, to speak of “dumbing” also entails “dumbing down” the quality of something or someone. Hence, the dumbing pain in which ‘life will go on without truly living’ in the reproduction of the Social will already presuppose a non-thinking life; a life that betrays and runs aways from the possibility of its ethical exposure. This is the befall towards historical time and the abstraction of positivism and value, by which precisely “every single thing” will become changeable and exchangeable for them to become legible. 

For Magris, the strategy of persuasion is not a political or social technology, it is rather a refusal of living in the time of the changeable and the civilizational organizational capacities to “hide ourselves from the reality of our own emptiness”, in which the promotion of pain is rendered oblivious through the working out of a life that has already accepted the reification of death [2]. If we are to follow John Ruskin to the letter, this is the spirit of the triumph of bourgeoisie civilizing enterprise: “vulgarity is one of the forms of Death”, he writes [3]. The acceptance of vulgar life does not mean the end of life in exceptional historical or spectacular moments (as frequently as they have become); it is the suppression of persuaded life after the fall of prophets, higher values, and transcendental principles that accumulate in useless rubble.

Vulgarity, then, is the aesthetic vortex of what social pain can only organize through the reproduction of realized self-defacement. It could very well be that what Magris says with and about Michelstaedter in Un altro mare (1991) runs parallel to what he calls the “impolitical anarchism” of Joseph Roth’s world colored by the irreducible fragments of individual feelings, passions, and working through the loneliness of pain that oscillates in the ocean of language that struggles to retain a world [4]. This is the life of the soul that before the eclipse of the modern eon (including the real existing communism, as Magris takes into account): resist, in full force, the spillover of ethical vulgarity to persuade oneself that, even after redemption, there are other irreducible paths towards death. 

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Notes 

1. Claudio Magris. A Different Sea (Harper Collins, 1993), 86.

2. Ibid., 56.

3. John Ruskin. “On Vulgarity”, in Modern Painters (1860), V.5, 348.

4. Claudio Magris. Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Einaudi editore, 1971), 225.

American apocalypticism. On Pierpaolo Ascari’s Fine di mondo: dentro al rifugio antiatomico da giardino (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

Pointing to a methodological clarification, Pierpaolo Ascari’s Fine di mondo: dentro al rifugio antiatomico da giardino (DeriveApprodi, 2024) opens with an untimely advice: the threat of atomic extermination of human life can only be told and appealed through the irony deployed in all areas of consumerist culture. Undoubtedly, this fits pretty well to the case on point, since American modernization is both the hotbed of Hollywood and the atomic bomb, two poles of the regime of a vicarious life consisted with Henry Adams’ well-known assertion that, in spite of everything, America civilizational passion has always been generalized optimism. And it is not surprising that Stanley Kubrick, when asked about the thesis of Dr. Strangelove (1964), also claimed that the only possible form to tell a story about the bomb of total extermination was through a black comedy (Ascari 11). This self-serving optimism is tested in Ascari’s Fine di mondo (2024) by looking at the construction of an apocalyptic underworld fantasy; that is, in the garden of anti-atomic sheltering that reveals the true arcana of modern Americanism as a subterfuge – but also a civil current in plain sight – parallel to the rise of mechanized labor under the conditions of the triumphant Fordism. Of course, now that our farewell to Fordism has been longed trumpeted, it does not take much to see that what remains is the infrastructure of schizophrenia and general terror in the social fabric that colors the specific tune of American apocalypticism. Ascari’s book is a superb elaboration of this tonality as historically rooted and articulated, but also open to its (pseudo)theological mutations undergoing in our present. 

On the surface, Ascari’s Fine di mondo (2024) is a short compendium of the civil responses and techniques towards atomic destruction and survival; but, more deeply, is also a history of Americanism as a historical project committed to a long process of civil domestication, enclosure, and endurance of survival. Of course, the nuances here are important to grasp the subtle hypothesis of Ascari’s working scene, since we also know that modernity at large (considering both its contingency and contradiction as features of its emergence) was also a process of an optimized gnosis through alienation and the enclosure of private property towards commerce stabilization and productive growth (the nomos). But for Ascari the specificity of the American nomoi through the lenses of atomic sheltering and refuge implies a microphysis; that is, a “way of life” validated through theological premises tailored in the organization of subjective deificatio (Ascari 23). This means that the apocalyptic apparatus driving American philosophy of history is not just one of realization towards the absolute objectivation of the world – even if such endeavor is necessary and preparatory – but rather that the sheltering and self-imposed domestication of human existence has become naturalized as a threshold of the conditions of finite human life. The paradigm of sheltering as the unit of survival is a form of self-regulation of grace that is consistent with the evangelical dispensationalism and technical election analyzed in Monica Ferrando’s recent important book.

The concrete examples abound in Ascari’s short but densely illustrated book: from the Civil Protection comic to the details of the emergence of “do it yourself” assemble manuals (discussed in the correspondence between Adorno and Sohn-Rethel); from the Hulk to Godzilla in a post-atomic bombed world; form the resilient speeches on atomic menace by JFK to a 1950s study conducted at Princeton University that reassured that “fathers” will get to know their children better in conditions of total sheltering even if it results in an “ethics of the jungle” (Ascari 34). Following Guy Oakes’ groundbreaking The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994), what is distilled in Ascari’s pop culture puzzle is the panorama of the “Cold War” not as a war that did not take place between two imperial powers; but rather a total war that took place beneath the crust of the earth (and this is why the topoi of the refugee becomes so telling) and at the thicket of human existence waged as psychic management of the civil sphere. In fact, the “imaginary war” is nothing else than the stazion once social life that has yet to cease to exist in our days (Ascari 48-49). 

For Ascari this implied an interiorization of the ‘sublime’ in the reification of the social fabric, which cannot be divorced from the lobotomized subjectivity of the crisis of “social man” that Gianni Carchia identified as the steering project of post-enlightenment Romantic negativity. In the turbid vaults of the self-made man we encounter the liquidation of everything that is living and the projection of fictitious death that clings into “salvation” in spite of absolute destruction; because, after all, those that survive total destruction are only there to confirm the soteriological greatness of the American destiny (Ascari 78-79). The thorough “Ubu” dimension of American psychic political power definitely speaks to this well sedimented conviction of sacrificial subjectivity. Who does not remember the glorious chants for resilience and isolation of the American political elites during the peak of the COVID19 crisis management? If it came to no one’s surprise that a large majority of Americans accepted the pandemic arbitrary rules (monetized whenever needed, it goes without saying), it was because the American subjectivity has been adapted for quite too long to the ongoing separation of refugee and domestication. After reading Ascari, in fact, we think whether the emergency policies were not just another episode in the history of American sheltering now extended at a planetary scale.

There is another idiosyncrasy to American apocalypticism that must be accounted for. And this is introduced towards the end of Fine di mondo (2024), when Ascari quotes Ernesto De Martino about nuclear war; mainly, that when it comes to atomic annihilation there is no longer the symbolic mythic-ritualistic process of reintegration, but rather the mere technification of the hand that gathers scientific knowledge in convergence with the death drive” (Ascari 81). In other words, this technico-apocalypticism brings to absolute unity the originary response of the human species (the movement of the hand) with the organization of scientific rationality that, like Günther Anders saw, brings no re-symbolization of the principle of reality, but rather it can only reaffirm the layering of the principle of reality to govern over it (Ascari 85). In a way, if it as if the essence of American apocalypticism is instituted as if beyond time, since the endurance of a “time of the end” means that the triumphant death (and the dead fueling the demagoguery of its process) foreclosing the symbolization without an exit. Indeed, an apocalypse without redeeming kingdom. For Ascari the only anticipation – primordial mechanism of anthropological capacity – is that of “money”, and hence the dominance of the principle of general equivalence entails gaining the temporal illusion of some distance from the ongoing production of death. But it is evident to anyone today, as it was said not long ago, that the true dead are those petit bourgeoisie living in the American suburbs. And they keep coming as the embers of domestic happiness try to ferociously shut down the latency of a piercing pain. 

Yes, the nature of permanent apocalypticism confirms that the true and final object of techno-capitalist force has always been the possibility of multiple life worlds. And its erosion implies the endless possibility of ordering the life of the city, as Elon Musk just a couple of weeks ago told the former president of the Republican Party: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and now they are full cities again. Yeah, it is not as scary as people think”. If the enterprise of civilization has largely been understood as springing from the crust of the earth upwards, one of the important lessons of Ascari’s Fine di mondo is that it trains us to look downwards and inwards as the cruxes of America’s persistent government over the garden of our souls. 

Carlo Michelstaedter: Pain and the Social. A seminar with Revista Disenso. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the following months some of us will offer an eight week seminar exclusively dedicated to a close and analytical reading of the enigmatic work La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) by Italian thinker Carlo Michelsteadter (1887-1910). Ever since his death – as can be easily gasped by Giovanni Papini’s obituary in 1917 – there has been an aura of mystery around the infamous philosophical suicide of Michelsteadter that only parallels that of Socrates’ hemlock or Otto Weiniger’s self-inflected gunshot. Of course, we will be less interested in the biographical motives, and if push comes to shove attention to this detail will be elaborated in light of the nexus of his thought to the event of his death.  

La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) offers a unique theoretical elaboration about the civilizational decline of the “living” into the rhetorical deferment of life as realized in the organization of social alienation. And for Michaelsteadter there is no other purpose of rhetorical form than the absolute submission to the general abstraction that defaces the event of pain. It is no accident that he was also interested in the thematics of health and ancient techniques of pain-relief (the techné alupias, for instance), even if underdeveloped in his thinking given his sudden premature death. So, it is for us, his posthumous readers, to take these sets of issues and move them forward in our present any way we can. This is part of the task that motivates putting together this seminar after a series of conversations with friends and interlocutors.

La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) deploys the classical metaphysical tradition through the ancient poles of “rhetoric” and “persuasion”, where the second (the ancient Peithò) seeks to return the voice and expression to the problem of pain as an ineffable type of speech (Logos) that refuses the elevation of force that harbors the circulation of violence and the administration of social death. The ancient notion of the Peithò withdraws echoes of the mythical inception and the sacred, as also reminded by Aristophanes: “Persuasion’s only shrine is eloquent speech (Logos)…And I Persuasion (Peitho), the most lovely word” (The Frogs, 1391-1395). Where and how do we attune ourselves to the peitho today – the imperative of the eros of the word in the wake of the regime of social production of pain? 

In the aftermath of the collapse of the cycle of civilizational secularization, it is only obvious that all these questions stratified in the tradition once again become attractive and pertinent. In this light, we think that Michelstaedter’s thought still offers us a series of  significant hypotheses to think through the crisis of social man and the domination of the civil that colors our current predicament, where the question of “pain” is still an understudied problem. Throughout this course we will address notions such as rhetoric and persuasion, life and communication, nihilism and values, the logic of capital and the social bond, or the notion of world and pain. Our aspiration when approaching Carlo Michelsteadter’s work is to develop reflective conditions to address the thorny issue of an ethics of pain that so thickly enmeshed in our historical moment.

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‡: Information about the registration to the seminar will be made available at Revista Disenso in upcoming days. The seminar will run every other week for a period of eight sessions (roughly from the beginning of September to early December, 2024).

On American despair. by Gerardo Muñoz

The rhetoric of “decadence” now prevalent in United States has reached such heights that, regardless of political orientation, it is clear that it has become a pretext for a desired take off and accession from the objective  stagnation and paralysis. Paradoxically, the assumption that there is “decadence” is revered as a moment of forthcoming light and rejuvenation; and, thus, as a “crisis” that can be identified and managed through the end. As it is well-known, for some critics of decadence the Golden age of American life was the landing on the moon and the population boom of the 1950s; technology and family. The elements are self-serving: to accelerate the reproduction of the human species, and to lead technological gigantism against new geopolitical competitors (AI, chip wars, Green economy, etc).

In the early twentieth century Americanism was a benefactor of private Fordism (everyone could enjoy his or her car, that is, their increasing isolation), but in principle things have not changed much a century later in terms of the outlook and the techno-administrative power. But the one thing that has changed is that the age of increasing productivity and formal production is no longer the objective coordinates of social relations; rather, depopulation and stagnation are the new variables that public powers that must be governed through its effective processes. Ultimately, this also implies that the waning of the high-modern state is no longer effective, and so the established discussion about “race to the bottom” fails to understand that there is no bottom. Hence, the only race is toward planetary destruction.   

And what is curious to note is that even those that have identified the epochal crisis of Liberalism can only exacerbate and contribute to the acceleration of the ongoing destruction with cultural and rhetorical veneers notwithstanding. The ‘postliberal’ commitment to the fantasy of a “new policy of re-industrialization” cunningly allows the autonomy of state-sovereign capacity as the main orientation within the growing desert of administrative functions. In fact, this is a fort da moment in which policy makers can be in favor of empowering the nexus between executive power and the federal bureaucracy; while, at the same time, the mouthpieces of these policies can promise a dismantling of the administrative state in a post-Chevron era. This schizophrenic position is not a symptom of mere anachronistic derailments of a political movements, it is also an expression of the desperate attempts of American failed (and to a large extent non-existent) political elites to find a formal mediation between state, administrative coordination, and constituent power, precisely because this nexus is broken and in shackles. 

And truth be told, no piecemeal or nudge-driven re-industrial protectionism is “enough” to cure the social angst and despair of contemporary American subjectivity at all levels of human experience. It has been two honest economists, Anne Case & Angus Deaton in the book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2021), who taken noted that what they call “deaths of despair” is the central social affection of contemporary America, which fuels the slow but steady self-annihilation of the life that no longer truly lives (and paralyzes the economic framework as well). And, in turn, what outlives the hegemony of social domination is the regulation of pain and despair as the last dispensation of this unliving.

The necessary oblivion of the social production of the deaths of despair is what remains necessary so that a pseudo-theological framework of imperial “decadence” can retain its competitive narratives in the abyss. The end of real forces of autonomous production have led the way into the production of pain, which as Gianni Carchia clearly saw in his reading of Michelstaedter (Retorica del sublime, 1990), is a form of active ethical communication between souls. For all the alleged talk about spiritualism, theology, and instrumentalized Christianity in times of “decadence”, the high point of Americanism remains a techno-administrative apparatus that can only produce and conceal the prolongation of social pain. Precisely, “the parabola of the impossible so that any notion of the ‘good’ fails to be affirmed in this world”. 

The irreducible in language: a note on Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947). by Gerardo Muñoz

At the outset of L’espéce humaine (1947), Robert Antelme discloses the difficulty between language and experience that lays at the heart of the book, and which is never thoroughly assumed at the level of form in the novel. L’espèce humaine (1947) is ultimately not an account about the impossibility of describing what took place in the camps; from the banal physical violence to the desperate hunger, from the microaggressions to the slightest movements and carnage of bodies in space; from the joyful smiles in the most miserable of scenario where the ultimate goal was for the human life to slowly rot; the sequence of actions engage in no struggle to bring to a crisis the level of representation. And Antelme goes into painstaking efforts to give us a full picture of what took place, only to never talk about it again in writing or in personal conversations as Marguerite Duras tells us [1]. So, what to make of Antelme’s initial affirmation in the “Forword” where he states that: “…during the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive and we felt a frantic desire to describe it as such as it had been…[..]. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be checking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” [2]. The unimaginable for Antelme is a sort of threshold of language; a limit for the unrestricted, that is, for what could allow for an experiment of language after the catastrophe, or in the wake of the civilizational catastrophe that is consummated in the camp. 

This delirium and anxiety over language – to tell it now and how it happened and to tell “the world”, only to immediately acknowledge the impossible task of doing so – does not take place at the order of the narrative; it is first and foremost something that we get a glimpse of at the end of the book as the liberating soldiers enter the rubbled towns only to encounter the incontinence of the survivors “talk and talk, and pretty soon he isn’t listening anymore” [3]. At that moment, the face to face between human beings will follow “to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge”, Antelme tells us [4]. But what type of untransmittable and nocturnal knowledge is Antelme referring to here? It is not about some ethical exigency of the defacement of experience through linguistic construction; it is rather the torrential and densely weight of description and events, that numbs and deposes language in the very mediation of its effective sayability. The experience of human suffering and domination is untransmittable not because there is a deficit in language or the effacement of representation; but, on the contrary, precisely because there an excess of language that flattens irreducible suffering to an anaphoric socialization of speech that tacitly accepts inhumanity at face value. And that socialized distribution of speech underserves suffering, in virtue of equalizing an expansive chatter that neutralizes in survival the inherent pain of the irreducible human species within the imposible ordeal of total annihilation. 

Antelme’s L’espéce humaine  is stubbornly nominalistic in its thick descriptions of things and events, and it wants to avoid metaphoric transports. He prefers to call things as he sees it and get to the thicket of things in the most nauseating of repetitions. In a way, the hellish atmosphere of the concentration camp resides in the slow moving degradation of human life deprived of the world. However, there is one moment where Antelme resorts to calling a situation ‘hell’; that is, precisely, to an account of the transparent use of language, the raw incontinence and commanding force towards exteriority, as if there is no longer a caesura or separation between being and language once enunciation has been homogenized as commanding force. This is a language without a secret or unsaid, moving against the outside of consciousness in the same depretatory form as the same administrative machinery that has lifeless bodies as its target. In this way, language being turned into the force of speech will not only foreclose itself to the world, but it will signal the very intangibility by virtue of the flattening of verbal communication as an immediate and furious call to an annihilation of appearance. Antelme writes in this admirable moment – one of those instances where description of the state of things is incepted by the negation of the very conditions that allow for the narrative order: 

“Degradation, and flabbiness of language. Mouths whence nothing any longer ever came that was ordered, or strong enough to last. A weakly woven cloth fraying to bits. Stencens succeeded one another, contradicted one another, expressed a kind of belched up wrtnessness; a bile of words. They were all jumbled together: the son of a bitch who’d done it, the wife left on her own, food, drink, the old lady’s tear, the fuck in the ass, and so on; the same mouth could say it all, one thing after the other. It came forth all by itself; it would be empty. It only stopped at night. Hell must be like that, a place where everything that’s said, everythat’s expressed, comes forth equalized with everything else, homogenized, like a drunkard’s puke” [5]. 

The incontinence of language at the limit of what can be said is a secondary hell; that is, the last contortion that the inhumanity of the human can offer outwards in order to outlive in a moment of minimal pleasure, since the absolute pain of a glacial existence has been deprived of any real contact with the world and things. It is a linguistic hell – the looping language of the camp, will only mirror also the linguistic codification that around the same years will be elevated to the paradigm of cybernetics and the regime of information theory – will now appear as a unified block of application, enforcement and extraction. Hence, we should take Antelme at his word: language has become “flabby”, and it is a “puke”. It is circulation without sense, as in the looping mechanics of the furnaces charted by the Nazi engineers that appears in the recent sequence of the film Zone of interest (2023). It is not that sayability loses it claim to the autonomy of its form before an event; it is also that by virtue of its own degradation against the erasure of events, it can only be unified, packed, homogenized and rendered into equivalence in the wake of the absolute triumph of the historical project of alienation and external objectivity.  

The passage of the old hymnal texture of language as solace and lamentation could only entail the conservation of communication, which for Theodor Adorno writing during the same years as Antelme (1946-1947) will deduce as the “techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere whose shelter he can thrive” [6]. That the experience of the camp for Antelme ultimately meant that the “executioner can kill a man but cannot change him into something else”, must be placed in tension with the epochal transformation of a hellish experience of language at the service of the nihilistic service of equivalence that unveils its purest semblance at the camp [7]. The unitary reduction between the “socialized Man” and the “deportee” enters into a proper focus that Antelme was able to grasp with uttermost honesty: “…that there is no inherent difference between the “normal” system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a shepherd image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live” [8]. At the risk of an overtly mannerist claim, it seems to me that the kernel of Antelme’s intellectual effort is to withdraw from the condition of hell that is condensed in the block of ice fixated in the ruinous material of language [9]. Memory, experience, friendship, truth, writing, the soul – these are all tools to chip against the brute reification of the glacial subjection at the price of ultimate solitude. Is there anything else worth a shot? In the last pages of L’espéce humaine, Antelme returns to the question of “freedom”, only to claim that “to be free” implies to “say no to everything” – and could we also refuse the language as it declines into flabbiness, equivalence, and its putrid decline, as overflowing mountain of trash that covers up the ongoing pain of the human species? [10].  

Sure thing, the hölderlinean enduring and difficult task of the “free use of one’s own” appears here with some urgency as the requirement of traversing the attunement to pain. Antelme seems to have wanted to offer a negative theology to “forever starting anew”, in which the irreducible of human sayability is posited as the condition of the “only transcendence between beings” [11]. “To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience;  a prefix that for us designates distance and separation” [12]. Aren’t distance and separation two conditional criteria for grounding the irreducible? The habitation of the speaking being can harbor the contours of the unfathomable expression on the reverse of social tribulations, which is always the primal nomos of equivalence. Allowing the expansion of the irreducible as a the site of an ordinary accumulation of freedom preserves a sensible region for what takes place (“whatever happens” — and is not this taking place the opening of the non-site of the chorá?) in a language attuned to the relentless event that has forever touched us. This is already the site of the unimaginable beyond and away from the language of survival that permeates everything in both times of peace and of war. 

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Notes 

1. Marguerite Duras. El dolor (Alianza editorial, 2019 ), 71.

2. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 3.

3. Ibid., 289.

4.Ibid., 290.

5.  Ibid., 135. 

6.  Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the damaged life (Verso, 2020), 33

7. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 220.

8. Robert Antelme. “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 22. Dionys Mascolo makes more or less the same claim in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) when speaking about the stratification of species in the camps and the division of classes in society: “l’intuition aveuglante de tous les survivants est celle d’avoir fait quant à eux, sous une forme extrême, cette expérience: que l’organisation de la société en classes telle que nous la vivons est déjà une image de la division de cette société en espèces, comme dans les camps”, 87.

9. Robert Antelme. “Revenge?”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 15.

10.  Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 291..

11. Robert Antelme. “The Smiling Angel: Rheims Cathedral”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 10. 

12. Maurice Blanchot. “The Indestructible”, in The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 

Persuasion of the surround: a reply to Andrés Gordillo. by Gerardo Muñoz

The friend Andrés Gordillo has generously sustained an ongoing conversation in light of the talk delivered in Mexico on institution and immanence (a first reaction could be read here). In a recent note he brings many elements to the table, and his versatile writing makes it difficult – alas, this is a wish come true for any reader – to locate an univocal point of entry. This is perhaps because there is none. Andrés wants to keep us at the edge, and so he enacts the set up: there is communication, and because communication is the event of language, there is still the possibility of mystery. Many things already pop up here, but this might be doing injustice to Andrés’ elaborate draft. So, for the sake of the exchange, let me open the route by running through a moment that impacted my first reading. It is this moment: “El desencuentro que aviva la amistad de ambos personajes [Narcissus and Goldmund] es el de haber decidido resguardarse en la exterioridad de sus elecciones, ahí donde son obra del amor”.

This is a condensation of what the Hesse’s novel means to him; or, rather, how it speaks to him in light of a discussion regarding the dominance of the civil principle, and the question of an experiential dimension that we defined provokingly as a minor transcendence. I am not sure I am in the position to unpack Andrés’ thesis, if it is a thesis at all. I do remember a couple of years ago an exchange with Alberto Moreiras on the logic of the encounter and the misencounter related, precisely, to the problem of the eclipse of experience. This is the problem that keeps soliciting thought; it is the problem of thought itself.

However, I am getting ahead of myself. Andrés stages a complex framing: there is friendship as absolute difference (or in virtue of a fundamental misencounter), and then there is an exteriority of their existential decisions; that is, in the manner that they are irreductible to their being in the world. I spoke of framing purposely, since I find myself these days with Pablo Picasso’s “The Blue Room” (1901) from the early period that I encountered in Washington DC. It is a rather small picture – and to the viewer, the semi-statue like nude, a female figure it seems, comes to the forefront sliding downwards. A mysterious resonance dilates between things – and indeed, the objects in the room (the sheets, the rug, the bouquet of flowers, the paintings, the half-open window) feel like things. This is an intimate surround at the threshold of catastrophe, where things could be lost at any moment. And we know that epochally they soon were.

We are in a strange setting – and if it is strange to us it is because there is a sense to which alienation and solitude here is the fundamental harmony of dwelling. This is not yet the assumption into plain and continuous historical time that will amass things into objects. The “Blue Room” (1901) inscribes esoterically the thematics of pain – it is a work in which Picasso responds to his friend Carles Casagemas’ suicide that very same year. No metaphorical or allegorical reading will do the job to put us in “The Blue Room”. In the wake of an elliptical death, pain stands in, like the nude the water basin, as the irreductible to history and the menacing social sphere. I will bounce this to another moment of Andrés’ text: “Por ahora me siento inclinado a conversar: avanzar hacia un umbral que se desploma”. This ‘crumbling threshold’ now appears to me as a sound and prudent description of what “The Blue Room” (1901) was able to achieve. An experiential awakening against the conflagration of modern historical time: soon enough – and boy was it soon – the interior space of “The Blue Room” will multiply into infinite cells of the planetary designs in which social man will be just a potential inmate. This is why Picasso in 1901 speaks still today a strange language for us – it discloses a surround, an exteriority that we have been deprived of. It is a surround that is fully folded within.


If pictorial practice is not mere representation, but also, more fundamentally, a form of thought, then we can claim that “The Blue Room” (1901) attests to the proximity of the misencounter of friendship that outlives in the experience of the surround. And here the painter had no privileged position – he is no figure of genius, no commander of historical destiny, no magician of forms. He is also a befallen figure because he is the cipher of life. But to overcome the rhetorical surplus of socialization requires techniques in the face of the irruption of pain. Nothing less solicited Carlo Michaelsteadter when criticizing the reduction of the “man of society” to the pieties in “exchange for the tiny learned task and his submission, the security of all that human ingenuity has accumulated in society, what he would not otherwise obtain except by individual superiority, the potency of persuasion”, he wrote in Persuasione e la rettorica, another masterpiece of the 1900s. Yet, persuasion requires to be vigilant at the moment where things enter the historical penumbra and its rhetorical artifice; the reign of endless confusion amidst the most transparent and disingenuous computations.

How one becomes persuaded within a tonality, and remaining to be so – this is also a surrounding mystery of “The Blue Room” at the outset of the century. We still dwell in its dissonance.