There is a wonderful poem titled “Midston House”, where the now forgotten American poet David Schubert defines the poetic task as the possibility of freeing a path through conversation capable of transposing both experience and language. The verses, also quoted in John Ashbery’s lectures on “minor poetic traditions”,taking the form of the imperative read as follow: “What is needed is a technique of conversation / but not the limited vocabulary of our experience, the surface irritations which pile up, accumulate a city, – but the expression, metamorphosed, of what they are the metaphor of– and their conversion into light” [1]. This technique of conversation and the living words should not be understood as a mere transposition or vehicle for the grounding of meaning that makes exchange possible; rather it is first and foremost an ethical mode rooted in experience that can enact the clearing, between sense and silence in order for something to appear. What emerges from the cloud of the phenomena is not the blinding light of truth; what is true can only be taken as the effortless coming in what has been cleared. This is why for Schubert the task of poetic speech is concerned with coming into “light” not as an exclusive effect of language, but as the distance between language and sensation that sparks the soul momentarily, to use an eckhartian figure.
Conversation allows for the simplification between things through a detachment in a path where the possible supersedes that of the deficiencies and needs. This fleeting state of serenity is confirmed in further verses when Schubert endorses the possibility of the eternal place of concordia: “To a place where life is simple and decent, not too demanding …That man, whose handshake was happiness” [2]. This is not a sublimated state of bliss in a subject, but the crossing over, an event, which is usually at hand distance and yet ungraspable. In this way, it becomes pertinent to assume that what Shubert mysteriously solicits as a “technique of conversation” nourished in experience but always as excess to it, never comes to fulfill the autonomy of poetry and life, corrupted by the exclusionary modalities of rhetorical dispensation.
But the technique of conversation is the coming of the poetic at the end of its tradition; a poeticity completely aligned with Osip Mandelstam’s revocation of the value of “poetic work” in order to recover, as the only possibility of presence, the tension that the voice lends to the contemplation of thought. In his short poetological statement, Schubert seemed to have grasped this problem when writing that “this rather unimportant novelty [poetry] is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight” [3]. The poetic task of conversation both proceeds and exceeds life, appearingas a formof nepsis, a workable vigilance of interiority, that run through every ethical intensity. And if the poetic conversation takes the form of light, it is because its verbal illumination is far from announcing a new world; it is merely the witness to the sensation in thought that has cleared a site for cohabitation.
If the task is to measure up to a techne conversationis of language it is because the poetic tradition guarded by the age of the poet is no longer viable, since it has run astray without any possibility of legitimate restitution. In her new biography of Paul Celan, Anna Arno comments that in the early years, in a poem titled “The Arrows of Artemis”, the poet considered the Arcadian topos with great skepticism in the wake of catastrophe and historical barbarism: “….not ponder that Artemis’ arrow still lurks in the forest and in the end will strike him?” [For Celan] mythical lands provided no shelter against the shockwaves of history. Celan was declaring a new path” [4]. What is the essence of this new path? Of course, it is the path of the meridian, which in its asymptotic drift towards conversation and alterity shatters the illusion of the self-sufficient and embellished order of discourse, whether as inflationary rhetoric or as absolute muteness atrophied by delegated systems of communication. The poetic word, on the contrary, is the moment when persuasion looks at the face of the homelessness for those “who speaks truly, who speaks the shade” [5]. It is in this capitulated assortment of clearing and shadows where one can locate what Schubert called the ‘fragment of life’.
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Notes
1. David Schubert. Works and Days (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1984), 56.
2. Ibid., 57.
3. Ibid., “A Short Essay on Poetry”, 2.
4. Anna Arno. Paul Celan: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2026), 61.
One of the decisive lessons of Giorgio Agamben’s archeological examination of Western politics is that the imperative to confront the closure of representation, sooner or later it must also come to terms with the notion of the body (corpo) as a central metapolitical condition in the genesis of modernity. If L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) brought to its final stage the philosophical exploration of Western ontology of politics defined by efficacy and realization; in most recent opuscules, Agamben has shown how the fixation and regulation of the body is also embedded in the regions of language and sensation of human life as well. In this sense, it is impossible not to read Il corpo della politica (Bollati Boringhieri, 2026) along with Il corpo della lingua (Einaudi, 2024), as two parallel commentaries on the defining stature of political representation. If a new beginning is one of the decisive questions of our times, then one of the pending tasks is precisely to think the body (corpo) against the ontotheological assumptions of calculative reason.
Similar to Il corpo della lingua (2024), Il corpo della politica (2026) starts with the treatment of the Copernican revolution of bodies in Hobbes and Newton, which in the face of the cosmological infinity inscribed a notion of two bodies in order to allow for representation within spatial coordinates. In other words, Hobbes’ artificial sovereign represented by the mortal god Leviathan (state normative authority) will have an autonomous colorary in the autonomy of the subject that will become “political” as long as it becomes coterminous with the civic body of the “People”. Thus, to speak of “bodies” is not just to rationalize physicality in space – although it is also this from a technical viewpoint that state legibility will soon demand of the incipient civil society – but more importantly, it entails the administration of energy and movement (in Agamben’s well known lexicon, the domestication of potency to the realization of purposeful ends). For Agamben, Spinoza’s conatus, which appears in the Baroque period in critical dialogue with Hobbesian and Newtonian frameworks should be read precisely a way to think past the body as substance, following the steps of the tradition of ancient Stoicism in which beings are corporeal insofar as they are in tension with the world, allowing the tonos or acoustics to animate being in its movement towards preservation and exposure (Agamben 20-21).
If all beings are traversed by a tonos – a tension that crosses as its medium in virtue of its contact with the world – this means that they are no longer defined by a substance, but as intensity within a field of forces once thrown in the world. As Agamben writes in passing with explicit confrontation with Heidegger’s Being and Time: “…con la tesi perentoria ‘l’essenza dell’esserci giace (liegt) nell’esistenza’. L’esserci è stato “gettato” nel mondo, ma si direbbe che, una volta gettato, non cade in piedi, ma giace (liegen significa innanzitutto essere sdraiato). E questa concezione sub-stanziale dell’essere che il conatus mette radicalmente in questione” (Agamben 23). In an archeological gesture that is already signatura of his work, Agamben reminds us that Hobbes’ substantive and artificial division of the “two bodies” that anchors modern politics can be traced to the corpus mysticum and the theological debates concerning transubstantiation that will later be recasted in the intersecting works of both Ernst Kantorowicz and Carl Schmitt, in which the impolitical dimension of the multitude becomes political through the artifice of decision and representation of a unified and indivisible body (Agamben 25-26).
The catastrophe of modern politics takes place when the body, once reduced to a substance and computable object in space, ceases to be understood as an inteusum or intensity of an irreducible multitude that expressed a generic and universal human species, as it was for Dante: “La politico – il finis totius humanae civilitatis che Dante intende definirie nel suo trattato – è ancora una volta un campo di tensioni interne allo stesso genere umano e questa intensità ha la foram di una moltitudine” (Agamben 39). In other words, for Agamben following the implicit tonus present in Dante’s Monarchia, the political is neither action nor mediation, but what names the very site of the possible. Agamben calls the hypothesis of an “anarchic politics” (politica anarchica), which no longer defines itself in relation to a formal mediation of government and state, but rather as the intensity of the multitude through the generic being (Marx) or the universal humanity (Dante) that takes the form of sensible Empire devoid of principial politics mediated by constituent power (Agamben 47).
Where does the multitude dwell outside the constituted representation of a community of belonging or the social mediation of the state? Already in 1990s Agamben had written a gloss on the politics of exile collected in Mezzi senza fine (1996), and the last part of Il corpo della politica (2026) he returns to philosophical and theological notion of the exile vis-a-vis the historical experience of the Jewish tradition as an errant or stateless people, as Erich Unger called it in 1922, whose existence has been defined by exile or galut (Agamben 48). It is a bit of a misnomer to call the exilic experience a “politics”, since for Agamben the authentic tradition of exile does not entail the right or duty fixed to a community of belonging; rather, what outlives the law is the only path capable of deposing it (in the manner of Paul, that is, as katargeo). In this way, justice is now understood not as a procedure in a normative system, but as a written tradition that can only be studied and reflected upon and ultimately experienced as a state of passivity.
Hence, the exilic experience is the caesura between language and world, in which we touch the exteriority with a renewed intimacy that unfolds the uncommunicative solitude that keeps the mystery of our use of language. Following the neoplatonic formulation “phygé monou pros monon” – understood by Erik Peterson as an expressive mystical relation of a “fuga di un solo presso un solo” – there is intimacy and authentic belonging whenever there is sensible separation in being (Agamben 55). Following Plutarch and Plato, for Agamben the exilic dimension is the very home of philosophy and thought, which confirms, against Crito’s suggestions at the end of Socrates’ life, that there life outside of the polis and the conglomerate of the demos, because life is outside itself once it is assimilated in the virtuality of a divine that nourishes its own potency. In what stands as one of the most precise formulations of the pheugein (exile) condition as a figure of existence, Agamben writes of its precise ascesis:
“La celebre definizione ascetica della fuga dal mondo come assimilazione a Dio andrà resa, pertanto, restituendo tutta la sua forza alla metafora politica: “l’assimilazione a Dio virtualmente un esilio” (kata ton dynaton significa qui, secondo il sense più proprio del termine dynatos, “virtualmente, secondo la potenza). L’affermazione e tanto piu significativa in quanto, con queste parole, Platone rompe con l’insegnamento socratico del Critone, secondo cui la possibilità di phygé offerta al condannato non potrà che essere rifiutata, perché non vi è vita possibile fuora dalla polis” (Agamben 57).
This region that precedes and exceeds politics – in the language of Sophocles, the well known ypsipolis apolis – is akin to the tone that runs to the forgetting of any substantive ontology of politics that seeks to subsumes life into the confinement of external forces. It is in this paradoxical situation of assimilation in exile, and a permanent exile that assimilates itself in God as shared thought that politics can be transfigured as an apodemia that refuses the closure of life into principles of government and dominium, and away from the community form of propriety and rooted belonging. Agamben recalls that in the history of Christianity, it is the time of the parish (paroikias) what allows the soul to live in earth as foreigner and exile, in proximity of the medium of the kingdom, and that only later with Saint Augustine it was transformed into a territorial institution for the communio and communal salvation (Agamben 60-61). In the paroikias, Agamben returns to the kingdom not as a retheologization of the politics, but as a figural parable in which a poetic dwelling is enacted in the measureless passivity of a form of life, a project consistent with the formulation of the singular whatever being articulated in La comunita che viene (1990).
The assimilation in the exile of the divine, which recalls the forgetting of oneself and the god announced by Hölderlin in“Note on the Oedipus”, is refined in the last essay of the book entitled “Il corpo dell’Europa”, which reproduces a lecture delivered in Venice in May 2024 about idea of Europe. As a sort of concluding reflection or apostilla, we are now able to say that for Agamben the only possibility of dwelling in the vestiges of the European tradition and memory is to rescue, from the wreckage of its history, the sediments of a texture of the phygén: to be exiled is not just a vitalist affirmation of this life, but more importantly, it also implies disclosing the possibilities buried in the past with the dead, that is, in contact not only with Gaia, but also in the downward movement to the domus of the infraworld (a figure that receives a novel treatment Agamben’s recent book La lingua che resta). Agamben exemplifies this exile with the dead with three poetic moments of high european modernism: Ezra Pound’ Cantos, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Eric Auerbach’s masterpiece Mimesis written from his exile in Turkey – and of course, we could also think here of Kafka’s parables and Joseph Roth’s narratives of Jewish errancy; as well as Alexandre Lerrnet Holenia’s phantasmatic crumbling of Empire in The Standard and Osip Mandelstam’s “The Fourth Prose”, where the end of the work leads to the human voice as the supreme poetic task in the face of nihilism and political totalitarianism.
It should be clear, however, that the problem is not found a temporary refuge or a last stand in the fortress of modern literature, but of coming to terms with the phygé as a fundamental problem of language that, in virtue of its unique and irreplaceable experience, delivers a world nested in the affection of remembrance. As Agamben asks towards the end of the lecture: “Is there a sensibility and a form of life that we can call European?” (Agamben 82). This question can only be answered when we dwell and assimilate into the exile of thought that harbors the residues, figures, and voices that speak to us from the dead in a tradition because it is no longer transmitted, we can only access it poetically. In the only moment that the word anima (soul) appears in the text, in the very last sentences, it becomes clear that it is only in the intensity of thought that life accounts for the inseparability of the body and the soul that historical abstraction has rendered oblivious and alien from the tonos of presence. We are not yet ready to declare a return to the appearance between being and world, and for that very reason even the presence of the divine, as Agamben says following Isaac Luria, is itself exiled from the creation of the world until the advent of the tiqqun in the night of restitution. The exilic dwelling of life outside itself is marked by this sort of secret unfaithfulness in the absence of the god. In the meantime, the task of an ethical life is to passively reside in an exile where the reality of the soul returns what is possible and breathable to the appearance of the real.
Many interpretations of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Remembrance”) have taken for granted that the hymn’s last verse might have been a paraphrasis and creative translation of Pindar’s ode Pythian 3. In the philological scholarship of the poem, it was Günter Zuntz who took notice of the analogical semblance to shed light on “Andenken” final verse as something more than mere imitation: “Never, however – unlike Pindar who does so frequently – does Hölderlin begins a hymn with a praise of the Muse, which would be an imitation, but not an analogy…the “Andeken” conclusion, “Yet what remains, the poets found” – corresponds almost verbatim to Pindar’s Pythian 3 final verse…” [1]. If we reread Pindar’s Pythian 3 from Race translation (Loeb, 1997, 263), we encounter the following verse: “Excellence endures in glorious songs for a long time. But few can win them easily”. If on Hölderlin’s side we encounter the “remnant” of the sayable in language, in Pindar’s ode we are presented with the endurance of a “glorious song” of the festivity that is carried out in struggle and forward in time.
Ignoring the common place interpretation that assumes that Hölderlin’s concluding verse is a distortion of the translation from the Greek, Zuntz goes to note that the pindaric remnant in Hölderlin’s hymn effectively “constitutes in essence an analogy – not an imitation; it rises from the affinity of spirit not from an act of self-effacement” [2]. This analogical relation with the past, and thus the memory of Antiquity speaks directly to the modality of the improper that is common to the hermeneutical debate on the poem. All things considered, and following Zuntz’s hermeneutics, we could say that the pindaric intrusion in the concluding verse is a way in which the poet is enacting the harmonious poetic creation as it finds external resonance in tradition. As Hölderlin notes in his difficult note “On the mode of proceeding of the poetic spirit” (“Die Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes”): “Put yourself through free choice in harmonious opposition with an outer sphere, just as you in yourself are in harmonious opposition, by nature, but unrecognizably, as long you remain in yourself” [3]. The solicitation of the irreducible distance from the creation is always the preparatory transitional space of poetic cohabitation that rejects a notion of life consolidated in modern representation.
In this sense, the poetic spirit in Höderlin is a keeper of the analogia of the incurable separation between the language and gods; this means that remembrance is only possible because there is an abyss cured by the song. And here the maximum proximity between the German poet with Pindar comes to the forefront, as the distance that separates him from the inaccessible world of the Greek means that one cannot longer proceed from myth, but rather from the “remnant” of the festivity of the song that seeks the harmonious through expropriation with nonbeing. What “remains”, via analogia, is the flowing of the song as “capacity for the solitary school for the world” in postmythic historical time [4]. The poet does not “remember” what the substantive essence of the song as if the past is a reservoir of retrievable expenses; rather, what remains is the possibility of what must be said “amid the many things that remain to be borne in the long time and to be said in song” [5]. The song is a prelogical meandering that overflows reality because it is persistently remembered.
And yet, this is a song without ideal form, because after the tragic age of the titans “we lack song that loosens the mind” as Hölderlin notes [6]. This poetic tension conquers and frees itself from the world at the risk of absolute loss. The analogia musicae retains the highest of the divine in suspended disbelief, which according to Hölderlin occurs “at a moment when man forgets both himself and the God, and in a sacred manner, turns himself around like a traitor” [7]. Here we are already at a distance from Pindar’s verbal testimony for Hieron and glorious fame, since what “remains” is the pure event of the song that transfigures presence so that “the memory of the heavenly ones does not die out” [8].
In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the Newtonian thematization of the limit afterall). In particular gloss 554 strikes a tenor for our current epoch: “Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes an opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say that there is nothing fine about it” [1]. In the world after the fall, the intramundane system of felix culpa, is already one of dual power.
In many respects, this image is stronger than that of nihilism as the oblivion of walking upwards gazing at the abyss, because it connects the social pressure of “opinion” to that of the common ground that makes out of blindness the legitimacy of vacuous enlightenment. In the very void that truth will carve out for authority, Pascal seems to imply that the imperium of opinion will reign as a dual power of administration and mediation with the world. This is why for Pascal, force without opinion is indocile; but opinion without force amounts to the persuasion of solitude of the last man in the earth. At the heart of the groundlessness of modern legitimacy there is the necessary organization of opinion or doxa that will regulate the community of the living and the dead because ultimately its end is to master the mystery of language in its inability to name.
Of course, Pascal thought that language could overcome the fictive empire of opinion, which in its modern avatar of propaganda is meant to design apocalyptic tendencies towards self-destruction in the course of historical development. As a “properly speaking wholly animal”, the human can only dwell in a poetic region “entre-deux”, that is, between the abhorrent light and the infinite depth of darkness, where language endures through the symbol well beyond the experience of the fallen corruption of nature. As Lezama Lima reminds us in a short essay on the French thinker, the poetic region in Pascal is ultimately the experience of language as a mystery of creation that refuses to accept the post-mythic condition of nature and human boredom that will euthanize the use of linguistic creation [2]. Now it can be said that the intrusion of the infinite chatter of opinion takes place precisely in the logged forest of speech, which consolidates its rhetorical autonomy of language away from the possibility of distance and self-constrain of the sayable. The statecraft of rhetoric is the infrastructure of the reign of opinion, because here the draining of the depth of being is supplanted by alienated voluntary participation at the very ground of nothingness. Nihilism takes a decisive step forward when language can become any differential sign to communicate what has become impossible to be said outside the cubicle of the enthymeme.
Paraphrasing the ancient wisdom of Pindar’s famous opening verse in Fragment 169 (“Law, νόμος, the king of all”), Pascal assures us of the fragility of this imperium: “An empire based on opinion and imagination resigns for a time, and such an empire is mild and voluntary. That force reigns for ever. Thus opinion is like the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant” [3]. Is it possible to separate, nevertheless, the reign of opinion from that of force; and, secondly, the circulation of force as grounded in a fabric of language that has already descended into the empire of opinion without any trace? In a way, there is no modern politics without the presupposition of the autonomy of a field of opinion integrated into “rational control”, to use the expression of American political theorist Harvey Mansfield. And even if Carl Schmitt could state in his Constitutional Theory (1928) that no democratic secular state could effectively exist out without opinion as a diffused and disorganised form of acclamation, it is now completely obvious to us that the post-liberal state configuration, persists in a constant state of the fluctuation, compartmentalization, and archic steering of opinions. What survives the utter collapse of the category of political modernity is the flattening of language into “opinion” that provides standing to the epochal anomia.
Following classical philologists we are tempted not to ignore that in the word anomia entails not just the suspension of legislated norms and positive commands, but also the decline of the distance between existence and the divine that in antiquity, in the age of Pindar, subsisted under the notion of eunomia as harmonious attunement of the very lived experience. In other words, the consolidation of opinion is a long historical effect of the erosion of distance and perspective that restricts the capacity to “ascertain a spiritual excitement…and if worth anything, a language, a witness to reality” [4]. To bear witness in language is a poetic enactment that, at heart of its solitude, refuses the glacial ripples of the force of opinion vested in reality.
Verónica Jaffé’s most recent Poesía, traduccion, libertad (2024), which gathers some of the translations already contained in Fredrich Hölderlin: Cantos Hespéricos (La Laguna de Campona, 2016), features an introductory essay where she reflects on translating Hölderlin’s poetry from the German into her own creative visual renderings of Spanish. Reflecting on the difficult task, if not utterly impossible, of translating “Andenken” (in Spanish she opts for “Recuerdo” and not “Memoria”), Jaffé departs from an important observation that we must take into account here: the fact that this late hymn has been catalogued as a proemial composition. What does it mean that “Andenken” is to be read as a proem? As we know from the Ancient sources, the proem is an oratory prelude to the topic deployed in a text; in other words, it is the persuasive caesura of language before any argumentative exposition. Hence, the composition of the proem is something like the pure mirroring of language. This could explain why Hölderlin’s “Andenken” while prima facie about memory and thinking does not have a guiding thread to restrain it; it unfolds the enactment of its own recollection through the sayable.
If “Andenken” is a long proem – the space where the poem and proem absolutely coincide – then this means any translation must keep the poetic possibilities of oration in preamble, in path of preparation. Jaffé offers two distinct trans-creations of the famous poem’s last lines. The first reads thus: “Un mar que guarda los recuerdos / que da amores, que los toma / para que solo queden después / como tesoros / en quienes recuerden y en quienes escriban” [1]. In the second version, even more elaborate and idiosyncratic, Jaffé writes: “de pensar con todos / mis amores, es decir / pensar fijando / papel y lápiz / sobre tela / en memoria de todos mis muertos” [2]. It is noteworthy that the famous literal last lines of the “Andenken”, suspended in an enjambment, appeals to a canvas that is splattered with the memory of the dead. It seems of all the dead of the human race. What does it mean that the act of remembrance is the recollection of all the dead? Poetic imagination, if a testamentary document, appeals to the archaic where the living and the dead inhabit the world through image [3]. For Jaffé – but this also an intuition that Hölderlin shared in his pindaric translations – the beginning is not a previous stage, but in media res of the event of language.
The recollection of language within proem attests to the exilic dimension of language; the site where no one truly ever belongs to: “…la lengua en mi país que no me pertenece”, writes Jaffé [4]. This means that the authentic remembrance of language is not a national language, but always ex patria lingua, or a language outside the telluric fabric of the national community. Because we are always walking strangers in our own language, the contact with the dead repeatedly reemerges in the memorial grain of the voice.
As C.M. Bowra has noted, Pindar’s allusion to Memory takes place in the context of the Muses: “[the poet] invokes Memory because she embodies the accumulated wisdom of the past, and the Muses because they pass on this wisdom to him. What he asks from them is the ability to deal properly with what they give….men are blind if they do not pursue wisdom with the help of the Muses” [5]. If the “Andenken” should be read as a proem, this is because recollection is always fixed in the irreducible experience of our voice that recalls language from its beyond.
In the Spanish language there is a wonderful idiom that has gone out of fashion in our times to express a sudden silence: “ha pasado un ángel”, or an angel passed by. The phrase is commonly used whenever a sudden silence imposes itself in the middle of a conversation, which leads to obvious discomfort and embarrassment among those engaged. It is almost as if the invisible angel reminds human beings that conversation rests as much in words as in silence; and that the shadow of silence sooner or later interrupts any communicative practice. According to historians and lexicographers, the inception of this idiom into Spanish remains a curious enigma, since although used in early modernity it does not have a Latinized version, and its origins can only be traced to classical Greek antiquity. In fact, Plutarch notes in his De garrulitate that whenever silence is introduced in a meeting it is said that Hermes has joined the company [1]. The angel thus stands for the nonpresence of language in language, just like an icon is the sublimation of presence in pictorial representation.
We know that in Antiquity the angel as a minor divinity (angeloi) was a mediator between heaven and earth, only that in that moment that an ‘angel passed by’, it is not all clear on which side is there heaven and where earth [2]. In his beautiful book Angels & Saints (2020), Eliot Weinberger reminds us that for Saint Augustine the angels were first and foremost original gardeners of Paradise – given that they are free from felix culpa and sin – and that they are messengers between the living and the divine, as documented in the beggar Lazarous carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham [3]. Here it seems that the invisible inception of the angel relates fundamentally to the dead and conclusion, which also carries its aspiration in the lacunae of a conversation that reaches an impasse, and that for a moment effectively dies.
The angel that accompanies the dead and the poor – and thus our structural poverty in language, being in the language that always lacks a grasping signifier – is also confirmed by lexicographer Alberto Buitrago, who in his entry on the idiom writes that the expression has its origins in the fact that in antiquity whenever a dead person was mentioned or brought up in conversation there was a silence held, because it was thought that his “spirit” (his angel) had become present in its nonpresence of language [4]. Although Buitrago does not provide any documentation for his assertion, it does bring to bear that whenever we are in communication, whether we like it or not, we are in the communion of angels that are expressing the soul of the dead through the litany of their names.
This is why Antelme could suggest the similar enigmatic notion that being powerless and in poverty means to ‘have to forever be’ in a silence adjourned so that language can continue speaking. This is why perhaps the irruption of authentic silence has the effect of a certain petrification of the human expression, as masterfully captured in Velázquez’s Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630). It is through silence that we encounter the divinity that for a moment places itself outside of language in order to contemplate it, letting the angel make his entrance. The language of computational machines is not only a language that has renounced its poetic and ethical instance; it is also a form of gated communication that has expelled itself from the angelic visitation of its own contemplation.
In a letter dated from January of 1962 to his friend Carlos M. Luis, José Lezama Lima makes a case for the intimate relation between language and charity: “What lasts [la cantidad] is only possible through faith. Because what lasts with faith is charity. Omnis credit – believe all things. Charity is belief in anticipation. And what is poetry (the image), but this superabundance of charity that always presupposes creation? [1]. The question in the last sentence – a question that could have only come from a great poet – is not all naive, since it is also a slight displacement from the canonical source underlying the notion of charity. In fact, the expression caritas omnia credit comes from Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Book X, Section 3), where the Church Father treats the reception of his testimony to the rational knowledge of the “hearing of men” who will be attending to his words [2].
This means that for parole to be heard and enunciated in its original presence, there has to be a gathering in charity that makes not just ‘true’, but most importantly, a garment of faith in the occurrence of language. This means that for Lezama Lima, there was no distinction between “theological language” and “language as such”, or “poetic register”, since they are all participants in the mystery of charity, because only charity can welcome language as abode. Poetics as such is understood as facticity of parole. But for Lezama, the word depends on having grasped the motion of charity.
Lezama’s test for Carlos M. Luis was quite high: if you lose your faith, you would have given up on language as creation. This was not a new problem for the poet who already in his essay “La dignidad de la poesía”, mentions caritas omnia credit, as a process of destruction of representational (merely transactional and duty driven language) communication that arrives at the order of charity through language as intangible and inexistent by virtue of transcending what does not exists, thus manifesting itself as possible [3]. This is the moment in which the charity of language appears as both presence and promise, and what Lezama calls “el resurgimiento del verbo” (the reemergence of the word). Poetics is thus neither the subject matter of poets, nor the master dogma of theologians; rather it is the faith in language that once enunciated it can only move towards a greater opacity of the shadow of mystery. This is why a great Christian theologian says that charity(agape) is partial knowledge of the divine, otherwise there will be only a detestable army of mere academics, scribes, and administrative experts [4].
In other words, charity does not belong exclusively to the Saints, but it runs through All Souls and its dead. The long history of the Church has betrayed the parole of charity, going as far as transforming it into a social mechanism of distributed goods that has become known as the subsidiarity principle. But for Lezama Lima, in an esoteric pauline tone, charity had nothing to do with political absorption and pastoral power; it was fundamentally a problem of language as a relation of reciprocity between beings in order to subsist as species, to paraphrase a well versed French priest on the matter [5].
In our days we see that “believing in language” has become in the public the inverse: non-belief through credit; that is only after possessing it (I do not need to believe in you insofar your credit validates who you are). It has been noted that by a kind of philological accident in the history of secularization, the word charity in English came to be understood one handedly as almsgiving and subsidiarity over the original divine love, which is love supreme in language. A language that does not unify, but that creates ethical relations; in fact, this might be the only uninstructed means of allowing them to fruition.
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Notes
1. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (Verbum, 2013), 324.
2. Saint Augustine. Confessions (Penguin Books, 1961), 208.
3. José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar Editor, 1977), 774.
4. Claude Tresmontant. Saint Paul and the mystery of Christ (Harper & Brothers, 1957), 157.
In 1947, the very young Cuban poet Fina García Marruz published the liturgical poem Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Ediciones Orígenes, 1947), which stands in the modernist tradition series of attempts to probe the divine nature of language after the flight of gods and the triumph of the new secular jargons. If earlier in the century a well known Italian philosopher will predict that the international language of the future will be that of technical terms; the English Catholic poet David Jones, will reaffirm that we are “living in a world where the symbolic life (the life of the true cultures, of institutional religion and of all artists) is progressive eliminated – the technician is master. In a manner of speaking the priest and the artists are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs – for the technician divides to rule” [1]. And if “liturgy” originally meant “public service” and the sphere of gestures, as suggested by Lubienska de Lenval, then Transfiguración has to be read, even into our days, as an attempt for language to measure to the transfiguration of revelation, in which the poem is a sacramental form that retracts language to possibilities of retaining communication.
In fact, Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte, reinforcing the liturgical repetitions of an hymn and a sacred chant, enacts a flowing rhythm (“en tanto que”) that assesses the limits of the ineffable; a pure exteriority that is the negative or wound of language without ever being able to transcend it. In this sense, Marruz’s poem is only the poetic anabasis to the impossibility of a guided sacrament to organize interiority and visibility. Only the mystical can mediate between exteriority and the crisis of appearance. In an almost programmatic fashion, we read in the second part of the poem: “oh, difícilmente podríamos comprenderlo / Él se ha vuelto totalmente exterior como la luz; / Él ha rehusado la intimidad y se ha echado totalmente fuera de sí mismo” [2]. Transfiguration is the event that exiles oneself from the self (phygé), and in which language can generate contact with something other than its own conventions. This is why they [the witnesses and the martyrs] cannot provide an account about the transfigured revelation – just like anyone cannot truly provide a narrative, except by betraying the experience – except by their hearts as if being mysteriously called by a singular name (“ellos sienten que dentro de su corazón alguien / los ha llamado misteriosamente por su nombre”).
How can language disclose a sense of exteriority that is capable of moving past the autonomy of signification and self-referentiality of language? Can language befall into exteriority? Marruz provides an answer to this question, which can be taken as her contribution to the aporias of modern poetics: poetry can only attune to transfiguration as a cohabitual of a communicating being. In the year that the poem was published, Marruz also wrote in the winter issue of 1947 Orígenes a dense essay titled “Lo Exterior en la Poesía” (“The exterior in poetry) where she claims that “the heart of poem is always outside of it – it should not be that the poet can offer infinite variations of a secret self-possessed knowledge, but rather to rediscover the liturgy of the real; the extreme degree of visibility, which is also its great escape” [3]. What could the “liturgia de lo real” have meant for Marruz in 1947? Marruz does provide a clearcut theological definition of the exteriority as the “angelic”, which does corroborate the hymnological dimension of language, a transcendence between beings of the invisible. The liturgy of the real that defines the exteriority of the poetics of life does not entail a Romantic elevation by the Poet, but the effort to animate reality beyond an alienated monologue. This is why Marruz writes that “only a dialogue can realize an impossible communication, mystical, whenever it does take place in all of its purity” [4].
In 1947 Marruz went a step further than her fellow poets Gaztelu & Lezama Lima, who had defined transfiguration as a learning exercise of the potentia dei of the divine (“a todo transfigurarse sigue una suspension y el ejercicio del Monte era solo un aprendizaje”) [5]. Read side by side with Antelme’s Angel of Reims, one could very well say that for Marruz there is an event of transfiguration whenever transcendence delivers communication between beings, soul to soul; a relation that can one truly speak of the ungrounded and commencement. The liturgy clamored in language is not the memory of an original Adam severed from Nature, but the transfiguration of a linguistic relationship with the world. This might be the secret to Marruz last two verses: “como la infancia que acuña nuestro Rostro allí / donde no puede ser despertado”. If transfiguration also entails recapitulation, this means that this is not a process of forward becoming, but of retaining the atemporal detention that, like that of childhood, traces our silhouette as both figural and pure presence in the bushes of language.
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Notes
1. David Jones. “Religion and the Muses” (1941), in Epoch and Artist (Faber&Faber, 1959), 134.
2. Fina García Marruz. Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Orígenes, 1947), 6.
3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 19.
3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 22
4. Ángel Gaztelu & José Lezama Lima. Editorial: “Éxtasis de la Sustancia Destruida”, Nadie Parecía, Número IX, Nov, 1943, 1.
Surely friendship does not depend on obligations or frequency, but it does posit expectations on something like a movement of reciprocity. In fact, movement (κίνηση) and reciprocity are so intertwined that without it, there would not be any separation, only a compact bundle in unity without relations. But, what is at bottom reciprocity? If this notion merits anything thought at all, it must be removed from any conception of exchange in the manner of the quid pro quo and the the ius talionis, where at first sight reciprocity seems to reside as a form of levelling differentiated quantities. In social exchange there is levelling but surely there is no reciprocity except by the legal force enacted by the pressure of duties and obligations. Already in the nineteenth century, at outset of bourgeois society, Søren Kierkegaard with extreme lucidity denounced social levelling as a form of glittering vice: “The idolized positive principle of sociality in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida. Levelling is not a single individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power” [1].
What is reciprocal in social exchange is no longer the incommensurable relation between beings, but the enactment of language saturated by its own completion, which is the aim of social organization. If there is no reciprocity in the age of kallopismata orphnes as the reduction of rhetorical language it is because there is no longer a missing word in the event of communication, given that, potentially, everything has been already communicated (it is obvious that today this process can only intensify with the planetary deployment of Artificial Intelligence). The only determination of reciprocity that should be of interest is the one that accounts for the lacunae in language that halts force of social levelling. To reciprocate does not mean to give each his due that defines the Western legal operation; it is rather the mutual codependency in the unforfeited event of language.
At this point, an etymological observation might be useful. In On the Latin Language, Varro records reciproca as a condition of elasticity; that is, a present quality that allows a thing to return to the position from which it has started. Reciprocare thus entails to move to and fro, and to demand [2]. But if we adapt this observation into the sphere of language, we immediately notice that in language there is no previous position nor set origin, which means that reciprocity can only be the undisclosed and disclosed movement of language. Breathing, articulating, speaking: the animus that escapes from the mouth as a mirror of the god of words. The erosion of reciprocity in modern society, thus, goes deeper than the first appearance in fact that human beings are witnesses to a crisis of communication; more importantly, humans have ceased to sense reciprocity because they believe that there is only god where language is mute, and there is language when gods are extinct. Such is the long vigil of computing language as an idol that is neither divine nor of the essence of the human voice. To reciprocate today means to re-divinize the world through words; and through our words greet incoming worlds.
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Notes
1. Søren Kierkegaard. “The results of observing two ages”, in A Literary Review (Penguin, 2001), 76.
2. Varro. On the Latin Language, Vol.1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1938), 335.
In the late summer of last year, the painter Baruj Salinas (1935-2024) passed away at age 89. I was saddened to learn about his death many months after, and only because I had meant to write to him about a future encounter. For over fifteen years, I had contact with this extraordinary painter, and looking back into the past, my first visit to his studio in sunny South Florida when I was only a college student has become quite vivid and unforgettable. It was a rather small and unpretentious atelier filled with some cans and areca palms, and canvases everywhere. I remember that during my first visit he showed me an illustrated commemorative Torah on the five hundredth mark of the expulsion of the Jewish from Spain, of which only a few handmade copies were made (one of them was gifted to late Pope Francis). He was a painter that carried with him, very much like Edmond Jabès, a sort of clandestine culture of the sacred Book.
In fact, the last letter that he wrote to me in April of 2022, Baruj candidly recalled his early collaboration with the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente in Tres lecciones de tinibles (La Gaya Ciencia, 1981), for which he illustrated the pages with splattered Hebrew letters in magenta. I open one of the pages to “Guimel”: “El movimiento: exilio: regreso: vertigo: el solo movimiento es la quietud” writes the poet as if describing the pictorial gesture of Baruj. A life in double exile, Baruj’s painting oscillates between movement and repose, discharge and emptiness, figuration and the uttermost disintegration of the line.
If Baruj was arrested by the clandestine culture of the Book it was also due to his interest in the possibilities of language. This is a challenge whenever we confront a picture by Baruj: how can we assert in language what the picture is enacting without falling into the allure of ornamentation or the prescription of images in Jewish art? When I wrote about his work back in 2011 this ecstatic tension seemed attractive, but now I can only see it too emphatically invested. The truth is that language betrays what the movement of his painting resists time and again. And there is no such a thing as “Jewish Art”; in fact, whenever the topic came up (during those years I had taken a course on this tradition), the painter remained unaltered and quiet, keeping silence regarding its meaning, but insisting on the expressivity of his pictures.
Baruj’s abstraction befriends the persistence of everything living and thinking. The foam-like shapes levitate towards concrete forms of withdrawal and clearing of the pictorial space. This is why his friend María Zambrano, who wrote about his work, had suggested that in Baruj’s paintings emancipate “un pensar que se hace, como se hace aqui vida en su modalidad propia que es la pintura”. In Baruj, painting is an event that coincides with an image of thought, while the image of thought, stubbornly withdrawn from mimetic representation, materializes a proximity that only painting gives the world.
It is almost as if painting allows thought to breathe – and, in breathing, becoming extension, and thus a corpus in the world. This could perhaps explain why Baruj’s recurrent pictorial obsession was the landscape seen from high above, encircled by the aura of a clouded space. As Kurt Badt observed regarding the pictures of Constable, in painting the sky is the organ of sentiment; transcending the earthy attachment of our heavy footed existence. Before language, the light of painting circumvents the invisible space where all forms will fall into place accordingly. The hand of Baruj Salinas teaches us to orient ourselves in the divinity of appearance that is only eternal because it manages to be invisible between us.
Infrapolitical Reflections 