Few characters are more memorable in the first book of Plato’s The Republic than the sophist Thrasymachus, whose shadow is still very much looming around us given that it is obvious that today everything in our contemporary world is optimized through force. Thrasymachus’s strict identification of reserve power (potentia) with justice (ius) is in many respects prophetic, since it already subordinates the ideal of justice with practical reason and effective norms, a crowning achievement of modern political power. This is why Leo Strauss could claim in The City and Man that Thrasymachus’ position is ultimately a defense of the thesis of “legal positivism” that brings to fruition the legitimate order and the police powers of the city. In other words, Thrasymachus discovered that the requirements for the permanence of an active social order of a police entails the mediation of the two dimensions of legal authority: obedience and the internal recognition of a secondary rule that liquidates the possibility of raising the question of what is “just” (now internal to the organization of internal powers). If the aim of “justice” becomes the optimal application of effective rules and norms that provide the services of the city, then political rule becomes an infallible and uncontested logic. Politics is ultimately force, and force is the energy organized by politics in the city.
As Strauss writes: “Thrasymachus acts like the city, he resembles the city, and this means according to a way reasonably acceptable to both…Thrasymachus is the city. It is because he is the city that he maintains the thesis of the city regarding justice and that he is angry at Socrates for his antagonism to the thesis of the city. Thrasymachus’ rhetoric was especially concerned with both arousing and appeasing the angry passions of the multitude, with both attacking a man’s character and counteracting such attacks, as well as with play-acting as an ingredient of oratory” [1]. Well before the general equivalent of contractual commercial relations, Thrasymachus’ rhetorical deployment functioned as a techne alupias against the unwarranted passions of human beings. And, contrary to the common opinion that separates the craft of sophistry from the unity of rational discourse (logos), Thrasymachus’ defense of force presupposes the autonomy of language in the rhetorical construction (very much like modern poetry centuries later) to serve as the hospice of rational pondering in the polis. To make language the exclusive battle ground: even in antiquity it was said of Thrasymachus, “you are just like your name, bold in battle”. And Plato wanted to hold on to this picture. This ultimately means – and it is still at the center of our contemporary predicament – that the coming of the “Social man” in the city is only possible on the condition of a primary transformation of the event of language and the speaking being. This is why if Thrasymachus was the “pioneer of rhetoric and elocution”, as it has been claimed, it is only because his appeal to the pragmatics of political power was mediated by the invention of the ‘mystery of the prose style’; that is, of reducing the non-grammatical mediation to the orderability of a prose adjusted as an instrument to the world [2]. The enslavement of the passions is the commencement of the social prose in which we are forced to act in our alienated roles.
Only when language becomes rhetorical communication it is possible to grasp the world as a case of an entity of legibility and knowability, where reasons (inclusive and exclusive, that is, as what can be delegated for my own interests) and political rule converge without residue. What will become obvious through the cybernetic dominion over “information”, it was first elaborated as the pressure of rhetoric where the logical force of predication took its force to disclaim myth as the unappropriated experience of worldly phenomena. The art of rhetoric does not render “truth” obsolete; it rather incorporates theoretical and systemic deductions – a flattening of logos without myth -, so that the event of truth can no longer stand as the unsurveyed horizon of the intelligibility [3]. The consolidation of force means this much: that Thrasymachus’ prose of the world is not just an exclusive political program of the “fictitious”, as much as a program for the total attainability of the world; a world that by becoming fully accessible and objective, it pays the high price of eclipsing the presence of things, and the event of truth and naming in language. A world without kallipolis that will only distribute and perpetuate ad infinitum injustice as the corollary for the triumph of immanence of force.
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Notes
1. Leo Strauss. The City and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 78.
2. Bromley Smith. “Thrasymachus: a pioneer rhetorician”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1927.
3. Gianni Carchia. “La persuasión y la retórica de los sofistas”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 60.
For anyone familiar with the delicate thought of Monica Ferrando, the short book just published, Arcadia Sacra (Il Molino, 2024), makes it impossible not to read it in light of her the two previous works, the ambitious Il regno errante (Neri Pozza, 2018) that reconstructs the political paradigm of the nomos of Arcadia, and L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), which brought to light the corrupted meaning of a theopoetic understanding of “election” and its appropriation by an effective economic theology apparatus that governs over the destiny of the modern edifice. Arcadia Sacra continues Ferrando’s highly original reconstruction of the unforgettable myth of Arcadia within the obscure setting of secular modernization in which painting itself has come into crisis to the point of utter obsolescence. We might be the first epoch in the history of humanity (or even prehistoric, since painting goes back to the non-original origin of the caves, as Ferrando has argued) in which painting itself is lacking and almost non-existent [1]. And although Ferrando does not allude to the present directly, it goes without saying that by choosing as her focal point Titian’s early picture “The Flight into Egypt” (1508), the vision deployed in the essay can only speak to us as urgently, where the thematics confronted by the Renaissance of Venetian painting returns to our present in a fractured flash: imperial conflagration, unlimited deployment of force, usurpation of territory and multiplication of legal checkpoints, and the accelerated disconnection between architecture and nature, color the ongoing devastation of the vantage point of the landscape now eclipsed by the radiant artificial confinements of the contemporary metropolitan designs.
Already during his postwar years in the United States, Theodor Adorno observed how the unbounded sadness of the American landscape has nothing to do with an inhuman romantic sublime; it was rather that the landscape feels as if it bears no traces of the human hand [2]. If Americanism configures the long lasting night of planetary nihilism; this is so, not only due to capitalist subsumption and production of human life, but fundamentally because of the inherent obliviousness of the landscape that forecloses dwelling in the world. But the myth of Arcadia, as Ferrando will insists, is no utopia nor crafted rhetoric (the bucolic genre as an aesthetic compensation to the normative grid of the social bond); it is also the question about the earthly ground of existence, and the necessary attunement with the things that have been domesticated into order of the metaphysics of idolatry and objectivity (Ferrando 28). In this sense, Arcadia does not name another world to come; it is a world that has been registered many times, reappearing whenever the hand reaches out in proximity as if caressing the landscape’s skin.
The mytho-poetical deployment of Arcadia returns amidst a world in conflagration, and for Ferrando this has fundamental political implications insofar as it shows a way out from the grammar at the service of force and political dominion of commanders and soldiers – which is always already exercised as legitimate to coerce and to become a tool for the regulation of abstract mediations – into the voice of poets, painters, and shepherds (Ferrando 51). Arcadia reveals that the human species is a ductile animal that can sense by the ability to touch and use. This is why Arcadia stands as a third space outside the political dichotomy of empire and republicanism, between the struggle of usurpation and conquest, and the techno-political administration of common goods of social distribution and institutional delegation. The abstract humanism of the Renaissance, as Heidegger once claimed alluding to Machiavelli’s political thought, is also the commencement of a specific political technology rooted in certainty and justification that can only conceive representation as the ground for the production of an “effective truth” [3]. The virtuous homini militari of the Italian city states anticipate the neutralization of force as legitimate rule that will prepare the stage of modern political realism based on fear and normative rule of law. The final efficacy of force is to transform the sense of the world into a mere object, as Weil clearly understood it in her essay on Homer’s Iliad. One of the key insights of Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024) is that it shows that, parallel to the revolution in political technologies taking place in Renaissance Humanism, the image of Arcadia was being rediscovered in treatises and paintings in order to remain faithful to a different attunement of the nomoi, in which the philosophy of history of sacrifice, endless civil wars, and destruction of the Earth do not constitute true destiny (Ferrando 14). In an exoteric way – and it is so, because the craft of the painter is, precisely, depiction and figuration of the nakedness of what appears before our vision- painters like Titian, Veronese, and Bellini, became witnesses to the acquiescence of the nomos mousikos, which far from soliciting the conceptual density of a theory of Justice; it registered the preeminent condition of poetizing nature of living in the vanishing world. Indeed, it was in the musical nomos where the soul could establish the communication between exteriority and interiority within the gleaming order of things.
If Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art suggests that the erection of work occupies the open space of this clearing; Ferrando will thematize how Boccaccio’s understanding of the Earth as radiantly divine was drawing upon the tradition of Arcadia will emerge as the pictorial space of the artists to disclose the vibrant sense of a necessary freedom (Ferrando 43). This means that living among the gods is not reducible to panentheism, if understood as oppositional to monotheism; rather, it was the opening to the event that gathered forms of life, creations, affections, and territories. In other words, there will always be gods whenever the world is not enclosed into the homogenous surface of a unified planetarity. And is not painting the quasi-originary activity of human anthropogenesis (the event of being in the world as such) the sensible evidence that negates any conceptual and political translation directed towards action and justification? After all, painting is, among other things, the business of depicting mute things, as Nicolas Poussin famously claimed.
But muteness must be qualified and expanded, since Arcadia is no asylum or final refuge of man. Titian’s “The Flight into Egypt” depicts a rite of passage, but also opens to a set of rhythmic connected activities that lead to the landscape. Thus, as Monica Ferrando reminds us, building from her previous Il regno errante, Arcadia is also the material experimentation of acoustic energy; music, or the the nomos mousikos, no longer guided by the command of political service, directed by attunement of the lyre and the syrinx, will speak the unwritten language of the human soul. Painting and music convergence at the nonsite of permanent formlessness. And it is rhythmic music allowing improvisation and experimentation that reimagines a different conception of the polis; a transfiguration of political life, in which the principle of civility in all of its complexity (citizenship, objective transference and negation, civilizational fortitude) will no longer articulate the principal axis of the human commonwealth. Neither a source of higher natural law nor a mere expansion of positive norms, the nomos of Arcadia for Ferrando entails: “inalterabile a unire intimamente musica e legge, entrambe ágrapha, non scritte, se non nel cuore. L’interdipendenza tra modi della musica e nomoi della città, che sarebbe vano interpretare secondo un rapporto causale, trova nella stessa parola nomos un compendio inesauribile, ribadito nella Politeia: «Non si introducono mai cambiamenti nei modi della musica senza che se ne introducano nei più importanti nomoi della polis” (Ferrando 54). The separation of law from music – as Ferrando will say for poetry and philosophy in later pages – will ultimately lead to the moral struggle towards the rise of the fictitious (and whoever can impose it through their effective hegemony) against the emergence of the “love of thought” (l’amore del pensiero) (Ferrando 57). In this sense, the moralization of justice and its conversion into a specific historical grammar (lex scripta in the juridical apparatus) will ground the order of the polis in which the human will be absolutely sacred so that the sacred nearness between existence and the world – the atopia where the promise of happiness can take place – will vanish forever. As Carlo Levi saw clearly during the postwar years, the rise of the political administration of fear will coincide with the decline of painting as the source of being in liberty within the senses [4]. And, in our days, the historical termination of secularization can only be felt like an unending glacial interregnum (it is no surprise that Disney’s epochal blockbuster is precisely a defense of alienation of a cold being in a Frozen castle) in which the prehistoric reminiscence of the garden can only appear as an afterthought or mere representation, always out of reach, and viciously grazed by wild beasts before our own eyes.
But seeing is already an exercise in prefiguration of a world that returns where painting stands as the medium for a mediation between the formlessness and the soul. This is why, above all, pictorial space is a privileged surface from which to flee our condition of unworldly inmates of our times. In a certain way, painting does not just bring to bear truth against the regime of calamitous fictions; it is also bears witness, as Ferrando states towards a high moment of Arcadia Sacra (2024), to the rediscovery of a new mental space that revives the attunement to a state of the world no longer reduced to the depredatory practices of civilizational extraction and consented servitude (Ferrando 77). The tradition of painting is not just a collection of forms and artistic conventions, but the ongoing concert that facilitates our movement (and being moved) towards happiness.
This is the promise of the itinerant Mary’s passive and inclined face in Titian’s early masterpiece. It does not come to surprise that for Ferrando, the mother dwells among the gods of peace, in contrast to the figures of the commander or the inquisitorial or priestly judge that monitor an endless narrative of intra-species civil war (Ferrando 63). It should not go without saying that at the same time that some contemporary scholars in the face of a historical crisis of legitimation attempt to revive the aura of the homini militari, the precepts of the ragion di stato and the technical virtues of the charismatic Prince; it has been the work of Monica Ferrando, in fully in display in Arcadia Sacra (2024), that invites us to turn to the counters of eros of painting that, almost stubbornly, transmit to us the infinite possibilities of life among the green blades of grass in Pan’s spiritual land (Ferrando 82) [5]. The sacredness of Arcadia resides in this unbounded exteriority that thanks to the mystery of the mother, is always commencing; and, having achieved happiness, it wants to know nothing about bring the world to conclusion. Beneath the arcana imperii (Rome) and the bylaws of the polis (Athens), the landscape of Arcadia remains a harmonious passage of our cohabitation.
5. I am thinking here of the works of several American historians of political thought and legal scholars in recent years that have mobilized efforts to restore a “neoclassical”, Renaissance centered political tradition, as a response to the crisis of modern liberalism. The most prominent list includes, although it is not limited to James Hankins’ Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard U Press, 2020), Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (Cambridge U Press, 2023), and Adrian Vermuele’s endorsement of Renaissance imperial categories such as Ragion di stato, Lex Regia and the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, see his “Sacramental Liberalism and Region di Stato” (2019) and “The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia” (2023). The pastiche of this neoclassical investment made possible by rhetorical and hermeneutical deployments of instrumentalized myth, it is something that I have taken note of in “¿Revival de la tradición legal clásica?” (2022). Drawing a parallel to this classical absorption in American political thought, one could say that this is a reiteration of what Monica Ferrando herself has analyzed in her chapter on German Romantic Neoclassicism and the Winckelmann aesthetic project in her L’elezione e la sua ombra. Il cantico tradito (Neri Pozza, 2022), except now that it lacks aesthetic meditations (there is no Dichter als Führer), thus culminating in the direct exercise of applied executive force.
Giorgio Agamben’s most recent La voce umana (Quodlibet, 2023) sets the scene with an elemental question: what is to call on something, and what is it to be called upon? The exploration around the notion of the voice (a sort of chorâ that falls between the different antinomies of human language, as we will soon learn) is far from new in Agamben’s work, who from the the early period of Il linguaggio e la morte (1982) directly confronted the negative foundation of phonê in relation to the closure of metaphysics. In a certain way, the perimeter of La voce umana (2023) is now deliberately limited to how the ‘mystery of the language’ is to be found in the unending event of the voice as the arcanum of anthropogenesis itself. At this stage of his investigations, the problem of the voice for Agamben designates a double movement of inflection and recapitulation: the voice proves the internal division of political life in the West; at the same time, it is also the most intense experience that a form of life can bestow the disclosure of the world. The attentive reader might recall the last pages of L’aperto: l’uomo e l’animale (2002) where the impasse of the anthropological machine was assigned by caesuras between human and animal, the semiotic and the semantic, the word and the name, redemption and the end of time, writing (gramma) and sound. But it is now with the voice that a clear way out becomes apparent. In the analytics of the voice klesis no longe stands as a political-theological category of the West; but, on the contrary, a call of language unto itself, the vocative that resists linguistic denomination and the free-standing outside the case and even language itself (“fuori lingua”) as suggested by Gustave Guillaume.
The vocative dimension of language is shown as pure means of the human experience: the apostrophe that calls something – as in Moby Dick’s majestic beginning “Call me Ishmael” – is already the call through the act of naming, and naming falling into the voice becomes the originary place of language in the denomination of speech (21). Irreductible to the antinomy of langue and parole, the semantic and the semiotic, the vocative texture of the voice emerges as the third figure that neither linguistics, philosophy of language, phonology, analytical linguistics, and biological cybernetics are capable of truly grasping. And this is so – Agamben does not says it in this brutish way – because there cannot be any theory of the voice and the vocative denomination; there can only be a poetics of the voice in which the transformative and self-generative experience with reality is staged: “Ma è possibile pensare il linguaggio prescindendo dal suo rifermenta lla realtà? La voce – il vocabolo – non designa soltanto un significant, chiama piuttosto un ente reale…non si limite a elencare segni in un lessico, ma annuncai ed encunia realtà” (36).
In my respects – and this is not the place to bring into focus Emile Benveniste’s last seminar on language and writing – Agamben’s treatment of the voice is nourished by pushing beyond the limits of the great twentieth century linguist who, for the most part, remained silent on the place of the voice. Not that there is a need for another substantive treatment of the vocative; in fact, one of the great achievements of La voce umana (2023) is precisely the archeological reconstruction of the Aristotelean “what is in the voice” (ta en té phonē) formula in which the classical metaphysical inception of language comes closest to the voice only to render it “articulate” and thus subordinated to the legibility of gramma or the written sign (42-44). And whatever one thinks of what constitutes the “primacy” of metaphysics in West (phone or gramma), what is important is the fact that domestication of language has been auxiliary by the “fundamental discipline of the West” (grammar) that sets off the immediate point of dialectical force between speech and the alphabetical inscription in the voice (45-46). Civilization is nothing more than the historical process of taming one’s voice.
At this point, it becomes clear that Agamben remains faithful to his old friend, the Spanish poet José Bergamín, whose bewildering essay from 1933 “La decadencia del analfabetismo” (“The decline of illiteracy”), argued precisely that the upwards movement of civilization of grammar and writing undermined the living voice and imagination of concrete and localized people (“pueblos minorías”) livelihood [1]. Indeed, it does not take much to see how the grammaticalization of human experience was a fundamental infrastructure for the consolidation of civil society grounded in the articulation of internal recognition of rules, normative directives, and binding statutory enforcement. The triumph of the order of grammar will only intensify the movement towards the total integration of every form of life into the fictive rhetorical space on behalf of what has already been stated without having to persuade, to put in Carlo Michaelstaedter’s terms that I do not think contradict the terms that Agamben extracts from his exegesis of the voice.
The political problems emerging from the confrontation with the voice are multiple. One can recall how in modernity, when “words have been liberated from their sacred denomination” (something pondered by Joseph De Maistre in his The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions as political revolution sets through universal recognition), the closure of the rhetoric embedded in “social life” captures the event of the voice into a stable communicative dimension of language (“suoni della lengua”), which for Agamben resembles the etymology of the word phònos: murder, that is, the self-conscious assassination of the voice at the altar of free-floating rhetoric and the order of discourse (50-51). By the same token, in our epoch every living being has the malleable equalizer and “amplifier” (a word used, indeed, by the Supreme Court of the United States when deciding the case that granted equity between finance campaign and ‘public use of language’) of words, but it is only rare to see anyone truly possessing a voice. If every entity in the world has been previously assigned and grammatically ordered, what is absent is precisely the chōra as the “invisible and formeless place” (‘invisibile e senza forma”) in which the intelligible pure state of the language in the voice. In this strict sense, whoever possesses a voice is one who dissolves the axiomatic arrangement of discourse only to transform the world as inhabited. This is why the voice remains not a threshold to semantic register or the written technology, but rather an unknown song (“canto ignoto”), as it was called by Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo. And this song, the voice, can be followed and deciphered but never truly mastered as absolute transparent knowledge (45).
And if music is an index of prophecy, as Gianni Carchia once suggested, then this means that the voice, like the mythic harmony of the spheres, is what exceeds the proper human as indivisible and non-exchangeable realized only here and now. The political consequences are immense, Agamben is right. This means that we need to restate the medial and geographical distances of the chorā over the orderly cultural exchange of the polis. As it has been noted, the rise of the city state is waged against the orphic poetic myth; in the same way that the Roman imperium was possible by the erasure of the Etruscan musical underworld. Agamben reminds us that the birth of biopolitics coincides with the historical invention of the science of language leading to the impoverishment of the intangible and expressive communication between souls. This is Agamben’s rendition that the task of philosophy – not historical benchmarks or epistemological categorizations – resides in the attunement to the highest hymn of expressive form as it has been studied by Nicoletta De Vita’s erudite monograph Il nome e la voce (2022). There is no philosophical or theological closure as long as the song remains.
We can say that wherever there is a chorā of the voice something like this minor transcendence of the original human being that retracts from the soteriological false exits that have devastated the anthropogenic event. And it occurs to me that we could thematize three areas of what this closure means for us today: first, the technification of politics in epoch has been reduced, precisely, to a discursive theory of articulation (of social demands) to craft the fictive totalization of hegemony; second, the collapse of the political representation within contemporary democracies has turned into the optimal organization of containing willful self-expression in light of the contingency of values of the dominant aesthetic regime; and finally, the very understanding of legal culture and constitutionalism in the West has shuffled different modalities of the written authorial intention to generate the internal rules of institutional and statutory norms only to expand police powers and codification of conducts. At the expense of the unknown song, all sorts of prosthetic contraptions have been erected to douse the prehistoric voice that nevertheless keeps overflowing and reemerging like the unnerving cracking squick of Kafka’s Josephine. It is this watershed mystery of the anthropogenesis with its philo-poetological density that calls on humanity by the highest superlative imaginable: its voice.
Transfiguration. Towards the end of Nuestra confianza en nosotros: la Unidad Popular y la herencia del por venir (Ufro, 2023), Rodrigo Karmy suggests that the experiential texture of Salvador Allende’s political years amounted to a sort of corporeal transfiguration of historical time, but also of the political subject within modern architectonics of the inter-state sovereign system. The death-martyrdom brought a new world into order, radically transforming the sense of historical assumptions and its immanent refutations and accelerations. For those of all that know Karmy’s philosophical investigations working through this intuition, it is impossible not to see that ‘transfiguration’ does not entail ‘sacrifice’, but rather it implies the figure of the martyr [1]. And we also know from Erik Peterson that martyrs are absolute witness to truth of an irrevocable event; in other words, those that transcend the core materiality of the mere opinions and matter-of-factness as to remain faithful to the unfathomable to a world brought to abrupt change (and at times, this means also despair). Karmy writes:
“Se produce así una transfiguración radical de Allende que trastoca enteramente el juego de la teología política, tal como ha sido planteada bajo los avatares del fantasma portaliano: si en esta última, el cuerpo físico termina desmaterializado en un cuerpo institucional, tal como ocurrió con el devenir del general Pinochet, en Allende termina desmaterializado en una potencia por venir (no en cuerpo institucional), aquello que Walter Benjamin llamaba lo «nunca sido»: «Siempre estaré junto a ustedes», dice el presidente usurpado por el golpismo esa triste mañana de septiembre” [2].
The truth of transfiguration – and in a sense every event of truth is always carried by the energy what is transfigured – marks the incommensurable distance between the eternal persistence of the word and the historical movement guided by the precepts of civilization. Whereas the political grammar organizes itself through an indiscriminate institutional corpus and a set of moral binding obligations upon its citizens; the truth of transfiguration is the keeper of the night of the soul that, like the myth of Er, signals the passage between the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead. When transfigured, the dead can become even more lively than those allegedly “alive”; where those alive become embodied and rigid statues or mummies. As such, the energy of transfiguration remains outside the cloisters of history and its memory sites, since its realization takes place whenever there is a drift outside and beyond the suturing of the world as mere stated and enclosed fact.
Voice. The “we” (Nosotros) in Karmy’s thesis does not signal the constituent political unity of the People nor a partisan form that can exert force towards the inversion of the sedimented historical order. In his archeological endeavor, the ‘nosotros’ indexes a non-numerical instance through the vocative raises its own question to the past. This does not imply that there is a “collective voice” that must enact its point of annunciation through representation and mediated forms; the voice emerges as an exception to the grammaticalization of the constitutional order and its statuary production as expression of legislative will. The voice is the exteriority to every scheme of reproduction. But, what is a “voice”? Following Emilio Recabarren, Karmy connects the voice to the very act of creation: in other words, a voice to the truth implies the vocative of what has truly never been there before. Like the chorā, the voice is both at the reemergence of its origin and medium rather than substance; and this is why the voice, unlike the written language, cannot be subsumed to the reification of mimesis and generative substance [3]. The voice is what every time remains irreducible to the order of discourse difference, historiographical narrativity, and the original letter and spirit of the law. And even in traditions without “Constitutions”, law cannot escape its written and grammatical framework; this is why in Common Law, the Constitutional authority is supplanted by the historical absorption of habits, manners, and tradition into the force of legal codes and binding statutes. It is a high merit of Karmy’s Nuestra confianza (2023) to reminds us that the happiest moments (and perhaps the only moment worth saving, that infinitely returns against the grain of historical progress) of the revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century are to be found in the evocation of the voice and its popular music (something that can also be said of the Cuban Revolution, for instance). This esoteric orphic thread evidences the disjointed relation between the polis and the mythic transfiguration when facilitated by the prophetic overtones of the musical nomos in the genesis of the West [4]. Hence, whenever there is a voice, the suture of politics to the theology cannot amount to the continuous transaction upon the survival and agony of the living.
Freedom from revolution. Unlike the reverential or formalist accounts written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean Unidad Popular, Karmy’s essay invites us to dwell about a political experience after its epochal exhaustion: the collapse of the horizon of the philosophy of history implies the internal implosion of the modern revolution’s infrastructure (constituent power, moral justice, militant subjectivity, sacrificial energy). For Karmy to arrive at a certain nearness to the well lighted tradition of the UP is to abandon once and for all the civilizational eon of sedentary political hegemony (“a revolution in world history” bringing about the age of the nomads to an end, claimed historian Edward Gibbon) that has now paved the way for the unlimited forms of planetary government exerted through the rationality of the management of population and the distribution of the economy [5].
The farewell to the revolution and its reverse – it is well known that De Maistre claimed in the wake of the French Revolution that the opposite of the revolution is not a counter-revolution, but what is all together contrarian to it – means to put a halt to the paradigm of force (positive and immanent hostility) that has oriented actions, expectations, passions, and even dreams taxed at the fictive illusions of an abstract Humanity devoid of any possibility of happiness in the world. It is only after we can leave behind the revolutionary metaphysical mimesis that a new sense of freedom could emerge away from the dominion of the land-surveyors of the Earth. Abandoning any clamors oriented towards the future, it is now for us to attune to the everlasting traditions that are unrelinquished to the endless rubble of time.
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Notes
1. Rodrigo Karmy. “The Absolute Gift: Martyrdom as Destituent Power”, SAQ, 122, 2023, 157-170.
2. Rodrigo Karmy. Nuestra confianza en nosotros (Ufro, 2023), 183.
3. Ibid., 102.
4. Gianni Carchia. Orfismo e tragedia: Il mito trasfigurato (Quodlibet, 2019).
En el viejo artículo “Praise of Law: the origins of legal philosophy and the Greeks” (1947), originalmente escrito en ocasión de honor a la obra del jurista norteamericano Roscoe Pound, Werner Jaeger desarrolla la sorprendente tesis que la génesis del derecho se encontra en la Grecia antigua antes que en el imperium romano, y llega a decir que el pensamiento filosófico griego nunca dejó de reflexionar sobre la constitución de una legalidad. Ya en en los poemas homéricos, recuerda Jaeger, encontramos una tematización no tanto del nomos como de la themistes, un conjunto de ordinanzas orientadas a un principio de autoridad mundana aunque proyectada en forma de mito a los dioses. La themis separaba el mundo de la civilización ante el mundo barbaro sin ley (que era el mundo del Cíclope en la Odisea). Ya en Homero y Solón, la distinción entre drecho y justicio se complemetarian para explicar una relación con la naturaleza que cosmológicamente implicaba orden y armonía. La dike en Anixamandro, por ejemplo, se etendía como el orden eterno que componen todas las leyes del mundo. De manera que antes que la concepción de la división del poder de una garantía “positiva” del derecho tal y como lo entendieron los modernos, ya la armonía que a la que aspiraba la diké como balance (isomoiria) de los humores.
Esto implicaba una relación con la salud, pues la “buena salud” capaz de garantizar un principio de igualdad (ison) era solo posible mediante un ordenamiento que limitara “la tendencia hacia el exceso”, como nos recuerda Jaeger (358). De manera que el ideal de la salud para los antiguos no se hallaba en una administración de un cuerpo “enfermo” y al que hay que curar como luego lo asumirá la biopolítica, sino como armonía entre la irreductibilidad de almas. La polis tenia que orientarse hacia la Justicia, ya no como abstracción de un gobierno (como lo entiende el tomismo y el derecho natural), sino diferenciación absoluta entre derecho y Justicia en el ordenamiento del mundo. Lo justo era un medio de la salud, y estar saludable solo podía ser una realización de la j instancia de la justicia.
La consitutcion de la polis como entidad política demótica de alguna manera marca una transformación inédita del principio armónico hacia una concepción de igualdad de representación mediante la comunidad social. La isonomia consolida la máxima pindárica del nomos basilus (el nomos es rey) que para Jaeger es el logro más alto de la civilización griega. La polis “enseña y educa al hombre”, llegaría a decir Simonides quien instala una paideia de la virtud cívica entre iguales. Esto es, la isonomia necesita no solo de una recodificación representativa en la polis, sino que tambien requiere de una paideia como “educación en el espirtu de las leyes” (361). Como demuestra Jaeger, esta concepción civil del derecho hace que la ley se entienda como una “mera funcion del poder” (364). Y así lo entendieron los sofisitas que, como recordamos con Trisimaco en La República de Platón, llega a definir la Justicia (el concepto pivote que busca indagar Socrates) como cualquier cosa que sea definida por quien tenga el poder en un momento dado.
En efecto, no estamos muy lejos aquí del concepto hobbesiano de potestas soberana, donde la armonía queda relegada por una comprensión legal fundada “desde la seguridad y el crédito en la producción de la naturaleza de la realidad” (365-366). Ahora la textura de la polis depende de una ingeniería hidráulica de la legalidad cuya finalidas es el manteninimietno del orden de lo civil. En efecto, la circularidad entre orden y civilidad emerge como un proyecto de “creciente subjetivismo” (growling subjetivism, Jaeger dixit), a tal punto que en Platón el estado se entiende como una gigantesca abstracción pedagógica (366). De alguna manera la paideia del estado orientado hacia lo Justo requiere de un dispositivo educativo hegemónico que termina reemplazando la centralidad del derecho, o al menos volviéndolo secundario.
Pero Jaeger insiste que la palabra final de Platón sobre el derecho no se encuentra en el organización pedagógica de La República, y que al final de su obra el filósofo regresa a la cudestion de las leyes. En Las leyes enfrecerá una noción de derecho positivo mediante un protector guardían del derecho que legisla a partir de un principio de racionalidad del derecho (una integridad interna, tal y como luego lo entendería Lon Fuller en The Morality of Law). Pero será en el diálogo Minos, cuya autoría de Platón es cuestionada, en donde se define el ejercicio del derecho como “technē”. Según Jaeger la technē habilita el descubrimiento de una cosa real contra el dogma poleos de la decisión del estado (370). En otras palabras, es mediante la techné que el derecho se orienta hacia el ser verdadero de las cosas a pesar de la positivización de las leyes de una comunidad política. Esa verdad no es reconocida en la legitimidad de un “pueblo” sino en el logos del guardián.
En este punto reaparece aquí la diferenciación entre derecho y Justicia o “verdad”, que en Platón se tematiza como la diferencia absoluta entre filosofia y derecho en el momento de la consolidación administrative, aunque el estado es el portador de la Ley como medio para la verdad de las cosas. Este es el resto cosmológico en el pensamiento platónico para una época en su momento ya dominada por la visión sofística de la validación del derecho como paradigma subjetivo en la construcción de la realidad; un sentido de realidad que luego la jurisprudencia romana perfeccionará bajo la rubrica de la “-res” [2]. El artificio consistirá, por un lado, en la construcción de un sentido ordenado de la realidad; y, por otro, de una estratificación de valores asumido por la producción de una normatividad. La mirada de Jaeger en la génesis griega constituye, de esta manera, algo así como una urgeschichte de la consolidación del ius romana y del desarrollo clásico del imperium del derecho.
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Notas
1. Werner Jaeger. “Praise of Law: the origins of legal philosophy and the Greeks” (1947), en Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies (New York, 1947).
2. Yan Thomas. L’istituzione della natura (Quodlibet, 2020).
En lo que sigue quiero organizar algunos apuntes de lectura sobre la noción griega de nomos mousikos, y para hacerlo quiero glosar algunos movimientos del último capítulo de The Birth of the Nomos (2019) del estudioso Thanos Zartaloudis, quien ha elaborado la contribución filológica y conceptual más importante del concepto hasta el momento. La noción de nomos mousikos pudiera orientar de manera decisiva la prehistoria de una institucionalidad no necesariamente jurídica, previa a la captura del derecho, y en tanto tal capaz de iluminar la relación entre derecho y forma de vida (ethos). En efecto, Thanos Zartaloudis comienza por recordarnos que en el Fedro Sócrates refería a la filosofía como la “más alta mousikē”, y que, en este sentido, la mousikē era una forma de vida, un ethos cuya exploración experiencial se daba mediante la mousikē [1]. Pero la mousikē tiene una prehistoria o una protohistoria antes del momento platónico, que en realidad es su último momento.
En sus inicios la mousikē constaba de una dimensión experiencial mayor que la technē, pues prepara las condiciones para la realización más educada del carácter (ethos) (341). Y, por lo tanto, se entendía que antes que la polis estaba mousikē, y que no habría vida en la polis sin la necesaria condición de la mousikē. Zartaloudis no llega a relacionar la mousikē con el ideal de la ciudad bella (kalapolis), pero sí nos dice que esa “experiencia” de la mousikē garantizaba un orden; una noción de orden acústico, más ligada a la voz y a la memoria que a una sustancia medible de la vida en la polis.
La mousikē, por lo tanto, apelaba directamente a las Musas, y, por extensión, a una función de la transmisión social de la memoria. Según Zartaloudis se trataba de: “una iniciación con la divinidad, que era saber común, y también poder de la música para instituir un saber común o una comunidad mediante la mimesis” (348). La mousikē constituía una forma institucional mínima, invisible, que tampoco era reducible a la especificidad de la música, sino a la asociación con las Musas. Y con las Musas se hacía posible guardar el silencio de la palabra, que entonces se entendía como un ejercicio fundamental de la paideia del ethos.
Aquí la mousikē asume su condición protofilosófica y especulativa más importante: la mousikē es el nombre que se le da al evento originario de la experiencia lingüística de lo no-lingüístico. Zartaloudis nos dice que la memoria que transfiere la mousikē es siempre de antemano trágica; y es trágica porque en ella se registra, o se intenta registrar, la pérdida de la voz como apertura del logos en la phonē. De manera que la “Musa es, el nombre de un acontecimiento que intenta ser recordado como advenimiento de la palabra, como cosmopoesis musical” (355). La Musa es, entonces, no solo ritimicidad de la mousikē, sino la memoria de la pérdida de toda divinidad que, en última instancia, dispensa la inmortalidad mediante el recogimiento de lo mortal, como sugiere Zartaloudis glosando a Jean-Pierre Vernant.
Las Musas ejemplifican una relación entre la voz y el orden social mediante la dimensión del ritual que Zartaloudis refiere de manera directa al problema de la armonía. Y es mediante este problema que la mousikē se convierte en un tema abiertamente político, o de interés político puesto que: “Armonía no era una cuestión de darle forma al caos, en el sentido de lo medible y lo cuantificable, sino de escuchar el chaosmos y ser capaz de anunciarlo” (362). Por eso ahora se puede entender porqué mousikē eventualmente pasó a ser una forma educativa política del ethos, así como un episteme técnico de las matemáticas y de la filosofía. De manera que mousikē era la forma mediante la cual se podía activar una regeneración del kosmos desde la experiencia de la phonē en el decir. La organización de la mousikē para los griegos poseía un poder cosmopoetico. Y Zartaloudis indica que el fenómeno del kosmos no era otro que el de aletheia en la canción. Se trataría, entonces, de un ritual de la mimesis del orden de lo melódico.
Es probable entonces que el nomos mousikos haya sido el sobrevenido técnico de transponer este problema de la voz como acontecimiento a formas genéricas de la melodía y de la tonalidad (382). Y posteriormente en Platón la mousikē obtiene un carácter jurídico y social, por el cual el acontecimiento queda plasmado en el orden de la legislación estatuaria. O sea, nos encontramos ante una forma temprana de la invención del “costum” como norma escrita. He aquí uno de los misterios que Zartaloudis registra, pero que tampoco logra desentrañar del todo de manera explicita: ¿cómo entender el tránsito del orden musical previo a su dimensión estamental del derecho, y luego su confección en la sutura del nomos mousikos? Zartaloudis cita al estudioso Mittica quien argumenta que dicha transformación es de orden de la analogía, y necesariamente de un desarrollo temporal, cuya ambigüedad permaneció por mucho tiempo en la antigua Grecia.
Pero será en Las Leyes de Platón donde la analogía encuentre su mayor grado de sofisticación y perfección, puesto que las reglas mousike serán transpuestas al ordenamiento (taxin) de la polis. Y ahora el poeta aparece ‘ordenado’ para la finalidad de un ‘bien común’ de la polis, ya que el poeta compondrá en la medida en que parmanezca dentro de la ley (nomina), apele a lo bello (kala), y contribuya al bien (agatha) de la ciudad. La dimensión del kosmos-mousikos, nos dice Zartaloudis, ahora aparecía albergarse en el artificio de la palabra. Y solo de lejos era posible escuchar “el pensamiento acústico” de Heráclito. Pero entre sonoridad (nómos) y ley (nomós) algo irremediablemente se perdía: el ritmo incongruente a la forma – el orden melódico, ahora devenía un molde para el orden social. Así se edificaba el nomos mousikos como actividad cívica. Y era el filósofo quien portaría la divisa de la “más alta mousike”, cuyo mysterium era residual a la apariencia de la idea. Por lo tanto, la mousikē era una instancia profética de toda filosofía, como en su momento pensó Gianni Carchia.
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Notas
1. Thanos Zartaloudis. The Birth of the Nomos (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
¿Cómo entender la elaboración trágica del drama de Empedocles de Hölderlin? Se trata de otro intento de abordar la relación disyuntiva entre la sensibilidad moderna y la génesis griega tras la fuga de los dioses. En un importante ensayo sobre La muerte de Empedocles, Max Kommerell se refiere a esta tragedia como la construcción de un “género en desocultamiento” [1]. Ahora bien, lo que se deja ver no es un rasgo elemental ni el error trágico del personaje, sino algo más originario; algo que Kommerell designa bajo un concepto de intimidad, que en su retirada “mora con el otro” desde su singularidad irreductible. Este movimiento, como lo es también el del propio Empedocles, viejo poeta-filósofo-profeta del mundo, se asume como recapitulación, y por lo tanto solo ejercicio en el umbral de la vida. Para Hölderlin, por lo tanto, estaríamos ante la “restitución” de lo infinito en lo finito de la vida, una sutura en declinación desde la cual podemos contemplar, a todas luces, la catástrofe del momento desde la cual emerge el mito de la autoafirmación del hombre. Este es el primer momento de “separación” de la physis, entre lo orgánico y lo aórgico, que tan solo puede ser la formación de lo que ya ha “acontecido”. Empedocles encuentra la inestabilidad del hombre en la génesis de la separación de la presencia.
De manera que no hay posible edificación de mito (típicamente prometeico), como el esbozado por Goethe y luego tomado por la figura del artista de Nietzsche, puesto que Hölderlin lleva al creador ‘súperhombre’ a la ruina. Y más aun: la ruina de este poeta profeta también supone la desintegración del pueblo como unidad orgánica ante un mundo que ahora pasa a ser abismal. En palabras de Kommerell: “abierto a una religiosidad amorfa de una época abierta después de su colapso [2]. Es por esta razón que no hay en Empedocles una figura carismática interesada en abrir la energía para una época entre una comunidad existencial. Como vemos entre los personajes del drama, Empedocles solo se autoreconoce en la amistad bajo el claro de los dioses fugados que alguna vez habían depositado en él la irradiación de una trascendencia ilimitada.
A diferencia de lo que se ha notado de La muerte de Empedocles como la afirmación de lo trágico bajo la figura sacrificial de poeta genial (hiperbólica de toda una época romántica subjetivista según nos dice Carl Schmitt en una entrada de Glossarium); la fuerza infinita del personaje desplaza y pone en suspenso el personalismo del poeta y el mando por liderar el encuadre objetivo del mundo. Pero esto solo puede hacerse – o así lo hace Hölderlin – a partir de un concepto de religiosidad interior como sustrato de proximidad que pone en crisis lo subjetivo y lo objetivo. Y para esta frontera común-en-separación no hay administración ni guías posibles. Por eso se cerraba el eón de los profetas en comunidad. Aquí Hölderlin se adelantaba a las críticas illichianas a la figura del sacerdocio como figura de la representación eclesiástica de las almas. La crítica al sacerdote en La muerte de Empedocles es explicita: “Fuera! No puedo ver ante mi al hombre que ejerce lo sagrado como industria. Su rostro es falso y frio y muerto, como lo son sus dioses…Concededme la gracia de recorrer tranquilo el sendero por donde ando, el sagrado sendero callado de la muerte” [3].
Kommerell sugiere que más que una factura del mitologema, estaríamos asistiendo a nuevo tipo de religión o de religiosidad transfigurada que se vincula de manera directa a la intimidad, que resuena con la phygen neoplatónica. La verdad oscura o enigmática de Empedocles es la reserva de una proximidad infranqueable – pero también inmedible, en su cesura constitutiva – entre la organización humana de lo sagrado y el tiempo destituido tras la consumación de los dioses entre los seres vivos. El gesto de Hölderlin, sin embargo, a diferencia de la impronta cristológica, capaz de deificar una comunidad a partir del principio de gracia y del pecado, se ve justificada bajo el trabajo infinito de la reconciliación entre lo orgánico y lo inorgánico. Esta franja es lo que pudiéramos llamar una zona invisible, en la que la recapitulación orienta un destino singular e irrepetible. En última instancia, este es el único fundamento de Empedocles. La teología transfigurada de Hölderlin evita el paso de la catástrofe de la separación sin abastecerla con un principio del medio, extratemporal para la comunidad en espera.
En otras palabras, Hölderlin quiere morar entre el derrocamiento del basileus y el advenimiento de la isonomia como administración de las cosas (polis). De ahí que, en la segunda escena, Empedocles refiera al fin de la época de los reyes, de los archêin: “Avergonzaos de desear aun un rey; sois demasiado mayores; en tiempos de vuestros padres, las cosas habrían sido diferentes. Nos os ayudara, sin nos ayudáis vosotros mismos” (91). Podríamos leerlo en paralelo con el Hölderlin histórico: ni reyes, pero tampoco con los poetas. En Hölderlin esta apertura no signa un momento “constituyente” o instancia que prepararía la realización del ideal estatal de la historia hegeliana, tal y como en su momento pensó Dilthey [4]. La puesta en escena, al contrario, intenta afirmar la destitución misma de la unidad facilitada por la efectividad de las mediaciones en conflicto (poeta-palabra, rey-pueblo, sujeto-objetividad).
En “Fundamento para el Empedocles”, leemos: “en donde lo orgánico que se ha hecho aórgico parece encontrarse de nuevo a sí mismo y retomar a sí mismo, en cuanto que se atiene a la individualidad de lo aórgico, y el objeto, lo aórgico, parece encontrarse a si mismo, en cuanto que, en el mismo momento en que adopta individualidad, encuentra también a la vez lo orgánico en el más alto extremo de lo aórgico, de modo que en este momento, en este nacimiento de la más alta hostilidad, parece ser efectivamente real de la más alta reconciliación.” [5]. La descomposición objeto-sujeto queda sublimada a las condiciones de un nuevo expresionismo, puesto que en el “día de la separación, nuestro espíritu es profeta, y dicen verdad los que no van a volver” (97). Solo el espíritu de la intimidad puede tomar el lugar del profeta en toda su expresión. Es así como se instituye un destino singular que se resiste a las transferencias secundarias (el pueblo amado).
Pero, ¿por qué aparece eso que Giorigo Colli llamó el triunfo de la expresión en Empedocles? El mismo Hölderlin encara esta pregunta en un momento decisivo de “Fundamento para el Empedocles”: “Pero ¿en qué puede consistir esta expresión?, ¿qué cosa es aquella expresión que, en una relación de esta índole, satisface a aquella parte que al principio era la incrédula?, y en esta expresión estriba todo, pues, si lo únicamente tiene que perecer, es porque apareció de modo demasiado visible y sensible, y sólo es capaz de esto por cuanto se expresa en algún punto y caso muy determinado” (115). La expresión en Empedocles constituye el momento del nacimiento de los sentidos, por los cuales accedemos no solo al mundo, sino a los propios colores y al claro de la existencia [6]. Ahora la visión no es metáfora suplementaria del logos, sino una tecnología en la que podemos navegar lo visible así como el pasaje indeterminado del mundo de las formas. La tarea del poeta-creador como Empedocles no reside en la factura de la palabra profética que ha sido llevada a su recapitulación (su cumplimiento), sino hacia lo más inacabable de los sentidos vitales: el amor y la repugnancia. Es esto lo que nos recuerda Hölderlin. Y son el amor y la repugnancia porque es desde estos dos grados de afectación que se pueden manejar las variaciones de la fuerza tras la retirada de la unidad y el fin de las revelaciones.
Se trata de dar un salto y efectuar un movimiento. En el inciso sobre Empedocles en su La naturaleza ama esconderse, Colli se detiene en este salto tal y como aparece en el fragmento 110 del filósofo presocrático: “en efecto si de un salto fijándote en tu densa interioridad inspirado contemplarás los principios con puro anhelo”. Este fragmento capta, nos advierte Colli, el íntimo sobresalto que intensamente separa y forma. Una interioridad que es exploración de una potencia, pero solo en la medida en que permite la percepción de toda la irreductibilidad de los mundos [7]. Esta fijación en el salto es apertura al acontecimiento coreográfico de un ser-fuera-de-si desde la cual la realidad no llega a petrificarse, porque permanece bajo el dominio de una potencia intransferible, una expresión sin objeto y sin dios.
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Notas
1. Max Kommerell. “Hölderlin’s Empedocles Poems”, en Philosophers and Their Poets (SUNY Press, 2019), ed. C. Bambach & T. George, 239-261.
2. Ibíd., 257.
3. Friedrich Hölderlin. La muerte de Empedocles (Acantilado, 2001), 36.
4. Wilhelm Dilthey. “Friedrich Hölderlin (1910)”, en Poetry and Experience (Princeton U Press, 1985), 350-368.
5. Friedrich Hölderlin. “Fundamento para el Empedocles”, en Ensayos (Editorial Ayuso, 1976), ed. F. Martinez Marzoa, 133.
6. James I. Porter. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 154-155.
7. Giorgio Colli. La naturaleza ama esconderse (Ediciones Siruela, 2008), 191-215.
La edición y selección de Cartas filosóficas de Hölderlin (La Oficina, 2020), eds. Arturo Leyte y Helena Cortés, es una insuperable condensación de los momentos estelares de la extensa producción epistolar del poeta alemán ya anteriormente recogida en Correspondencia completa (Hiperión, 1990) desde hace mucho tiempo agotada. En primer lugar, entonces, se agradece que se ponga a disposición del lector una selección de las cartas de Hölderlin desde las cuales podemos adentrarnos a la intimidad de un pensamiento en el que poesía y amistad se dan cita bajo la textura misma de la vida. En efecto, las cartas de Hölderlin respiran intimidad y calor de cercanía; todas ellas dirigidas a la familia (madre, hermano), colegas intelectuales (Schelling, Hegel, Schiller), o amigos (Ebel, Sinclair, Böhlendorff). La gradación de los destinatarios marca el ritmo de la coincidencia entre el hábito de pensamiento de Hölderlin y su pulsión de una interlocución marcada por la confidencia de la lengua. No es menor que sea desde la correspondencia – y no desde el ensayo, el tratado, o la extensa conversación del gran autor de genio que deja un registro enciclopédico sobre cuanto tema haya bajo el sol, como es el caso del Goethe de Eckermann – sea la forma en donde el brillo del pensamiento de Hölderlin asuma su forma más nítida. Aunque tampoco se trata de una correspondencia propiamente filosófica; esto es, entregada a los claroscuros de la abstracción y de la sistematización del sistema idealista. Hölderlin sorprende – y nos sigue sorprendiendo – justamente porque rompe contra este esquematismo, contra su tiempo.
Esta pasión de comunicación (que es también pasión por lo común de la palabra que jamás tendrá destinatario) conoce la vinculación heterogénea solo desde el fragmento. Esta pulsión genera sorpresa no tanto por la escritura o los caldos de confesión, sino por la irrupción de la idea. Tal vez esto es lo que Giorgio Agamben ha querido ver al mostrar cómo Hölderlin asumió de manera existencial una vida habitante en la que pensamiento y vida, hábitos y palabra encuentran una sutura soluble en un poeta que veía de manera secreta, sin pathos ni compensaciones extenuantes, el despegue de la consumación del nihilismo de lo moderno [1]. La forma epistolar es, en este sentido, como la forma autográfica: desfigura al autor. Y en ella aparecen clinámenes que sustraen a la vida de la metafísica de la apariencia. Este movimiento claramente exílico, sin embargo, gravita sobre las estelas del amor y la amistad, dos nombres de la intensificación del afuera. La epístola confirma que la supuesta locura de Hölderlin no es otra cosa que esta forma de deserción existencial entramada desde la potencia de un habla que pronto se vería acechada por lo que, tras Michelstaeader, pudiéramos llamar la ciencia de la retórica.
En este sentido, lleva razón Arturo Leyte al decirnos que Hölderlin fue un filósofo que no deseaba serlo, puesto que lo importante era atender a la poesía como “la búsqueda de lo vivo”; o lo que es lo mismo: la parte común y vulgar de la vida real y práctica [2]. La tragedia de Hölderlin es, por este camino entreverado de sustituciones y guiños, el doble movimiento de la incepción poética en la filosofía, y de la suspensión de la obra poética como realización de toda idealia. Por eso Hölderlin es la forma destituyente tanto de la sistematización absoluta de Hegel como del monumentalismo poético de Goethe. La “mala repetición” del genio de las varias mascaras (Scardanelli, Scaliger Rosa, Salvator, etc.) consistía de la sustracción de toda ficción de las credencias de “autor” para así morar en el paréntesis que devela la khora en todo decir poético. En otras palabras, la existencia ahora aparecía como el lugar de la poesis retirada de la abstracción normativa moderna. Por otro lado, la poética parecía alejarse de la experiencia y de la configuración de los géneros clásicos para convertirse en una forma de la abstracción a la sombra de un mundo puesto en obra. Esta sería la metafísica de la producción. Por eso en las notas sobre Edipo Hölderlin diría que la tragedia de la poesía moderna era su máxima alienación de la experiencia, “con todo sentido de precisión en la práctica” [3]. La mirada oblicua de Hölderlin ante el gigantismo moderno se movía así en una vacilación de dos puntos excéntricos: el extravío de los géneros poéticos como experiencia de ser, y la devastación de la tragedia como “alma viva” que en la antigüedad entregaba los elementos para la configuración de todo destino. En cambio, la modernidad de Hölderlin es no haber visto con nostalgia la pérdida (o el olvido fundamental y final) de lo que supuso el origen griego, sino la posibilidad de morar allí donde las mediaciones entre el ser y lo aórgico aparecían disyuntas. Esto explica el paso naturalista o panteísta de Hölderlin al interior del idealismo alemán: sólo una percepción de lo invisible, mediante el arte, podría transfigurar la condición nihílica moderna. Como apunta Arturo Leyte en su estudio, se trata de pensar una “imagen sagrada que puede guardar la relación con la naturaleza poética” (8). Es una imagen sagrada que triunfa por sobre la ficcionalización de la prosa del mundo tras la fuga de los dioses.
De ahí, entonces, la dependencia en una teología transfigurada, de un theos sin dioses ni sacramentos; sin plegarias o mandatos; y también sin burocracia eclesiástica y sin encarnación mesiánica. Esta teología transfigurada apunta, mucho antes que lo tematizara Iván Illich, al fin del eón de los profetas como antesala para “un mundo externo sensible para tiempos mejores” (93) Pero la filosofía no puede llevar a cabo esta tarea, lo sabemos. Tampoco lo puede hacer una nueva mitopoética imbricada en las representaciones residuales de la antigüedad y de la época pindárica de los géneros. Como le escribe Hölderlin a Niethammer en una carta de 1796: “La filosofía es una tirara y, más que someterme voluntariamente a ella, lo que hago es sufrir su yugo” (108). Ese yugo es síntoma de la pulsión del intelecto en tiempos que no están dados para poetas fundadores de nuevas épocas. Y quienes se atreven a fundarlo de esta manera – como Goethe con su nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse – recaen en una compensación favorable a la realidad contra el mito. En las antípodas del principio de realidad emergente de lo moderno, Hölderlin busca un consuelo en la disolución, una transferencia destituyente que prescinde de ontologías substitutas para la acomodación genérica del “Hombre”. De ahí la radical extrañeza de Hölderlin ante la génesis política de lo moderno: un pensamiento destructivo que, mediante la poética de la vida, renueva la pregunta por la revolución efectiva del actual estado de las cosas. O dicho muy brevemente: es probable que Hölderlin haya sido el pensador de la descomposición de un mundo en el ocaso de la experiencia. La falsa tragedia propia de la tecnificación abolía todo destino.
En uno de los momentos más bellos de toda la correspondencia, Hölderlin le dice a su amigo Ebel (1797): “…tengo un consuelo, y es que toda efervescencia y disolución tienen que conducir necesariamente o a la aniquilación o a nueva organización. Pero puesto que no veo aniquilación, pienso que lo tanto de humus de nuestra descomposición tendrá que resurgir la juventud del mundo…” (117). La modernidad política definiría de manera incorrecta la organización de esas fuerzas: a saber, intensificar la errancia de la especie en su entregada sumisa y total a la mistificación del discurso del capital. En cambio, el devenir de las condiciones actuales del mundo le ha dado la razón a Hölderlin: una nueva organización para una “futura revolución de las ideas y los modos” solo puede llevarse a cabo desde una poética del pensamiento en la vida. Esta organización – que por momentos coincide con lo que Hölderlin llama una “iglesia estética” o iglesia invisible – es condición de posibilidad para proliferación de las fuerzas que hacen posible la transformación de lo nuevo en el mundo. Contra la aparición frívola del constructo de lo Social (traslación de la polis), la insistencia en el alma avisaba de un movimiento, sin lugar a duda “el más difícil”, para despejar la dimensión de una vida inesperable de sus formas. Esta era, acaso, “la excelencia griega”, como le aclara a Böhlendorf en la conocida epístola de 1801 sobre el uso de lo nacional. La excentricidad, entonces, no sería antropológica ni política, sino poética y sensible.
Este desplazamiento prepararía el verdadero reino de una descomposición en retirada de lo moderno: contra el principio de igualdad (cuyo precio es siempre la liquidación de lo irreductible), Hölderlin apuesta con la mirada en el origen griego a “no tener nada igual a ellos” (191). Contra la igualdad, una irreductibilidad de las almas. Por supuesto, “el libre uso de lo propio es lo más difícil”, porque nos fuerza al ejercicio de una morada extática para reinventarnos a partir de los accidentes de su devenir. Nunca dicho de manera explícita, leyendo las Cartas filosóficasde Hölderlin, podemos sospechar que esta búsqueda no es una forma solitaria y aislada de una condición de locura, sino más bien la afirmación de la amistad para quienes han transitado al reino de esos amigos que no se conforman con las técnicas que legitiman la “realidad”. Nunca mejor dicho: “Porque eso sí que es lo trágico entre nosotros, que nos vayamos calladamente del reino de los vivos metidos dentro de una caja cualquiera y no que, destrozados por las llamas, paguemos por el fuego que no supimos dominar” (191). Y “usar” las cosas de este mundo desde una postura forastera es la tarea de toda vida que se resiste a la domesticación diseñada en las carpinterías especializada en las cajas del sujeto. No es menos cierto que se volvía imposible regresar al fulgor de las llamaradas de un mundo, el griego, tan lejano como perdido. A cambio, ahora la vida se asumía como errancia, pero también como portadora del acontecimiento de cada cosa dicha por la voz del viviente.
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Notas
1. Giorgio Agamben. La follia di Hölderlin. Cronaca di una vita abitante (Einaudi editore, 2021).
2. Arturo Leyte. “El filósofo que no quería serlo”, en Cartas filosóficas de Hölderlin (La Oficina, 2020), 15-60.
3. Friedrich Hölderlin. “Notas sobre Edipo”, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ensayos (Editorial Ayuso, 1976), ed. F. Martinez Marzoa, 133.
The core of my present intervention was prompted by a joke recently told by a friend. This friend said: “Alberto Moreiras is Spain’s most important Italian philosopher”. I felt I had to respond to it, in my own sort of way, such as this brief intervention. I will offer at least three hypotheses as why that was said. First, what is obvious: Moreiras’ analytical reflection is irreducible to the dominant Spanish philosophical or cultural reflection, however we take that to be (taking in consideration that Moreiras’ work is hardly defined solely by the Spanish archive or historical tradition). Second, that Moreiras’ reflection is somewhat close to the Italian philosophical tradition, particularly in the wake of the contemporary turn of “Italian Difference”. Thirdly, that Moreiras’ own singular thought shares a vinculum with the Italian philosophical culture as “thinking on life”, as perhaps best defined by Roberto Esposito in his Living Thought (2011). There is probably no way to find out the original “intention” of said friend in terms of the Italian signatura of Moreiras’ work, and it is not my desire defend any of three hypotheses. Rather, in what follows what I want to develop is a preliminary exploration of the way in which Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (2006) could be very well read a horizon of thought that retreats from community vis-à-vis the non-subject that transfigures the “democratic kernel of domination” (Moreiras 94).
In this analytical development I want to ‘actualize’ Línea de sombra’s potential not very rehearsing the arguments against the so called decolonial option, the metaphysical concepts of Empire and multitude, or the critique of the humanism of the politics of the subject, all of them contested in the book. It is not that I think that those discussions are closed, but rather that I want to suggest that a different politics of thought that radicalizes and abandons those very notions – nomos, legacy, and subject – through the practice of infrapolitical reflection. Hence, I will take up two instances of this nomic sites of contemporary reflections in the so called school of “Italian Difference”; mainly, Remo Bodei’s “Italian” entry in the Dictionary of untranslatables (Princeton U Press, 2014), and Roberto Esposito’s articulation of “Italian philosophy” in his Living Thought: the origins and actuality of Italian Philosophy(Stanford U Press, 2011). I would like to anticipate a critique that could perhaps note that I am putting off Italian thought, or even antagonistically clashing two schools of thought. I am not interested in establishing what could well said to be a legislative clash between theories. I am also aware that Italian Difference is a topological heterogeneity that organizes variations of common themes among thinkers, but that it is not reducible to what singular thinkers generate in their own effective elaborations. In this way, you could say that what I am interested here is in the way in which a certain nomic grounding under the name of ‘Italian Thought’ has been articulated, grounded, and posited as a tradition between conservation and rupture. In the remaining of this intervention, I would like to offer some preliminary speculative ideas about the way in which infrapolitical reflection decisively emerging from Línea de sombra divergences from the general horizon of radical democratic politics advanced by Italian theory.
For reasons that are not just chronological, I think Remo Bodei’s entry in the Dictionary of the untranslatables is preparatory for Esposito’s own take on the territorial and exterritorial force of “Italian Philosophy” in his 2005 book. Indeed, Esposito records in a footnote Bodei’s entry, as well as other recent contribution to the topic such as Borradori’s Recording Metaphysics: New Italian Philosophy (Northwestern, 1988), Virno & Hardt’s Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minnesota, 1996), and Chieza’s The Italian Difference Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009). An important predecessor reflecting on Italian philosophical culture – ignored by both Esposito and Bodei – is Mario Perniola’s early “Difference of the Italian Philosophical Culture” (1984), which already establishes the conditions for thinking this nomic specificity beyond the encompassing paradigm of the nation-state, and against the grain of the organization based Italian identity of the Risorgimento. For Perniola, “this is now over, and that natilistic ways, based on a comparison and vindication of identities have completely exhausted their historical function” (Perniola 105). The exhaustion of a national philosophical script is what reversely makes the case for Italian thought to be a thinking measured by civic activism, which entails that the conditions for transmission and interruption of tradition is essentially through a distance between history and language (Perniola 108-09).
sIn a profound way, Italian philosophy is what speaks without historicizing itself, or what speak the non-historiciable to put in Vico’s terms in the New Science. This amounts to an interruption of any philosophy of history, since it discloses a region of what cannot be rendered a science of history. Italian philosophic reflection opens up to the collapse of narration not as consequence of State persecution or constitutive violence, but as a function of a politics incapable of coinciding with the Italian nation-state (as we know this is the symptom of Gramsci’s formulation of the subaltern, and the North-South relations the Prison Notebooks). Perniola’s early essay is an important salient informant of Bodei’s entry, since what arouses the second’s reflection is precisely the drift towards a civil philosophy, or what is the same, a philosophy based on a civic vocation. Thus, writes Bodei:
“From a broad historical perspective and taking into account the limits imposed by its irreducible complexity the Italian language has been character by a constant and predominant civil vocation. By civil I mean a philosophy that is not immediately tied to the sphere of the state, nor to that region of interiority. In fact, ever since its humanist and Renaissance origins, its privileged interlocutors have not been specialist, clerics or students, attending university, but a wider public, a civil society one has sought to orient, to influence, to mold” (Bodei 516).
Italian language, which for Perloina was constitutive of Italian thought, here takes a civic function that exceeds the proper limits of the philosophical act. This is why Bodei’s most important symptomatic definition is Machiavelli’s ‘verità efffecttuale della cosa’, which is guided by desire at the intersection between tradition and innovation, revolution and rupture. For Bodei’s Italian vernacular language necessarily breaks away from the very containment of the philosophical nomos, spilling over an excess that is anti-philosophical or ultra-philosophical. By proxy of Leopardi’s writings, Bodei argues against the ‘German poem of reason’, defending a poetical space of thought that knows (according to Leopardi) “the true and concrete…the theory of man, of governments, and so on, that they Germans have made none”. The point being is not just that Italian philosophers are ultra or non-philosophical, but that an antiphilosophy of praxis, of what citizens already do. The difference, according to Bodei vis-à-vis Croce, only rests upon critico-practical reflection as the central determination of thinking in Italian (523).
As it is for Esposito – but we can say also for Agamben in the last volume of the Homo sacer series, L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) – philosophy is a praxis that provide immanent validation for Aristotle’s treatment of dunamys and energeia, as well as his general typology of causation. What is at stake here is nothing less than the actualization of the question of technology (technê), which Bodei reads in Galileo’s as a contestation to the systematization of maquination (Gestell). The scientific thought of Bruno or Galileo bring to halt the machination that Heidegger understood as the end and realization of epochality through gigantism, by positing the artificiality of the apparatus (of the ‘thing’) as an extension of nature, and not as its mere opposition (Bodei 527). Although he does not explicitly thematizes it on its proper terms, one could very easily read in this argumentation the polarity that structures Italian non-philosophy: the question of civic vocation (klesīs) and the question of nihilism (the co-belonging between technique and philosophy of history).
What is rather puzzling about Bodei’s argumentation is that at no point does he account for a genealogy of what I would call the non-philosophy of life, or even the life of non-philosophy as the excess of the philosophical life in the Italian republics. In other words, Bodei leaves out the sophist, and it is the figure of the sophist what ultimately lead a positive civic contemplative life outside the constrains of philosophical schools, such as stoicism (Bonazzi & Bènatouïl 2006). Instead, what he does offer and reconstructs is the paradigm of an Italian philosophical tradition that still structures itself between tradition and interruption, thought and action, immanence and life. This is the conflictivity or differend – we could also call its krisis, which Cacciari’s studied in relation to the labor of the negative in his important book Krisis: Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negative (1976)– that in Bodei remains unresolved at the political register, still organized around the concept of the “civil”.
Roberto Esposito’s Pensiero vivente (Giulio, 2010) shares many of the basic premises advanced by Bodie, but there is little doubt that it is the most sophisticated and sustained reflection on thinking the nature and the political consequences of “Italian Difference” in the wake of nihilism and biopolitics after Michel Foucault’s critique of governmentality. Although unlike Bodei, Esposito pushes the political consequences to its limits on the relation between philosophy and history. According to Esposito, it is on this threshold that a region beyond the impasse of the philosophical and political categories of Western modernity, would allow an actuality of thought with transformative capacities and innovative energy (Esposito 21). Departing from Deleuze & Guattari’s anarchic definition of philosophy as de-territorializing, Esposito affirms not an ultra-philosophy or a non-philosophy, but the development of an uneven grammar that is universal due to its very singularity, that is, it could travel unbounded throughout Europe with arguments, formulations, and images that everyone could make their own and share (20).
Esposito outlines three different paradigms of Italian difference: a political one that solicits conflict in every instance; a radical historicity of the non-historical; and one of life, which is to be understood as both the worldliness of the modern subject and the deconstructive gesture of the dual theological machine folded on the person. I want to limit myself to elaborate on the first and third declinations (political conflict and life). Esposito also thinks against the German or English traditions understood as State traditions – the traditions of Locke, Hegel, or Fichte – which he sees as constituting the state knowledge of the political (Esposito 21). Esposito views them as philosophies of history, whose nexus to the political is one of consensus and not of disagreement or antagonism. Instead, “Italian philosophy has shown a critical and sometimes antagonistic potential not commonly found in other contexts. Sometimes, in special situations, and under certain conditions – in the case of a drastic transition between epochs like the one we have been experiencing for some hears now – what appears to be, an is, in effect, a lack or an antimony can transform itself into advance compared to more stable, well-established situations” (21).
This ‘antagonistic potential’ defiantly avoids the nihilism of acting according to the presenting of principles of the normative order. However, so it seems to argue Esposito, the antagonistic politics feeds off crisis, is born out of transitional or inter-epocal subsumption. The question is similar to the one that one could formulate against the hegemonic principle overriding the populistic logic, which Moreiras frames it in this way in Línea de sombra: “if hegemony is the democratic horizon of domination [because it is not consensual], the search for a politics of the closure of sovereignty begs the question about the end of subalternity in a radically democratic horizon” (Moreiras 94). But the truth of democratic politics is only possible against the condition of hegemonic attainment. Esposito writes this much: “…[against] the Hegelian identification between politics and state, the world of life is cut through by pervasive struggle, in a fight to idea for hegemony: whether like it or no, we are always forced to take a position in favor of one part against the other” (Esposito 25).
I would not go as far as to say this exhaust the horizon of Esposito’s political thought, from the intricacies of the impolitical to his most recent turn to the impersonal. However, this does mark a fissure from the possible of generating a radical theory of de-theologizing the political, an operation of thought not alien to the infrapolitical horizon (132). Essentially, the problem here is not about the theory of hegemony, or the continuation of hegemonic principle of Roman politics, as what continues to divide and administer life through domination. More so, I would argue, give that we are seeing here a second order of interior domination that posits the life of infrapolitics at the expense of the political and the community (munus). This means, that if one takes seriously the articulation of infrapolitics as the possibility of action outside the subject, that it is not enough to think the politics of Italian difference as a pre-statist that is always already the promise of a democratic or post-democratic infrapower as governed by a counter-hegemony of decision (Moreiras 224). Secondly, this leads to the question of contingency that underlines the very co-belonging between history and philosophy of the Italian Difference. Stefano Franchi is right in noting that the “sporgenza” or protrusions are processes that punctuate the body and archive of Italian thought. Protrusions are also what allow for the development of epochs, constituting the excess and contingent foundation of the historical unfolding as such. Of course, the pressing question is: “and how do we know if ‘Il Pensiero vivente’ as such – not the book Esposito wrote, but though he advocates in its last sentence as a breach capable of renewing contemporary philosophy as a whole – is capable to uncover those events in unprecedented ways?” (Franchi 31). And what is more: how does one establishes a co-substantial difference from an epochal presence of living thought to Esposito’s own thought (impersonal / third person)?
My purpose here is not to resolve this aporia in Esposito’s characterization of Italian Difference, because to cross its nihilism. Infrapolitics has something to say here in regards to location. In the chapter on infrapolitics in Linea de sombra, Alberto argues: “The difference between an imperfect experience and one reducible to an aporia is also the difference between understanding the aporetic as the end of thinking, and that of understanding as a reflexive opening that is the beginning of an infrapolitical practice in the same location where the suppression against the aporia reinforces the exorbitant violence of the imperial biopolitical hegemony” (Moreiras 235). But infrapolitical dwells necessarily in a non-space or alocation, since is very excess is the falsification of life; that is, what is no longer structured around an enemy for political antagonism. Italian Difference necessitates a non-supplementary exodus that is infrapolitical life, what escapes biopolitical life of the community.
Here one must ask, what is the relation between alocationality and democracy? Is there a democracy of the impersonal or the unequal? This is a difficult question to ask at this moment, but it is pertinent if the question about civic duty (Bodei) or immanentization of social strife is constitutive Italian thought. Following the political historian of Ancient Greece, Christian Meier, Agamben concludes his recent Stasis (2015) by suggesting that the politization brought by the isonomic foundation carries the latent possibility of social strife or stasis, which is the obfuscation of the ontology of war (politics) within the polis. This runs counter to Arendt, who in On Revolution attributed non-rule to the principle of isonomy as antecedent to democracy as majority rule (Arendt 30). It also seems insufficient to end at Esposito’s determination of the community based on the logistics of binding-debt (munus), intensified today by the total unification of existence and world, in what Moreiras has called the principle of equivalence (Moreiras 2016). Is infrapolitics then, always, a shadow of civil war? If the non-subject cannot constitute isonomic citizenship; infrapolitics disjoints the mediation between the political and the differential absorption of differences. In other words, posthegemonic democracy prepares a different institutionalization for political relation that no longer covers the empty space of the One at the heart of the civil.
* A version of this text was written on the occasion of a roundtable on Alberto Moreiras’ book Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (2006, 2021), which Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and I organized for the ACLA 2016 at Harvard University. I am actualizing it here with minor changes in light of the first discussion on “Italian theory” in the framework of the Foro Euroamericano, at 17/instituto, which I am co-organizing along with José Luis Villacañas, Benjamin Mayer Foulkes, and José Miguel Burgos-Mazas. The first session is mow available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BjW4euQduE
Bibliography
Alberto Moreiras. Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (Palinodia, 2006).
Giorgio Agamben. Stasis: civil war as a political paradigm (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Hannah Arendt. On Revolution (Penguin Books, 1986).
Mario Perniola. “The difference of Italian philosophical culture”. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 10, N.1, Spring 1984.
Mauro Bonazzi & Thomas Benatouïl. Theoria, Praxis and the Contemplative Life after Plato and Aristotle (Brill, 2012).
Reiner Schürmann. Broken Hegemonies (Indiana University Press, 2003).
Remo Bodei. “Italian”. Dictionary of untranslatables (Princeton University Press, 2014), 515-527
Roberto Esposito. Living thought: the origins and actuality of Italian Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Stefano Franchi. “Living thought and living things: on Roberto Esposito’s Il pensiero vivente“. Res Publica: Revista de filosofia politica, 29 (2013), 19-33.
Marcello Tarì’s book There is no unhappy revolution: the communism of destitution (Common Notions, 2021), finally translated into English, is an important contribution in the ongoing discussions about politics and existence. It is also an exercise that pushes against the limits of contemporary political thought in the wake of the ruin of the grammars and vocabularies of the modern politics and the rise of the techno-biopolitics of governmentality. More importantly, the operation of Tarì’s book escapes the frame of “critique”, abandoning any false exits to regain the legacy of the Enlightenment and of “judgement” in hopes to reinstate the principles of thought and action in the genesis of the legitimation of the modern social contract. But the radicality of the horizon of destitution – which we have come to understand vis-à-vis the work of Giorgio Agamben, and the Invisible Committee – is first and foremost a thematization of the proximity between thinking and politics against the historical stagnation of a historical subsumed by the total technification of value (the principle of general equivalence). Since Tarì’s book is composed of a series of very heterogenous folds and intersections (literally a toolbox in the best sense of the term), in what follows I would like to sketch out a minor cartography to push the conditions forward that the book so elegantly proposes in three registers: the question of “revolutionary becoming” (the kernel of Tarì’s destituent gesture), the hermeneutics of contemporary domination, and the limits of political militancy.
Revolutionary becoming. Marcello Tarì correctly identifies the problem the epoch as fundamentally being about the problem of revolution. However, the notion of revolution must be understood outside the continuation of the modern horizon of the Leninist technique of the revolutionary vanguard nor party, the “revolution within the revolution”, and any appropriation of the “General Intellectual”. At the end of the day, these were all forms of scaling the desire as cathexis for the matrix of production. On the contrary, the problem of revolution is now understood in the true Copernican sense; mainly, how to inscribe an excentric apositionality within any field of totalization. When this is done, we no longer participate in History, but rather we are “freeing a line that will ultimately go down in History, but never coming from it”. Tarì argues that the field of confrontation today is no longer between different principles of organizing revolutionary strategies and even less about ideological critique; nor is communism an “Idea” (as it was thought just a decade ago in discussion that were philological rather than about thinking communism and life); the new epochal exigency is how to put “an end to the poverty of existence” (3). The potentiality of this transformation at the level of factical life, is what Tarì situates under the invariant of “communism”: “…not as an idea of the world, but the unraveling of a praxis within the world” (35). This communism requires a breakthrough in both temporal and spatial determinations, which prepares a dwelling in absolute relation with the outside (49). This revolutionary tonality is one closer to messianic interruption of historical time capable of destituting “actual state of things” governed the metaphysical apparatus of production and objetivation of the world, which depends on the production of the political subject. In an important moment of the book, Tarì writes: “…. only the revolutionary proletarian dimension can grasp the political as such, the true break from the current state of things. The real alternative to modern politics is thus not to be ground in what we usual can an “anti-politics”, which is merely a variation of the same there, but instead in a revolutionary becoming” (50).
The revolutionary becoming is a transformative intensity of singularization, which ceases to become a subject in virtue of becoming a “non-subject” of the political (67), which about a decade ago Alberto Moreiras announced to escape the dead end of the hegemony-subalternity controversy (one should note here that the fact that the Left today has fully subscribed the horizon of hegemony is something that I think it explains many of the deficits of the different experiments in a realization of a progressive political strategy). And this becoming revolutionary, in virtue of ceasing to be a subject (person, vanguard, multitude, worker) entails a new shift from action to use, and from technico-rationality to an opening of the sensible and singular means (metaxy). Again, Tarì’s continues as follows: “Becoming revolutionary…. means utilizing fantasy, freeing the imagination, and living all of this with the enthusiasm of a child” (75). The notion of “happiness” at stake in the book it is played out against the determination of the subject and the processes of incarnations (Karmy) that have haunted the modern revolutionary paradigm as always-already integrated into the metaphysics of the philosophy of history.
Metropolitan domination. Secondly, Tarì’s book locates the metastasis of domination at the level of a new spatial organization of the world in the apparatus of the metropolis. As we know the metropolis is not just an urban transformation of the Western form of the urbs and the polis, but rather the force of appropriation of the world into interconnectivity and surface in order to optimize, administer, and reproduce flows of the total fictionalization of life. The gesture towards the outside that crosses over Tarì’s book entails an exodus from the metropolitan structure that makes uninhabitable experience. This takes place by a process of domesticating its possibilities into the order of sameness (crisis of appearance) and translating our proximity with things into the regime of objects. What is stake in the metropolis – if we think of the most recent revolts in Santiago de Chile, Paris with the to the hinterlands of United States and Italy – if not precisely a response against the metropolitan machination “aiming at the destruction of every possibility of having any experience of the world and existence itself” (84). This why the intensity of any contemporary revolt today is proportional to the experiential texture of its composition and modes of evasion. Of course, Tarì correctly identifies the metropolis as an expanded field of cybernetic inter-connectivity, which, as I would argue is not merely the production of “bad substance” (to use Tiqqun’s Bloomian lexicon), but also a recursive dominion over the medium (metaxy) in which experience and the singular autopoiesis labors for the optimization and hylomorphic regimes that administer civil war. In this sense, destitution names an exodus from the metropolitan technical order and the sensible reproduction of the medium. It is in the outside the metropolis that the ongoing process of communization can free an infinite process of communization and forms of life.
Residual militancy and infrapolitics. But does not the exodus or the destitution of the metropolis – opening to singular experience, love, friendship, and the use of one’s disposable means and inclination – presuppose also a step back from a political determination, in other words, a fundamental separation from coterminous between existence and politics? At the end of the book, Tarì claims that “whenever anything reaches a certain level of intensity it becomes political” (117). But is the intensification of thinking or love or friendship always necessarily political? Tarì writes a few pages later that: “love is continually traversed by a line of extreme intensify, which makes it an exquisitely political affect” (126). But does not the politization of love depends on a certain commitment (a “faith”) to a residual militancy, even if it is a militancy posited as the principle of anarchy? But perhaps this is the difficulty at stake: since anarchy is only entails the “anarchy of phenomena” in reality, postulating a political principle as counter-exposition, however tenuous, might not be enough. For this reason, the crisis of appearance today needs a step back from the heliopoliticity of exposition. In an essay written a couple of years ago, Alberto Moreiras thematized this difficulty vis-à-vis Scürmann’s principle of anarchy, which I think is worth quoting: “The Schürmannian principle of anarchy could then be thought to be still the subjective reaction to the epochal dismantling of ontology (as metaphysics). But, if so, the principle of anarchy emerges, plainly, as principle, and principle of consciousness. Anarchy runs the risk of becoming yet another form of mastery, or rather: anarchy, as principle, is the last form of mastery. At the transitional time, posited as such by the hypothesis of metaphysical closure, metaphysics still runs the show as consolation and consolidation” [1].
If politics remains the central condition of existence, then it follows that it depends on a second-degree militancy that can govern over the dispersion of the events and this ultimately transfers the force of steering (kubernates) to mitigate the crisis of thought and action in the sea of “absolute immanence”. But immense is also a contemporary fundamental fantasy [2]. Against all “faith” in absolute immanence we need to cut through in its letting be (poein kata phusin) of the abyssal relation between existence and politics. This originary separation is an infrapolitical step back that solicits a distance an irreducible distance between life, events, and community form. The commune would be a secondary condition of political organization, but the existential breakthrough never coincides with community, except as a “common solitude”. Secondly, the infrapolitical irreducibility between politics and existence wants to reject any compensatory temporal politico-theological substitution, which also includes the messianic as a paradigm still constitutive of the age of Christian community of salvation and the efficacy of deificatio. The existential time of attunement of appropriation with the improper escapes the doble-pole paradigm of political theology, which has been at the arcana of both philosophy of history as well as the messianic inversion. A communism of thought needs to produce a leap outside the politico-theological machine which has fueled History as narrativization and waged against happiness [3]. Attuning oneself to the encounter or the event against the closure of the principle of reality might be a way out from the “hegemonic phantasm” of the political, which sacrifices our infinite possibilities to the logistics of a central conflict. If civil war is the side of the repressed in Western politics, then in the epoch of the ruin of authority it opens an opportunity to undue the measurement (meson) proper to the “Social”, which is now broken at the fault lines as Idris Robinson has put it [4]. It is only in this way that we can move outside and beyond the originary positionality of the polis whose “essence never coincides with politics” [5]. The saving of this irreducible and invisible distance prepares a new absolute proximity between use and the world.
2. Lundi Matin. “Éléments de decivilisation” (3): “It is also about the creed of the dominant religion: absolute immanence. Doing itself, designed to obey the modes of proceeding from production, is in advance conforming and consecrated. On this sense, no matter what you do, you bend the spine in front of the cult dominant. If all things count, none has a price, and everything is sacrificeable.”. https://lundi.am/Elements-de-decivilisation-Partie-3
3. This is why Hegel claims in his lectures on the Philosophy of History that: “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history”. The revolutionary overflow of happiness is only possible as an exodus from the theological political structure of historical production. Here the question of style is emerges as our defining element.
Infrapolitical Reflections 