prehistory

Hunger and gluttony after civilization. by Gerardo Muñoz

It could easily be argued that one of the central immaterial characters of Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947) is the constant state of hunger. It is the more telling that Antelme – and it is also surprising that most of his relevant critics have been unattentive to this problem – does not reflect explicitly about the nature of hunger in his account, as if already hunger as “facticity” of the destruction of human experience in the camp was enough to show how the crisis of effective symbolization with the world means, ultimately, the struggle for the maintenance of the nutritional condition for survival [1]. It is a particular state of nutritional privation that colors not just every community or social relation in L’espèce humaine, but also every thought, passive meandering, and even moral clarity of the deportee life in the camp. The pathetic struggles over pieces of bread or scoops of putrid soup while deposing the human race from the world brings them back, at the level of consciousness, to the raw origins of its anthropological self-affirmation. And this means that every bite of food and every bit of  protein digested by the human being is only the antecedent of the future need to meet the elemental nutritional gain for survival. The ‘consciousness towards hunger’ colored in the camp becomes the mirror image of the incessant eating disorder of hypermodern social adaptation as two forms of predatory struggle over the exchange goods of the world. 

Excessive eating and nutritional deficiency are, in this sense, two pothistorical temporal circuit of human beings as a species of hunger and gluttony. About a decade ago a book entitled Hunger: the oldest problem (2014), written by Martín Caparrós, stood out as a proof of a materialist conception at a planetary scale, which for the novelist could easily be solved by drafting the legibility of material inequality and charting the regional disproportionate asymmetries between the “good eaters” (and good feeders), and those in permanent hunger, malnutrition, localized famine, and potential starvation. For Caparros, given the height of our “civilizational progress”, hunger revealed the “original plague of humanity….which now can be solved through a political decision” [2]. The substance of the “political decision” for hunger of the human race was as empty as the very nauseating fatigue of real starvation, although as a rhetorical ploy it does contribute, even against its own presuppositions, to the civilizational paradigm that structures the poles of gluttony and hunger that sustains the domestication of the human species in conformity – under the terror imposed by the glacial tonality of nihilism – with a ‘good enough life’, as an American cultural scholar univocally upheld it [3]. A deconstructed Michelin rated restaurant is as much of the ‘good enough life’ as the oversized pots of soup delivered by World Central Kitchen in any of the ongoing war zones.

A ‘good enough life’, always marching towards the absolute postponement of an absolute hunger in any part of the planet, whose most recent avatar (not the final by any means) is the well wrapped brown bag of “food app delivery” that is silently placed in front of your house door. The food delivery package, very much like the breadcrumbs of the concentration camp described in  L’espèce humaine, enter full circle even if the arrangement of symbolic reality says otherwise. It does not matter that there are human hand struggles for dregs in the camp while in civil society there is a seemingly untouched brown bag; what makes them equivalent is how the autonomization of hunger and gluttony have been deprived of everything except its own functionalization. In other words, the absolutization of gluttony and hunger as abstract nexus of social reproduction entails the complete devastation of commensality, and all features of experiential sharing that in the ancient tradition is gathered in the banquet or in wine festivities [4].

This absolute autonomization turns its back to the world, which has now been transformed as a mere reserve and container. This is why the analogies with the wild cornucopia of the elastic worlds of Gargantua or Pantagruel, or even the mythical land of Cockaigne fall short, and can only contribute to fetichize the problem of the “true hunger” of the human species beyond nutritional and biological  arrangement. The dialectical movement at work in the alleged returned to the primal anthropological condition comes at a price: the sensible and meaningful relation, which is no longer to be invented but rather to be renounced in the elaborate thickening of a social space organized through depredation and adaptation. In his Manuale di sopravvivenza, Giorigo Cesarano noted that the problem of hunger exceeded the political and biological determinations, since hunger was first and foremost the problem of the completion of nihilism – the only hunger was that of the wandering of the human species reveals the hunger of meaning as a the true double negation: 

“At the end of prehistoric times, the most ancient problem signals the return of the negative instinct: hunger. But this time is about the hunger of meaning  that exceeds, while bringing it to synthesis, the anxiety of survival as merely an animal and its false resolution as a life that transcendentals the idealist forms of the human “ideal”. …both the negative instinct and the rational separation, having conquered some coherence in its praxis, from a possible totality seeks to insert being in a real university in order to be known truly as such” [5].

In this dense moment of his book, Cesarano seems to be arriving at an important inflection point: that is, the primal instinct of hunger, precisely as fealt and maximized in the new existential poverty of the human experience, is already compensatory to the concrete realization of an absolute hunger of meaning that emerges in both the privative stage of hunger, and in the consummation of any imaginable and desirable meal. Hence, the return to the facticity of the prehistoric stage of instinct negativity is ultimately the final exclusive dish: the nothingness of nihilism to retain the illusion of, in the words of Antelme’s poem “The soup”, going to far (or as far as it needs to be that the “world doesn’t end” [6]. The anthropophagic energies are the last tools of self-burial of the bicameral man in the wake of intramundane extinction [7].

But the dialectical vengeance in the epoch of real subsumption is hereby expressed in its uttermost kernel: the material world can only take the image of a predatory park of hunters and preys, of eating and being eaten. In the privation of death, the fictitious life of being is already a form of expropriating death as ongoing struggle for survival and self-conquest of life’s own organic illness, as it appears in Anatole France’s fragment: “No, I would rather think that organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet. It would be intolerable to believe that throughout the infinite universe there was nothing but eating and being eaten” [8]. The poverty of a restricted vitalist self-reflection can only described the organization of the world as a civilization that resembles a Pac-Man maze of the circulation of the equivalent. It is not difficult agree with Adorno that this is a perfect image of the integral society without any residue – as it continues to be in any point of the planet – is the last possible well administered utopia.

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Notes 

1. See the essays in the volume On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries (The Malboro Press, 2003), 55-203.

2. Martín Caparrós. Hunger: The Oldest Problem (Melville House, 2020).

3. Avram Alpert. The Good-Enough Life (Princeton University Press, 2022).

4. Albert Hirschman. “Melding the public and private spheres: taking commensality seriously”, in Crossing Boundaries: Selected Essays (Zone Books, 1998), 11-28.

5. Giorgio Cesarano. Manuale di sopravvivenza (Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 70.

6. Robert Antelme. “The Soup”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries (The Malboro Press, 2003), 36.

7. Julian Jayne. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Msriner Book, 2000).

8. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2020), 83-84.

Lezama Lima and the Etruscan way. by Gerardo Muñoz

Towards the end of his life, poet José Lezama Lima will mysteriously begin to sign the letters to his friends and family as “the Trocadero Etruscan”, a “member of the Etruscan religiosity”, and even the “man who lives in the Etruscan village” [1]. Why call himself an “Etruscan” in this particular moment of his life, and what could it possibly mean? The question about the meaning of the Etruscan authorial mask has been so thoroughly ignored by the literary critics that commentators at their best have noted that “being Etruscan” merely stands for his “cosmopolitanism” and “well-learned Europeanism”. Of course, this explains little to nothing. A sophisticated poet such as Lezama Lima, who ruminate over every single word he would write, could not have ignored that the Etruscans, unlike the civilized Romans and the Latin authorities, was a remnant to the very civilizational enterprise; a prehistoric people poor in written culture, achieved expressivity by the whole outlook of their form of life. And as in the case of Hölderlin’s adoption of different nom de plume (Scardanelli, Killalusimeno, Scaliger Rosa, etc), Lezama’s becoming Etruscan points to something so fundamental that if underscored we would fail to grasp the endgame of his vital poetic experience. The transfiguration of the name does not merely stand as a metaphor; rather it points to a distant figure that will finally dissolve him so that his immortal voice could continue to live on.

Indeed, the self-identification as an Etruscan for Lezama became a subterfuge to flee a political reality – his political reality, entirely structured by the revolutionary gigantic productivism and subjectivism – through a poetic refraction that would free an ethos from the overpowering of alienated autonomous space of the linguistic reproduction of social life. If at first glance it seems like a paradox that Lezama will adopt the Etruscan figure for his antisocial ethos – a civilization lacking written records or high literary achievements, a religious community known for its necropolis – this strangeness will ultimately prove that behind the Etruscan name there was no poetic exclusivity of the poet’s genius, but rather, as he claims in “A partir de la poesía”, the possibility for a divinization of reality to retreat from the historical epoch. In fact, Etruscan culture for Lezama was not a mere archeological ornament, but one of the “imaginary eras” of the West; that is, a stage of condensed and unnumbered imaginative possibilities resistant to griping subsumption and totalization of values. The Etruscan was the mythic remnant through the pantheistic divinization between language and the world. As Lezama writes glossing, in passing, Vico:

“Vico cree que las palabras sagradas, las sacerdotales, eran las que se transmitían entre los etruscos. Pero para nosotros el pueblo etrusco era esencialmente teocrático. Fue el más evidente caso de un pueblo surge en el misterio de las primeras inauguraciones del dios, el monarca, el sacerdote, y el pueblo unidos en forma indiferenciada … .les prestaba a cada una de sus experiencias o de sus gestos, la participación en un mundo sagrado. […] Pues en aquel pueblo, el nombre y la reminiscencia, animista de cada palabra, cobran un relieve de un solo perfil” [2]. 

The divinization of the Etruscans stubbornly insisted on the wonder of things. The human participation in divinity is no longer about founding a new theocracy or a “theocratic politics” in the hands of a ‘mystic accountant’ that would finally put the nation back in track (into the res publica), as Lezama would solicit out of desperation in the 1950s diaries [3]. On the contrary, for Etruscan people the fundamental tonality was the divine music of experience. Of course, we know that D.H. Lawrence captured this when claiming in his Etruscan Places (1932) that “the Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience. An experience that is always spoilt” [4]. And this experience (like every true experience) needs to be necessarily spoiled, which ultimately means that it cannot be mimetically rendered, arbitrarily modified, or subsumed into the order of idealization. But all of this is merely redundant, since the Etruscan inscription is what accounts for the limit to civilization, becoming the impossibility of the destruction of myth in the arrival of modern aesthetic autonomy. Thus, for Lezama the Etruscan way had something of a persistent cure against the ongoing civilizational disenchantment, even if it does not cease to appear in the modern attitude. In fact, Lezama writes that: “Rimbaud is the best reader of the Etruscan liver” (“hígrado etrusco”) to describe the dislocated position of the poet in the modern world of technology [5]. In the Etruscan cosmology, the liver was a symbolon of the vision of the cosmos registering the divisions of the spheres in the sky through the divine naming of the gods; it is the figure by which the poet guards the desecularizing remnant of the prehistoric inception of myth [6]. But this does not mean that Lezama will look at himself in the mirror of Rimbaud’s symbolist alchemy.

Rimbaud as an Etruscan is the poet who descends into hell because his lyricism can bear the pain in the disruption of language after the archaic peitho. Does the possibility mean a travel back in historical time? Not the least, as Lezama knew how to let go of storytelling and historical necessity. This is why Etruscans stand for an image or a sort of handwoven picture (the hand will make a comeback, as we will see) to gain vision. And this is one case on point: the Etruscan stands paradigmatically to the “sufficient enchantment” (“la cantidad hechizada”) , which discloses a higher knowledge of the soul (psychê) in the taking place of poetic errancy: “Sabemos que muchas veces el alma, al escaparse de su morada, tripulaba un caballo inquieto, afanoso de penetrar en las regiones solares” [7]. To wrestle against the historical reduction of autonomy of the modern age means to find this enchanted sufficiency necessarily for myth remnant to elevate itself against the aesthetic mediation that, in the words of Gianni Carchia, had become a consoling surrogate of the emptied historical time [8]. An entirely other conception of freedom is firmly implicated the Etruscan way: the gathering of the enchanted poetic dwelling to dissolve a reality that had become too thick in the business of brute force purporting to call ‘what’s out there’. The Etruscan reintroduces a divine nominalism of pure exteriority.

However, the Etruscan way does not commute with things of the world; rather, his soul unbinds the empirical limit of death to overcome death, and learn to live as if it were already dead. The trespassing of death through the poetic enchantment – which Lezama will also call an ‘potens etrusca’, or the Etruscan potentiality- will multiply the invisible possibilities against the rhetorical closure of reality legitimation. By accepting the thick of the dead as an illuminated presence, the Etruscans draw out the most important consequence: learning to live among the dead as the ultimate form of a dignified life. This is why D.H. Lawrence reminds us that the underworld of the Etruscans – their refusal of reality, the embrace of their dead, the augurium – was after all “a gay place…For the life on earth was so good, the life below could but be a continuation of it. This profound belief in life, acceptance of life, seems characteristic of the Etruscans. It is still vivid in the painted tombs. They are by no means downtrodden menials, let later Romans say what they will” [9].

If civilization is a construction that takes place at the crust of the Earth as some have claimed; the way of the Etruscan is a downward declination away from the architectural reduction of world sensing [10]. For Lezama the Etruscan dreams of a civilization submerged in the depths that only an acoustic totality that bear witness to its sensorial gradation: “Esas civilizaciones errantes por debajo del mar, sumergidas por el manteo de las arenas o por las extensivas exigencias…reaparecen, a veces, en los sueños de los campesinos” [11]. Hence, the fundamental dignity of poetry resides in the mythical homecoming that guards the possibility for what remains inexistent: “this is why the poet lives in the Etruscan world of the birth of fire” [12]. And although the Etruscan stands as one of the worlds in possession of an imaginary epoch (the other two for Lezama being the Catholic world and the feudal feudal Carolingian Empire), it is only in the Etruscan where the resurrection had taken the transubstantiation in the name itself; even if the price was its own liquidation as a historical people that refused to be incorporated into the doxa of postmythical order [13].  

The fiery force of the mythic peitho outlives and predates the political epoch of the nomos of fixation organized as “One People, One State, One Language” [14]. As Lezama explains in “La dignidad de la poesía”: “…el odio en la polis contra el daimon socrático, hizo que la nueva doxa no logra sustituir a cabalidad el período mítico….Si por lo mitos, los dioses se irritable con la felicidad de los de los mortales, pero al menos, se interesaban por sus destinos; en la nueva doxa, la poesis se extinguía – el daimon individual reemplazando al destino individual liberado de la polis” [15]. The primacy of myth as orientation to happiness should make clear that for Lezama the poetics of naming follows the overflow of its permanent modalization [16]. The Etruscan way marks the path for the irrevocable retreat from the space of the polis where civilization will be erected on the grounds of deliating ethos and daimon, polis and poesis, and ultimately life and death as a rubric of a new science of separation. The fact that the civilization of social reproduction has been erected on the basis of the destruction of the chthonic underworld speaks to the systematic erasure from the dead as a vital extension of life [17]. The poetic natality of the Etruscans will only be cultivated, as Aby Warburg suggests, from the assumption of deep superstition in the face of the placement of political autonomy, which allows for the persistence of the image as inseparable from the needs and uses of the living [18]. And only persistence could prepare the final triumph over death.

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Towards the later phase of his work, the poet seems to never want to abandon the Etruscan inframundo. Lezama returns to the Etruscan scene towards the end and unfinished novel, Oppiano Licario (1977), in which the central character Fronesis describes at length the mutation of reality following the footsteps at a distance of Ynaca Licario slowly merging into the Tarquinia necropolis painted wall, which is accompanied by a visual reproduction of the Etruscan tomb:

“El sacerdote, en el lateral izquierdo, hace gestos de ensalmo en torno a una espiga de triga. Un pájaro que se acerca queda detenido sin poder posarse en el ámbito hechizado de la hoja. En el lateral derecho, el sacerdote repite idéntico rito, pero ahora de la raíz colorida hace saltar la liebre que cavaba en las profundidades. El aire cubría como unas redes de secreta protección en torno de la mutabilidad de las hojas y de la inmovil jactancia de los troncos. Una indetenible pero resguardada evaporación alcanza aquella llanura con los muertos …La conversación subterránea era el símbolo del vencimiento de la muerte. [20]

The ongoing conversation (the shared word koina ta philōn) in a mysterious divine language had triumphed over death because it had overcome death and the sight of death. It is no longer the transposition of a historical sublime that must protect experience from the fixity of the human corpse, since the soul can escape the limit of form. In passing through and embracing death, the Etruscan validated their passions for mirrors and the palm, which according to Lezama is the true keep of the appearance of the uttermost revealing of the face in its own irreducible ethos. The possibility (potens etrusca) of defeating death while in life finds in the Etruscan appearance Lezama’s most intimate poetic arcana: the persistence of the anima renounces symbolic legibility as too innocuous and ornamental; where the flags of victories now resembled an accumulation of well settled defeats nurtured in the name of the muteness over “life”.

The Etruscan distance mysterium validated myth as the affirmation of the cosmos as based on the potentiality of contemplative imagination [21]. Lezama will call this distance the “eros de la lejanía” (Eros of distance) in the experience of the inframundo that will break through by affirming the possibilities of divine naming as a correlative causation in the world [22]. As Lezama tells his sister in a letter from 1966, he had already assumed to have crossed the bridge between the dead and the living: “Para mi ya ha sucedido todo lo que podía tocarme….Pues creo ya haber alcanzado en mi vida esa unidad entre los vivientes y los que esperan la voz de la resurrección que es la supresa contemplación” [23]. Or yet again: “El que está muerto en la muerte, vive, pero el que está muerto en la vida, es la única forma para mi conocida de la vida en su turbión, en su escala musical, en su fuego cortado” [24]. To scale up life to the higher music is the final trope of happiness as already dead. The Etruscan dirita vía of descension – “a weight going down” of stepping into the Earth, as Ruskin would have it – achieves the arrest of the divine contact between the voice and the dead [25]. It is for us to raise this mirror before our impoverished and fictive unswerving reality.

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Notes 

1. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (1939-1976) (Verbum, 1998), 230.

2.  José Lezama Lima. “A partir de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 831.

3.  José Lezama Lima. Diario (Verbum, 2014), 87.

4. D. H. Lawrence. Etruscan Places (The Viking Press, 1957),  90.

5. José Lezama Lima. “La pintura y la poesía en Cuba”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 968 

6. Gustav Herbig. “Etruscan Religion”, in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume V (Dravidians-Fichte, 1912), 533.

7. José Lezama Lima. “Introducción a los vasos órficos”, Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 861. 

8. Gianni Carchia. Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019), 81.

9. D.H. Lawrence. Etruscan Places (The Viking Press, 1957), 31.

10. Amadeo Bordiga. “Specie umana e crosta terrestre”, in Drammi gialli e sinistre della moderna decadenza sociale (Iskra, 1978). 

11. José Lezama Lima. “Estatuas y sueños”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 449.

12.  José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 774. 

13. Ibid., 776.

14. Erich Unger. Die staatslose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922).

15.  José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar, 1977), 777.

16. Monica Ferrando. “Presentazione”, in Hermann Usener, Triade: saggio di numerologia mitologica (Guida Editori, 1993).

1176.  Giorgio Agamben. “Gaia e Ctonia”, Quodlibet, 2020 https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-gaia-e-ctonia 

18. Aby Warburg. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Getty, 1999), 189.

19. Image included in Chapter VII of Oppiano Licario (Cátedra, 1989), 375. 

20. José Lezama Lima. Oppiano Licario (Cátadra, 1989), 374.

21. Aby Warburg’s treatment of the symbolic mediation between myth and distance appears at the center of his essay on Pueblo Indians. See, Aby Warburg, El ritual de la serpiente (Sexto Piso, 2022), 66.  And also, Franz Boll, Vita Contemplativa (Heidelberg, 1920), who connects contemplari to the augur’s spatiality of the templum.

22. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (1939-1976) (Verbum, 1998), 411.

23. Ibid., 109.

24. Ibid., 266. 

25. John Ruskin. The Letters of John Ruskin (George Allen, 1909), 133.