rhetoric

Zoning and the inalienable. By Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

Pindar’s Fragment 180. by Gerardo Muñoz

Understanding what the ancient Greeks thought of sayability in language is no easy task, but in Pindar’s Fragment 180 we can confirm that the use of language must come to terms with the internal lacuna of silence. Pindar says as a way of recommendation: “Do not break out useless speech in front of everybody; there are times when the path of silence is most trustworthy, but lofty discourse holds the sting of domination” [1]. Although this fragment has been read as a form of “prudential speech”, it might be more interesting to read it as a form of the inception of the sublime in language, which Longinus, although not referring directly to the same fragment, inscribed it under the idea of being ‘tongueless’ or aglossīa, which like Ajax’s silence says significantly more in its restrain than from saying something directly. Language becomes useless – that is, it ceases to have any use with itself – if it becomes a tactic to diminish any given rhetorical order. It is no surprise that in our time the predominant use of language takes the form of a transaction through technical terms that has no use of its own. 

It has been shown that Pindar’s conception of language was not about representation, but rather about the voice or kompos that takes place whenever there is vibration or harmony in the collision or contact between two objects [2]. Of course, the truly originary collision in language is between the voice and the idea, where the cradle of language opens to its own poetic and ethical possibilities. Hence, if there is restraint and silence as constituent of language, it is because there is a rhythmic movement that accommodates without the intromission of an external force. Here, it is the well known definition of poetic creation that Pindar lays out in “Olympian 6”: “Upon my tongue I have the sensation of a clear-sounding whetstone, which I welcome as it comes over me with lovely streams of breath” [3]. What carries those streams of sounds?

The poet is not an independent creator with higher access to language; the poetic instance is only accessible to those who, in contact with inspiration, can sharpen their tongues to the use of one’s language. We are in language when we find ourselves in the direction of a “path of words” [4]. Thus, the contact of language is not with objects or entelechies of the visible world, it is first and foremost with the receiving movement of the voice as a “lovely streams of breath”. In this way, Pindar’s plea for silence is not to be understood as an active negation of “saying”, but of an internal lapse or suspension of language that allows the emergence of the truth of the voice. The absence of kompos turns language into an instrument that can only prepare and foment conflict and domination, seeking to overcome something that is ultimately captive of the common ground of an uninspired language. And this means that language without inspiration is not only a voice that has run astray from its rhythm, it is also a language that will only find war in its path. 

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Notes 

1. Píndaro. “Fragmento 180”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 410. 

2. Helga Kriegler. Untersuchungen zu den optischen und akustischen Daten der bacchylideischen Dichtung (Verlag Notring, 1969), 90.

3. Píndaro. “Olympian 6”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 90. 

4. Píndaro. “Olympian 1”, in Obra completa (Cátedra, 2023), 90. 

Hypocrisy as last refuge. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

On reciprocity. by Gerardo Muñoz

Surely friendship does not depend on obligations or frequency, but it does posit expectations on something like a movement of reciprocity. In fact, movement (κίνηση) and reciprocity are so intertwined that without it, there would not be any separation, only a compact bundle in unity without relations. But, what is at bottom reciprocity? If this notion merits anything thought at all, it must be removed from any conception of exchange in the manner of the quid pro quo and the the ius talionis, where at first sight reciprocity seems to reside as a form of levelling differentiated quantities. In social exchange there is levelling but surely there is no reciprocity except by the legal force enacted by the pressure of duties and obligations. Already in the nineteenth century, at outset of bourgeois society, Søren Kierkegaard with extreme lucidity denounced social levelling as a form of glittering vice: “The idolized positive principle of sociality in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida. Levelling is not a single individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power” [1]. 

What is reciprocal in social exchange is no longer the incommensurable relation between beings, but the enactment of language saturated by its own completion, which is the aim of social organization. If there is no reciprocity in the age of kallopismata orphnes as the reduction of rhetorical language it is because there is no longer a missing word in the event of communication, given that, potentially, everything has been already communicated (it is obvious that today this process can only intensify with the planetary deployment of Artificial Intelligence). The only determination of reciprocity that should be of interest is the one that accounts for the lacunae in language that halts force of social levelling. To reciprocate does not mean to give each his due that defines the Western legal operation; it is rather the mutual codependency in the unforfeited event of language. 

At this point, an etymological observation might be useful. In On the Latin Language, Varro records reciproca as a condition of elasticity; that is, a present quality that allows a thing to return to the position from which it has started. Reciprocare thus entails to move to and fro, and to demand [2]. But if we adapt this observation into the sphere of language, we immediately notice that in language there is no previous position nor set origin, which means that reciprocity can only be the undisclosed and disclosed movement of language. Breathing, articulating, speaking: the animus that escapes from the mouth as a mirror of the god of words. The erosion of reciprocity in modern society, thus, goes deeper than the first appearance in fact that human beings are witnesses to a crisis of communication; more importantly, humans have ceased to sense reciprocity because they believe that there is only god where language is mute, and there is language when gods are extinct. Such is the long vigil of computing language as an idol that is neither divine nor of the essence of the human voice. To reciprocate today means to re-divinize the world through words; and through our words greet incoming worlds.

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. “The results of observing two ages”, in A Literary Review (Penguin, 2001), 76. 

2. Varro. On the Latin Language, Vol.1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1938), 335.

Due Process and justification. by Gerardo Muñoz

Even if it is appalling to witness the brute amount of executive force in the current American political system, it is nonetheless “business as usual” if understood within the internal development of its own legal order. In other words, what is emerging is not a drastic rupture or abdication due to external pressure against “legal liberalism”, broadly understood as a package of normative rights to solve social conflicts in a political community, but rather the consequential effect of the decline of the legitimating force of positive law, the modern legislative state, and the principles such as the right to due process – which includes but it is not limited to a public hearing, a defense, the right to a defense, cross-examination of witnesses, or an impartial jury. The slow erosion of constitutional due process has not only resulted in an unprecedented upsurge of civil cases resulting in “guilty pleas” devoid of legal process (about 95% of cases according to Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch), but also in the collapse of remedies from government even if a federal court decides against the state. As Aziz Huq shows in The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (2021), the demise of legal remedies means that the federal courts at large can only “interpret the constitution” but remains silent and inoperative in terms of the practical solutions to amend injuries, seizures, or plain violence enacted.

Any attentive student of the history of law does not second guess that many centuries before the ratification of the Constitution of 1789, the principles of modern criminal procedure, such as due process, fair trial and reasonable doubt, were already sedimented to such an extent that the Medieval canonist Guillaume Durand in Speculum iudiciale (1291) claimed that the right to defend himself should not be denied even to the devil if he were summoned to the court. In this sense, the so-called “Due Process Clause” of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that claims that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” is a latecomer to the internal development of Common Law’s theological secularization. And it should not go unnoticed that the clause explicits states “person”, instead of the narrow privilege to the “citizen” or the “legal resident”, which is why during the Founding Era even foreign pirates accused of illegal activities were still subjects of the Due Process clause under the international and domestic legal order. As crude as it may sound, in the current moment one could very well say that the “concept of piracy” had more footing in a juridical concrete order than in the current legal stasis operative in a post-positive scenario. 

Even those constitutional scholars that in the wake of the “War on Terror” defended the Sedition Act of 1798 in order to defend a “process reduction” during an instance of political emergency, also warned of governmental overreach could very well upset political opposition and public support or loyalty (Vermuele & Posner, 2007, 235). Today we are in muddier waters (although fully “rational”) in which the punitive juridical order increasingly acts without a “process”, and the Federal Courts are incapable of offering clear cut remedies. This begs the question: what comes after the classical paradigm of due process inherited from the historical dispensation of Common Law? In other words, if the rule of law can now fully prescind, under ordinary times (there is no “emergency declaration”), of the right to due process and to the guarantee of remedies, what is the source of its legal authority? 

This is an ambitious question that we cannot even attempt to answer here, but there is at least one possible working hypothesis: mainly, that post-positive rule of law adjudicates from the production of its own justification. It goes without saying that legal justification has always been an internal mechanism of legal authority; but only now is the force of justification taking over formal procedures, normative guarantees, and written and unenumerated rights. Justification makes its way as a rhetorical subsumption of any sphere of social reality. This is why, for the Federal Judge James Ho, “migration” can be understood as hostile forces if properly justified as an “invasion”. As a further task to be explored, one should bear in mind as a symptom that the most influential and enduring legal philosophy to have emerged within the crumbling edifice of modern legal positivism was precisely a concept of law defined by two guiding criteria: “fit and justification”. This means that law’s empire is no longer ordered through the “process” but through what becomes “justified”.

The last stage of embalmed decay. by Gerardo Muñoz

The techno-administrative organization of the world that is showing off its force these days is only possible thanks to a previous devastation of the opacity of language, which ultimately connects human beings and the world. It is also the mysterious vortex of the breaking point of humanity into being, of which today there is only remembrance and scholastic teaching but seldomly authentic expression. When politicians, engineers, and social functionaries stubbornly distract us with open attempts to decimate secondary languages, prohibiting the annunciation of words through the legal enforcement of “place and manner” norms, and elevate abhorrent structures of linguistic commands and information as units of social interaction, it is obvious that the collapse has already happened. It also means that in terms of “Social” planning humanity has ceased to exist under the shadow of speech, to use an expression from Helene Lubienska. Hence, it is all the more absurd to confront this transformation with a strategy of multiplication of rhetorical codified languages that merely deepen the schism between the expressivity of language and their worlds. It suffices to say that any recognition of a para-official language of social interaction plays into the fictitious polarity of homogeneous globality and reified nationalism –  the constitution of print nationalism being the historical destruction of minor and dispersed languages of remote places and villages for the sake of the organization of a productive fictitious historical subject.

We must ponder what it means that the current imperial world order is one that does not offer a language, let alone the flourishing of minor or ‘vulgar’ languages as in the Latin Middle Ages, but rather an exit from language, which is the cybernetic project of codifying flows of information and looping inputs in which asymptotically humanity surrenders their languages. In past imperial adventures, language was either a tool to subordinate the world of the colonized, or it was a lingua franca of elites (administrators and the clergy) that allowed for the real existing languages in the territories integrated precisely by their exclusion or subalternity to the civilizing regime guided by literacy. The sharp contrast with today it is striking, since it is all too clear that the project of cybernetics, and its most recent avatar “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), is fundamentally an Empire that does not even require to rule and neutralize the “civil war over words” that Thomas Hobbes repudiated in the European confessional state, since its ultimate goal is not political statecraft, but the regulation of unworldly bodies of social reproduction. 

This is why some contemporary engineers have said that AI requires “a reconfiguration of the social contract”, with the caveat that it would necessarily be a “social contract beyond language and thus without politics”. The last social dispensation at the hands of engineers is the human soul, as it has been said. For this conception of language, it matters to only understand it as a semiotic reduction of the expressive human being to naked animality as the general form of the posthistorical being in the present. It is noteworthy that a great North American writer, Cormac McCarthy, while working on this problem of language at the Santa Fe Institute scientific research program (a central hub of American developments for artificial science and the unification of the sciences), reached the conclusion that language must be understood in relation to a virus: “a virus nicely machined. Offer it up, Turn it sligh, Push it in, Click. Nice Fit. But the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit…The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that” [1]. The “unruly nature” of language, precisely because it does not fit into the biological pattern of virological model, must be mastered into an accompanying narrative of the social world, taking the copula and grammar as the final functionalization of the fictitious community. The artificiality of language is a civilizational decay that takes place not as heteronomic cooptation by technological advancement, but within its own internal abdication of its voice and mystery. 

It is precisely this internal threat that the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa sought to expose in the most polemical moment of his posthumous tract The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Stanley Nott, 1936) – an essay that was restituted, let us not forget, by Ezra Pound precisely to confront the pauperization of ‘Basic English’ as the standard of linguistic use – in which he writes the following observation about the extreme filing of words: “Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary” [2]. Fenollosa could not have foreseen that the posthistorical epoch – an epoch of the most furious abandonment of thinking – there was nothing else to file in terms of the expressivity and poetic soil of speech. The course of American artificial humanity is not a human with a pocket-dictionary; it is something way more grotesque: an animal that can repeat and chatter sounds and symbols severed of its proximity with any linguistic inherence and the sensorial worlds. And it goes without saying that the engineering plan against the poetic soil of speech, as North American poet understood well, means that this war is waged against the last reserve; that is, the ethos understood as ‘the cave of everyone’s inner being’. 

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Notes 

1. Cormac McCarthy. “The Kekulé Problem”, Nautilus, April 2017: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

2. Ernest Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character, edited by Ezra Pound (Stanley Nott, 1936), 28.

Kallopismata orphnes: the eclipse of language. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his most decisive confrontation with the scientific method and the legitimacy of science through objective knowledge, Carlo Michelstaedter introduces a rather loosely expression from Plato’s Gorgias to lever his position against the sufficiency of the scientific experiment: the “kallopismata” (καλλωπίσματα), which can be rendered as “embellishments” or “ornaments” that is constituted in figures such as matter, law, the final cause, or ruling principles (archein) that align the conditions for calculative and sufficient reasoning [1]. For Michelstaedter, the world of objectivation and scientific neutrality proceeds through figures of rhetorical ornamentation, kallopismata, which allows conquering the future; that is, what remains completely foreign and inaccessible to the domain of calculative reason waged upon a series of expressed goods. 

It could be said that kallopismata is the artifice that allows the absorption of those goods to the historicity of civilization as they undergo their own ‘corruptio optimi pessima’ a process of functional realization of their entelechy: the desert becomes a cloister, the banquet an academic, the artist’s studio a school of beaux artists…imitative technique assumes the name of art; any virtuosity assumes the name of virtue [2]. In a language similar to that of Heidegger’s, Michelstaedter speaks of the constitution of an “exceptional machine”, which positions the organization of the world through rhetorical deployment (and it was not by coincide that Heidegger referred to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness with one another”), and hence the fundamental metalinguistics of any social economy. The exceptional machination not only deploys generic meaning from the irreducibility of things, but also organizes the mediations between the subjective plane and the objective reality. In this way, the rise of the hegemony of science in the hands of the ‘pioneers of civilization’ and a “community of the wicked”, as Michelstaedter calls the endeavor of modern scientists, can violate nature offering security and comfort to the totality of mankind. This will explain their civilizational endurance and the recursive positionality for historical self-amendment and renewed adaptation.

How can this community of the wicked achieve absolute consent and domination through their practice? The domination over nature is not exclusively an anthropological process extended outwardly; it posits a nexus between interiority and exteriority where the question of language itself is entirely redefined. This is why the most stealth invention of the practice of scientists for Michelstaedter is to “infiltrate life with certain words….on which meaning unknowingly prop themselves for their daily needs, without acknowledging them they pass them on as they were received” [3]. The ultimate experiment of the techno-scientific understanding of the world amounts to the elaboration of cybernetics (a term that Michelstaedter never uses but that obviously colors the effect of his general scheme of civilizational nihilism); that is, the unification between the phenomena of the world and the human’s sayable language. To this end, Michelstadter will emphasize this proximity: “Technical terms give men a certain uniformity of language. In  vain do the proponents of internally created international languages dream. The international language will be language of technical terms; of kallopismata orphnes, ‘ornaments of the darkness’ [4]. Whereas darkness denotes the harboring of language and its limit – and one can recall Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris – its slow decay in darkness, kallopismata orphnes, outlives itself by the artificial luminosity that tears all mediation from the sensible world, now realized as fully alien to the appearance of truth and the truth of appearance. As Giorgio Agamben has noted, in what could be read as an esoteric gloss on the triumph of the kallopismata orphnes in our times, the technical question in the scientific paradigm is not merely a problem of the modes of techniques and instrumentalization, but more concretely a process that brings to an end the use of language as a sensible experience with the world [5]. And insofar as “sense” is only an idea of the sayable, it might as well be senselessness has been fully integrated into the infinite production of “informational differences” (“data run”), a final hypertrophied form of an unworldly logoi. 

It would not have passed Michelstaedter that the context in which the degraded notion of kallopismata (embellishment, ornament, decoration as adjectives do the work, but one should also register the kallos, a central tonality in Plato’s musical thought) happens in a rebuttal of Callicles to Socrates’ critique of force and personal interest as requirement for a conception of Justice. In 492c of the Gorgias Callicles will reply to Scorates stating the following: “No, in good truth, Socrates—which you claim to be seeking—the fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness, and the rest of these embellishments (kallōpismata)—the unnatural covenants of mankind—are all mere stuff and nonsense” [6]. In other words, for Callicles anything that does not have the force of principle or justification has already fallen to the level of “stuff” and “nonsense”, even though that nonsense is itself the use of language in its contact with the “thereness” of appearances. It is no coincidence that in his lecture of ethics, Wittgestein will press upon the nonsensical expressions of language in order to elude the escaping and impossible essence of language every time that it seeks to move beyond the world” [7]. In other words, if Callicles is the hyperbolic figure of the rhetorician-scientist, what is at stake in the inception of kallōpismata as veil of language is nothing else than the effective liquidation of its ethical dimension, which in turn transforms the use of language into a mere coding instrument at the altar of philopsychia, or, in the words of Callicles, of empty “unnatural covenants” (para physin synthēmata), depleting language to exclusive semantic and and metaphoric correspondence [8]. In other words, the ascendancy of the nonlanguage of the kallopismata will now entail abandoning the imperative mode in which language and life can enter a secret relation as defined by its use [9]. 

Can one even speak of human life after the ascension of the kallopismata orphnes as the civilizational matrix of the world? A life without the use of language, under the veil of kallōpismata, represents an unprecedented milestone and perhaps something beyond the rhetorical enthymemes. Perhaps one could elucidate this point in this way: according to Hans Blumenberg, the most important rhetorical form ever invented was that of the prayer because through its practice one is ultimately trying to persuade a God. In contrast, in the complete darkness prefigured by kallōpismata orphnes that dwells in a civilization eclipse – the rise and fall of modern secularization and political idolatry – the gods can no longer be posited as exteriority towards the taming of the gnosis for the anthropological need of self-affirmation [10]. Because the process of fictitious anthropomorphism has reached its own limit to the point of becoming itself an “exceptional machine” (macchina eccezionale), the mystery of the senselessness of language has lost the world not necessarily by becoming mute and silent, but by enslaving itself to the endless chatter and infinite consensus by the moral equilibrium of the social age that for Michelstaedter ultimately meant “the machinery of dispersing interests, where the paths of existence are no longer clearly traced, but become confused and disappear; hence it is up to every existence to create the luminous path among the universal chaos; as if were, an art of practical life” [11].  It is that existential path granted by the nonsense of language (soul to soul) that grants beauty in the event of appearance, that cuts through and overcomes the civilizational allure of linguistic kallopismasta whose radiant heliotropism can only result in the most spectacular of blindness. 

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Notes

1. Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric (Yale University Press, 2004), 98.

2. Ibid., 96.

3. Ibid., 98.

4. Ibid., 98.

5. Giorgio Agamben writes in “Sul dicibile e l’idea”, Che cos’è la filosofia? (Quodlibet, 2016): “Technics is not an “application of science”: it is the fundamental production of a science that no longer wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends to replace its hypothesis with reality, to “realize” them. The transformation of the experiments – which now takes place through machines there so complex that they do have anything to do with real conditions, but purport to force them – eloquently shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake. As science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question through ideas, in language, loses its necessary connection with the sensible world”, 115. The attempt to escape appearance and experience to turn the world into a mimetic illusion administered by the aesthetic dominance of the pseudos was also elaborated by Gianni Carchia in his analysis of Plato’s aesthetics in L’estetica antica (Editori Laterza, 1999), 89-100.

6. Plato. Gorgias (Loeb, 1967), 413.

7. Ludwig Wittgstein. Lecture on Ethics (Wiley & Sons, 2014), 50-51.

8. Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric (Yale University Press, 2004), 97.

9. Carlo Michelstaedter “Appendici I: Modi Della Significazione Sufficiente”, in La persuasione e la rettorica (Adelphi Edizioni, 1995), 142.

10. Hans Blumenberg. “Una aproximación antropológica a la actualidad de la retórica”, in La realida en que vivimos (Ediciones Paidós, 1999), 133. Philippe Theophanidis recently suggested in a discussion that we should read kallopismata orphnes in mind with the formulation  “God help me”—because I haven’t the courage to help myself” that Michelstaedter introduces in the chapter “Rhetoric”, 69. “Notes on The Constitution of Rhetoric”, unpublished, February 2025.

11. Carlo Michelstaedter. Epistolario (Adelphi Edizioni, 1983), 159.

Social hostilities. On Julia Yost’s Jane Austen Darkness (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

There is always something ominous and shady that harbors the apparently simple narrative worlds of Jane Austen’s novels. It has been too long since I have read them thoroughly, so I have to take Julia Yost’s word for it, especially when it comes to her extensive citations and character judgments in her most recent book essay Jane Austen’s Darkness (Wiseblood 2024) solely dedicated to the British novelist. But Yost’ initial intuition – the vortex of her argumentative edifice – is to make Austen more than a critic of the modern social sphere. Departing from D.W. Harding’s “Regulated Hatred” (1940), for whom the the civility of the Social (its overcodification and transmutation of norms and values) means the regulation of averted passions, Austen’s darkness reveals that that moral order is already an artificial and fallen production of lesser evils. In the nascent historical epoch of the birth of the Social, the rhetorical order of the polis will translate the alleged ‘elemental topics’ of community life into the orderly scene of ongoing civilizational depredation, in which accumulation is just one of its avatars. Towards the end of her book, Yost cites Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon as the height point of the end of the world of manners and sentiments into an “economy” that fulfills the “demand for everything” (Yost 65). 

This is the moment in which the world will become the object solely justified by the movement of civilization itself. “Civilization, civilization, indeed”, says Mr. Parker in Sanditon. What is never clear in Austen’s work – and this is precisely the problem of the darkening hue that Yost wants to claim in her essay – is whether there civility of manners and sentiments proved insufficient for the civilizational force towards objectivation; or, rather, whether manners (and its Burkean ideal of the little platoon as corollary to modern liberal normative pressure) will become an indirect force within the new fabric of civil and state mediations. At any rate, this dialectical valance is an index of the dissonances of Austen’s social world, which allows us to see, in dialogic slow motion, the reduction of the taking place of the world into the transactional exchange of forms. 

According to Yost there is a cure in Austen’s medical toolbox for the enduring the social disappearance of morality and conviction to elucidate the question of personal “spiritual fate”: marriage. Yost is emphatic: “Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness and with one sparking exception, it is an uncertain one” (Yost 2). The institution of marriage in the wake of the nascent post-confessional state will be a regulatory intramural test by the forces of reaction, and it does not take reading Louis de Bonald’s treatise on divorce form 1801 to arrive at this conclusion. But the sacramental institution is not freed from its own internal contradictions; after all, marriage will only be a regulatory social practice within the stratified and regulated autonomous sphere of modern society.

The aspiration to elevate the moral sacramental praxis of the pre-confessional state will be staged within the topological arrangement of the social space in which domesticity becomes a site of potential imprisonment that, in the words of Austen’s Mansfield Park, “will deaden the sense of what was lost” (Yost 28). As Yost claims, domestic space during Asuten’s age becomes deleterious and of potential imprisonment. Topological closure entails that the outside is only possible through the inside (think of conditions for formal labor during classical industrialization), and that the inside has become become exteriority ordered by general process of rationalization and the liberation of the ego, as Theodor Adorno explains in his short “On the Problem of the Family” (1955). In fact, the historical social trend that Adorno identified as “[the transformation of the family] as a mere association of convenience, the more it loses those features of the ‘primary’ group which until  recent developments were attributed to it as invariant” do not have to be circumscribed to the epochal crisis of the family in the zenith of Fordism; it is already in nuce in Austen’s desperate attempt to find a way to carve the depths of social domestication and biological maintenance.

For Yost, almost intuitively, marriage is a second-best (of course, she does not call it like this), because “poverty takes many forms; lack of a husband and children is one” (Yost 36). But can marriage absorbed by social totality provide an exit from the originary poverty of its anthropological decay? Even for Edmund Burke (as it was for De Bonald), domesticity is a triumph of anthropological freedom; but, only insofar as this anthropological condition accepts the decaying positioning of human existence both corporeality and linguistically. In other words, to speak of anthropological self-affirmation is already a retranslation of the oikos in an epoch in which the totalization of the “Social Man” will absolutely color the entire process of autonomization. In this sense, within the flashes of Austen’s world this color is oblique and hazily obscure. What does it mean to lose the appearance of the world once everything becomes legible, permissible, and exchangeable? Austen’s originality is to have been able to guide us in direction at a moment where everything was in the making. 

 Jane Austen’s Darkness is not only short but unpretentious; and, as part of lacking pretension theses here are rough and underdeveloped but they do carry weight. And some of them carry a lot of weight and durable resonances. This is the case towards the end where the “darkest” symptom of Austen’s scene of writing assigned to an effective degeneration of language that, according to Yost, paints Austen’s dark view of modernity: “Language genderates, as medical jargon makes a commercial purpose that folds itself healing purpose and the advertisement remedies become inexorable from the advertisement of maladies” (Yost 67). Yost here speaks almost in the register of Karl Marx writing in the pages of Rheinische Zeitung in 1842: “What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live”. The rise of the social figures of doctors and soldiers are expressive of the living body of the social fabric and its reduction into biopolitical administration. Yost plays with the idea that perhaps Austen’s last work is the revenge (this is perhaps too strong of a verb) against the expansion of the social mimicry induced by sentimental life (Yost 68). After all, the romantic subjective negation of the enlightenment shortcomings pays the price of arousing the vulgarity of competing feelings for the acceptance of social recognition.

This intuition unwrites the conceptual narrative regarding the taming of the passions and the privalining neutral space of diverging interests: the contract form of the new commerce society will tame passions while generalizing the social production of pain and circulation of hatred as sublation of the new. Thus the need to anesthetize language from its own capacity of the sayable; expiation will only take its form as either opinions or justifications. At this point, the sacralization of death and its unrestrained standardization will reasonably justify the condition for the overpowering of secular sacrificial history at that altar of abstraction (Progress, Growth, Freedom). Yost’s emphasis on Austen’s laughter as “salubrious” can be read as a comic exception from the stage of abstraction; the refusal of language to clog the imagination and the invisible into the codification of norms. In this distance, language embraces the pain of separation; and, like the laughter of the Thracian Woman, the incommunicable abandons the conceptual inertia of hostile protuberances of social life. And making way into the abyss clears up the heavy fog of darkness. At least a bit.

A Peitho relief. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a small marble Roman relief of Peitho (it is about 15” x 5” wide) of what used to be a larger decorative plate illustrating Helen being persuaded by Aphrodite to accept her husband’s voyage to Troy. The personification of Peitho in the form of a seating lady accompanying Aphrodite is not rare in classical representation, and if we are to follow Friedrich W. Hamdorf’s genealogy, it was actually the norm when it came to visual depiction of the deity [1]. What is striking in this Roman relief of Peitho is precisely the unassuming silence of the figure, who is merely gazing down and touching a dove or bird with her right hand and sunk in thought. Is not this mystical silence what bathes the mythical figure of Peitho, which according to Euripides has no other sanctuary than that of language?

The Peitho relief stands as a fragmentary of an ancient memory where the event of language implicated persuasion instead of commanding; a sensibility of saying instead of legitimate validation; granting space for the poetizing in the world instead of rationalizing, in the advent of the polis and the bios politikos, the transcendental condition of the political community [2]. Peitho will become rhetorical once it has taken the autonomos form of the transaction and the mutilated word by which nothing is ever said except a lethargy of the immanent movement of the logos. In the Roman relief Peitho does not communicate because she dwells in the poetic lacuna of language. 

In fragment 81 of Aeschylus’ Niobe we read a mysterious outline of Peitho: “Death desires no gifts; one can gain nothing by making sacrifice…from him, alone among divinities, Persuasion stands aloof.” The ossification of language in hand with the general autonomization of rhetorical separation, in the words of Gianni Carchia, will mark the destitution of Peitho’s poetic magic allowing death to speak through the fierce instrument of demagoguery and and the production of justifiable certainties [3]. In a world without the irruption of the mythic-magical element personified by Peitho, there is only general declensions towards persuasion as a form of predication: to convince, to obey, to follow, and to concede belief as persuasion was transformed linguistically [4]. It is no surprise that the civilizational decline of the mythos of Peitho coincides with the rise of the rhetorical techné that guaranteed the autonomization of the world (private & public, appearance & truth); but, most fundamentally, the stabilization of the resource of rule-based lexicon as the dominion over exteriority.  

Even the Sophist Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen defines Peitho as “Language is a power ruler who with a tiny and invisible body accomplishes deeds most devine” [5]. The process of deification of language (in the sense of the sources of archê) can topple the divine in order to mobilize all the energies no longer in the “uninterest encounter between souls” (Carchia’s words), but rather by grounding a necessity that, first and foremost, establishes its ontological solvency in the unending rhetorical polemics. As the sensible myth of Peitho withers into organized grammar and rules of predication, it is noteworthy to recall that in the monotheist tradition the organization of the invisible in becomes colored by “faith” in the law. 

This could explain why Saint Paul seemed to have made a conscious attempt to oppose any remnant of the Hellenic persuasion (πειθώ) in favor of “demonstration of faith” (ἀποδείξις). As we read in Corinthians 2:4-5: “My words and proclamation were not based on the persuasion (πειθώ) of wisdom, but on demonstration (ἀποδείξις) of the Spirit and power… that your faith would not be  based on human wisdom, but on the power of God. Indeed, “apodeixis” (ἀποδείξις), the word deployed by Paul, will guarantee persuasion only in revelation and the Christian philosophy of history; meaning that Peitho will remain, like the Roman relief from the First Century, a mute aesthetic artefact and a petty reminder of the expulsion of ethōs from language. 

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Notes 

1. Friedrich W. Hamdorf. “Peitho”, in Griechische Kultpersonifikationen der vorhellenistischen Zeit (Zabern, 1964), 64-65.

2. Francis Kane. “Peitho and the Polis”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol.19, N.2, 1986, 118.

3. Gianni Carchia. “Eros y Logos: Peitho arcaica y retórica antigua”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Técnos, 1994), 23-24.

4. María Dolores Jimenez López, “‘Persuadir’ en griego: el marco predicativo de peitho”, in Word Classes and Related Topics in Ancient Greek (Peeters Louvain-La-Neuve, 2006), 175-176. 

5. Gorgias. Encomium of Helen (Bloomsbury, 2008), 44.

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

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

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

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

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

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