rhetoric

Longing for prose. Reflections on Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Every book has a history of its own, its subterranean itineraries, and oblique paths that are only disclosed when entering in contact with its future readers. There is no question that Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) has plenty of merits that we cannot begin to elucidate. For one, it is a monograph that should be of interest to students of Latin American studies, but also to any fellow travellers wanting to confront and think through the problem of writing at the wake of the epochal crisis of the state form and the exhaustion of the historical subject. Can thinking overcome the deficiencies proper to cultural studies and populist hegemony to understand the ongoing fragmentation visible everywhere?  One can start by saying that Le Calvez’s books points to a positive direction from this impasse, avoiding the shortcomings of sociological epistemology and the auratic reflexes of subaltern subjects as the master oppositional category to State form in the becoming of modernist development and global neoliberalism. In  Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) the object of study is the irruption of EZLN or Zapatismo, and more specifically the scene of writing of the Zapatistas through the genealogy of their declarations, public letters, gestures, and signatures of all kinds that speak to the persistence of a writing of defacement; a scene of writing beyond the propriety of the social function of the author, and on the margins of the legitimacy of the “lettered city” of the Latin American criollo uneven modernism. In the space of this commentary, I would like to list three levels of Le Calvez’s arguments that hope will further contribute not just to the themes proper to her study, but more fundamentally to a constellation of problems that exceed Latin America as a region of studies. 

First, Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) withdraws itself from understanding Zapatismo as a sociological political phenomenon of the late Mexican State, or a belated product of the shortcomings of the Mexican Revolution and its process of modernization. Unlike other studies of Zapatismo in Latin American studies Escrituras sin rostro (2025) is not invested in the restitution of new political subject of resistance in the face of global war and the anarchy of political action; rather, what is presented is the redrawing of a genealogical scene of writing subsumed by its excess and dislocation, stubbornly out of place that evidences the negativity of the collapse of the autonomous spheres of actions that once defined the apparatuses of historical development and legibility. As Le Calvez convincingly points out, the defaced and non-authored writings of the Zapataistas are neither literature nor political manifestos, and they also refuse the autonomy of literature and its incorporation into the objective ornaments of the Avant Garde projects. The defacement of writing for the Zapatistas is neither Avant Garde nor kitsch, because it is no longer interested in weighting itself on the rhetorical scale of social compartmentalization. In my terms, which are not those of Le Calvez, one could say that “escritura” or writing in this study is the vortex of flight from rhetorical submission; that is, what cuts through the enthymemes to refuse ossification and reproduction of language. The freedom of writing is always measured by the possibilities that is able to generate against rhetorical abstractions.

Secondly, because there is no justification in social or political principles, Le Calvez argues that Zapatista writing and negative gesture is a refusal of hegemony, and thus properly posthegemonic. If “escritura sin rostro” makes no demands, seeks no identification, and avoids the prefiguration of rhetorical subsumption, it means that Zapatismo openly rejects the articulatory nature of hegemony as the last avatar of the administration of identity at the end of metaphysics. As Le Calvez claims succinctly, the dispersal of writing cannot adequate itself to Laclau’s theory of hegemony and its “rhetorical foundations” of the social (Le Calvez 67-68). In this sense, posthegemony is not merely what interrupts the closure of politics in the neutralization of a new social consensus, but what transfigures language into its autographic, experiential, and faceless excess that overflows every identity and every place of enunciation. In very subtle and elegant ways, Le Calvez’s hermeneutics of the Zapatalistas’ Declaraciones confirm that the solicitation of hegemony in both discourse and political practice is an inversion, almost an hallucination in political form of the money form and the general equivalent in the historical process of real subsumption of capitalist value. If Zapatistas are indeed a “realist” political formation it is not because they parody of modern guerrillas or enact a new communal organization; the realism at its best is grounded in the capacity to discern that hegemony in the wake of end of the modern liberal state only serves to deepen the ongoing process of the capitalist utopia. 

Thirdly, and more surprisingly, is the fact that Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) does not just reconstruct moments of the Zapatista inscription, it also considers its intensity to its very end. And to think something to the end means to reveal its limits, disclose its fissures, and open a site to move pass the object of reflection. This maximum point of reflection is when philological exploration outlives itself in the intensity of an uncharted path. Thus, the story that Le Calvez tells us about Zapatista writing concludes with a series of aporias and contradictions that announce a certain “decline” and eclipse of its poetic intensity. This is a moment where its poetic elevation begins to deflate; and, in its decline we are confronted a persistent drift to “civil society”, “self-critique”, the appeal to plurality of “indigenous people” (what Gareth Willimans once called “fictive ethnicity” as representational ruse), or an internationalist appeal in order to generate a “counterbalance” to global neoliberalism (Le Calvez, 106-108). And we are putting aside the nomination of Marichuy for the 2018 Mexican presidential election. Does not this recomposition of social recognition, both global and national, seek to replenish the void in representation as it appears in the third Declaración that evoked “para nosotros nada”? (Le Calvez, 93). The waning of the poetic moment of Zapatista appears to project a flickering shadow of its dependency to political movements.

Does this mean then that the “rise and fall” of Zapatismo ends in a tenuous archē embedded in the ‘movement’? In his Latinamericanism after 9/11 (2011), John Beverley projected his unfiltered Leninism towards antiquity and Ancient Christianity when stating that the central political question for our times in the face of Empire, is to find ‘who are the real Christians today’ [1]. But ideological Leninism distorts the past, since as we know well, the central question for the Christians of the Early Church of the desert, such as Origen, was not who was going to mobilize the masses in the material world, but rather in what way to retreat and avoid worldly political power [2]. Zapatistas as the new and last Christians, then? It is a tempting question, but one that will only contribute to the Leninist reduction of historical political fictions. Our times is not one for Leninism and the Vanguard Party to carry a breakthrough. But perhaps Zapatistas are residually Christians in another country way; that is; in the internal dynamics of its own language. I would like to suggest that this language can be understoodX especially in the last phase of the Declaraciones, a late rhetorical style of the sermo humilis. As Erich Auerbach has shown, the sermo humilis was the rhetorical innovation of the early Christian community at a moment of the political decadence of the Roman Empire, at the entrance of the interregnum. The sermo humilis appeals to a low or popular style, seeking legibility and pathetic understanding of the difficult mysteries of faith. The humilis also designates the ground level of the land, the humus, which elevates through the persuasion for the humble and the humiliated common men of this world [3].

In other words, the sermo humilis could be said to be a sublime of the everyday life that is refractory to the mystery. It is obvious that if we now turn to the Zapatista late writing, something like the sermo humilis codifies a symptom that is no longer the mystery of revelation, but rather in its secularized form of the revolution. Does not the sermo humilis functions as a secularized artifice to guard and elevates hopes (all too human, alas) on behalf of the “revolution” to come? However, it is precisely political revolution, just like hegemony, what cannot longer account to the effective revolutionary force of the autonomization of capital. If according to Le Calvez the formation of the Zapatista is analogous to an “artificial movement” (masa artificial) like the Church, then one could say that the rhetorical construction of the sermo humilis functions as a linguistic prayer for the revolution whose only certitude is the apophatic metaphorization in the name of the “people”, the “homeland” (la patria), or the antagonistic and oppositional “we” (nosotros), or any other compact grouping. Of course, this is the terrifying question for the sermo humilis in its secularized form: to what extend the communitarian and autonomous ideal, through its appeal to the humiliated and subaltern class, does not transform itself into an apotropeic instrument devoid of true redemption? [4]. 

Is writing, and witnessing through writing the practice where the possibility of redeeming human experience is lodged? This is the fundamental question that Le Calvez’s book puts forth to us as readers, without entirely coming to an effective resolution. And yet, in the last part of Escritos sin rostro (2025) seems to offer us another possibility through the writings of Cristina Rivera Garaza, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Sergio Gónzalez Rodríguez in the face of a fragmented and disarticulated social body and the night of history in which social protection and protracted civil war become indistinguishable (Le Calvez 186). This writing is no longer tailored in the Christian shops of the sermo humilis, but in an open plain where the voice becomes “un anhelo de prosa”, or a longing for prose, crossed by the finitude of being and the collapse of mediating forms of totality (Le Calvez 174).

This longing for prose as it appears in Cristina Rivera Garza’s work – in the Spanish anhelo one can also hear the echo of breathing that is constitutive of life’s exteriority with the world, to conspire – is not the letter of the law as in Hegel’s spiritual prose of the world (“in the slave prose begins”, we read in Aesthetics), but the clearing of a voice that can register the world because it speaks from the witnessing of the ruins of representaiton, and the conviction that there is no political mystery high above, but only the irreductibility of writing in spite of it all. In the shipwreck of perpetual global war, writing’s redeemable elevation is the caritas that puts us in a permanent exodus from the order of representation (Le Calvez, 186). Writing, escritura becomes the passage of the chiasmatic and breathable imagination that, because it has cleared a via poetica, it can name what can also be properly inhabited. 

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Notes 

1. John Beverley. Latinamericanism After 9/11 (Duke University Press, 2011), 26.

2. David Nirenberg. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2014), 108.

3. Erich Auerbach. “Sermo humilis”, in Literary Language  & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1993), 39.

4. Gianni Carchia. “Eros y Logos: Peitho arcaica y retórica antigua”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1990),  29.

A world without Virgil. by Gerardo Muñoz

I remember that around 2007 there was a graffiti in Venice that read: “Non c’è nessun Virgilio a guidarci nell’inferno”, which can be rendered as “There is no Virgil that can guide us in this hell”. Many street graffitis come and go, and are easy to forget, but not this one. What does it mean that we live in an epoch without the company of the Roman poet Virgil? The suggestion prima facie is quite clear: if our voyage in the present entails a concrete hell (the subjection into economic domination and nihilism), it is an evermore so repulsive voyage as we lack the presence of the poet who can bear witness to the passing of an epoch and the possibility of the coming of a new earth. 

But why Virgil? As Erich Auerbach already noted, for Dante the historical Virgil is both the poet and the historical witness, given that the Roman poet’s exemplary descent into hell was the preparation of a “terrene Jerusalem (earthy Jerusalem), the universal peace that came to pass during the Roman Empire, proposed and glorified in light of its future mission…Virgil led the way as a poet because of his description of the realm of the dead; he was thus a guide through the afterlife because he knew the way. But it was not only as a poet that was destined to lead. He was destined because he was a Roman and a human being” [1]. It would follow that an age dominated by the realization of  absolute indifferentiation – this is the frame of nihilism after all – highly repressive of any proximity with the dead, can have no use of any Virgil even if one would offer to open a path to leave hell behind. The artist will not be understood or recognized as either human or poet, but rather taken as fully inhuman and incomprehensible. And this perhaps speaks to the tonality of terror and blindness that defines the undifferentiated suspended posthistorical time. 

That there are no Virgils to cast a forward light outside the epocal hellish condition entails that we are left with an absolute politicization over life and death that takes the form of a novel technical imperium. We know that in Antiquity, political unhappiness and disarray was a common state of affairs (and also exile from civil life); life was conditioned, although not totally subsumed, by cycles of domination and insubordination during volatile civil stasis. But still in that historical epoch, a poet like Virgil, as both human and poet, was able to turn away from the “harsh and evil world, and sets out for Arcadia where he allows no hope, not even any desire to do something about the suffering world, to lighten his sorrow and despair” in the communion of friendship and concordia to retreat from static political absorption [2]. When we say that our predicament is that of a a world without Virgil, this should not be understood as a reiteration of Max Kommerell’s paradigmatic Jugend ohne Goethe (“a youth without Goethe”); but rather, more fundamentally, as the impossibility for the human species to imagine a sense of redemption in world that reduces itself to exchange and strife. In other words, the absence of the memory of Virgil speaks directly to the ever-increasing incapacity of existence to dwell beyond the imperatives of a calamitous attenuation of destruction and oblivion. We should keep in mind that Dante’s memory of Virgil was a symbol for the poetizing myths of a new life; and, in turn, Virgil’s own Arcadian nomos was the confabulation of reality and myth expressed in a language that measured itself against the orderability of imperial force. The triumph of total politicity, which is to say the coupling of the political into effective dispensation of technology, mutes not only the voice of the poets, as much the contact of speech and the passing of the world into nothingness. 

In The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch describes this very passage through the mystical death and cosmic transcendence of the Roman poet himself, who now enters “a primal darkness which had held itself hidden behind the furthermost starry orb and now, independent of the arching path of lights, indeed, without putting out a single one of them it filled the dome of existence with impenetrable darkness: the essential world-darkness burst forth, that uncreated darkness which is infinitely more than the mere loss of light or absence of light…” [3]. For Broch, the passing of the world in the wake of the death of the poet does not coincide with the silence constitutive of speech, but with the severability of a language transformed as fully transparent and unmediated, in Broch’s words “all understanding, consummating, might and commanding; the world of pledge, the pure word, becoming so overpowering that nothing could withstand it” [4].

Extrapolated to our times, the liquidation of language takes form of absolute theatricality of the word, ascending to rhetorical and computational transparency. And in this unnerving cacophony, where everything is communicated, is realized in the historical project of cybernetics and automatized languages. The ethical texture of speech becomes unattainable for both humans, as poetizing beings, as they become incapable of inhabiting the dislocated abyss between myth and reality, now pivoted to a linguistic closure that commands them into the high noon of despair. An endless despair that has relentlessly lost with the inception of the divine.

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Notes

1. Erich Auerbach. “Figura” (1938), in Selected Essays: Time, History, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 2014), 108

2. Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind (Dover Publications, 1982), 293.

3. Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil (Vintage, 1972), 471.

4. Ibid., 481.

English and the dead languages. by Gerardo Muñoz

I still remember quite well how, a few years back at the Harvard University Bookstore, the Loeb Collection of Latin And Greek Classics, with their crimson and green covers respectively, were nowhere to be found on the shelves. And a slim store clerk when asked told me that those books on “dead languages” were no longer carried at the store. If this anecdote transmits anything is precisely the central question that still lingers from the pulsating notion of “dead languages”. What does it mean that a language is dead; if there is, in fact, such an ontological status for any language that has been traced from our past? This question returns to us today with some urgency as the most recent avatar of cybernetics, “Artificial Intelligence”, positions itself high above not just the alleged “dead languages” of the antiquity that many readers cannot longer master, but also the living spoken languages of human race as a whole. 

Prophetically, this was the problem confronted by W.H.D Rouse in a short text titled “Machines or Minds?”, and published in The Classical Weekly in winter of 1913. And as we know, Rouse, a trained philologist who translated Homer and Plato, was also the creator of the Loeb Classical Collection published by Harvard University Press beginning in 1912. The task of reviving the “dead languages” in Rouse’s program was a way to contest what he saw as the collapse of civilization in the face of rise of machine and the colonization of “leisure time”, as it was becoming a world of pure “electric force” (a topoi of modern civilization that will also finds its place in the writings of Warburg, Schmitt, and Florenski as we have recently noted ). 

In a description that resonantes in form and spirit with Carlo Michelstaedter’s forecast that the future of language will amount to an international language composed of technical terms, Rouse was more refined and precise in defining this instrumental transport by connecting the rise of science with that of English as a homogenous planetary language. Thus, inverting the assumption that “dead languages” are the defunct and no longer spoken idioms of past civilizations and archaic cultures; for Rouse it is “English”, and more specifically, scientific English that is ultimately a dead language, as it transmits nothing, as it is fundamentally detached from linguistic experience and imagination. As Rouse writes in one moment of his essay: “The very languages give what English does not give. Modern English is full of roundabouts, of metaphors without meaning, verbiage, shams; Greek and Latin are plain. The English language is largely dead: Greek and Latin are living languages. […] The scientific English sentences are all dead: they either wrap  a single sense in meaningless words, or they seem to have a meaning when they have none [1]”. The rhetorical artifice to which language succumbs expresses itself not through the use of words, signs and icons, but in a proliferation of discourse that no longer communicates anything precisely because it has communicated everything out of the fallacy of absolute representation and absorption of a flat system of wordless objectivity. In Rouse’s indictment of human decline finds its correspondence in what language’s entry into what he called the “Dagon of Science”, opening a new scenario for human historical destiny: “never was there a world that cared less for truth in speech and thought” [2].

There is a huge risk in reading Rouse’s defense of the “classical languages” (Latin, Greek) as a humanist blueprint for a forthcoming antiquarian revival, a nihilist outlook that is being fulfilled in the United States as a parodic reiteration of Winckelmann’s neoclassical imitation ideal.  Against the reification of dead languages as fictive “living entities” positioned as tools for knowledge and expertise, division of labor notwithstanding, what was fundamental for Rouse in the dead languages of the past – and in this sense, any language – is the ability of bringing about the experiential dimension of its use, thus connecting thinking and the experience without separations [3]. In other words, Rouse, very much like the last Émile Benveniste, found interest in classical languages not as a moral principle of civilization and identity foundation, but rather a site for the immediate experience between speakers embedded in a degree of the lived [4]. This is also why a poet like Eliseo Diego would state in Conversación con los difuntos (1991) reading other languages is a form of friendship beyond presence of the living. The conversation in languages is a way to keep open the passage from the living to the dead and back.

And whoever lives in language dwells in the memory and traces of all the dead languages, inscriptions, voices, and rhythms, because these contain the past as a reservoir of the figure of life. The consolidation of basic English as the hegemonic medium of communication with the return of extreme nationalism emerges, as Erich Auerbach wrote from his Istanbul exile, “to a ruse of providence designed to lead us along a bloody and tortuous path of an International of triviality and a language of Esperanto”. In this scenario, the slow annihilation of the human species takes place outside the world; that is, in the field of language, which has now become the central historical program of domination against the lived experience that connects the dead and the living. As languages become an autonomous frame of order and force, human beings’ existence is transformed into a mobile receptor of rhetoric, information, and opinion.

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Notes 

1. W.H.D Rouse. “Machines or Mind?”, The Classical Weekly,  V.6, 1913, 85.

2. Ibid., 86.

3. W.H.D Rouse. “Latin as a Universal Language”, Nature, February, 1916, 706.

4. Émile Benveniste. Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 67.

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.