In the November-December issue of Revista Sur in 1955, Jorge Luis Borges famously published “L’illusion comique”, an indictment against Peronism as a form of social theater, where melodramatic and overacted public liturgy energized the orchestrated pace of the modern mass politics. But unlike in Cornille’s baroque play, for Borges the political ensemble of the l’illusion comique is one in which social actors have become autonomous and fully aware of the script of their acts, and if they would play along fully conscious and in “willing suspension of disbelief” (the expression is cited directly from Samuel Coleridge) [1]. This secularized form of the l’illusion comique is one in which theatricality is ever-present and unabsorbed, since its ultimate purpose is to conceal and justify a “terrible reality” (una realidad atroz) even when it aims to invert or dislocate it. It is clear that in our time, the l’illusion comique is an extension of a political agency that has convinced itself that the street topos is in radical opposition to the crisis of modern state form. No greater l’illusion comique than that which imagines that one more rush of goliardic spirituality will produce the dawn of a new beginning.

The order of the sentimentalization and pathos was the way that Borges described the l’illusion comique of the 1940s, the era of the high modern state conducting the social masses; however today the illusion is flat and rhetorical, always assertive of its metonymic mediation. In just one example of rhetorical inflation, the Prime Minister of Spain recently constructed a analogy that stopped short of a full personification: “It is time for the Parliament to have the appearance of the streets”. If Parliaments or legislatures bodies cannot truly provide legislative acts any more on behalf of those that they allege to represent, what follows is the last gasp of the legislative state that appeals directly to its naked constitutive sources as “streets that speak”. We are thus in a strange and bizarre world in which streets act and speak, and parliamentary houses become mute and sterile. And yet, what does it mean that the streets speak or have spoken?

It is obviously nothing like the coming to the possibility of a unison voice, but rather the form that politics undergoes once cybernetics becomes effective through its optimization of public opinion. If Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” would write facing Van Gogh that the “painting speaks” (it is that which speaks), it was because truth is disclosed in the proximity of what is being shown. Obviously, this disclosure has little to do with intentionality or the function of a commodity or utensil that tries to drag the viewer into the mirror of semblance. The proximity to a voice or picture severs us from the common place in which we are customarily gathered, which is why painting remains an exclusive site for unmediated truth.

Hence, when we are told that “streets speak” there is nothing being disclosed except what is already enacted by the theatre of the l’illusion comique: the management of opinions to be decided on the plane of force and struggle, submission and rhetoric, hegemony and the cheap thrills of affection later absorbed in representation. As Pedro Sánchez has told us in the open, streets and parliaments today are not in opposition, on the contrary, they are the two poles that hold up the l’illusion comique that energizes whatever little remains for what we call “politics” under the defunct notion of social mobilization. Any attempt to escape the undisclosed world of opinions needs to break free from the illusion comique that continuous to parody both reason and comedy. The verses from Ciaran Carson’s The Irish for No (1987) obviously come to mind: “Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. In the ruins: obliterated streets, the faint impression of a key” [3]. There are no real exits when there are only ghastly impressions that lead us to the penumbra of the l’illusion comique, merely enough to survive in nihilism.

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Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “L’illusion comique”, Sur, N.237, Noviembre-Diciembre 1955, 10.

2. Ciaran Carson. “Smithfield Market”, in Collected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 99