schism

“Desecularization: theology and thought”. Introduction to the seminar in Granada, Spain, July 2026. by Gerardo Muñoz

At least since Ernst Böckenförde declared the end of secularization and the exhaustion of the liberal state form in the late sixties, the distinction between theology and politics has experienced a profound schism across Western social life, which once served as the ground and mediation to the homogeneity of “ethical life” (Sittlinchkeit) of civil society. It is still useful to recall Böckenförde’s theorem as a refresher: “What does the state live on, and where does it find the force that sustains it and guarantees its homogeneity, after the binding force emanating from religion is no longer, and can no longer be, essential for it? Until the 20th century, in a world that was first interpreted in a sacred way and then as a religious world, religion had been the most profound force involved in the political order and in the life of the state. But is it possible to find and preserve life in a completely earthly and secular way? […] Therefore, the question of binding forces is raised again, and now at its true core: the secularized liberal state lives on prerequisites that it can no longer guarantee” [1].

Indeed, one could say that in our era, clearly marked by the collapse of political mediations and categorial order, the schism between theology and political forms inherited from the Judeo-Christian eon has increasingly become full fledged and patently visible at a global scale. In a certain sense, and leaving behind all nuances, the operating horizon of thought today implies from and through the energy of this schism. If this meeting attempts anything however modest, is precisely the intuition that in the wake of the schism of political theology, the “theos”, following the trumpeting of the death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche or the flight of the gods as orphanage from the divine declared by Hölderlin, presents with an opportunity to think a non-rarefied style on the reverse of historical collapse. In recent years, a certain theological latency has been present in many contemporary theoretical projects, insisting on approaches related to mysticism and life, the gods of language and nominalism; the insistence on the communication between souls, the messianic and presence, to name just a few figures of thought without pretending to be exhaustive.

As machination and the spiritualization of technology subsumes the totality of social life in the West, existence enters a region of thoughtful and cunning marranismo, which could be taken as a form of life in the desert and a keeper of its depth of the ethos. How does one make sense in this moment of delirium and relentless decline, which include although it is not limited to, the defeat of the cycle of global uprisings  and the solicitation of positions of exodus and desertion? In other words, we are trying to think of a language that we speak across distant places,  and come to terms with the tonality of pain and despair. Is there a non-nihilistic way out of a civilizational project governed by the cybernetic dominium, continuous predatory extraction and lethal destruction of worlds? “Desecularization” is not naming a historical moment after “secularization” – something that has taken place in its own historical dispensation – just like posthegemony is not naming a temporal sequence to principial hegemonic politics. And of course, “desecularization” is not a program of any sort, although it is interesting in positing the possibility of “a new beginning” in the wake of the ruin of political theology as the orienting strategy of division and orderability, which fundamentally colored capitalist civilization on the abstraction of work and the work of abstraction proper to the historical modulation of Christian metaphysics and its theological rubrics. And if “desecularization” is neither a concept nor a program, I still would like to retain at least its resonance to other positions that have I have called for lack of a better term, the quadrant of positions of refusal [2].

Can theology, a confrontation with theology, drag us out of the via negativa towards something else? It is easier said than done. And it is never sane to get caught up in the spinning wheel of a term, whether it is “desecularization” or “desistence”, or “destitution”; a sort of rhetorical enchantment of the “-des”. Ultimately words say very little at the level of the concept, and they tend to offer a cell in which the process of amnesia and ratification can take place – the task of refusal, then, I take it, is also watching over, what the Cappadocian Fathers called the nepsis – what thought cannot elevate to the luminosity that emerges from the term. We are interested in theology and theos, but only insofar it opens itself to thought and the place of language, as well as the irreducibility of existence and death, to the imagination and the endurance of an ethics that undeniably invites makes itself present whenever we hold on the incommensurable distance between language and world. And if we have invited both Monica Ferrando and Alberto Moreiras to open up this seminar with us, it is because their styles of thinking are clearly devoted to pursue this question to the end. Of course, this means something consequential: they both affirm a path wherever it might take them (one can even visualize this in Monica’s extraordinary nocturnal paths in painting, such as the series “Paessaggio Perduto”, or “Lost Paths”). And it is a commonplace to say that both of them have been grappling with the problem of theology from almost opposite directions of the meridian distance awakened to the horrific abyss of our present, which means that perhaps the marrano and Pan do meet as fugitives in the forest passage both lost and found.

One word must be said about the term that is meeting is trafficking with – and perhaps “trafficking” is, alas, a good verb since none of us (perhaps with the exception of one person, and even he might feel stranger with that label) are professional theologians, nor do we have access to revelation, but perhaps this is too much on the side of intimate matters that one should refrain from commenting upon. Of course, the trafficked word is “desecularization”, which alludes to a certain rupture with the very essence of the saeculum, or the political institutional authority and its institutional arrangements in this world. When Schmitt says that all political concepts of modernity are secularized theological concepts, he is also assuming the irreversibility of secularization as internal to the historical matrix of Christianized West. In fact, according to theologian Robert A. Markus, desecularization has already become operative within the early Christian epoch of Saint Augustine. In his Christianity and the Secular (2006), Markus writes the following:  “[in dialogue with Peter Berger] We may leave sorting out the complexity of that relation to the sociologists. All we need to note for our purpose is that the reverse, what some have called ‘desecularization’ has become a more recent preoccupation of sociologists of religion – and not only of sociologists. “This is just what came into being in the course of the emergence of Western Christendom from Roman Late Antiquity – a ‘deseculariation’ which is the reverse of what happened in the Wars of Religion. If the notion of the secular were to apply in such a society, it would have to be defined in more problematic terms: as what does not form part of a religious discourse … .The core of my argument in this book can be briefly summarized. Its substance is that Christian tradition has a legitimate place for the autonomy of the secular, even though for many centuries this was eclipsed in its awareness, and despite the perpetual undertow of what we have become costumed to call ‘triumphalism’ in Christian political and cultural attitudes” [3]. 

Of course, as Märten Bjork has recently shown, in Markus’ theological understanding of the saeculeum, the government of the Earthly city grounded in principial politics must also be relativized by the eschatology of the Kingdom – facing the event of death and the dogma of resurrection of life – that can take step back (or beyond) the libido domininandi, that generates the solipsistic desire for government and administration necessary for the circulation of a “libidinal economy” [4]. We can thus call the Markus’ position as the architheological position that dissolves the polarity of secularization and desecularization as an enterprise of Western philosophy of history and its homogeneous temporality of survival and reproduction. Secondly, it is also important to note that the notion of ‘desecularization’ made an important entry in the famous Capri conference of 1994 organized by Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida, where the French philosopher mobilized Plato’s chôra to avoid relapsing into religious faith, and thus uprooting revelation as the ur-site of Christianity.  Thus, for Derrida, ‘desecularization’ is a figure of thought that seeks a third space of the a priori of the nonsecularizable. In the brief dossier “Christianity and secularization” later published in Il Pensiero: Revista Di Filosofia in 1998, Deridda sheds light unto this path of his thinking, which he never fully develops: 

“….. The desert, the figure of the desert, which we discussed extensively in Capri, is clearly charged with biblical memory; and it’s not enough to say desert, or even “the desert grows,” to achieve or, conversely, abandon secularization. The desert within the desert is a radically heterogeneous desert. The motif of the chôra serves me, in general, as a guiding thread for thinking about a place, and chôra means place, to take place; and of the event, it is said that it takes place, and chôra means place or spacing, interval. This is a place that is, to use Plato’s terms, neither sensible nor intelligible, and which is spoken of in a bastardized discourse, in that it gives rise to neither a metaphorical nor a proper language, and in Plato’s text itself, it escapes all Platonic concepts and even Plato’s self-interpretation. This place is neither divine nor human… The chôra is the place where the demiurge, gazing heavenward, contemplating eternal ideas or models, inscribes the sensible copies for the formation of the world. Therefore, it is neither sensible nor intelligible, neither human nor divine; it is absolutely impassive, totally neutral with respect to all conceptual or dialectical oppositions; it is therefore the place that resists any reappropriation or reduction within the poles of anthropotheology. Chôra is that which cannot be reached even by a discourse of negative theology” [5]. 

The nonsite of the chôra is also what is heterogenous to the polis, and so for us the absolute differentiation between chôra and polis is precisely as important, and parallel to Monica Ferrando’s distinction between the musical nomos of the mythic topos of Arcadia, and the modern allocation of the nomoi of spatial dominium as appropriation, concrete order, and reproduction; the three pillars for the constitution of the ideological revolution of survival. Of course, the chôra can be said manifolds, but it allows us the temptation of political subsumption, of an inversion of a new “theological political” (as it is already taking place in many circles in the United States, with the unfortunate but expected in Leo XIV as equidistant, alas, the new self-delegated commissar of an “Anti-Cybernetics” point de capiton. Alas, once again hegemony knocks at the door, this time with theological garments).  This reservation speaks, if not directly, at least tangentially to Alberto Moreiras’ recent affirmation against the ‘retheologization of the world’, which would entail the hegemonization of the total space of social reproduction [6]. Here we might find room for fruitful dispute and elaboration. Indeed, because it is never about re-theologization of the world, but perhaps in the old formulation of Guy Landreau and Christian Jambet’s L’Ange: Ontologie de la révolution (1976) that any gesture of true refusal or revolt requires at least the partition of two worlds, if we are to avoid the eternal dialectic of desire between Master and Rebel that nourishes the ideological projection sustained through the amnesia of any ethical elaboration.

Perhaps by ‘desecularization’ we are pointing to an exit through the liquidation of this world, in the same way that the task of thinking is a schism against calculative representation and the eccentric plane of objectivity. As Landreau and Jambet claim in El Ángel (1979): “There are two kinds of thought, just as there are two worlds: one kind of thought that belongs to God, and one kind of thought that belongs to the world; one kind of thought entirely devoted to salvation, and another kind of thought animated only by an abject desire for knowledge—a searching thought, vain curiosity: precisely what we, intellectuals, philosophers, call Thought. Gregory of Nazianzus famously asserted that one can philosophize safely about the world, about good and evil beings. The monks, on the other hand, responded to him with the words of Sirach: ‘Do not seek what is too difficult for you, do not scrutinize what is beyond your strength. The simpler the symbol, the better” [7]. In other words, against the absolute immanence of an infernal materialism and its frozen fictions of the immaterial – where all that exists subsists as equivalent – there is a reality of the soul, the abolition of sexual difference, and by that matter the libidinal bond that generates the autonomy of the revolt of the Rebel perfectly comfortable under the shadow of the Master [8]. In this sense, if another parallelism is allowed here, the chôra is the collusion of the outside world to the polis in order to start anew from scratch from the site of the sensibility of our existence. 

If this position has been repeatedly called “gnostic” or maniquean by the executioners of modern irreversibility, so be it [9]. And perhaps these critics are right, and we can grant them that much: already Susan Taubes noted with scholarly precision that there are even Gnostic elements in Heidegger’s thought, even when his polemic with the architectonics of metaphysics becomes explicit against the reduction and adequatio of the medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, opening himself to a secret and clandestine tradition, in which the last god has his recollection in the excess or abyss of all vital experience (erlebnis); in what is outside of life at the entrance of another world [10]. The overcoming and taming of the gnostic manicheism has been precisely the infrastructure through the rarification of Christian theology took place – in Landreau and Jambet’s terms – which transforms the conditions of the cultural revolution (existence) into an autonomous and spectral ideological productivity, which is the limit in which theological contemplation narrativizes itself into Christian community of salvation once necessity and deficiency bind you to political dominion – it is here where the Master and the Rebel coincide in their projected goals: that there is nothing other than political struggle. But the gnostic culture of existence never disappeared as readers of modern poetry know well, even though that might not be the site for the emergence of the angelic life of beatitude today either. 

As Pacome Thiellement says towards the end of his beautiful The victory of those without kings: gnostic revolution (2025): “In the absolute embrace of those without Kings, the fading of the initial eroticism is transmitted in every instant of life. It creates neither anger nor remorse, but rather gratitude and a multiplication of protected powers. It appears at the moment when solitude is profound, not from the absence of love, but as a consequence of the pleromatic state inscribed in the man with memory: the overflowing of unitive eroticism into all the possibilities that life offers, whether in this world or others” [11]. It is this theology of the infraworld – not so much of heaven, but of a memory of the worlds and the humus of the dead that becomes one with the mirror of the heavens – allows the metaphysical gnosis to breathe out in thought, allowing for the pending encounter with the metaphysics of the schism of n-1 worlds to emerge [12]. It seems to me that this subtractive movement brings back, in interesting new ways, a metaphysics of purity and inoperativity; an imperturbable existence no longer seduced nor corrupted by the images of this world. 

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Notes 

 1. Ernst Böckenförde. El surgimiento del estado como proceso de secularización (Editorial Trotta, 2024), 45,57. 

2. Gerardo Muñoz. “Quatre positions du refus”, in Entêtement: Tenir une sensibilité (Pli, 2024), 20-26. 

3. Robert A. Markus. Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame Press, 2006), 8-9.  

4. Märten Bjork. “Deliver me from my necessities: R. A. Markus and Erik Peterson on the End of Law”, Political Theology, Junio 2026, 13-14. 

5. Vincenzo Vitiello. “Cristianesimo e secolarizzazione”, in Il Pensiero: Rivista Di Filosofia, XXXVII, 1998, 155-157 . 

6. Alberto Moreiras. “Gnosis marrana”.  Paper read in Universidad Complutense, October 2025. Unpublished. 

7. Guy Lardreau & Christian Jambet. El Ángel: ontología de la revolución (Ucrania, 1979), 128.  

8. Ibid., 105-106.

9. See, José Luis Villacañas. Tierra o Ser. La gran decisión de la filosofía contemporánea (Akal 2026), specifically the section “Gnosis y excentricidad”, 416-419. His recent column against Heidegger’s philosophical legacies and afterlives also deals with the gnosis, see “Heidegger, a la distancia de medio siglo siglo”, Levante, May 25, 2026: https://www.levante-emv.com/postdata/2026/05/23/heidegger-distancia-medio-siglo-130551106.html

10. Susan Taubes. “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism”, The Journal of Religion, XXXIV, Julio 1954, 160-162.

11. Pacome Thiellement.  La victoria de los Sin Rey: Revolución gnóstica (Granica, 2025), 159.

12. It is notable that Derrida in the exchange with Vitiello, Vattimo, and Ferraris already cited, he goes out of his way to claim that he never had anything against metaphysics per se. Could the same thing be said of Heidegger if one posits the differentiation between metaphysics and the holy, and onto-theology and the adequatio of Medieval Aristotelian metaphysics? Along this line, Laurence Hemmings has suggested a fertile dialogue between Heidegger and the sacred in his Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

Why is Nelly Richard afraid of infrapolitics? by Gerardo Muñoz

The dismissal of ‘infrapolitics’ as a notion to think the distance with respect to political subsumption and civil administration was there from its emergence. I remember that around 2015, Alberto Moreiras suggested that perhaps in ten years or so, given the total collapse of actual existing political frameworks in the West, there might emerge a sound moment for real and honest conversation. The wager was on the “might” at that moment. But it has already been a little more than a decade, and the apathy in many ways has only aggravated, almost in line with the increasing liquidation of politics everywhere and the undisputed swing to predatory nationalism that has made it impossible to say the big word from the previous political cycle: “populism”. In this scenario of paralysis we are a bit surprised by Nelly Richard’s strong words against ‘infrapolitics’ in her recent book Tiempos y modos (2014), in which she appears as a reasonable, at times enlightened intellectual mediator, against what she sees as the rampant philosophical “excesses” projected their categories to an otherwise expected horizon of social transformation announced by the Chilean revolt of October 2019. 

Against “infrapolitics” as a distance of thinking against political totalization, Richard claims that she wants to hold on politics and continues to call the futility of the notion: “me parece que no hay que regalarle esa palabra tan preciada a la política resevándose el prefijo infra. Me parece que es mejor preservar la política un tono que es en sí mismo el tono de una población que, eventualmente, como en el caso de lo que estamos tratando tiene, también sus continuados por otros medios, como la Convención Constitucional. En este aspecto no creo mucho en la infrapolítica. Veo en esas terminologías la paradoja de una grandilocuencia minotitaira, una especie de resta un poco suicida que complica el acceso y lacera los caminos dejando a los pobres afuera, por que no entiende bien de qué tratan esas palabras. Y entre restarse de una suma y sumarse a una resta, yo prefiero lo segundo” [1]. The overt populist intellectualism emanating from this assertion inadvertently results in the restitution of the Vanguard intellectual in full capacity to elucidate, transmit, and “accompany” the forward march of the People as a comprehensive moral totality. What today passes – and speaks in the name of – as “political realism” is short of twentieth century political pieties and belated fusionism (the Intellectual and the People), which is all too sad. 

Leaving aside for a moment the violence against the texture of language (its non-coincidence with communication), there is a deeper problem here, which is that that the contemporary affirmation of realist “politics” today is delivered with a side blackmail: the fear of remaining an outsider, of becoming an intruder, and thus, positing an “exteriority” is always inconvenient and necessarily despicable. It is antipolitical, and thus a mere abstraction of language. This is the gnostic position that must be suppressed in order for the mandarins of social articulation to stand another chance of reformulating the forms of the social contract as the telos of political reflection. In another moment of the text Richard is quite explicit of the necessity to reject ‘infrapolitics’ as merely parasitical to the “sophisticated and bibliophilic universitarian categories of contemporary theory” (she stopped short of saying of the “global north”): “Resulta más o menos obvio que no se puede abordar del mismo modo un registro de búsqueda intellectual (lo infrapolítico como ejercicio deconstructivo que puede darse el lujo de girar incesantemente sobre sí mismo en el régimen de la escritura y del pensamiento) que la formulación constitucional de un acuerdo de la comunidad sobre las formas políticas del contrato social” [2]. 

Is that all that contemporary thought can aspire, then? Another frozen and humorless, most definitely predictable instance of the social contract, the old faith in constitutionalism and normativity, inclusion and distributed abundance with its necessary communitarian anthropology and convinced that, alas, “this time” we will surely get it right? The noble ideal of Rousseauianism in Wallmapu for the twenty first century. In the declaration of updated political promises there always lurks an informant policeman that secures the any path of exit from the human park. And so we are obliged to play within the political vectors or be prepared to suffer in the isolation of the steppe. Across the aisle of the philosophers of the Social the blackmail is more or less the same. Politics or apocalypse, which remains completely oblivious to the deeply instrumentalized apocalyptic political ratio in the epoch of stagnation and polycrisis; always making demands on “lesser evils”, whether it is Mandamni in the metropolis, or the ecological transition in the EU. But we know that “politics is action, but action always invites the invention – the renewal – of a language…otherwise, it is the near-death of the left as voice, voice, provocation, unwelcome presence that remains the reality”, as a lucid art historian of our times has observed [3]. Infrapolitics is a modest step in that direction in an epoch in which the true illusion of a hegemonic politics suffices to submit and resist within social containment. 

The claims on behalf of absolute politicity explain the hatred against thought today, which is predicated on the introspective dogma that politics colors absolutely all aspects of life, and that life’s ultimate end is the stabilization of political community. Increasingly so, it is evident that the suppression of thought, in the strong sense of the word (thinking as noncalculation and poetizing), is rendered hostage to anthropological survival that does not see beyond domination and struggle, hostility and originary compensated violence, outsourcing social pressures to rhetorical inflation. In other words, on realist grounds, the assumption is that there is only politics because ultimately there has always been violence in the human experience. A hypothesis that fails to account for the interdependence of anthropological mutation for the abstract needs of social reproduction. 

This is why for the defenders of the closure of social mediations, there is no outside from it; indeed, there is literam no possibility of exodus at all, as Roberto Esposito claims in a recent book that resonates with Richard’s position: “From this point of view, human beings have no way out. Not because they run up against difficulties they cannot master but because any mastery is a subaltern expression of that which as always predominates. Thus. every avenue they take is barred by the very intention that moves them: ‘their not having a way out consists, instead, in the fact that they continually turn back on the path that they themselves have laid out; they get bogged down in their routes, get stuck in ruts, and by getting stuck they draw in the circle of their world’. Humanity cannot break the rifle of violence and find a way out – not due to the lack of strength because an outside, properly speaking, does not exist, given that violence occupies the entire field of existence” [4]. 

If violence occupies the entire “field of existence” for Esposito, for Richard it is politics what totalizes every relation into a cognizable order when it dares to speak in the name of the subaltern, the poor, or the slave under the shadow of the Master, masking its desire of inversion and thus becoming one itself. This is the narrative of constituent power and revolutionary dialectics at least since 1789. This is precisely what Christian Jambet & Guy Lardreau see in  L’Ange: Pour une cynégétique du semblant (1976); that is, the projected ideological revolution taking the manifold orienting principles of realist politicity (the historical proletariat, the People, Ecology, and even the revolution as the repetition of coming into semblance) that advances the plasticity of order [5]. Is a gnostic rupture possible against the realist discourses that hide their mastery? 

Infrapolitics has no programmatic blueprints or higher purposes in the interregnum, but at least it is committed with a certain stubbornness on the detachment of thinking and the irreducible ethics of language that is always more and always less than social domination; more originary and deeply existential than the scene of violence and its copious obsession with the readability of the public. Infrapolitics is always already in what we all do, and fugitivity is already under way on the other side of socialization. The “fear” that promotes its negation is, if anything, the symptomatic tenor that political forms take when what remains is a predictable rhetorical chatter. But on the side of opacity, we have already trespassed the blackmail of fear. It seems that we are already the outsiders: extranei a turbis aestimemur (Tertullian).

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.*Nota bene. Some Chilean friends have brought to my attention that the chapter where the mentions on infrapolitics unfolds, “Una pequeña y hermosa conjetura”: fragmentos de conversacion con Federico Galende”, is a dialogue between Richard and Federico Galende although at no moment does it become clear who is saying, asking or answering as one or the other. In a way, this chapter insofar as it is a flowing soliloquy of the two voices, authorship becomes a sort of third signature emerging as “Richard-Galende”. The ambiguity of the authorship in question, however, does not take away from the main premises of my response, which can be extended not only to Richard but also to Galende. At bottom, my response is not towards a specific intellectual project, it is registering a symptom of the contemporary philosopher emerging as a agent of the hegemonic closure of the Social.

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Notes 

1. Nelly Richard. Tiempos y modos (Paidós, 2024), 103.

2. Ibid., 99.

3. T. J. Clark. Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Thames&Hudson, 2025), 15.

4. Roberto Esposito. The Faces of the Adversary (Polity, 2026), 114-115.

5. Guy Lardreau & Christian Jambet. El Ángel: ontología de la revolución (Ucrania, 1979), 119.

The strain of waiting in the desert. by Gerardo Muñoz

How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the “new”, even though the price to be paid is always on the side of an overachieving cynicism and hypocrisy mediated by discourses of all kinds. At one moment of his dialogue Eupalinos or the Architect, Paul Valéry claims that whenever deep reflection is pushed by raw force, this unnatural attitude almost always misses truth: “The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced…we must do or suffer violence to see better or differently” [1]. The claim to see clearly beyond the immanent veils of the rhetorical commonplaces is still our question, although rarely posed. If our suspended epoch is that of formless rubble and extinction, one way in which this question could be reformulated today is to ask what does it mean to envision and live in the desert? Is not the desert condition, its suspended and dead temporality that gathers existence in the void, the only authentic event of posthistorical time? 

This is the problem that haunts Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari, (1940), in which the waiting for an invasion and hoarding armies is conflated to the event of a wait that is infinite and excruciating, very much like the video art of Douglas Gordon at the end of the century. The steppe is a form of deserted land without forestation and depth; it is the very triumph of the symbolization of time stretched into a unified surface that recalls the emptying momentum of every form. It is nothingness as an absolute event, as Buzzati writes:  “….the ramparts, the very landscape, breathed an inhospitable sinister air…At this moment Drogo was looking at the northern world – the uninhabited land across which, or so they said, no man had ever come. No enemy had ever out of it; there had been no battles; nothing had ever happened” [2]. How to account, and how to live, beyond mere survival, in a world nothing happens; that is, where the “nothingness” is the very schism between existence and world? When speaking hyperbolically of the Fortress in the steppe where the protagonist Drago is stationed, Buzzati will refer to this mundane condition as a “thankless world”. 

It goes without saying that a world beyond “thanking” is a world that is unworldly in its sensible and intelligible mediations, because it no longer appears to grasp the irreductibility of presence; it needs to repress what appears figuratively in its disclosure. This is why in the vast openness of the steppe, in its blinding clearing of legibility, there is only blindness and hallucinations that are always compensatory to the pain endured by the nihilism of a disjointed time. The waiting of the barbarians does not longer hold the concept of prefiguration once held by situated or concrete politics (Turgot’s high-modernist axiom comes to mind: “we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present”); it is rather the impossible, contingent and retroactive narration that fictive communities need to elaborate to endure the ongoing pain at the end of the social bond. This is the price to be paid to survive in the glacial habituation of nihilism.

It might be very well that what can be glimpsed in the temporal wreckage of the steppe is nothing but the mute language of pain that brings presence near without political translation, because it is always an excess to the stabilization of forms. In an interview published in Milan’s Il giorno in 1959, Buzzati referred to the landscape of the steppe as “Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier…it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting”. But this strain of waiting is the thrownness of existence and its absolute distance from the world. In fact, towards the end of the novel we read a condensation of this inconspicuous tonality: “It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are from their affection for reach, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence, the loneliness of life” [3]. 

What remains is language not because it can describe or narrate, but because only the voice can measure up to the tonality of pain. In his short prologue on the Spanish edition of the novel, Borges claimed that Buzzati’s desert is both real and symbolic of the void, although the symbol no longer transmits any legible sense of totality; it prefigures a certain exhaustion of symbolization. The truth of language in the absence of form can no longer adequate itself to events or situations; it is now the voice that gathers the turbulence of pain in the waiting of the coming of presence already inhabited. Whenever that voice fails to speak, as René Daumal observed in his unfinished Mount Analogue (1952), life amounts to an empty carcass and a restless cadaver of oblivion. As presence fails to materialize in the world of forms and events, the only realist position is the conjuration of life as a form of expressive self-exile refusing to participate in the hallucinatory social pressure that desperately masks the serenity of a static and inapparent landscape – it is the passive eye that contemplates the plain silence of the steppe while preparing the schism for a possible transfiguration [5]. It is perhaps this passive contemplation what Andrew Wyeth’s faceless Christina laying on the grass has always been yearning for.

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Notes 

1. Paul Valéry. “Eupalinos or The Architect”, in Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1989), 75. 

2. Dino Buzzati. The Tartar Steppe (Canongate Books, 2018). 31. 

3. Ibid., 220-221.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El desierto de los tártaros”, in Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos (Alianza Editorial, 1988), 22.

5. Endnotes in the recent essay on Jacques Camatte, “Time is an invention of men incapable of love” (2025) express it in the following way: “But it is not enough to feel foreign to this whole; one must break with it, create an irreductible discontinuity and schism”, Endnotes, December 2025: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jacques-camatte/time-is-an-invention-of-men-incapable-of-love

Dialogue with Jacques Camatte (1935-2025)

The passing of Jacques Camatte (1935-2025) a week ago from the writing of this text recalls a life that ostentatiously lingered in thought, and a thought that was entirely enmeshed and intertwined in the irreducibility of life. For some of us that had the good fortune to interact – however briefly and momentary, although every contact is always destinial and inescapable – Camatte transpired generosity and authenticity, and his voice evoked an almost Adanic happiness that has become rare among human beings. A common friend these days has recalled that somewhere in Camatte’s writing there is an endorsement of a capacious phrase from Chernyshevsky that could very well serve to remember his enduring ethical pursuit: ‘we have finally understood that the Earth is a place of life rather than judgement’. The opening the Earth as a dwelling place for life forms means that it is insufficient to conceive of domination as an organization of modes of production, since capital is first and foremost a spatial-temporal arrangement towards the future of the human species, and thus of a certain conquest of the world sensuous life. 

This was the outstanding triumph of real sumption: the modulated and ongoing alienation of the human community (Gemeinwesen) into a community of capital that has arrested time of life to the point of adjusting it to homogenized agony of historical time. Against the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution that theologically exported the polarity of the eschaton and the ho katechon, already in the inception of 1970s Invariance Camatte called for an exteriority of any philosophy of history in order to rework of “a new relationship between human beings and nature”, and “breaking the lock that inhabits the creation of a new form of life”. The two citations in dialogue with each other come from “Against domestication” (1973) and the introduction to Urtext: frammento del testo originario di Critica dell’economia politica” (the 1977 Italian edition curated by Gianni Carchia), although these are variations from the depth of the emergence of the invariance of truth as a vantage point of the world. At the center is a form of life that renews the world that transitions beyond all forms of metaphysical logistics of appropriation, mere standing reserve, and the general arrangement for the mobilization of production. Any point of departure against domestication measures itself against the totality of this fluctuating dominion.

As it has been said of other great thinkers, Camatte’s ultimate passion was rooted in thinking one idea to the end and not of endorsing a system of concepts. For him it was the schism, that is, how to undo the historical process of domestication of a fictive community against the absorption of the increasing autonomization of fictive capital. The schism against the capitalist general equivalent also demands advancing a secondary schism against all humanism and its originary separation from nature. In schism, there is something of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers’ “thought of the word alone” that is receptive to the movement of the soul tries to account for the perceived voice. This precisely what Camatte carried as the lesson from Bordiga’s idiosyncratic original communist program: a movement against the historical benchmark of the development and political economy of growth, which will entail the exhaustion of the revolutionary horizon driven by an ideological political technification that tends to deepen the power towards the positionality of epochal nihilism expressed in the revitalization of strife and the ‘errancy of humanity’ (contrary to Martin Heidegger’s notion of errancy as a play between unconcealment and truth, for Camatte errancy is another name for the civilizational narrative that exemplifies the withering of the  human community into organized and protracted social reproduction and historical abstraction). Hence, as for Bordiga, Camatte conceived the ontology of communism as a world view (not as a political program oriented by concrete historical subject or distributive economic reproduction; not a soteriological dogma nor a transhistorical material idea); that is, broadly speaking, thinking the relationship between the human beings and the earth. A question more pressing than ever given the current planetary conflagration, which exposes the civilizational course that has lead to an inhospitable world where the survival of the human being has become the byproduct of an effective hostis of the community of capital integrated to the global surplus value accumulation.

In Camatte’s unrealized thought – but perhaps all forms of thinking are so – the bordigist gesture persists in locating the schism at the threshold of the force of real subsumption of the anthropomorphization of capital, where the notion of revolution itself is transfigured since, unlike Delacroix’s paradigmatic romantic painting, ‘liberty’ no longer guides the spirit of the “living”. Its redeeming voice also carries downwards unto the depth of the souls of the dead. Amadeo Bordiga himself in “Dialogato coi morti “(1956) writes that “The Revolution…it is always, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it opened and where it promised, where it has an appointment with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: they knew that it never fails, never deceives”. True life can also take place with the nearness of that which seems remote (as Gustav Landauer once claimed: “For me, the dead also live”).

If both the collapse of the future and the increasing adaptation of social life has entered a gnostic dialectic of endless self-legitimation, it is paramount to capture not just the insurrectionary, but the resurrection flight in Camatte’s gesture that opens possibilities lodged in the dead as an emblem for the return to the world “full of joy and exuberant life”, as he wrote in an apostrophe in “Scatologie et résurrection” (1975): “I will draw from mother earth the vital and infinite power and I will resurface full of wisdom, joy and an exuberant life which will allow me to reach this human community…I will have left your world and been resurrected!” Does holding on to the unity of the Gemeinwesen require a theological undercurrent? Is not the passion for schism, and by the same token the stazion, the energy within the very dispensation withheld between mystery and revelation that has prompted the congenital forms of formal mediations and institutions for the political community? These are the questions that we are exposed to in the enduring task if we are to take seriously a continuous ‘dialogue with Camatte’, which carries the voices of the dead. Ultimately, any authentic conversation that dwells in thought does not have to invent anything new; we are depositories of an endless communication that is handed over, interrupted, and transmitted to anyone willing to hear and capable of being traversed by the shared word. 

In his last year of thinking, Camatte insisted on the notion of “inversion” in the wake of the civilizational phase of extinction, which would require deposing all forms of hostilities and bringing to an end the partisan positions invested in orienting technology and morality (nature) in their seditious defense of the real dominium over the passing of the world. For the current depressing (and depressed) times, writes Camattes in “Instauration du risque d’extinction” (2020), what could very well be a prelude to a return to the repressed allowing a return to the past to initiate an inversion that would allow liquidation of lall exhibition abandoning enmity. This is why, as he told me in an exchange that we undertook five years ago, “inversion cannot be a strategy, as it is totally outside of politics, which is the dynamic of organizing people, of controlling them”. A breakthrough, then, only as a mystical downwards leap into the past? Absolutely – but only insofar as the mystic is the ethical witness to his own openness to the word, and whose exodus from the social machination prepares a return to the world beyond the flattening and dominant language molded by rhetorical dishonesty or passive narcissism of the subjectivity.

This is why according to Carlo Michelstaedter to have courage in the world means to decide between two irreducible figures: the dishonest trickster, or the mystic in the desert. There are no third terms in between. And whereas the dishonest subject knows how to play the hand to his best outcome in each given moment; the mystic knows that his decisive moment is always commencing because the genesis of the human species has yet to take place. This beginning is always at the brink of an untimely auratic experience. And aura names the incommensurable distance from the rational containment of the world — unlike Teilhard de Chardin’s internal introspection in the noosphere that will bring the fullfilment of a spiritualized humanity upon Earth (realized in part by the unification of the sciences by cybernetics); in other words, an exodus from the temporal nominalism that inhabits another life attuned to its genesis: “devenu-devenant ce monde et sur cette vie autre au moment où s’effectue sa création”, he writes in “La séparation nécessaire et l’immense refus” (1979).

The visitation of Jacques Camatte in the world bears witness to that invisible freedom of the human species ready to jump and traverse the catastrophic trumpeting into the living and the dead, making possible the refractions of thinking as original texture of existence. From now on, the exodus from the immanence of this world will embrace a disempowered but perpetual dialogue with Camatte’s demure schism of the living. Indeed, we are always on the path to an earthly beginning.