secret

The last tzaddik. by Gerardo Muñoz


According to the Talmudic tradition there is a certain number of just persons, called the tzaddikim, that exist in every generation. Their divine and singular existence is known only to God, and according to the tradition if the world continues to exist it is only for their sake. They live in the desert of the world without ever being known by anyone in the public eyes. In this sense, the tzaddikim could be anywhere and everywhere as long as there is a nuance of humilitas. It is not clear, however, that the tzaddik is an ethical being in the polarity of thinking and action; but it is precisely this depth that renders him an opaque and mysterious figure. How many tzaddikim are there in each generation? 

Although Borges directs our attention to Max Brod as a modern source regarding the tzaddikim, it is actually Gershom Schlem who in an illuminating essay of this tradition records that it was the fourth century Babylonian teacher Abbaye who attached a number to these “saviors of the world” to thirty-six: “The world is never without thirty just men who daily receive the Divine Countenance” [1]. The world is not saved by the promise of redemption alone; what the tradition of the tzaddikim teaches future generations is that there is only redemption whenever something like a depth of existence is treasured as an embodied mysterium. In other words, it is almost as if in the tzaddikim the idea that “life is always elsewhere” is not only confirmed on the basis of faith, but on the inconspicuous existence that is divine in virtue of ceasing to be public and translucid. As Scholem says later on in his essay: “…these hidden just men belong to a higher order because they are not subject to the temptation of conscience which is virtually inseparable from public life”.

In a world pushed into full transparency, absolutely transformed into a reservoir of energy extraction and dispensation like the one that we are currently living, it is not all too difficult to imagine that even the secret lives of the tzaddikim are at risk of survival. And if the apocalyptic tone of our current gnosis has become predominant within the accelerated technological development, one could imagine that the opacity of the tzaddikim is slowly drying out, very much like the way that major rivers in the American desert are continuously being pushed to planned obsolescence and slow extinction. 

In fact, one could go further and say that there  is a clear analogy between rivers and the tzaddikim insofar as they are both pathways of generational communication of the human species with the world whose mouths that for millennia have made the condition of life possible. This means that in the same way that river mouths dry up, human language, with the advent of the barbarism of “Artificial Intelligence”, also becomes a new phase of desperate muteness, losing its capacity to pass forward its traditions and memories. Who is the last tzaddikim today? He or she will be the secret agent of language itself, the keeper of a divine surge that erupts even in the meanderings of a world out of tune. 

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Notes 

1. Gershom Scholem. “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men”, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schoken Edition, 1971), 252.

Language as a garbage heap. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is an extraordinary description in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes el memorioso” that depicts his state of absolute nominalism as literally a landfill, a pile of trash. We read the following: “Y también hacia el alba: mi memoria, señor, es como un vaciadero de basuras”, which James Irby translates as “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap”. The absolutization of memory without oblivion and forgetting renders all the possible and imaginable names as already present, but also useless to the point that they cannot be voiced, let alone retained at a distance. The world of Funes is analogous to that of the advanced world of technology that we are currently experiencing at an accelerated pace: the so called Artificial Intelligence remembers every name and all entities as if it were picking up items from a landfill container. It does not really matter if the names picked are correctly or falsified; it is precisely that naming as such no longer has any enchantment that is only granted by the divinity of the voice. As language becomes contained as a “heap of garbage” any relation between remembrance and the human voice that for centuries had been the source of affection is eliminated. 

Exactly two decades after the publication of Ficciones (1944) in his Seminar of Le Thor, Heidegger will also take note of Heraclitus’ Fragment 124 in relation to a heap of garbage as a definition of the cosmos: “…in its complete appearing as fire, “the most beautiful ordering of all is surely comparable to a heap of randomly spilled garbage. This means that the innaparent joining together is superior to every visible ordering, even if it is the most beautiful possible (fragment 54)” [2]. The emphasis is placed on the order of the random that in its inappearance discloses appearance as order (κόσμος). Immediately Heidegger notes that the archaic notion of “world” in Heraclitus, his “heap of trash”, is radically different from the standard of the world today that secures all possible predictions and calculation, where there is room for everything insofar as every-thing is taken as an extension of energy. 

This garbage heap realizes itself through the force of “speaking” in the name of technological orderability, efficiency, and promises of economic growth. The new order of the world as trash is proportional to the slow erosion of language that in its accelerating caducity loses its capacity to remember and forget. It goes without saying that in our present, and especially in the United States, the educational and academic institutions have been at the helm in the process of facilitating this compulsive destruction of language and memory, which evidences the intimate liaison of the technician and the pedagogue in the configuration of the immonde. 

Borges’ Funes will ultimately die from a pulmonary congestion, which is a testament of death in spite of the horror of a language incapable of naming and letting go. And in his lecture, according to the transcription of one of his students, Heidegger concluded with this recommendation: “What remains essential is to continue along the same path without having concern for any of the publicness around us”. A hidden and conjured language would be the only last standing order, a keeper of truth and beauty, because unlike the machine it voices the names while also exposing itself to the possibility of forgetting them.

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Notes 

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “Funes el memorioso”, in Ficciones (Emecé, 1958), 76.

2. Martin Heidegger. “Seminar in Le Thor 1966”, in Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2012), 8.