soul

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.

Thinking without form. On Gianni Carchia’s Name and Image (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

At long last readers in the English speaking world will be able to read Gianni Carchia’s work in translation thanks to the publication of Name and image: an essay on Walter Benjamin (Seagull Books, 2025), which was the Italian philosopher very last book published posthumously in 2008. This is not a work of late style as such, since these four essays on Walter Benjamin serve as an oblique and angular entry point to the thinking form of Carchia’s own philosophical concerns on sensibility, the survival of the myth through aesthetic mediation, and the post-kantian elaboration of the appearance as the condition for experiencing the world. This is a project without systematic architecture that dates back to his first books of the late seventies such as Orfismo e tragedia (1979) and Estetica ed erotica (1981), both published in the Milanese publisher Celuc Libri. It must be noted that although this is a marvelous introduction to Carchia’s philosophical idiosyncrasies and recurring themes, it is perhaps not the best introduction to Walter Benjamin, who in these four essays is read against the grain of dominant hermeneutical frameworks; that is, beyond Frankfurt Critical Theory and dialectics of the image, and on the other hand, the theologico-political concerned with messianic temporality as a transformative philosophy of history. 

It does not mean that Carchia is oblivious to these constitutive elements in the corpus of the German thinker; but it does mean that the profile constructed is one that favors a critical project that has disinhibited affinity with the Platonist project of beauty as condition of the critical endeavor committed to truth. For Carchia it is at this vortex where one should locate the “brilliant degree of illumination” that awakens philosophy from its slumber, overturning the texture of thinking to an erotics of the lost detail and the enduring fragment. Citing the correspondences to Florens Rang and The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, we know that for Benjamin “without at least an intuitive grasp of the life of the detail in the structure all love of beauty is no more than empty daydreaming” (Carchia 33). The task of the critic is one capable of arresting the inexpressible, only because beauty lives in the world as a state of silence and expressed revelation (Carchia 38). And it must be said that platonism in Carchia never manages to crystallize into a doctrine of being, pivoting to persuasion as the route to an idea without form.

Carchia shows that for Benjamin the reinvention of the critical method cannot aspire to the totalization of origins and principles  – or even that of the status of the visible (Schau), as he brought to bear in his comment to Max Kommerell’s Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik (1928) – underpinning the emergence of the idea where the seeds of truth germinate to unfold the interstices of historical sedimentation (Carchia 62). Unapologetically, Carchia suggests that Benjamin’s critical method, if there is such a thing, must be read as a “philosophy of the infinitesimal aim to shatter the prejudice that attributes to totality predominance over phenomena…at the price of their insignificance” (Carchia 61-62). In turn, this means that “the smallest cell of visualized reality outweighs the rest of the world” (Carchia 63). The infinite cuts through the world as a remnant that must be redeemed precisely because of its incongruence in the face of the triumph of immanence and the distribution of forms. And this is yet another sign that Carchia’s Benjamin must read as a thinker of a platonism of the immanence that by folding forms it is able to escape modernity’s temporalization of the sensible reality and its lethargic material objectivity [1]. This hits a hight note about Benjamin’s philosophical thought as anointed in the ancient currents of Stocism, since as Pohlenz taught us, the material forms of this world are the hurdles that neutralize the inception of the divine in a reality governed by the necessity of kakia.

Hence the confrontation with language occupies the center of every critico-historical reflection, which means how to live the immemorial language that is neither an instrument nor the “medium of prophecy or domination” (Carchia 85). Carchia reminds us that for Benjamin Karl Kraus’ language is platonische sprachliebe, or platonic love of language, which means a voice that overcomes the separations of signification and symbol, object and subject, and the consolidation of exchange through the voice of gratitude and use: “thanking and dedication – for to thank is to put feelings under a name” (Carchia 85). The word as apophantic revelation places judgement under erasure, enacting not a return to Edenic pristine nature of divinization or virtuality that attests to the figure and repetition of appearances and the medium of the “spiritual verbalization that animates reality” (Carchia 92). The abdication of an original language survives as the mythic memory of a voice porously open to translation: “All higher language is a translation of lower one, until the ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language” (Carchia 92). If for Benjamin the problem of translation is coterminous with that of the mystery of language, it is because it reveals the fragments of a vessel that removes the ground of rhetoric through “variation and discontinuity” (Carchia 96).  

In fact, reading Carchia one can infer that rhetoric is to language what the destiny is to human existence in its becoming. Thus, the destitution of language, its internal rhetorical and objective liquidation, appeals to the possibility of the event of happiness and bliss that is the only well illuminated path for redemption, that is, for the flourishing of the “nexus of truth and beauty” of the liberty of the soul. We are painfully aware that modernity is many contradictory elements at once, but Carchia tells us following Simmel, it is ultimately the historical project of Entseelung or loss of soul of the world, and thus “the faculty of memory as particular gift of the soul” (Carchia 121). The historical time of progress, its formal assumption and increasing autonomization, means a ritual situation that “seizes control in exteriority – as as continuum of temporal unfolding – of that entertainment, flashing, discontinuous awareness of the irrevocability of the past held firm by the image-memory” (Carchia 121). Hence, the exercise of thought and memory through the redemption of appearance is the necessary struggle against the usurpation of caducity, and thus the only promise of salvation through the dead, the defeated, and the forgotten. There are clear echoes of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” here that Carchia formulates as the necessity of memory in the repeated dispensation for the clearing of appearance. As he writes in one of the most formidable moments of the book when discussing the self-offering of the memory that guards the catacombs of the dead: 

“…for Benjamin, aesthetic temporality, as temporality of the soul absorbed in the contemplation of the nexus of truth and beauty, is the very origin of temporality’s self-offering, of temporality tour court as the space of memory. The salvation of appearance and the dimension of memory are all one: here is rooted the connection between temporality and the aesthetic dimension. The appearance constitutive of the space of redemption, and the beauty whose sacrifice would sacrifice the space of truth itself, are nothing other than memory continuously rescuing them from the space of historical time. It is precisely this connection, between the sphere of appearance as the sphere of the irremediable caducity, and the counter-movement of memory in the involuntary image, that forms the nexus that some of the most subtle passages struggle to delineate as the world of the soul, or rather the world of the past” (Carchia 120). 

Thinking the fragment becomes indistinguishable from retaining the sensible participation of the soul. It is this arresting breath (Hauch) of the soul that clears a path on which appearance is saved from the crushing weight of historical self-sufficiency. This confirms, if anything, that Benjamin’s sensibility for Carchia does not end in the confines of postromantic critique, nor in the utopia of totality and abstraction imposed by the metaphysics realized in money form over the living and the dead. As Carchia asserts: “utopia is the end of the constructive and generative ideal of knowledge” at the base of human anthropology and material conditions of social existence, but a whole “redirection underpinning what we have called thinking the informal” (Carchia 127, 135). 

What does it mean to think the informal, and what accounts a thought of the informal where Carchia posits Benjamin’s most enduring and clandestine signature? Avoiding all false exists in neopaganism of worldly immanence, Carchia connects the formless dispensation of thought with a nirvana state of para-rūpa (a hypostasis of God that does not presuppose a form, but that it is transformational),  the instance of imagination without an image and place that speaks of a chôra as the last refuge of the living. A refuge that, like the platonic cave, does not entail the accumulation or wealth of signification, but that retreats from the perils of insignificance and unhappy consciousness of nihilism. This is one way to understand what Benjamin writes in one of the glosses in “Short Shadows”: “…an image that has already crossed the threshold of the image and property, and knows only the power of the name, from which the lover lives, transforms, ages…and imageless, is refuge of all images”. An existence devoid of a central and authorized image can only prepare for the idea of justice that, because it is experienced it can retreat from the aleatory predication of the world. This enacts a descent into “an anarchy of being in this side of form”, as Carchia would beautifully call it towards the end of book; an inward saturation that is also a reservoir of sensibility because it is able to take a breath. And because it is breathing, it can assent to the external penumbra that restores the appearance of every thinking being in its very image and name.

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Notes 

1. On the platonic immanence and the soul, the central reference is Gianni Carchia’s essay “Platonismo dell’immanenza: Fenomenologia e storia in Hans Blumenberg”, Hans Blumenberg: Mito, Metafora, Modernità (il Mulino, 1999), 215-26.

Ius abutendi and late liberalism. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a recent lecture about the different strands of political liberalism in the American tradition – a lecture that in its own way was presented as a synthesis of his lifelong teaching now collected in the book titled The Rise and Fall of Rational Control (Harvard U Press, 2026) – the political theorist Harvey Mansfield made a claim that was left unquestioned by the audience, but that has some strong pungent resonances in our present: “You cannot conceive of a political [liberal] regime without some kind of abuse”. These words were not meant as a way to prevent the intrusion of this protuberance in a political order, but rather as a way to indicate that liberal politics is always, to some degree and arraignment, the administration of abuse. In Manfiesld’s own conception, the classical legal order of the American founding now chattered into “a thousand particles” (his words), dispersed in bureaucratic commands and executive arrangements, dispense a direct form of abuse. It is noteworthy that although Liberalism has always been thought in relation to fear (from the conception of auctoritas in Hobbes to the minimalist form of government of Skhlar), it is important to dwell on the initiate relation between liberal politics and abuse; or rather, about its kernel of truth in the notion of abuse. 

That liberalism’s ultimate objective can be understood as the regulation of abuse can easily be inferred, at least implicitly, in Mansfield’s own normative assumptions laid out towards the concluding pages of The Rise and Fall of Rational Control (Harvard U Press, 2026). Towards the end of the book, and commenting on Nietzsche’s declaration on nihilism and erosion of rational control for the efficacy of political order, Mansfield notes that when politics takes the form of an unconstrained form of subjectivity oriented towards survival, it must be supplemented by a new virtue of nobility and sacrifice: “Modern rational control, we have seen, does not work through  an effort of reason by its citizens; its government is indirect, using irrational moves to gain a rational result. It does not appeal to human pride, as would a liberalism attuned to the virtue of citizens in the exercise of their rights. That liberalism would return from an unnaturally constrained self, interested only in survival, to a reliance on the soul, which contains a concern for nobility and sacrifice as well as survival” [1]. In this framework of late liberalism, that in recent years in the American context has been called “post-liberalism”, can properly be understood as liberalism of abuse where force and executive power takes priority over legitimacy and social hegemony. The liberalism of abuse is not interested in the renewal of the social contract and the juridical capacity for rights and obligations; rather, it deploys a prerogative decision making over the souls of the living. Those that have recently claimed that the sphere of the soul is the new theater of operations have unlocked an important door of our epoch. 

To govern in this framework means to allow abuse to flourish in the social bond not just as a tributary of penal codification and retribution of punishment, but as a transference of hostilities through the grammar of values and willful possession. The old form of patrimonial form of legitimation, as some have recently emphasized it, does not just pertain to the transformation of political elites, it is also coextensive to the totality of civil society and its mediations [2]. And the normalization of patrimonial abuse casts the long shadow of the Roman Law’s notion of ius abutendi that transformed the concept of abuti into property destruction through the sovereignty of the subject of ownership. As the nineteenth legal scholar Ferdinando Piccinelli showed in his important study on this notion of Roman Law, the ius abutendi passed from being the the capacity of “using to the end” or the “consummation” of a thing as registered in Ulpian’s writings, into a plena in re potestas denoting the sovereign power of a subject over objects and things in the world [3]. This means that the notion of “abuse” in late political liberalism, at the threshold of the modern social contract and rational control, is structurally the way in which the destruction of our use of the world is legitimized and fostered. In this sense, the operativity of ius abuntendi is not exclusive to punitive practices, punishment and public police powers of the administrative state; more importantly, it should be understood as the ossification of subjects and objects that permanently enacts the unlimited destruction of the relations with exteriority, that is, with the world. When we use we are not decreeing modes of organized distribution, rather we are enabling the freedom of transit between things, the territories, and the proportional transmission of techniques. 

The deployment of abuse as technology of dominance is proportionally inverse to the obliteration of our capacity to use that defines the human experience. It is in this light that we can understand Hölderlin’s well known dictum in a letter to his friend Casimir Bohlendorff that “the free use of the proper is the most difficult thing”, as a refusal to disengage life from the political constrain of ius abutendi. It is only when use is thought, or brought into thought, beyond and outside political rational control that we can make room to inhabit the world beyond the perversions of abuse and judgment over the human species. In our historical conjuncture, we can say hyperbolically that all political thought is indirectly infused with ius abutendi, since it is incapable of seeing that the use of life never fully coincides with the circular polarity of domination and servitude; because there is a third figure beyond these two that allows use to unsettle the ground of force. If American political liberalism has entered a phase of self-infliciting abuse as the essence of political rule, destruction, and lethality of social forms, it is precisely because what it is desperately trying to conceal in the deep waters of Lethe is the pathway of a worldly use. After control, we are left with an expansive regime of socialized abuse even when it purports to speak on behalf of the preservation of the living community: “Because that is truly tragic among us, that we quietly leave the realm of the living inside some ordinary box, and not that, ravaged by flames, we pay for the fire we failed to control” [4].

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Notes 

1. Harvey Mansfield. The Rise and Fall of Rational Control (Harvard University Press, 2026), 305.

2. Aziz Huq. “America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State”, The Atlantic, March 2025: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n06/aziz-huq/wrong-sort-of-citizen 

3. Ferdinando Piccinelli. Studi e ricerche interno a lla definizione ‘Dominium est ius utendi et abutendi res sua, quatenus iurius ratio patitur’ (Firenze Presso L’Autore, 1886), 101-103.

4. Fredrich Hölderlin. Cartas filosóficas de Hölderlin (La Oficina, 2020), 191.

On the abyss of pictorial space (work in progress notes for a seminar). by Gerardo Muñoz

We have attempted to read Florensky and Schmitt side by side, and certainly many fundamental questions have been raised converging profusely on the problem of Catholic form. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that some questions have not been pursued at length, and they exceed the modest purpose of this short seminar. As a way of synthesis, I want to press against one question that seems to me to link both thinkers in the wake of secularization, and especially modern representation. Modernity is always too many things at once – it is purely the force of the contingent, but ultimately it is the temporalization of space through objectivity and its necessary legibility. It seems to me that the spatial question is a guiding thread, not the exclusive one, that connects Florensky and Schmitt’s interventions circa 1922. It is obviously the problem that the German jurist never ceased to reflect upon, if we recall how in the very end of his work he situated the very arcana of the law in relation to the visuality of the Homeric “kai nomon egnō”, a predicament for seeing space laying before the law; that is, subsumming the sense of worldly opening into the necessary predicate of a legitimate ground for order.

Schmitt’s purified, prima facie formalist conception of the Catholic form, is also fundamentally spatial, because the primordial essence of the duality of the ekklesia as an institution comes about through the dominion of life unifying the communities and burgs into an internal system of legitimation that builds a concrete order (in recent years the work of Anna Grzymala-Busse has convincingly tracked the morphologies from the medieval church the modern city state and the rule of law).  As we know, for Schmitt Rome (Catholic form) is Raum, spatial arrangement, dilation of orders and institutions, representation and decision elevated beyond the fundamental norm. In this sense, the thesis on the ‘visibility of the Church’ hinges upon the opening of the world as always already oriented towards salvation through the structural deficiency of human beings (original sin) and communitarian order of representation and delegation. This is why Schmitt remains a modern political thinker – perhaps the most acutely aware of thinkers when it comes to the fragility of the political project based on the specular visibility of legitimation – because the fusion of the political and that of territory remains indivisible, in spite all of his self-conscious response to the force of immanence noted in Political Theology (1922). The liquidation of the limiting autonomy of the political against technical neutralization is only possible because “space” has been first subsumed into the visible nomos of the nomon egno. 

It goes without saying that Pavel Florensky’s strategy is also extremely sensitive to visuality, but his position departs from the assumption that modernity is about the flattening of the unilateral and objective specular regime of visibility. One can recast what Alberti writes quite ostentatiously in  De Pictura: “No one will deny that things which are not visible do not concern the painter, for he strives to represent only the things that are seen. Points joined together continuously in a row constitute a line” [1]. In Alberti’s visual inception of pictorial representation, space is already orienting the direction for the flattening of pictorial space that defines modern pictorial representation in the well established argument by Clement Greenberg [2]. Obviously, Florensky wants to break against the flatness of modern representation, which is the condition of possibility for the very nihilism of subject and object that becomes worldness because it has no longer any possible carving out the “thereness” of space. It seems to me that this is what Florensky is after when elaboration of the ‘reverse’ or ‘inverted’ perspective. The inversion here is not just an aesthetic problem of the autonomy of work of art in the new distribution of labor, and here is where liturgy marks a fundamental distinction in terms of the analytical paradigm that frames Florensky’s investigations. Around the same years, Romano Guardini in his The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) defined the liturgical experience as anti-aesthetic phenomenon, because in its communion of souls, it gathers the visible as well as the invisible, whose exclusive beauty shines in the light of truth and not of delimited notion of “work”. For Florensky moving past linear perspective, and by extension objective representation, is the path that prepares “a new structure of thinking” as such [3]. In virtue of its own experiential depth, “a certain spiritual excitement, a joly that rouses one’s attention to reality itself. In other words, perspective too, if it is worth anything, should be a language, a witness to reality” [4].

The so-called inversion of perspective is a destructive operation at the level of sensibility against the traps of illusionism and abstraction, opening in the concrete and yet not-yet-here space where life and its alterity enter into contact. This is why Florensky claims that it is “the content of space that is transmitted, but not the organization” [5]. And in a more densely and rich moment of the “Reverse perspective” (1920) he writes the most clearly expressed elaboration of this new structure of thinking: “To sum up. It is possible to represent space on a surface, but only by destroying the form of the thing represented. Yet it is form, and only form, that visual art is concerned with. Consequently, the final verdict is proclaimed for painting, as for the visual arts in general, to the degree that it claims to provide a likeness of reality: naturalism is once and for all an impossibility”  [6]. As it is obviously clear, Florensky is not thinking destruction in virtue of restating a metaphoric sacralization of nature; rather, for him the liturgical depth of the reverse perspective discloses an experience is only possible in the contact between the possibilities of the world and being. It is this region that he call the “abyss of own freedom”, and that the attempt to contain it through the hegemony of the matheme and calculation only amounts to “as tasks of insane presumptuousness” [7] 

The turning of experience must inhabit this abyss of freedom retreating from an “unmoving monumental and ontological massiveness of the world, activity by the cognising spirit that lives and labours in these thresholds of ontology” [8]. Thus, accounting for that ontological reduction makes possible inhabiting realities in the world that never become validated through representation. As Florensky writes in a short piece published around these years: “Obviously our living remoteness from reality must again destroy realism in art as well. There are realities in the world; one comes to know them by coming into living contact with them through work in the worldwide sphere….art can unite us with realities are inaccessible to our sense – such are the formal prerequisites of any artistic reality, and a tendency that rejects even one of them thereby forfeits its right to be called realism” [9].

If the Christian liturgy remains the most “realistic” experiential arrangement for Florensky it is because the texture of space appears in its non-visibility as the “missing aspect of what what we might call the surrounding world…it is this surrounding world, place as such, which the liturgy addresses” [10]. It is this surrounding world, that is both beyond the world and yet within it, almost folded unto it, what I would claim that relates tendentially to the notion of the  chora (χώρα), not as an interchangeable modulation of “place”, but as what allows externality as the requirement of experience to be indifferent to sense because it its presence is that of possibility. John Sallis in an essay on the notion of the chôra puts it in a way resonates with the abyss of freedom withdrawn by Florensky:

“One could say—though not without some risk of falling into the dream in which the chora (χώρα)  is conflated with place—that the chora (χώρα) is the other of being, not just in the sense of being other than being (as every eidos except being would be other than being), but rather in a more abysmal sense, in a sense irreducible to a difference of sense. One could say, too, that the chora (χώρα) is the outside of being, that it is what enables externality as such and thus makes it possible for something outside being nonetheless to be” [11].

We should linger on those words: “a more abysmal sense, in a sense irreducible to a difference of sense”. But this abyss is not what refers to an ontological vacancy that becomes operative for the subject; it is the excess that allows being, and for that matter “ethical being”, to have composed duration in its region.  I think it is possible to accept the minimalist thesis of the liturgy as the sanctification of “time-place that the world is” (this is the syntagm deployed by Hemming) beyond divine revelation, but only if one takes up the chôra as the space of spaces (ur-space) at the end of secularization, a transformative leap that transcends time to land somewhere in the depths of regionality. It is the region that makes the passage, as Florensky would say, fata voletem ducunt, nolentem trahunt, from interiority to exteriority without ever achieving consummation, perhaps as a folded relation. The stakes are enormous no doubt. In an entry in his recent Quaderni XIII (Quodlibet, 2025), Giorgio Agamben defines it in a particular way that traverses Heidegger, but also beyond him. This is a difficulty disclosed by the chôra, and it is the beginning of further challenging investigations waiting for us:

“It is the choice of this misleading conceptualization that leads Heidegger to privilege, like Hegel, time and action over space and contemplation. Not “Being and Space [chôra],” as in Plato, but “Being and Time,” as in Hegel. Even the “wonder that beings are” becomes a task and a “sacrifice”. Instead, the aim is to understand this wonder ethically as “use” (“to use it again in order to contemplate it”). Admittedly, in his later years, Heidegger attempts to rewrite Being and Time as “Being and Space”; yet here too, the conceptualization remains imprecise because it does not sufficiently question itself. (Although he merely acknowledges the inadequacy of language, he continues to propose terms that are necessarily deficient.)” [12].

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NotesNotes 

Notes

1. Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting (Penguin Books, 2004), 37.

2. Clement Greenberg. “Modernist Painting” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 90.

3. Pavel Florensky. “Reverse Perspective”, in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (Reaktion Books, 2002), 246.

4. Ibid., 254. 

5. Ibid., 258.

6. Ibid., 258.

7. Ibid., 260. 

8. Ibid., 269. 

9. Pavel Florensky. “On Realism”,  in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (Reaktion Books, 2002), 181

10. Laurence Paul Hemming. Worship as Revelation: The Past Present and the Future of Catholic Liturgy (Burns & Oates, 2008), 47-48.

11. John Sallis. “The Politics of the χώρα”, in Platonic Legacies (SUNY Press, 2004), 42.

12. Giorgio Agamben. Quaderni XIII 2020-2021 (Quodlibet, 2025), 248

Painting and Paradise. by Gerardo Muñoz

Giovanni di Paolo’s “Paradise” (1445) is a small scene once featured as a predella of an altarpiece from Siena’s San Dominica cathedral. Albeit its miniature proportions it is a striking image of Paradise that puts us in front of a choreography of encounters of the dead, as if the heaven was not a superior and separate stage of life in the cycle of salvation, but rather a continuous stretched territory that takes off where “this life” had left. In its rather simple and rhythmic composition, surrounded by citrus and vegetation, Di Paolo offers the viewer a state of paradise that is not about absolute bliss or bathed in irresistible enchantments, but rather something that in poverty reveals itself in proximity, literally face to face, with an other, perhaps a friend or lover. If we zigzag across the figures it is almost as if the picture would confirm Roberto Antelme’s intuition that “the only transcendence is the relation between beings”. And nothing else is the painterly texture of paradise beyond life. In this way, one can define the earthly paradise as a space where transcendence is dispensed because it primarily welcomes and senses otherness.

One of the striking details of the picture is precisely the positioning of the hands of each couple. Just take a second to gaze around them. These are hands that gesture towards a supreme affection; it is the hand that reciprocates and welcomes. It has been noted – for instance, in Berenson’s A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend (1910), that Sienese painting of the fifteenth century introduced a new pictorial attention that manifested the coming to life of the spiritual. In Giovanni di Paolo’s Paradise the flickering hands, moving around the bodies, are perhaps signifying the initial touch of renewal between heaven and earth. In fact, it is almost as if the sliding of hands was the vehicle for the nongranular transition into the arrival of heaven. In a way of synthesis, one could say that paradise is always at the distance of the hand; which is why painting and happiness remain in an intimate dialogue regardless of themes or historical epochs.  

And one can ponder whether the absence of paradise from imagination in the wake of the absolute intrusion of hell in reality, is not precisely a world where the incommensurability between hand, nature, and language become indistinguishable; the transparency of sameness in an expansive totality well beyond reach. To be in nearness is not just an ethical transcendence between beings, but ultimately allowing a divine region to flourish for possible encounters. This is why Angelus Silesius says that “nothing exists except you and I, without both of us then god would not be god, and the heavens will cease to exist” [1]. Paradise is, as Di Paolo’s painting reveals, not the utopia to come in another time, but the  inconceivable place never fully detached from the experiences in this earth. As Karl Barth once wrote: “As the place of God in heaven is, of course, a place which is inconceivable to us. It cannot be compared with any other real or imaginary place. It is inaccessible. It cannot be explored or described or even indicated. All that can be affirmed concerning it is that it is a created place like earth itself and the accessible reality of earth which we can explore and describe or at least indicate; and that it is the place of God” [2].

This inconceivable place of God is the apocatastasis of what sorrounds us, of what has touched us, and of what we have touched; and this includes above all, the nexus of the living and the dead in a strenuous thought that gathers itself in what has loved. This space outlives the world of the living in order to express the divine that is, precisely, the unmediated appearance of each encounter. This means that painting paradise does not commission what a new life should look like as a way to overcome a previous existence of deficiencies and missed opportunities inscribed in felix culpa; what is recollected, and thus the only true apocatastasis, is a path to presence that knows neither end nor name that is self-contained in the ur-space of depiction. 

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Notes 

1. Angelus Silesius. El peregrino querúbico (Ediciones Siruela, 2005), 2005.

2. Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, III (T&T Clark, 2010), 149.

*image. Giovanni di Paolo’s “Paradise” (1445), part of the Metropolitan Museum Collection.

A painting that knows no evil. by Gerardo Muñoz

In several places of his Lectures of Aesthetics, Hegel refers to Dutch painting as a way to thematize the concept of completion that fulfills being in the world. For a moment his commentary brings to bear a state of the mundane while avoiding the vulgarity of the overachieving surface that would define the general tendency of modern painting. True, Hegel’s indictment of Dutch painting does not negate the modern sensibility either, insofar as the portraits of the Flemish tradition fail to disrupt that is always held incredibly visible in the frame of pictorial representation. The artistic triumph of Dutch painting depends on a specific oscillation between the inner and outer experience of the subject visible range of depiction. This is not an exclusive one-directional movement towards the immanence of life; which Carlo Levi will denounce as the estrangement from the world, but rather a synthesis that gracefully falls on the sensuous activity of painting just at the moment that appearance dispenses in the world. 

Thus, the emergence of Dutch painting was only possible in a specific form of life that was resolutely experiential in nature and spiritual rich. As Hegel writes in a first moment in the Lectures: “the Dutch in their taverns, at weddings and dances, at feasting and drinking, everything goes on merrily and jovieall, even if matters come to quarrels and blows; wives and girls join in and a feeling of freedom and gaiety animates one and all…this spiritual cheerfulness in a justified pleasure, constitutes the higher soul of pictures of this kind” [1]. And this spiritual freedom, sublated from the necessities and constraints of external things in the world, validates a concept of the ‘ideal of life’ that is transcendent only to its sense of living. Hegel notes that Protestantism facilitated the Dutch a materiality for this sense of worldly transcendence, of communitarian deificatio, allowing them to have, in his words, “some footing in the prose of life” [2]. So, Dutch painting is predominantly concerned with depth; and this depth is not concerned with the absorption of the spectator, but quite literally, almost in a physical way, enmeshed in the inner tonality of everyday figures. This is their inner being made visibly manifest. The manifested and gathered presence of this inner and outer movement of the infinite is precisely what retains the imperturbable trace of the divine beyond time; indeed; an eternal Sunday of life, as Hegel says in another important moment: 

“This painting has developed unsurpassably, on the one hand, through and through living characterization in the greatest truth of which art is capable…For this reason we have before us no vulgar feelings and passions but peasant life and the down-to-earth life. lower classes which is cheerful, roguish, and comic. In this very heedless boisterousness there lies the ideal feature: it is the Sunday of life which equalizes everything and removes all evil; people who are so whole-heartedly cheerful cannot be altogether evil and base”. [3] 

It is well known that in the art historical discipline, the moment of Dutch painting has been understood within the framework of the scientific and optical revolution of that century; a new “faith in the eyes”, to follow Francis Bacon’s terms, capable of generating a concrete and rational knowledge of the “common world” of a new, more geometrico, regime of light [4]. But nothing could be further from how Hegel’s synthesis approached the sensibility of Dutch painting; mainly, as fundamentally a site of the overcoming of evil because it was not alien to the comic downfall of human experience. In Dutch painting, Hegel reminds us, it is not that evil or wrongdoing is removed from the factical life; rather, it means that the comic is a nested experience that can grasp and transfigure the miseries or the disasters beyond taxative transactions of the social world and preparing the conditions for a kallipolis. 

Although it is not clear who are the Dutch painters that Hegel had in mind when writing about a painting that enters into the “Sunday of life”, certainly the pictures of Pieter de Hooch – “A Dutch Courtyard” (1660) comes to mind – where distant and miniscule figures smile at each other in the open encounter of a place. The erasure of evil from painting is achieved not from stating the dogma through which the world could transcend and reverse the fall from nature, that is something like a new “faith in the visible”; it is more the event that accounts for the surrounding as it becomes oblivious to the very artifice of depiction. In this sense, the imperturbable state of Dutch painting is achieved as a life that dwells in the folds of the world as it retreats from the force of anticipation. And, if according to Chrysippus, evil is nothing but losing the capacity of affection or mediation of our inner sensibility; what the Dutch pictorial order brings to bear is that the ‘good’, rather than being a substantive function of the will and contingency, it can only be accessed in a form of life that is indistinct from the inconspicuous and breathable space through which it dwells.

And what is the sensibility of the comic if not what remains ungraspable in each and every in a painterly expression in a world in consonance, a place without remainder? In other words, if there is a painting that has abdicated from evil, it is because its has attuned the soul to an exteriority that is no longer dependent on the weight of the sign. It is still the business of the mute things (Poussin) in order of the beautiful. This is the state the state of grace that Schelling thought the plastic arts could bestow human sensuous experience after the irredeemable apotheosis of nature: “In painting a lovely being that is neither  sensuous nor spiritual, but rather ungraspable, diffuses itself over the figure and nestle into all the figures and to each oscillation of the extremities. This being, which as we said, is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone, is what the Greek language calls kháris and we call grace (Anmut) [5]. And the movement of grace in painting is what initiates the transfiguration of death – the muted voices of the dead – into a divine whose sole task is the disclosure of presence. 

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Notes 

1.  G.W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics. Volume I (Oxford University Press, 1975), 169-170.

2.  Ibid., 597-98.

3. G.W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics. Volume II (Oxford University Press, 1975), 886-887.

4. Svetlana Alpers. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91. 

5. F.W. J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri : The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, 2021, Vol. 3, 146.

The vanishing horse. On Federico Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Federico Galende’s most recent essay El mínimo animal (ediciones metales pesados, 2025) is freestyle mediation on the singular animal that is the horse. When we say ‘horse’ we immediately dispense a bulky package: it is Pech Merle cave paintings and Franz Marc; it is Kafka’s parable of the racing red Indian, the agonizing horse in Picasso’s Guernica, as well as Juan José Saer’s mutilated horses in Nadie Nada Nunca (1980). Galende’s tiny mare, however, is first and foremost a memory of his childhood in the green grasslands of Córdoda that, we are told, had a big white spot in her muzzle. The first pages are spectacularly bucolic in a sedative language that retrieves a descriptive pollination of events and figures. But immediately the book gains depth and surprising detours. Galende notes that the relationship between humans and the horse differents slightly from that of pets, not as a question of scale, but primarily as complicity in language that shares the solitude between species: “…porque la del animal es una compania ofrecido a la soledad de lo humano en cuanto especie” (Galende 23). Avoiding the humanist temptation that makes the animal into a fantasy of the human, Galende’s situates the horse an experience beyond language. Is not this common solitude – that a few pages before Galende refers just in passing as ‘nocturnal communism’, in an esoteric allusion to his book on the cinema of Akis Kaurimakis – what has been usurped by the total domestication of species in a world that walks towards extinction? Galende’s El mínimo animal (2025) is an exercise in retrieving this innocence abode of man and animal in their reciprocal, and yet intransigent, mutation between worlds.

As a painterly writer, Galende is in full awareness that he must first interrupt the heraldic density of this animal. Because we know that the horse is an emblem of St. Paul’s way Damascus as much as it is one of modernity’s energy and mobilization. Galende is quite aware of it: the notion of “horse power” registers the unity of measurement of potential power for engines and motors. And just like the steamboat and gaslight, the horse stands a figure that unleashed a civilization defined by development and domestication of the world. The horse entered history through the main door of modern spiritualization (Galende does not elaborate on Napoleon’s famous horseback riding entrance in Germany, avoiding an image that is perhaps too obvious, already “manoseada”), allowing for social stabilization and homogenous time; the arrow of progress that underpins subjective historical consciousness. Galende writes, for instance: “De ser una masa abstracta que rodea la tierra, el espacio se convertía en una línea delgada, con la historia estirando un hilo la materia cósmica de la simultaneidad. Ahora, gracias al caballo, se tenía acceso a los lugares más retirados, solo que a causa de la velocidad de se los pasaba por alto de modo que lo que hasta allí había reinado de la imaginación comenzó a ser parte de lo accesorio, de lo circunstancial” (Galende 82). 

The unification of the planet under the nomoi of depredation would not have been possible without the domestication of the horse to coerce the acceleration of time as the index over space. As a cypher of time, the horse started to pop up everywhere progress made a violent incursion. This is perhaps why Galende, in a poetic style that seeks no conceptual scaffolding for self-assertion, claims that in its mystery the horse is not embedded in an ideal of freedom – which will be the freedom already fallen prey to the tribulations of civilization and the political world – as being in the world as such, without the pretensions of overcoming it; remaining a witness to permanent discontent in the open distance of some meadows (Galende 61). Can a notion of freedom be rethought from the figure of the horse at the end of history? Galende does not provide an answer, and his muteness is an attempt to resist transforming the horse into an apodictic symbolon of human anthropology transpiring meaning where there is none. The horse – and perhaps all animals are – stands for muteness and companionship without the burden of proof.

Perhaps the ultimate meaning in El mínimo animal (2025) can only be grasped in those silences, in what remains unthought and unsaid, which is another way of saying that Galende has provided the essay not only of form but of a soul. All things considered, the mystery of horse is a passing memory of the modern: speed, total mobilization, energy dispensation, the unity of a compact and legible world. What remains of the horse after the watershed of modern times; literally its exhaustion? Ultimately, the horse as species recalls the “specio”, which means to see, and to have the visibility for discernment; to be able to see with a sensible eye that blushes at the world before it crumbles into despair and conflagration at the threshold of the Anthropocene. And in many ways we are already there. Galende’s musings speak to an abundance trimmed by a trotting horse that only reappears in a poetizing that is capable of thinking and loving what has passed, like the epoch of horses. For Galende the horse is thus always sub specie aeternitatis. Towards the end of the book, and condensing Gottfried Benn’s argument on style as ranking higher than truth, Galende makes an open apology for appearance, that is rigorously eternal because it is concrete and unforgettable (Galende 91). 

Of course, the same can be said of Galende’s serpentine, courteous light prose – like a horse, that is, “una elegancia contenida” – that refuses the monumental and sterile retrievals of sedimented and dusty knowledge on the horse or any other animal (Galende 43). In this sense, Galende’s horse differs fundamentally from Blumenberg’s lion in its refusal to make of the species an anthropological metaphor, that is, a mere creed for the human bonum commune to stabilize social reality. Departing from the offerings of a meandering memory, Galende’s tiny animal is a vanishing horse that interrogates what it means to inhabit the space of non-relation that opens up when the modern scheme based on production, progress, and energy comes a halt. It is this “nothingness” what the vanishing horse reveals beyond itself, as Galende writes:

“Retirándose, el caballo le estaba advirtiendo a todo el siglo XX que la historia de retira con ellos y el mundo también, y todo lo que siguio 4 después de que por inercia ese siglo hiciera desfilar frente a sus narices las profecías más disparatadas…Pero no esperar nada no significa estar consciente de no esperar; puede ser al revés, que la nada sea una intersección invisible entre un sinfín de velocidades insustanciales. La aceleración de la vida – para decir lo con una expresión manoseada -…sirve para compensar este vacío que dura…” (Galende 87). 

In the stretched historicity of boredom and nothingness, memory awaits and assaults like an incoming galloping horse. And when Galende speaks of the “nothingness” that mediates between the temporalities of human action he is indexing the fabric of life; since authentic life only happens, as Don Delillo claims at the opening lines of Point Omega (2011) not when words have been spoken or inventions patented, but in the self-awareness of microscopic fragments of facticity. It is at this moment, when history unravels as a farcical script of putative norms of human action, and imagination can begin to gather species outside itself; in this way, perhaps once and for all, leaving behind the atrophies of nihilism already deposited in a language of strange instruments and recyclable data.

Just like Marguerite Duras’ Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953), where the Etruscan sculpture of a winged horse fails to enter the plot of a community of friends at a beach-town; Galende’s horse also disappears in the concluding pages of the book. In fact, there are two disappearances: first, the equestrian statue of Baquedano in Plaza Italia after the October social revolt of 2019; and, more importantly, that of his childhood mare in the hills of Córdoba. The vanishing horse at the limit of prose recalls the reality of the living for which there is no tropology: “…nunca conocí a ese ser, así como no es possible – nunca jamás – conocer a los seres ni tampoco el fin de ninguna historia” (Galende 110). As the horse makes his exit, we can only be sure that life has taken place elsewhere. Only because it has been transfigured in thought, Galende is able to seize a glimpse of it; a glimpse that is imperceptible and diluted before vanishing forever.

Casa Bayona’s pensive slave. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the Church Santa María del Rosario of Havana there is a pendentive cycle completed in the 1770s painted by the baroque artist José Nicolás de Escalera – whom according to Guy Pérez Cisneros, was truly the first professional Cuban painter of the tradition – that includes a black slave in a pensive pose seating on a lower step, just below a Dominican priest who figures prominently in the middle of the picture holding a Bible and raising his right arm forward [1]. It has been noted that the figure of the black slave is also the first portrait of a slave in the New World, and its meaning has been highly disputed. The enigmatic slave or liberto portrait shows the man in a thinking pose, with a folded long white shirt, and what seems to be a wooden rosary hanging in plain sight. It is hard to make the details of his facial expressions, but it is obvious that his gaze is neither upwards nor directed at the viewer, but rather suspended, as if were, in a moment of attention and rest (and also listening?). The context here is fundamental, since Santa María del Rosario Church was commissioned by the Count of Bayona, a wealthy member of the sacarocracia (sugar plantation owner) after a previous church was burned to the ground by a slave revolt that took place in 1727 in an act of complete defiance to Christian indoctrination. 

The event that only has come down to us in just a handful of mentions and erasures of the colonial archive is featured prominently, as we know, in Manuel Moreno Fraginals’ El Ingenio when the historian documents the spiritual schism of the eighteenth century colonial plantations of the island. According to Fraginals’ historical account, the slave insurrection in the plantation took place in the wake of a theatrical enactment proposed by the Count of Casa Bayona in an act of repentance and humility aiming to mimic a well known moment of the Christian story: one day the Count washed the feet of twelve slaves, and when he finished he made them sat with him for dinner. Later that afternoon the slaves revolted and burnt down the whole sugar mill, including the chapel, to the ground. The episode ended with a plantation mayoral officer hunting down the runaway slaves, who was ordered to place the heads of the dead slaves high in spikes for the Count and everyone to see them [2]. It is an early staging of visibility and bodily dominion that the modern epoch will take to its final conclusion. 

The portrayal of human suffering was a symptom of the impossible hegemony of christianization of body and soul that the missionary Nicolás Duque de Estrada decades later will try to deploy in his pedagogical treatise Explicación de la doctirna cristiana acomoada a la capacidad de los negros bozales (1823), which argued that obedience of slaves could be achieved by implating “guilt” and work ethic in the affective interiority, in the forum internum of their souls. But even Estrada was of the fact that after sixteen hour workdays the Christian ascesis was imperceptible and little more than convoluted chatter to the ears of the slave. It is almost as if the slave, separated from the politico-theological inscription of salvation, was already outside the subjective domination of productive bondage and political freedom.

When Escalera was commissioned to do the cycle of frescos at Santa María del Rosario he was asked to combine a twofold narrative: the history of Christian salvation and the story of the Casa Bayona. At the center of the altar piece is the world as a common house or oikos, that carries history and its bodily sovereignty forward. One possible reading of the pensive slave shown in Santa María del Rosario’s pendentive is to assume that this figure is completely outside the eschatological vision embodying a sense of freedom that only painting could have documented in its unique and mute language. This raises the question about the relation between painting and freedom in which the figural emerges unmistakably fixed beyond historical narration. Although writing about Cézanne’s late work, Kurt Badt once suggested that there is no such a thing as the representation of freedom, but rather “painting generates a concept of freedom as two-faced: negatively, it is liberation from isolation and resistance, positively to the serious gentleness of freedom….expression in freedom to the scene from nature, which declares the world to be existing together, a mutual self-supporting and carrying of things” [3]. The pensive slave portrayed in the pendentive does not embody freedom understood as the spiritual accumulation of rights and duties known to the order of historical transformation; rather is an absolute pictorial appearance of freedom because it embodies, in its non-separation of life and thought, a static moment of a being that contemplates the liberty of his potency.

What is striking about the collective portrait where Escalera inserted the former slave is what we can call, following Bernard Berenson, a dimension of the ineloquent that appears just as “mute, with no urgent communication to make, and no thought of rousing us with look and gesture. If they express anything it is the character, essence rather than momentary feeling or purpose. They manifest potentiality rather than activity. It is enough that they exist in themselves” [4]. In the pensive gesture of his pose, the slave is the untouched existence and the revolt that rips the escathological narrative that ordains the interiors of Santa María del Rosario. Malraux once noted that the age of the divine disdained the realistic portrait of an ordinary person, because he was too distant and mundane from the stone conclave of the gaze of the gods. The slave’s inexpressive ‘naturalness’ refrains from partaking into a mood compensated by the semantic compulsion of the colonial painter, because his naturalness discloses the indestructible soul that has transfigured the realm of the divine. 

The unfathomable mystery of the pensive slave or liberto is the obscure and yet luminous portrait of a life in thought that is, at the same time, the thought of a life that is forever inexpressive, and as such the highest state of imperturbable freedom in the aftermath of worldly destruction. The ‘gentleness of freedom’ that Badt locates at the heart of painting is the imperative of the stream that carries, and yet restrains, thought and appearance into the figure of life. The freedom that anchors painting – because such freedom is never realized in painting except as vulgarity – becomes a tacit secret for which ultimately there is no image.  

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Notes 

1.Guy Pérez Cisneros. Características de la evolución de la pintura en Cuba (Ministerio de Educación, 1959).

2. Manuel Moreno Fraginals. El Ingenio (Crítica, 2001), 99.

3. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cézanne (Faber & Faber, 1965), 314.

4. Bernard Berenson. Piero Della Francesca: The Ineloquent in Art (Chapman & Hall 1954), 7.

The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

The central question that “The Aleph” raises is as banal as difficult to answer: who is Beatriz Viterbo? For one, she is dead. Borges’ Leibnizian experiment with the infinite point of the universe is that even assuming that we account for all the possible predicates of this person we still cannot exhaust who lurks behind “Beatriz Viterbo”. In a way, Beatriz remains encrypted in a house soon to be demolished, remaining unattainable and mysterious in the passing of the world. As we know, there have been critics that have taken up the detective task to understand the significance of the name Beatriz Viterbo by probing the story’s dedication to Estela Canto, who later became the rightful owner of the original manuscript, and that connects to Dante’s Divine Comedy in terms of its cantiche structure as well as the figure of Beatrice [1]. However, as Giorgio Agamben once said regarding the Italian poet, it is utterly senseless to attempt to identify a subject behind Beatrice, since what is at stake in Dante’s poetics, perhaps of all poetics, is the experiment of language as an experience of love [2]. What the name Beatriz Viterbo enacts is no different. 

Indeed, in Borges’ Beatriz Viterbo this experience of love is one that fundamentally lacks images and predicates of this world; which means that love, if to be held as an intensity of the living, in the name harbors the region between life and death, between memory and forgetting. These distinctions are not oppositional, but rather an angular index that defines erotic intensity; and, as we know, the name is the supreme vehicle of the impropriety of oneself because it precedes it. As Borges writes in “The theologians” also included in The Aleph: “There are some that look for love in a woman in order to forget her; in order to cease thinking about her” [3]. The fundamental formlessness of love does not depend on neither images nor acts, but on the enduring vocative or song (canto) that shines forth in the open secret of the name. 

This is why the portrait of the deceased is insufficient for the narrator of the story. In a moment that is the clearest parallelism to the concatenation of “things seen” in the aleph, the name appears four times in repetition: “Beaitriz, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre…” [4]. If Osip Mandelstam once remarked that the “eye is an instrument of thought”, one could say that the the voice of the name is the instance where language and thought coincide without remainder; a convergence of Heaven and Earth, of the dead and the living in the grain of the voice. There are no static images of Viterbo because her mysterious life, the unlived life with the narrator, is precisely the missing image guarded by the name. In the basement, facing upwards to peek into the aleph, we are told that he, Borges, will be able to “establish a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz” (“podrás entablar un diálogo con todas la imágenes de Beatriz”). But what the aleph cannot yield is the missing image that is only the event of his irreducible linguistic contact proper to his memory. Once again Maldelstam: “The word, the name, is a psyche…does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten” [5]. But what is not forgotten is not that quality or that image of a person, but the enduring rustling of a name that recalls the oldest human experience: the mystery of the voice.

It might also be for this reason that Beatriz Viterbo recalls not just Dante’s divine and eternal Muse, but the world of the dead; the vetus in ‘Viterbo’, that is, the oldest or ‘most ancient’ life that dwells in the underworld, because its direct provenance is the archaic Etruscan civilization [6]. If Beatrice, as the trope of transcendence beyond the Earth has been a repeated object of literary interpretation, Viterbo as the vetus burial has rarely generated any interest (if the house of Viterbo is being demolished, this also means that in her proper name is the burial site at the end of remembrance). 

In the cadence of the name “Beatriz Viterbo” we can hear the transit between the living and the dead, the invisible and the present, the possible predications as well as the defaced; a work of oblivion in virtue of its own caducity. “Me trabajó otra vez el olvido”, writes Borges towards the end evoking the erosion of forgetting in the void of nonpresence: the working of eros pushes to the end, towards absolute oblivion through the very accruing of remembrance. Life is this immemorial that is encrypted, as if were, in a handful of names. 

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Notes 

1. Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Jorge Luis Borges : A Literary Biography (Paragon House, 1988), 414.

2. Giorgio Agamben. “No amanece el cantor”, in En torno a la obra de José Ángel Valente (Alianza Editorial, 1996), 49.

3. Jorge Luis Borges. “Los teólogos”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 50.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El Aleph”, in El Aleph (Alianza Editorial, 1999), 189. 

5. Osip Mandelstam. “The Word and Culture” (1921), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1975, 531.

6. Adolfo Zavaroni. Etymological Dictionary of Etruscan Words (2024), 310.

The love of painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

There might very well be an internal affinity between painting and love that at some point it becomes indistinguishable. A painterly picture can become love unquenched for that which remains persistently fixed and unrealizable. In one of the short essay books of his Big Sur period, Henry Miller asked this very question of painting. For him panting had a wondering origin that crosses the hand, undoing what we can easily enact. The erotic dimension of painting, thus, has nothing to do with the image or figure of the beloved, but rather with a specular limitation staged in the ability to allow the unseen to be incorporated in the visible scheme of the world. Only if we are able to see – and by the same token, only if there we are facing an event of painting – can something like use can be liberated from the constraints of mimetic compulsion. Miller writes in To Paint is to Love Again (1960): 

“To paint is to love again. It is only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to a certain manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat or unpalatable unless it is our power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see .See into and around. Or, as John Marin, once put it – “art must show what goes on in the world” [1]. 

The place of painting for Miller is an imperturbable state that refuses to be fixated on objects, but in the invisible region (as in the figure of the chora) that allows for the thing in the world to be used. This is why Miller considered Japanese watercolor and prints an absolute primer of the pictorial: it taught him the appearance of worlds within the world, regionalizing the surroundings never logically stated unto itself, which in modernity it became the catastrophic horizon of autonomy towards its posterior liquidation. This is why Miller, very much like Carlo Levi, understood that the crisis of painting in the Western tradition ultimately signaled a general sense of social terror as a new phase of human desperation attenuated by the circulation of social fictions. 

At the height of the the closure of civilization, painting reemerged, if Kurt Badt’s axiom is correct, as the last metaphysical activity of human praxis. A metaphysical activity that holds on to the experience of belief in suspended appearance of originary anthropogenesis. For Miller, in painting as much as in love “one must be a true believer” [2]. And this assertion must be understood in the backdrop of Miller’s experiential retreat in the landscape of Big Sur: an experience away from the closure of American city life in research of a “feeling of aloness as spiritual achievement”, as a relation of oneself towards disclosure [3]. In this sense, the painter is a counter-social figure that, refusing to make stir in the world, turns to serenity, silence, and to the pressing contours of the unfathomable beyond any prefiguration. The believer in painting – who is a figure of belief in the desert, after the flight of the gods in the nocturnal vigil of history – is the thrust to the experience of things without barristers or shortcuts to what is revealed.

The age of automation in mid-century transformation of American industrial production serves as the historical backdrop of Miller’s indictment regarding the poverty and eventual disappearance of painting due to the autonomization of human praxis and the gigantic scale in spatial organization. Following Georges Duhamel’s prognosis in America: the menace (1931), he shared the intuition that the crisis of dexterity meant the impossibility of realizing painting, now situated beyond the grasp of human absorption [4]. A land without landscape that, as Adorno noted, bears no traces of the human hand. And this was seen already in the 1950s when the rise of abstract expressionism in North American announced not just the end of easel painting, but the funeral of the whole pictorial tradition. The barbarism of gigantic and unlimited Americanism would run counter to painting as a sensorial activity that embraced the vital limitations of its region. 

Miller’s insistence on painting was an eulogy to a life as experience – painting is indistinguishable from the hands and souls of the painters that he encountered and shared his life – and the value of poverty as absolute necessity for a life that regionalizes our contact with the world. It was through the love of painting that humanity could only restore its divine presence without rest.

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Notes 

1. Henry Miller. To Paint is to Love Again (Cambria Books, 1960), 17. 

2. Ibid., 39

3. Henry Miller. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions, 1957), 34.

4. Georges Duhamel. America: the menace (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 85.