It is only towards the end of his novella Un altro mare (1991) where Claudio Magris deploys a philosophical synthesis on the character and lesson of Carlo Michelsteadter. In the narrative, this occurs when historical time accelerates, and we cross from the crumbling of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to the rise of Italian fascism and the confrontation between the German military occupation and the partisan forces and the postwar years. For Magris’ Gorizia characters this threshold leads the way into the historical epoché of a long civilizational decay and existential fatigue, where even the attempt to carve a ‘hide out’ (a community of salvation?) seems rather defeating. This is where Magris deploys his philosophical thesis – it must be quoted in full:
“This too is dumb pain, a weight that falls and crushes, the delirium of believing that life is redeemable, the illusion of the “I” which finds liberation from the world’s madness by sinking to the level of brute existence. Fortunately life is a short, painful negative adverb – “non-being” – and not something everlasting. The eternal scorches that “non, that tiny, ferocious sting. To keep to oneself and to turn to flame – that is true liberation from every single changeable thing. And nothing is more changeable than man.” [1].
A dumb pain that crushes humanity forever. And where Magris writes in lapidary tone that nothing is “more changeable than man”, one can also read – it is impossible not to hear it – what Blanchot says of Antelme’s camp testimony: that man is indestructible because he can be infinitely destroyed. But for Magris the enduring (it might not be the proper word) lesson of Michaelsteadter’s thought is that it accounts the refusal of a trascendental delegated life on the side of the redeemable and the messianic, always too functional to the same historical – rhetorical architecture of Western rationality. Could the perspective of persuasion be an alternative to the outlook of redemption (Adorno)? We can leave this question hanging for the moment. Perhaps one of the “fundamental lies”, to put it in Nietzschean overtone, is to believe the political legend of contractualism in which the compensation for “fear” of the state of nature is solely cured by the entry to the historical time of the civilizational principle can overcome the sense of pain.
The price to be paid for the Hobbesian logic is high: in other words, it is the dumbing of pain in life, which entails the course to optimize, suppress, and perhaps, in our contemporary vocabulary, to “medicalize” its symptoms (is not not health afterall the secularization of salvation). In English language, to speak of “dumbing” also entails “dumbing down” the quality of something or someone. Hence, the dumbing pain in which ‘life will go on without truly living’ in the reproduction of the Social will already presuppose a non-thinking life; a life that betrays and runs aways from the possibility of its ethical exposure. This is the befall towards historical time and the abstraction of positivism and value, by which precisely “every single thing” will become changeable and exchangeable for them to become legible.
For Magris, the strategy of persuasion is not a political or social technology, it is rather a refusal of living in the time of the changeable and the civilizational organizational capacities to “hide ourselves from the reality of our own emptiness”, in which the promotion of pain is rendered oblivious through the working out of a life that has already accepted the reification of death [2]. If we are to follow John Ruskin to the letter, this is the spirit of the triumph of bourgeoisie civilizing enterprise: “vulgarity is one of the forms of Death”, he writes [3]. The acceptance of vulgar life does not mean the end of life in exceptional historical or spectacular moments (as frequently as they have become); it is the suppression of persuaded life after the fall of prophets, higher values, and transcendental principles that accumulate in useless rubble.
Vulgarity, then, is the aesthetic vortex of what social pain can only organize through the reproduction of realized self-defacement. It could very well be that what Magris says with and about Michelstaedter in Un altro mare (1991) runs parallel to what he calls the “impolitical anarchism” of Joseph Roth’s world colored by the irreducible fragments of individual feelings, passions, and working through the loneliness of pain that oscillates in the ocean of language that struggles to retain a world [4]. This is the life of the soul that before the eclipse of the modern eon (including the real existing communism, as Magris takes into account): resist, in full force, the spillover of ethical vulgarity to persuade oneself that, even after redemption, there are other irreducible paths towards death.
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Notes
1. Claudio Magris. A Different Sea (Harper Collins, 1993), 86.
2. Ibid., 56.
3. John Ruskin. “On Vulgarity”, in Modern Painters (1860), V.5, 348.
4. Claudio Magris. Lontano da dove: Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Einaudi editore, 1971), 225.
One is always struck by the pictorial intensity of Massacio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” fresco (1425) at Santa Maria del Carmine Chapel. It has something to do with the unbounded expressivity swirled by an acoustic of lamentation that springs from both faces at once. The nakedness in movement only comes second. If it is right to call it ‘modern’ is precisely because of its polarity between movement and paralysis, light and shadow, the formation of the lines delineating the bodies and the free-style strokes that carry Massacio’s picture to a strict and unsurpassed balance. It is a picture of the gathering of lamentation and pain, which confirms Ernesto de Martino’s intuition that in the ritual of mourning weeping and crying is also accompanied by an act of self-defacement, such as covering the face or bring the face as close as possible to the lower body position. Adam’s pain is reinforced by the hand that covers and pulls the face downwards, almost making it disappear. In a way, his walkout of Paradise is already the stroll of a nobody.
There is perhaps an intimate relationship between defacement and pain. In his short gloss on this work, Robert Longhi notes that the source of strength of Massacio’s work is given by the intensity of light that bathes the bodies of Adam and Eve in its purest naked form [1]. This total exposition is the cause of sin that, as a great historian of religion has brought to our attention, presupposes the entire carnalization of both body and soul after being thrown into the soteriological world of the living [2]. From now on, human life vested in pain means paying the price of the destruction of the soul for the protected and preventive set up in the world.
The sinful life – a life that will have to be chosen but punished justly – entails the consummation of pain as the central tonality of post-felix culpa existence. In other words, it is not that life is shameful because it has been dispossessed (or because it recognizes itself possessed); it is dispossessed because it can no longer look at the world outside the blinding light of programmed obsolescence towards death without transcendence. And the liquidation of transcendence means that human beings become faceless entities in a world that will forever become unfathomable.
In our days – a present marked by absolute secularization of ancient religious somatic religiosity and magical traces – the phenomenon of defacement and the faceless far from disappearing is all over the world around us. The ritualistic mask which provided transcendence to the living presence of the divine gods has now become a symbol of social shame self-imposed by arbitrary and ever-increasing moral mandates. In a sense, we have not yet left the path initiated in Massacio’s Adam and Eve fresco, and who knows if we’ll ever exit it in the ongoing destruction of the human species. We do know, however, that any meaningful change of the current state of things can only take place starting at the divine surface of the face, as Carlo Levi so eloquently understood it in the postwar years:
“Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. If we go through the streets and compare the faces we see with our memory of them, we won’t recognize persons any more. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world”. [3]
Notes 1. Roberto Longhi. Breve pero auténtica historia de la pintura italiana (Machado Libros, 2023), 114. 2. Paula Fredriksen. Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 116. 3. Carlo Levi. La doppia notte dei tigli (Einaudi, 1959), 109.
Paying a visit to a painter’s studio is a rare experience, but definitely gratifying. Or at least, it has been for a long time even before I could put it to words. At her studio, I confirm that Laura Carralero’s commitment to painting as a practical activity has an unfathomable dimension, and I was pleasantly surprised that she shared the same sentiment that our current epoch is not one in which painting has a minimal breathing space. And whenever painting emerges in the official market circuits of art, it seems that it is always already parasitical to some verbose rhetorical apparatus or heteronomic planning that distortions the painterly sentiment. But was not painting the task of speaking the engagement regarding “mute things”, as Poussin would have it? There is little doubt that rhetorical inflation that thrives in mechanisms to legitimate art continuously devalorizes the mysterious proximity of painting with things in the world. We should reflect – or we should continue to reflect – about what it means to be in a point in the history of humankind where the obsolescence of painting and the disappearance of the dexterous achievement of the hand has thoroughly been realized (Focillon’s praise of the hand remains as actual as when it was first written: “The artist that cuts wood, twerks metal or rock keeps alive a very ancient human past that without which we would immediately cease to exist. Is not admirable to see in the mechanical age this stubborn human survivor of the ages of the hand?”) [1].
The task is immense and abnormal, and it defies (because it exceeds it) the theoretical concept and the absolutism of the philosopher. The engagement of the painters – a secret community that still exists here and there, in different geographies of the world – is precisely a keeping of the divine vortex of the human in the abyss without higher pretensions. And there is something stubbornly strange about painting against the mounting force of destruction. Although perhaps ‘resistance’ here means nothing but to hold on to the originary instance of appropriation of experience in the wake of the epochal mutation of anthropogenic composure; as if the end of the species is also pulsating its commencement.
Holding to painting is not just a substitute to the act of refusal (something that I have recently mapped out); rather, it refuses the very negation of the anthropological erosion in its soulful interaction with what it remains outside of language. To hold on to painting means to engage in the imperturbable: what discourse cannot mold and relocate; what previously is poor in language so that a new language, and thus a new world, could emerge anew among the rubble. In his forthcoming book Those Passions, T.J. Clark states, quite forcefully, that no political transformation or epochal breakthrough can emerge without a preliminary transformation in language; and, I am tempted to say, that practice of painting is the topoi in which eye, world, and hand come together in the very act of separation of said renewal.
The terror of painting – only aggravated in the last decades or so, although a process that took off the postwar years and continued into schools of art where militant pedagogues can only shout “don’t bother to paint!” – is the general stimulus of the reified world; a world in which the paradigm of “objethood” now stands as the compensatory empty experience for poignant idolization of nothingness and “mere stuff”. Sure, there is no return to painting in its grandiose historical sequences – Renaissance, French modern painting, the European Baroque, Van Eyck’s optical discoveries – which ultimately means that painting’s instantiation with the tradition is also bare and unexplored; or, absolutely uncharted whenever there the event of true painting. While I glance at Carralero’s diminutive wooden oil paintings I have this in mind at least. There is a return to the divinity of the icon, but it is not a restitution of its theological investiture and its purported liturgy; the pictorial exercise takes into account the structural void in which painting finds itself resisting, for better or worse, representationalexcess.
And this speaks, I take it, to the muteness of painting as such, which is also Carralero’s silence about the import of medieval icons into the present. In a way, the painterly operation (I realize that this expression is awful) is executed in a paradoxical redemption, since space always calls forth presentism, a here and now. One is reminded of Stevens’ verses in “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “To say good-bye to the past and to live and to be / in the present state of things as, say, to paint / In the present state of painting and not the state of thirty years ago”. The emphasis of the verse declines towards that injunction “as say, to paint”, which fixes a current state of being in the world where we are in it but outside of it. Is not this, precisely, another description of the “Just”? I am eager to work through painting’s stubborn position to this description, which means to hold on to the imperturbable.
The imperturbable seems to me like a fitting term to grasp what Carralero is doing in her pictures, although with no pretensions to exhaust her pictorial adventure. The solemnity of the icon and its inverted gnosis yields something palpable as well as unattainable. What is being held is the vortex of painting’s mystery going back to Lascaux and ancient burial paintings. Carralero rationalizes her interest in medieval and Eastern European religious painting as a retreat from the unbreathable decay of contemporary pictorial practice as a general tendency. Here the renewal of painting is only possible through the sensible dimension of an integrative imagination. Hence, to live in the present, in the hour Stevens’ simile, is also to dwell in the flashes of painting’s general economy of sensible forms. A new history of freedom can take this as its point of departure; that is, to posit no longer the social functionalization of norms and rules for relations, but to expand the sensible space of the innumerable symbols of existence.
In the well-known essay “The Pathology of Freedom”, Günther Anders says something significant about painting’s imperturbable nature: “Painting that fixes the aspect of a man or a thing in a picture seems as it were to repeat the act by which each thing is already condemned to itself” [2]. This “being-precisely-this” could be taken as the closure of contingency in relation to all possible forms; although it is also painting in which the contingency of the non-visible in the visible what arranges the possibility of what is precisely absolute contingent as absolute in each picture. This is why in great pictures we tend to feel that the consummation of form reveals as a necessary tradition that, by virtue of being thus, it assume the thisness of the particular rendition. This commitment that weighs heavy in each of Carralero’s paintings is a testamentary to the imperturbable even if we are already entering (or already in it) the eclipsing world of the mystery of the senses, a world that can no longer see the redeeming and unassuming vision that painting can offer.
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Notes 1. Henri Focillon. Elogio de la mano (UNAM, 2010), 131-132.
2. Günther Anders. “The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification”, Deleuze Studies, Vol.3. 2009, 283.
Victoria Cirlot’s vibrant short book, Taüll: liturgia y visión en los ábsides románicos catalanes (Mudito&Co, 2023) focuses on the well-known apse fresco panels of the Romanesque Saint Climent Church (Lleida) dating back to the twelfth century now housed in the Museo Nacional de Arte de Catalunya (MNAC), whose central figure is a Maesteis domini elevated to representation of the highest celestial cosmos. In another sense, Taüll should also be read (and perhaps the obligatory accent here is necessary) as a synthesis of Cirlot’s own work on the theological infusion of visuality and what it means to “see” and “being seeing” in a world that strives for legibility. Cirlot has no ‘presentist’ anxieties about the Romanesque period – its iconographic and overtly enigmatic depiction – but it is not difficult to think of the Christian temple as an aesthetic laboratory, or artist studio, in which the liturgical dimension functioned not much so much as a private space for the faithful, but rather as a site of encounters and vital experience (Cirlot 11).
The liturgical performance depended on visual arrangement that opened visions of the inner sense, which Cirlot quoting Saint Augustine calls acies anime — transcendence through a sensible awakening that encompassed all the senses. Following Pavel Floresnky in his study about the Church as the synthesis of the arts, Cirlot attempts to portray the impossible experience at Tüll as the site of the life of the spirit; that is, where the spirit is transformed and released (Cirlot 12). Before there is acclamation and synthesis, there is an unfathomable experience facilitated by the liturgical imagery which is a passage or a preparation of sorts.
It is almost impossible for us today – situated at the threshold of the autonomization of the arts and the division of its practices – to grasp the antecedent image (imago) through figures of what will only later be seen. Cirlot quotes Saint Paul to anchor this difficult chiasmatic movement of veiling-unveiling: “Now we see through a mirror, an enigma, but later we will see face to face (Cor.1.13) (Cirlot 22). Is the pictorial unveiling, or rather veiling, the juxtaposition of the image in space what will ultimately solve the enigma of unmediated appearance? And could appearance be released without its dependence on the mystery that prescribes the image making and destruction well into the totalization of modern pseudos at the art of depiction? There are conscious echos of Carchia’s thinking (in my reading of Cirlot, that is), which I think help to grant a bit more breathing space, as it were, to Cirlot’s unelaborated suggestion that “Pero la pintura es el fruto, no de una percepción sensible, sino del ojo visualiza eso que tiene que ser despertado en la interacción de los sentidos físicos” (Cirlot 23).
To paint, or the painterly activity, is the gathering of an inner vision, where there is no more separation between the autonomous senses (visions, touch, flavor). Cirlot notes how the detailing of the querubin angel having small eyes painting on their hands would confirm this thesis. The movement of the hands registers a vision that touches the proximity of the specular Glory of transcendence. Following Henry Corbin, Cirlot can remind us that the angel for the mystical tradition is an entity whose “being is only vision” (Cirlot 28). In turn, the all-seeing angel is not a bird’s view (I guess today we will also say a drone commanded from a computing application) that has total vision over the terrestrial grid; it is more a vision that is able to see each thing — given that his divine vision he can see God in everything, and things in themselves because the painterly eye can only look outwards through the inner eye of the heart (Cirlot 38). In fact, the heart’s eye is a retreat from the world of countable and visual things, as transcendence becomes the mere contact of the senses with the divine.
Part of the difficulty of grasping what is taking place at the Saint Climent of Taüll apse resides in a gesture that is the inversion of pictorial verisimilitude, if one is to take up Michael Fried’s thesis in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) as a reduction of disenchanted pictorial representation. In other words, the pictorial manifestation at Tüll is neither theatrical nor figural absorption for the spectators, but it was rather an experience with the liturgical mystery that strived in the liberation of the soul at the uncharted height of God itself (Cirlot 40). And perhaps of being a mode, among many, with the presence of God in things, and things and names as already expressing the unavowable nature of the divine. Cirlot’s thesis gains traction and depth at this point, since the central task of pictorial creation at Tüll is to find the means of granting visible to what must remain invisible (the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist mysterium) that breaks away from the implementation of imitatio naturae (Cirlot 44). This also speaks as to why Cirlot, with prudential reasons, never speaks of an aesthetic sublime that this pictorial commitment with the theos and experience clearly appears to reject. In the sublime construction, sense has been subordinated to the negative position, by which the return of representation will reveal itself in its erasure.
The seemingly absorptive theatricality does not stand up to the highest music of the aspirations at Tüll. Once again Florensky appears as a central interpretive key for Cirlot: the iconomic and atmospheric opening of Romanesque art frees contemplation to a degree in which vision and the outside of life entangle to such a degree that no autonomization of the ‘aesthetic experience’ can formalize the sensorial gathering of the invisible upwards where “el alma no podía descansar”, or where the soul knows no rest. One can also recall Kurt Badt when writing about Constable meteorological landscape: such opening in the picture is the true organ of sentiment. But “that world is long gone” – the world of visual liturgical at Taüll – concludes Cirlot, and something similar could be said of the practice of painting. The minimal lesson at Taüll is as simple as it is difficult: any access to the world today requires to divest from the hand of technē so that the hand of pictura can take hold of the fleeting mystery of a life experienced. Such is the enduring vital vision at Taüll.
“Symbolism and immortality”, was the title of a talk that a very young Boris Pasternak gave in 1913 to a group of students, although the paper was finalized around 1917. It has been known that the integral version was destroyed or misplaced, and only a synthesis was preserved in the author’s papers, which provides access to the thicket of the argument, which concerned ultimately the immortality of artistic creation and the transhistorical participation of the human species in the enduring process. Pasternak himself inscribes this lecture at the heights of his ars poetica: “My main purpose was to put forward the proposal that perhaps this maximally subjective and universally human corner or lot of the soul was art’s immemorial area of activity and its chief content. And, further, that although the artist is of course mortal like everybody else, the happiness of existence which he has felt is immortal and can be felt through his works by others centuries after him” [1]. Unlike the contentious positions about the creative genius and the orientation of the poet (dichter als Führer) that soon enough will inform the thick aura of European modernism in the age of dissonance, for Pasternak in the 1910s (the same decade as the early Lukacs and the youthful Michelstaedter), creation concerned a gathering of experience outside subjectivity; it was fundamentally the experience of the outside beyond the subject, which could only be cultivated by the poetic sensibility’s relation to that outside. It is not clear where there was a figural specificity to the notion of “poet” that Pasternak advances; but, what is essential, is that the poetic task was only possible through a spiritual formation and deployment of symbolization, that is, of the transfigurative use of language.
Pasternak does not distinguish between vulgar and crafted poetic language; rather he uses the term symbolism to account for the sensible immortal reservoir that is transmitted in the stratification of the genesis of the human race. It is not of minor importance that Pasternak is writing in the dawn of a concrete materialist revolution, in which possession is only registered, counted, and even “destroyed” as mere “stuff”, thus incapable of solving the crisis of the transmission of tradition and blind to the problem of sense. Indeed, perhaps the revolution can only deepen the epochal crisis of symbolization. Pastnark will write affirmatively: “Immortality takes possession of the contents of the soul…in pure form this is what symbolism teaches” [2]. In a conception that is strikingly similar to Warburg & Saxl’s conception of the symbol (and history now designed as a study of the coagulation of symbologies) as a surplus discharged of energy as the reservoir of human sensation and formulas of imagination (the pathos formulae); the attunement towards symbolization never amounts to an accumulation of meaning and narration, but rather it is what preserves the earliest and purest stages of human expression, as argued by Saxl [3].
This is why there is no immortality except in the beginning: the real process of the anthrogenesis is only accessible in those moments of passion and experience while “being observant and drawing from nature”, Pasternak will claim in his talk. The immortality to be retained, it seems now clear, is not that of a future and postponed soteriological communal “life”; it is rather a life that clings to the ordinary and intuitive symbolism that resists the monstrous numbing of fictitious life commanded by the blackmail of the reality principle required by orderability. In this light, perhaps Alfred Metraux is right in that going beyond the neolithic age marked a catastrophic wandering for human beings. (And is not the poetic instantiation a painful reminder of this?)
The stratification of symbolism was of a higher reality; a playful dance between the figure and the non-figural, between the visible and the invisible, between the countable and the non-countable. Pasternak situates this tendency under the sign of “theos“, a religious character in which the texture of the soul is able to find some breathing space as condition of possibility for the opening of symbolism. Modernity is many things at once, but for Pasternak what was being “withered away” at the altar of morality and politics, Church and State (his terms verbatim) was precisely the historical draught of the symbolic man: “The communion of mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic, because it is full of meaning” [4]. This means that there is no community of salvation that serves as the general economy transport between the two kingdoms; if there is a Kingdom it is only of the symbolization of the irreducibility of souls, that can only enjoy immortality in the renunciation of what the materialist and survivalist life is capable of offering in detriment of the experiential possibilities of creation and language when grasping the sense of deathlessness.
In the life of civil society you will live organized only unto death, without any experience of immortal death of any other, given that death has become mere transaction, a burdensome logistical ritual, a common spectacle. And this is why Pasternak, unlike the Cold War pawn that sometimes he was forced to embody, gradually became convinced that poetic existence could only take place outside the Social with no role or mission to subscribe to: “Do not reserve a poet’s position: it is a dangerous, if not empty” [5]. What was at stake was not a “new life” but a second birth (title of his own poetry collection, Vtoroe Roshdenie from 1934) to plunge into the depth of symbolization. The task is not to invent anything “new” (that modern fetishism), but to regain the life of the soul where the origin commences: “…and here art stops, And earth and fate breath in your face” [6]. It is a mysterious and impossible portrait of a face that reckons with the passing of the symbol and its absolute mystery. The very texture of expressivity that, against all odds, lingers on.
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Notes
1. Boris Pasternak. An essay in Autobiography (Collins and Harvill Press, 1919), 69.
2. Boris Pasternak. “Symbolism and immortality”, in The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writing on Inspiration and Creation (2008), 40-41.
3. Fritz Saxl. “The expressive gestures of Fine Arts”, in Lectures V1-V2 (Warburg Institute, 1957).
4. Boris Pasternak. “Foreword”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 14.
5. Boris Pasternak. “To a Friend”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 100.
6. Boris Pasternak. “Second Birth”, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), 109.
In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption. In a certain sense, Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.
Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema (2023), she admits that any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles – presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33).
As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema.
The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye.
No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.
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Notes
1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.
2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.
At the outset of L’espéce humaine (1947), Robert Antelme discloses the difficulty between language and experience that lays at the heart of the book, and which is never thoroughly assumed at the level of form in the novel. L’espèce humaine (1947) is ultimately not an account about the impossibility of describing what took place in the camps; from the banal physical violence to the desperate hunger, from the microaggressions to the slightest movements and carnage of bodies in space; from the joyful smiles in the most miserable of scenario where the ultimate goal was for the human life to slowly rot; the sequence of actions engage in no struggle to bring to a crisis the level of representation. And Antelme goes into painstaking efforts to give us a full picture of what took place, only to never talk about it again in writing or in personal conversations as Marguerite Duras tells us [1]. So, what to make of Antelme’s initial affirmation in the “Forword” where he states that: “…during the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive and we felt a frantic desire to describe it as such as it had been…[..]. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be checking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” [2]. The unimaginable for Antelme is a sort of threshold of language; a limit for the unrestricted, that is, for what could allow for an experiment of language after the catastrophe, or in the wake of the civilizational catastrophe that is consummated in the camp.
This delirium and anxiety over language – to tell it now and how it happened and to tell “the world”, only to immediately acknowledge the impossible task of doing so – does not take place at the order of the narrative; it is first and foremost something that we get a glimpse of at the end of the book as the liberating soldiers enter the rubbled towns only to encounter the incontinence of the survivors “talk and talk, and pretty soon he isn’t listening anymore” [3]. At that moment, the face to face between human beings will follow “to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge”, Antelme tells us [4]. But what type of untransmittable and nocturnal knowledge is Antelme referring to here? It is not about some ethical exigency of the defacement of experience through linguistic construction; it is rather the torrential and densely weight of description and events, that numbs and deposes language in the very mediation of its effective sayability. The experience of human suffering and domination is untransmittable not because there is a deficit in language or the effacement of representation; but, on the contrary, precisely because there an excess of language that flattens irreducible suffering to an anaphoric socialization of speech that tacitly accepts inhumanity at face value. And that socialized distribution of speech underserves suffering, in virtue of equalizing an expansive chatter that neutralizes in survival the inherent pain of the irreducible human species within the imposible ordeal of total annihilation.
Antelme’s L’espéce humaine is stubbornly nominalistic in its thick descriptions of things and events, and it wants to avoid metaphoric transports. He prefers to call things as he sees it and get to the thicket of things in the most nauseating of repetitions. In a way, the hellish atmosphere of the concentration camp resides in the slow moving degradation of human life deprived of the world. However, there is one moment where Antelme resorts to calling a situation ‘hell’; that is, precisely, to an account of the transparent use of language, the raw incontinence and commanding force towards exteriority, as if there is no longer a caesura or separation between being and language once enunciation has been homogenized as commanding force. This is a language without a secret or unsaid, moving against the outside of consciousness in the same depretatory form as the same administrative machinery that has lifeless bodies as its target. In this way, language being turned into the force of speech will not only foreclose itself to the world, but it will signal the very intangibility by virtue of the flattening of verbal communication as an immediate and furious call to an annihilation of appearance. Antelme writes in this admirable moment – one of those instances where description of the state of things is incepted by the negation of the very conditions that allow for the narrative order:
“Degradation, and flabbiness of language. Mouths whence nothing any longer ever came that was ordered, or strong enough to last. A weakly woven cloth fraying to bits. Stencens succeeded one another, contradicted one another, expressed a kind of belched up wrtnessness; a bile of words. They were all jumbled together: the son of a bitch who’d done it, the wife left on her own, food, drink, the old lady’s tear, the fuck in the ass, and so on; the same mouth could say it all, one thing after the other. It came forth all by itself; it would be empty. It only stopped at night. Hell must be like that, a place where everything that’s said, everythat’s expressed, comes forth equalized with everything else, homogenized, like a drunkard’s puke” [5].
The incontinence of language at the limit of what can be said is a secondary hell; that is, the last contortion that the inhumanity of the human can offer outwards in order to outlive in a moment of minimal pleasure, since the absolute pain of a glacial existence has been deprived of any real contact with the world and things. It is a linguistic hell – the looping language of the camp, will only mirror also the linguistic codification that around the same years will be elevated to the paradigm of cybernetics and the regime of information theory – will now appear as a unified block of application, enforcement and extraction. Hence, we should take Antelme at his word: language has become “flabby”, and it is a “puke”. It is circulation without sense, as in the looping mechanics of the furnaces charted by the Nazi engineers that appears in the recent sequence of the film Zone of interest (2023). It is not that sayability loses it claim to the autonomy of its form before an event; it is also that by virtue of its own degradation against the erasure of events, it can only be unified, packed, homogenized and rendered into equivalence in the wake of the absolute triumph of the historical project of alienation and external objectivity.
The passage of the old hymnal texture of language as solace and lamentation could only entail the conservation of communication, which for Theodor Adorno writing during the same years as Antelme (1946-1947) will deduce as the “techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere whose shelter he can thrive” [6]. That the experience of the camp for Antelme ultimately meant that the “executioner can kill a man but cannot change him into something else”, must be placed in tension with the epochal transformation of a hellish experience of language at the service of the nihilistic service of equivalence that unveils its purest semblance at the camp [7]. The unitary reduction between the “socialized Man” and the “deportee” enters into a proper focus that Antelme was able to grasp with uttermost honesty: “…that there is no inherent difference between the “normal” system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a shepherd image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live” [8]. At the risk of an overtly mannerist claim, it seems to me that the kernel of Antelme’s intellectual effort is to withdraw from the condition of hell that is condensed in the block of ice fixated in the ruinous material of language [9]. Memory, experience, friendship, truth, writing, the soul – these are all tools to chip against the brute reification of the glacial subjection at the price of ultimate solitude. Is there anything else worth a shot? In the last pages of L’espéce humaine, Antelme returns to the question of “freedom”, only to claim that “to be free” implies to “say no to everything” – and could we also refuse the language as it declines into flabbiness, equivalence, and its putrid decline, as overflowing mountain of trash that covers up the ongoing pain of the human species? [10].
Sure thing, the hölderlinean enduring and difficult task of the “free use of one’s own” appears here with some urgency as the requirement of traversing the attunement to pain. Antelme seems to have wanted to offer a negative theology to “forever starting anew”, in which the irreducible of human sayability is posited as the condition of the “only transcendence between beings” [11]. “To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation” [12]. Aren’t distance and separation two conditional criteria for grounding the irreducible? The habitation of the speaking being can harbor the contours of the unfathomable expression on the reverse of social tribulations, which is always the primal nomos of equivalence. Allowing the expansion of the irreducible as a the site of an ordinary accumulation of freedom preserves a sensible region for what takes place (“whatever happens” — and is not this taking place the opening of the non-site of the chorá?) in a language attuned to the relentless event that has forever touched us. This is already the site of the unimaginable beyond and away from the language of survival that permeates everything in both times of peace and of war.
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Notes
1. Marguerite Duras. El dolor (Alianza editorial, 2019 ), 71.
2. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 3.
3. Ibid., 289.
4.Ibid., 290.
5. Ibid., 135.
6. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the damaged life (Verso, 2020), 33
7. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 220.
8. Robert Antelme. “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 22. Dionys Mascolo makes more or less the same claim in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) when speaking about the stratification of species in the camps and the division of classes in society: “l’intuition aveuglante de tous les survivants est celle d’avoir fait quant à eux, sous une forme extrême, cette expérience: que l’organisation de la société en classes telle que nous la vivons est déjà une image de la division de cette société en espèces, comme dans les camps”, 87.
9. Robert Antelme. “Revenge?”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 15.
10. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 291..
11. Robert Antelme. “The Smiling Angel: Rheims Cathedral”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 10.
12. Maurice Blanchot. “The Indestructible”, in The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
For anyone familiar with the delicate thought of Monica Ferrando, the short book just published, Arcadia Sacra (Il Molino, 2024), makes it impossible not to read it in light of her the two previous works, the ambitious Il regno errante (Neri Pozza, 2018) that reconstructs the political paradigm of the nomos of Arcadia, and L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), which brought to light the corrupted meaning of a theopoetic understanding of “election” and its appropriation by an effective economic theology apparatus that governs over the destiny of the modern edifice. Arcadia Sacra continues Ferrando’s highly original reconstruction of the unforgettable myth of Arcadia within the obscure setting of secular modernization in which painting itself has come into crisis to the point of utter obsolescence. We might be the first epoch in the history of humanity (or even prehistoric, since painting goes back to the non-original origin of the caves, as Ferrando has argued) in which painting itself is lacking and almost non-existent [1]. And although Ferrando does not allude to the present directly, it goes without saying that by choosing as her focal point Titian’s early picture “The Flight into Egypt” (1508), the vision deployed in the essay can only speak to us as urgently, where the thematics confronted by the Renaissance of Venetian painting returns to our present in a fractured flash: imperial conflagration, unlimited deployment of force, usurpation of territory and multiplication of legal checkpoints, and the accelerated disconnection between architecture and nature, color the ongoing devastation of the vantage point of the landscape now eclipsed by the radiant artificial confinements of the contemporary metropolitan designs.
Already during his postwar years in the United States, Theodor Adorno observed how the unbounded sadness of the American landscape has nothing to do with an inhuman romantic sublime; it was rather that the landscape feels as if it bears no traces of the human hand [2]. If Americanism configures the long lasting night of planetary nihilism; this is so, not only due to capitalist subsumption and production of human life, but fundamentally because of the inherent obliviousness of the landscape that forecloses dwelling in the world. But the myth of Arcadia, as Ferrando will insists, is no utopia nor crafted rhetoric (the bucolic genre as an aesthetic compensation to the normative grid of the social bond); it is also the question about the earthly ground of existence, and the necessary attunement with the things that have been domesticated into order of the metaphysics of idolatry and objectivity (Ferrando 28). In this sense, Arcadia does not name another world to come; it is a world that has been registered many times, reappearing whenever the hand reaches out in proximity as if caressing the landscape’s skin.
The mytho-poetical deployment of Arcadia returns amidst a world in conflagration, and for Ferrando this has fundamental political implications insofar as it shows a way out from the grammar at the service of force and political dominion of commanders and soldiers – which is always already exercised as legitimate to coerce and to become a tool for the regulation of abstract mediations – into the voice of poets, painters, and shepherds (Ferrando 51). Arcadia reveals that the human species is a ductile animal that can sense by the ability to touch and use. This is why Arcadia stands as a third space outside the political dichotomy of empire and republicanism, between the struggle of usurpation and conquest, and the techno-political administration of common goods of social distribution and institutional delegation. The abstract humanism of the Renaissance, as Heidegger once claimed alluding to Machiavelli’s political thought, is also the commencement of a specific political technology rooted in certainty and justification that can only conceive representation as the ground for the production of an “effective truth” [3]. The virtuous homini militari of the Italian city states anticipate the neutralization of force as legitimate rule that will prepare the stage of modern political realism based on fear and normative rule of law. The final efficacy of force is to transform the sense of the world into a mere object, as Weil clearly understood it in her essay on Homer’s Iliad. One of the key insights of Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024) is that it shows that, parallel to the revolution in political technologies taking place in Renaissance Humanism, the image of Arcadia was being rediscovered in treatises and paintings in order to remain faithful to a different attunement of the nomoi, in which the philosophy of history of sacrifice, endless civil wars, and destruction of the Earth do not constitute true destiny (Ferrando 14). In an exoteric way – and it is so, because the craft of the painter is, precisely, depiction and figuration of the nakedness of what appears before our vision- painters like Titian, Veronese, and Bellini, became witnesses to the acquiescence of the nomos mousikos, which far from soliciting the conceptual density of a theory of Justice; it registered the preeminent condition of poetizing nature of living in the vanishing world. Indeed, it was in the musical nomos where the soul could establish the communication between exteriority and interiority within the gleaming order of things.
If Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art suggests that the erection of work occupies the open space of this clearing; Ferrando will thematize how Boccaccio’s understanding of the Earth as radiantly divine was drawing upon the tradition of Arcadia will emerge as the pictorial space of the artists to disclose the vibrant sense of a necessary freedom (Ferrando 43). This means that living among the gods is not reducible to panentheism, if understood as oppositional to monotheism; rather, it was the opening to the event that gathered forms of life, creations, affections, and territories. In other words, there will always be gods whenever the world is not enclosed into the homogenous surface of a unified planetarity. And is not painting the quasi-originary activity of human anthropogenesis (the event of being in the world as such) the sensible evidence that negates any conceptual and political translation directed towards action and justification? After all, painting is, among other things, the business of depicting mute things, as Nicolas Poussin famously claimed.
But muteness must be qualified and expanded, since Arcadia is no asylum or final refuge of man. Titian’s “The Flight into Egypt” depicts a rite of passage, but also opens to a set of rhythmic connected activities that lead to the landscape. Thus, as Monica Ferrando reminds us, building from her previous Il regno errante, Arcadia is also the material experimentation of acoustic energy; music, or the the nomos mousikos, no longer guided by the command of political service, directed by attunement of the lyre and the syrinx, will speak the unwritten language of the human soul. Painting and music convergence at the nonsite of permanent formlessness. And it is rhythmic music allowing improvisation and experimentation that reimagines a different conception of the polis; a transfiguration of political life, in which the principle of civility in all of its complexity (citizenship, objective transference and negation, civilizational fortitude) will no longer articulate the principal axis of the human commonwealth. Neither a source of higher natural law nor a mere expansion of positive norms, the nomos of Arcadia for Ferrando entails: “inalterabile a unire intimamente musica e legge, entrambe ágrapha, non scritte, se non nel cuore. L’interdipendenza tra modi della musica e nomoi della città, che sarebbe vano interpretare secondo un rapporto causale, trova nella stessa parola nomos un compendio inesauribile, ribadito nella Politeia: «Non si introducono mai cambiamenti nei modi della musica senza che se ne introducano nei più importanti nomoi della polis” (Ferrando 54). The separation of law from music – as Ferrando will say for poetry and philosophy in later pages – will ultimately lead to the moral struggle towards the rise of the fictitious (and whoever can impose it through their effective hegemony) against the emergence of the “love of thought” (l’amore del pensiero) (Ferrando 57). In this sense, the moralization of justice and its conversion into a specific historical grammar (lex scripta in the juridical apparatus) will ground the order of the polis in which the human will be absolutely sacred so that the sacred nearness between existence and the world – the atopia where the promise of happiness can take place – will vanish forever. As Carlo Levi saw clearly during the postwar years, the rise of the political administration of fear will coincide with the decline of painting as the source of being in liberty within the senses [4]. And, in our days, the historical termination of secularization can only be felt like an unending glacial interregnum (it is no surprise that Disney’s epochal blockbuster is precisely a defense of alienation of a cold being in a Frozen castle) in which the prehistoric reminiscence of the garden can only appear as an afterthought or mere representation, always out of reach, and viciously grazed by wild beasts before our own eyes.
But seeing is already an exercise in prefiguration of a world that returns where painting stands as the medium for a mediation between the formlessness and the soul. This is why, above all, pictorial space is a privileged surface from which to flee our condition of unworldly inmates of our times. In a certain way, painting does not just bring to bear truth against the regime of calamitous fictions; it is also bears witness, as Ferrando states towards a high moment of Arcadia Sacra (2024), to the rediscovery of a new mental space that revives the attunement to a state of the world no longer reduced to the depredatory practices of civilizational extraction and consented servitude (Ferrando 77). The tradition of painting is not just a collection of forms and artistic conventions, but the ongoing concert that facilitates our movement (and being moved) towards happiness.
This is the promise of the itinerant Mary’s passive and inclined face in Titian’s early masterpiece. It does not come to surprise that for Ferrando, the mother dwells among the gods of peace, in contrast to the figures of the commander or the inquisitorial or priestly judge that monitor an endless narrative of intra-species civil war (Ferrando 63). It should not go without saying that at the same time that some contemporary scholars in the face of a historical crisis of legitimation attempt to revive the aura of the homini militari, the precepts of the ragion di stato and the technical virtues of the charismatic Prince; it has been the work of Monica Ferrando, in fully in display in Arcadia Sacra (2024), that invites us to turn to the counters of eros of painting that, almost stubbornly, transmit to us the infinite possibilities of life among the green blades of grass in Pan’s spiritual land (Ferrando 82) [5]. The sacredness of Arcadia resides in this unbounded exteriority that thanks to the mystery of the mother, is always commencing; and, having achieved happiness, it wants to know nothing about bring the world to conclusion. Beneath the arcana imperii (Rome) and the bylaws of the polis (Athens), the landscape of Arcadia remains a harmonious passage of our cohabitation.
5. I am thinking here of the works of several American historians of political thought and legal scholars in recent years that have mobilized efforts to restore a “neoclassical”, Renaissance centered political tradition, as a response to the crisis of modern liberalism. The most prominent list includes, although it is not limited to James Hankins’ Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard U Press, 2020), Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (Cambridge U Press, 2023), and Adrian Vermuele’s endorsement of Renaissance imperial categories such as Ragion di stato, Lex Regia and the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, see his “Sacramental Liberalism and Region di Stato” (2019) and “The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia” (2023). The pastiche of this neoclassical investment made possible by rhetorical and hermeneutical deployments of instrumentalized myth, it is something that I have taken note of in “¿Revival de la tradición legal clásica?” (2022). Drawing a parallel to this classical absorption in American political thought, one could say that this is a reiteration of what Monica Ferrando herself has analyzed in her chapter on German Romantic Neoclassicism and the Winckelmann aesthetic project in her L’elezione e la sua ombra. Il cantico tradito (Neri Pozza, 2022), except now that it lacks aesthetic meditations (there is no Dichter als Führer), thus culminating in the direct exercise of applied executive force.
Rereading Dionys Mascolo’s Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) in preparation for an upcoming course with Philippe Theophanidis, one gets the sense of beginning backwards or at the very end, since this late essay is a recapitulation of what the Rue Saint-Benoît Group embodied and stood for. And it is so obvious that for Mascolo what is at stake in Antelme’s letter is not a particular practice of confession (and the coupling of secrecy and extraction), but rather an integral register of an experience that belongs to “friendship in thought without reserve” [1]. And that it would not have been possible without friends, as simple as that. Of course, the condition of possibility of this shared thought in friendship has less to do with general principles, norms, or creative acts, and more with what Mascolo does not hesitate to qualify as “a sensibility that was common to us”.
What is this sensibility, and is it possible to describe it? This is a question that I do not think that is attempted to be resolved in Mascolo’s commentary nor in Antelme’s letter so consumed by its internal lacunae and effacement (I am definitely not capable of saying a word about it at the moment, and this might be one of the questions in the ongoing dialogue in the seminar). Mascolo does offer a little more when he states that this sensibility, however broad and partial, was always elevated against all totalitarianisms that were hegemonizing the political positions of the epoch. Obviously, it names the political totalitarianism (Fascist and state planned communism alike), but also the “the soul of the project” (‘est l’âme du projet et sa forme aboutie’) that must retract from it [2]. The last pages of Mascolo’s reflection is a shallow-deep, an insinuation, into the possibility of saying something in relation to this difficult proximity.
Hence, against total subsumption of life into political planning (whether on the right or left, whether ecclesiastical or in the name of the secularized forms of militant communist parties), Mascolo’s insistence on the ‘soul of the project’ is sustained by the “missing word” give that dispenses human necessities as infinite. He writes: “Et par mille et mille détours, il me (nous) fallait toujours en revenir au même point : Je suis ce qui me manque est la sentence que je porte (nous portons) inscrite à l’intérieur du front. La moindre des choses alors est de proposer que, sauf mensonge, elle vaut pour tout homme”. [3]. But what could it mean that “what I am” is always constituted by the missing word? It is definitely not a substantive attribute to a person (and thus what I can acquire), but a word that in its ideal absence and lack of epistemological validity stands as a form of seeking (zēteîn) that Nicoletta Di Vita has recently linked to the form of the ancient hymn [4]. The missing word is the passive and pure voice that calls out the rhetorical fiction of political totalitarianism. In other words, the missing word does not enact a present state of things, articulating the denomination in language with distinct objects of the world; it only has transformative weight when revealing what remains under the capes of morality.
This is why the experience of the camp constitutes a central threshold: on the one hand, it is an extreme and sharpened image of social alienation between classes; and, on the other, it is the experience that by depriving the human of its humanity it brings to an effective end the polarity between rich and poor that structured the economy of salvation and damnation of Western civilization. This is what Antelme describes in his essay “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, which according to Mascolo brings the rich to a psychotic night of desperation towards destruction and death of the specie. Hölderlin’s definition that “we have become poor in order to become rich” as a clement predicament in the face of the modern is here-forth suspended in the spiritual crisis generated by the social engineering whose most extreme case is the model of the camp.
And yet the missing word remains irreducible even after the corrupted stage of innocence and the impossibility of redemption. Mascolo, reader of Nietzsche, does not believe in the theos. This is why for him the missing word, far from being an apostrophe that offers consolation in the wake of the catastrophe, it remains concretely attached to the experience of the friend that no longer finds solace in abstract peace, but in the profound musicality of what remains inconsolable: “cette heureuse absence de paix qui est sa musique profonde, et que donne en partage l’être aimé, l’inconsolable qui console” [5]. This transfigured word – the unending capacity for hymn in the human, its nomoi mousikos – is both an excess to memory and appearance, and perhaps, more importantly, an excess to the experience of living and the dead. And is not this “seeking” passage of the missing word what the Rue Saint-Benoît Group was obsessively after?
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Notes
1. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Maurice Nadeau, 1987), 82.
2. Ibid., 83.
3. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort…,82.
4. Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022), 27.
What comes after state form? The grounds for a self-evolving civil war at the heart of the social is what opens up in the wake of the collapse of the categories and grammar of modern politics. Stasiology becomes the fundamental unit to grasp the decoupling of the liberal state from its fixed guarantees and duties. Already during the crisis of legitimation of the seventies, we were told that the modern secular liberal state can no longer guarantee the conditions that made it possible, in the famous hypothesis developed by Böckenförde. The stasiological paradigm thoroughly governs the once implied mediations, social forms, and positive juridical norms of state-society internal mechanics without reminders and procedures. This is why all calls for political realism today are futile and insufficient; the only real existing realism is the one that must be confronted with increasing categorial inversions that ultimately channel the passage from a sufficiently ordered polity (the equilibrium of commerce and virtues) to the conflagration of the civil war as the production of social fabric.
All of this is implicit and glossed in Rodrigo Karmy’s excellent essay Stasiología: guerra civil, formas de vida, capitalismo (Voces Opuestas, 2023) in which the empty performance in the stage of fictitious contemporary sovereignty exchanged for the effective precautionary inversions that have become operative at a planetary scale: republicanism has given in to empire; the horizon of “liberty” nows entails dispossession and domination; authoritative and legitimate rule now means interpretative and exceptional discretionary execution; and, civil society (the modern civilizational unity for social cohesion) has become an axiomatic nexus to manage the tractions and turbulence of total economy (equivalence). The current state of things could not be more grim – and everything that passes through the sign of “order” (orderability, ordinary, ordo) elevates in the name of an self-sufficient abstraction that government paranoia to guide every deviation. The Leviathan stage has zoomed in into the pastoral exercise of uncontested dominion. Those that have claimed that the polis – precisely, as the sphere of social exchange and masquerade, in other words, of practical nihilism – is defunct are perhaps right in stating that its autonomy was destined to become the sheltered territory for pirates, delinquents, and the mafia. What is civil society today if not the confluence or the commuting space of the concert of all existing indirect powers?
For Karmy, abstraction and inversal do not mean just arbitrariness and formlessness lacking description. There is some rationality to what is arbitrary and anarchic in how the public powers are conjoined, distributed, and organized under several logistical units of optimal endurance: a) an axiomatic method that is immanent, flexible, and technologically sophisticated in its aversion to civil war; b) there is a process of exposition and vigilance that, conflating oikos and polis, makes hostis and inimicus indistinguishable, and by extension, coextensive to a global police (just as predicted by Carl Schmitt in the prologue to the Italian edition of The Concept of the political) that can manage and intervene in world-events as without residue. Expressively, Karmy reminds us, the police apparatus becomes the composition of cybernetic deployment based on the capillary consortium of information, reproduction, and differentiations. c) And finally, there is a nomic coupling between politics and geopolitics as the univocal destiny of a planetary humanity as a nihilistic mastery over nature, passions, and geographical localities. But if a century ago Benjamin suggested in One-Way Street (1928) that the power of the proletariat amounted to the measure of its convalescence, it seems that this is a materialist ideal that also has sunk deep into the anomia of the seas. Neither a “collective and sensible” proletariat nor a mobilized pacifist can enact the much expected epochal katechon; the immanent subject of Empire is already invested in the paradigm of force and counter-force, reinforcing what Karmy sees as the global practical and rhetorical geopolitics as an ongoing polemos: “Toda guerra es, ante todo, una guerra contra el pensamiento, Por eso abunda el análisis geopolítico” (Karmy 79). The manifest destiny of geopolitical grounding (knowledge, measurement, exposition) can only admit voluntary servitude towards the conflagration and the distributions of dominance and “influence” that has only intensified from the Iraq invasion of the early millennium to the Covid-19 pandemic techno-administrative measures.
But geopolitical dominance can no longer be said to integrate – there are too many cracks and holes in what it is still called, by inertia (Karmy calls it the ‘Newtonian hypothesis’) , the autonomy of the social. Similarly, its universality is a fallen one; but not because it has accepted the Augustuinian saeculum against the Pelagian heresy, but rather because its unitary mold consists in an internal stasis fractured within: a schism of every community from itself, a separation between things and forms in the originary sense of the Greek polis. Could another nomoi be recovered here? This is the last question posed by Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) through the poetic scene of Guadalupe Santa Cruz, whose turn to the garden is an involuntary act that gathers whatever is left of an ethical life from the ongoing devastation enacted by the barbarism of civilization. The garden is the threshold to a world according to Karmy reading Santa Cruz: “…al borde del mundo, el jardín es la figura que remite al cultivo de estilo, cuidado de la potencia de la imaginación, en último término, lo que designa un gesto” (Karmy 102-103). It is no coincidence that gesture and gestar is a polysemic term that allows to comprehend the figural and self-evolving of a transformation of life; “freedom” is not to deploy internal force towards the appropriation of advantageous outcomes and interest, but of the possibility of delineating the appearance of “a life” holding the unmeasurable world in proximity [1]. It is at this point where forms color how we become who we are.
What must be saved is not “life itself”, but rather the theōs between world and existence that opens “new possibilities” that is anti-scientific precisely because it is not incorporated by the pressure of objective absorption. The theōs is the invisible deviation from the worldly necessity of how things should be and what our lives should aspire to become; and only in this sense we are all martyrs as witnesses to this nearness. Extracting a further consequence from Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) one could claim that every desertion from geopolitical destiny – its unspeakable misery, its blatant bad faith, its farcical prepotence that forces a parodic eschatology – presupposes a return to a new life, which has always began at the surface of our face, as if anticipating reality prophetically: “Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world.” [2]. If the acclamations for a “New Man” concerned the humanist aspiration of the productive modernity; the vita nova concerns, first and foremost, the conservation of the partition of the soul, the only true entity of alienability where life conquers death. The practice of stasilogy sets out an exercise of this elegant depiction: allowing invisibility to prefigure and breach a new life from the trenches of a never ending struggle.
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Notes
1. Monica Ferrando. “Gestare la figura. Note sulla pittura e il suo gesto”, Giardino di studi filosofici, Quodlibet, 2018.
2. Carlo Levi. The Two-Fold night: A narrative of travel in Germany (Cresset Press, 1962), 109.
Infrapolitical Reflections 