space

Pascal against the empire of opinion. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the Newtonian thematization of the limit afterall). In particular gloss 554 strikes a tenor for our current epoch: “Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes an opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say that there is nothing fine about it” [1]. In the world after the fall, the intramundane system of felix culpa, is already one of dual power.

In many respects, this image is stronger than that of nihilism as the oblivion of walking upwards gazing at the abyss, because it connects the social pressure of “opinion” to that of the common ground that makes out of blindness the legitimacy of vacuous enlightenment. In the very void that truth will carve out for authority, Pascal seems to imply that the imperium of opinion will reign as a dual power of administration and mediation with the world. This is why for Pascal, force without opinion is indocile; but opinion without force amounts to the persuasion of solitude of the last man in the earth. At the heart of the groundlessness of modern legitimacy there is the necessary organization of opinion or doxa that will regulate the community of the living and the dead because ultimately its end is to master the mystery of language in its inability to name. 

Of course, Pascal thought that language could overcome the fictive empire of opinion, which in its modern avatar of propaganda is meant to design apocalyptic tendencies towards self-destruction in the course of historical development. As a “properly speaking wholly animal”, the human can only dwell in a poetic region “entre-deux”, that is, between the abhorrent light and the infinite depth of darkness, where language endures through the symbol well beyond the experience of the fallen corruption of nature. As Lezama Lima reminds us in a short essay on the French thinker, the poetic region in Pascal is ultimately the experience of language as a mystery of creation that refuses to accept the post-mythic condition of nature and human boredom that will euthanize the use of linguistic creation [2]. Now it can be said that the intrusion of the infinite chatter of opinion takes place precisely in the logged forest of speech, which consolidates its rhetorical autonomy of language away from the possibility of distance and self-constrain of the sayable. The statecraft of rhetoric is the infrastructure of the reign of opinion, because here the draining of the depth of being is supplanted by alienated voluntary participation at the very ground of nothingness. Nihilism takes a decisive step forward when language can become any differential sign to communicate what has become impossible to be said outside the cubicle of the enthymeme.

Paraphrasing the ancient wisdom of Pindar’s famous opening verse in Fragment 169 (“Law, νόμος, the king of all”), Pascal assures us of the fragility of this imperium: “An empire based on opinion and imagination resigns for a time, and such an empire is mild and voluntary. That force reigns for ever. Thus opinion is like the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant” [3]. Is it possible to separate, nevertheless, the reign of opinion from that of force; and, secondly, the circulation of force as grounded in a fabric of language that has already descended into the empire of opinion without any trace? In a way, there is no modern politics without the presupposition of the autonomy of a field of opinion integrated into “rational control”, to use the expression of American political theorist Harvey Mansfield. And even if Carl Schmitt could state in his Constitutional Theory (1928) that no democratic secular state could effectively exist out without opinion as a diffused and disorganised form of acclamation, it is now completely obvious to us that the post-liberal state configuration, persists in a constant state of the fluctuation, compartmentalization, and archic steering of opinions. What survives the utter collapse of the category of political modernity is the flattening of language into “opinion” that provides standing to the epochal anomia. 

Following classical philologists we are tempted not to ignore that in the word anomia entails not just the suspension of legislated norms and positive commands, but also the decline of the distance between existence and the divine that in antiquity, in the age of Pindar, subsisted under the notion of eunomia as harmonious attunement of the very lived experience. In other words, the consolidation of opinion is a long historical effect of the erosion of distance and perspective  that restricts the capacity to “ascertain a spiritual excitement…and if worth anything, a language, a witness to reality” [4]. To bear witness in language is a poetic enactment that, at heart of its solitude, refuses the glacial ripples of the force of opinion vested in reality.

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Notes 

1. Blaise Pascal. Pensées (Penguin Books 1995),  192.

2. José Lezama Lima. “Pascal y la poesía”, in Obras Completas. Tomo II (Aguilar Editor, 1977), 564-565.

3. Blaise Pascal. Pensées (Penguin Books 1995), 566.

4. Pavel Florensky. “Reverse perspective” (1920), in Beyond Vision (Reaktion Books, 2002), 254. 

Desvivirse. by Gerardo Muñoz

The common Spanish verb “desvivirse” resists obvious translations. Could one translate “desvivirse” as “unliving”, “constructing by destroying”, or “fulfilled life”? It seems that none of them capture the full meaning of an expression that is anchored in practical use. It is important to note that when the term emerged in the intellectual discourse of Spanish twentieth century, its depth was intimately connected to its meaning (life, living, vocation) that it immediately took the life of a concept for cultural milieu and national character. In his lecture “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, Manuel García Morente suggested that “vivir desviviendose” was the singular form of life of Hispanic being that attained eternity while on the terrestrial world: 

“Porque lo típico del hombre hispánico es, por decirlo así, su modo singular de vivir, que consiste en “vivir no viviendo”, o, dicho de otro modo, en “vivir desviviéndose”, en vivir la vida como si no fuera vida temporal, sino eternidad. El hombre hispánico no considera la vida eterna. O la salvación del alma como el remate, término y fin de la vida terrestre, sino como remate, término y fin de cada uno de los instantes y de los actos de la vida terrestre. La salvación eterna no es para él solamente un objeto de contemplación; ni tampoco solamente una norma de conducta, sino que es, ante todo y sobre todo, lo que da sentido y finalidad concreta a cada uno de los actos en que se descompone la vida terrestre” [1]”. 

For García Morente, the specific meaning of “desvivirse” entails a tension between interiority and exteriority; and, by extension, between life and death, and in fact of death in life that leads to resurrection and a new life. He writes: “La vida del alma hispánica es un constante morir y resucitar para volver a morir; hasta que la última resurrección” [2]. “Desvivirse”, quite literally, happens at the level of the soul when life continuous through finitude and concrete death. This is why the notion of “desvivirse” has a clear theological underpenning that one can pair with the divine apocatastasis in intramundane life. “Desvivirse” is never about personal salvation and the economy of election, which is why Americo Castro would emphasize that this vocation does not align well with modern individualism, because the “vivir desvivido” experiences its own ruin like a joyous and exuberant Saturnalia” [3]. 

As in the indication by García Morente, for Castro “desvivirse” entails something like an external perspective in which life can ultimately only take place from its transcendence with a relation to what’s outside of itself. This outside is neither determined by politics nor rhetoric [4]. To live “desviviéndose” entails an intensity that persists not just as an interior affirmation of self-preservation, but as an erotic relation with what is most desired and venerated (many Spanish thesaurus of the nineteenth century would define desvivirse as “to love or desire with eagerness”, “amar con ansia”). If extracted from the cultural and identitarian historical context, “desvivirse” appeals to the object of passion that overflows the senses of human life. 

This overflow is embedded in the word itself. The great Spanish scholar of Benedictine monasticism, García Colombás, in his book El monje y el Misterio Pascual (1984), made a simple, and yet remarkable lexicographical observation about the word “desvivirse”. Colombás noted that while in most of monastic literature the prefix “-des” donates privation and deficiency, the function of this prefix in “desvivirse” suffered a complete inversion, since now it entails to love intensively and thoroughly, as in “se desvive por complacer a todo el mundo” [5]. As a theologian, it should not have passed Colombás that the term in question is a triad of three linguistic units: -des/vivir/-se. This means that it is not just that the prefix exerts the meaning of privation of “life”, but also makes room for the reflexive “se”. It is curious that in in Spanish grammar “vivirse” is often used in relation to location (i.e. “el va a vivirse al campo”), and never as a conventional reflexive action (i.e. “él quiere vivirse solo”, “el se vive solo” = this would be incorrect). Taking this cue, one could perhaps say that the inversion so keenly perceived by Colombás acts upon the living so that they can repeatedly making space for the unfolding of life, rendering possible the soul’s crossing the inside and outside in every form of life. 

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Notes 

1.  Manuel García Morente. “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, in Idea de la Hispanidad (Espasa-Calpe, 1947), 215. 

2. Ibid., 216.

3. Américo Castro. España en su Historia: Cristianos, Moros, y Judíos (Editorial Losada, 1948), 45.

4. Ibid., 279. 

5. García M. Colombás. El monje y el Misterio Pascual (Ediciones Monte Casino, 1984), 132.

Of the destruction of worlds. On Mauricio Amar Díaz’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

What does it take to destroy a world? It would seem that the question itself is too metaphoric and impertinent; perhaps also hyperbolic and presumptuous against the flight of the infinite embodied in worldling. But this is the question that we should direct ourselves to according to Mauricio Amar’s short and highly accessible book El Paradigma Palestina: Sionismo, Colonización, Resistencias (DobleaEditores, 2024), which is written in the wake of the ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza in order lay bare the paradigmatic abyss of social death in which humanity finds itself at the peak of its civilizational dominance. Amar does not use the term “paradigm” lightly, and nor is he interested, as recasted recently by none other than Steven Bannon citing Thomas Kuhn’s work about scientific revolutions, in posting a central conflict towards transformation; rather, one must situate this strategic conceptual deployment in light of the Chilean philosopher’s own work on imagination and use, which provides an irreducible and sensible texture to every emergence of a paradigm [1]. This means that if Palestine is, indeed, the paradigm of our epoch is precisely because it has no-space in the world – it is what can be infinitely be destroyed, as Maurce Blanchot famously said commenting Antelme’s work – and what illuminates the core and extension of the “integrated” planetary humanity oriented towards the administrative governmentality of contemporary Western democracies, and its corollary geopolitics of the total artificial spaces, as Bruno Maçaes has recently called it. Reading Amar one senses that under the name “Palestine” he is registering a limit to the Humanist force, where an existential claim reveals the maelstrom of an epoch that has resorted to a grotesque parody of the ancient homeric standards of domination and submission. It is the outlook that Simone Weil described as the paradigm of transforming the world into nonliving things.

If understood as a paradigm, Palestine reminds us that the homeric energy towards the aristocracy of equality through force and death among the human race never truly ceased, but only changed forms and cloaks throughout the ages. The post-mythic West seemed to have constructed itself through the repeated revolutions that accommodate justifications for usurpation and containment, self-deification and legibility of the territory at the service of a fictive ethnos. The belated nationalism of modern Zionism has had the paradoxical quality of being both a project of territorial usurpation after its illegalization in International Law (The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928); while, at the same time, a politico-theological configuration that, as Monica Ferrando has shown in L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), clings upon the manipulation of the theological election of “a People” in order to deploy the coterminous binding between community and territory justified through divine narration. The interdependence of the spiritual goal of Zion is only possible through the construction of a settler state, at the same time that the occupying state’s only legitimacy based on ‘one God, one People’ relies on the restitution of an instrumentalized form of the theological election. This is why for Amar the Zionist state building project is a the paradigm of a specific type of colonial governance whose end is not just to capture errant people into social subjects, but more fundamentally a translatio imperii that folds the Earth into a territorial nomoi of distinct multilevel functions: checkpoints, walls, vigilante control of movements, constructions and erasure of surfaces, administration of critical infrastructures, development of extractive resources, and finally the hunting down of humans that necessarily blurs the line between civil population and battlefield combatants. When Amar reminds us of Israel’s predominance in planetary security and warfare technology, one can immediately recall Emile Benveniste’s suggestion that “measurement” (med*-) and the proportional addition to produce objectivity, entails an efficacy of permanent dominance and governability whose main enterprise is the management of populations through the regime of accumulation. As Andreas Malm reminds us of the current cartography of Palestine: “The genocide is unfolding at a time when the state of Israel is more deeply integrated in the primitive accumulation of fossil capital than ever…This is the political economy of normalization: a sacralization of busines as usual that destroys first Palestine and then the earth” [2]. The ongoing devastation of Gaza is a window into the project as a whole: the necessary destruction of the worlds and the total artificiality of the life-worlds, always at the service of maintaining the needs of anthropological symbolizations.

For Amar this points to an epochal scenario of a people without world; and, following the lead of Sari Hanafi, he will claim that the paradigmatic mirroring of Palestine is also an spatial-cide, in which the living are deprived of a sense of inhabiting and roaming that brings to bear that the nakba is not something that has taken place in history once and for all, it is a catastrophic event that has not ceased from repeat itself, and whose ultimate intention is to suture the world and existence, the soul and the spirituality of the open atmosphere that is needed to sustain life. Reading Amar between the lines  – who towards the end of the book finds distant interlocutors in Darwish’s poetry, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as well as in the glosses of Walter Benjamin on history and the prose of Edward Said – one learns that the true arcana of Palestinian resistance is also a secret promise for our apocalyptic times: to hold on to the world, so that we can all passionately land on the Earth and freely breath in its surroundings. The nexus of the Palestinian question and the intrusion of Gaia, although underdeveloped in Amar’s analysis, obliquely runs through a text that is also very much about the central question of ethics that never abandons thought: how to name what escapes without taking the world as such into an object to be possessed, destroyed, and remade anew as a hostile secular imago dei. The vindictive hyper-consciousness of the contemporary unmediated arcana imperii now reveals, as Amar says towards the end of he book, a mirror through which we can observe our own increasing domestication, in which the metropolis is just the luminescent and self-protected hub, but whole ultimate darkening shadow is the Gaza’s pile of rubbles resembling an open air necropolis (Amar 108-109). Through different arrangements of organized destruction, both the metropolis and the necropolis converge in their preeminent ‘struggle against space’ and its form of life for the sake of familiar pieties of enslaved survival of unworldly anomie (Amar 116). 

Does this mean that we are all “Palestinians”? Mauricio Amar’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024) rejects the all too well expected craft of solidarity and subjective identifications that can only work on the payroll of the gravediggers of the current civilizational project. On the contrary, if Palestine is our paradigm, and it remains so, it is because it can only refuse measurement and recognition in order to dwell in the only possible exteriority as embodied to Darwish’s poetry that Amar quotes towards to the end book: “Do not trust the poem / absent child / it is the throbbing of the abyss” (Amar 140). From the abyss we nourish the soul as the return to land on Earth prepares itself in order to no longer conquer a territory, an ancient tradition, or a “People” (ethnos), but to dwell on the nearness of a place that is an excess to every location or community of belonging (this is the false exit of the kibbutzim). We do not have political grammar to articulate what this integral freedom could mean, except that it is an exotic relation in Victor Segalen’s sense: a creation of a world alien from the compatible and petty one that currently drains us into its ongoing desperate destruction and passive enslavement [3]. Finally, like all authentic paradigms, it is worth noting that Paradigma Palestina (2024) teaches and preaches nothing; it only invites us into the swirling sensation that crosses over the imagination and the singing voice, from the world of the last remaining lives to the isles of the dead martyrs, and back. 

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Notes 

1. Mauricio Amar. Ética de la imaginación: averroísmo, uso y orden de las cosas (Malamadre, 2018).

2. Andreas Malm. The Destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth (Verso, 2025), 53.

3. Victor Segalen. Essay on Exoticism (Duke University Press, 2002), 24.