time

Riverrun. On Catalina Porzio’s Ensayo del agua (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

A hymn to the overflowing currents of water and language, Catalina Porzio’s Ensayo del agua (Mundana Ediciones, 2026) opens with a pindaric scene of celebration: “Una vez que la mano se ensambla a la copa olvida la autonomía que las rige….en esa comunión indisoluble, chocamos los cristales con estridencia y porfía por la satisfacción repetitiva de oírlos tintinear. Descontando que un exceso de entusiasmo haga estallar en mil pedazos la escena” (Porzio 12). Water is the pouring of wine and liquor; but it is also the mystery of oceans and the human necessity of quenching one’s thirst. It is all of this, sure, but a series will not do given that water is formless and defies the mimetic faculty that has allowed humans to draw associations high above in the sky. Porzio’s prose defies this temptation of crafting a topoi of water, opting for a dance of forms, descriptions, and enchantment brought together and dissolved by the sargasso sea of her own prose. To claim that writing is like swimming or paddling in water is a poor description to pin down what Porzio achieves in this essay. Her gesture is more versatile without stepping into an abyssal onanism, and this means that to begin to understand water, a certain levitation prose might be in order. A levitation that brings water both near and far. And this is because water escapes the metaphorical reduction of language, and it is always the event as such (just like the title insinuates it: it is not an essay about water, but the essay of water or a water essay). 

I am tempted to write “splash!” but this brings to mind David Hockney’s visual world, which is always frozen and imperturbable, at times undisclosed; whereas Porzio’s prose is agile, elegant, and strangely inviting, and thus uninterested in the mute surroundings of the West Coast. Perhaps it is much better to enact Joyce’s lexicon: riverrun down by the waters forms of Viña del Mar, coastal central region of Chile, and into the fragments of infancy and balnearios, and finally making a turn at Tolousse-Lattrec’s La Toilette. As Porzio tells us while making a stop: “Parece imposible hablar del agua a secas, pues dada la fluidez de su naturaleza, cambiante y escurridiza, invita continuamente a la deriva, haciendo inevitable los desvíos, las disgregaciones” (Porzio 44). A riverrun from a certain attachment – uninterested in the play of signifiers and graphism – of writing, which means that Porzio’s poetic prose is highly engaged in vivid synesthetic imagery. In fact, this overflowing prose is accompanied by the light of painting, and most importantly of the hand that orients the voyage throughout the book. 

The experience of the prose, in this sense, is not just an exercise in writing, but one of absorption, because it is only after being arrested that jubilation triumphs over reason (and one could also add: over grammar). “La algarabía desconoce la razón”, we read about halfway (Porzio 64). Of course, it is silly to say that good prose needs pictorial supplementation and artifice; what I am trying to say is that, while reading Porzio’s essay, absorption is the hand that discloses the world of sensorial celebration. The hand retains in the overflowing currents of riverrun downstream. Painting is both an instance of the light that absorbs and that renders imperturbable the errant topography of experiences. And this is why Porzio is right in reminding us that “y es que navegamos gracias al olvido” (Porzio 66). If there is a work of memory it is because we are deep in the waters of Lethe, and perhaps the unfathomable image of experience is what gives us a hand in the dangling spiral motion. 

As we know, this is at the heart of Hölderlin’s “Andenken”, where the verse “But it is the sea that takes and gives remembrance” validates both memory and oblivion of a human experience that quenches its thirst in the mystery of time (ultimately only a letter separates “sed” from “ser” says Porzio towards the end of the book). At the risk of vulgarizing Porzio’s essay – although her writing is not fully disconnected from the handles of the present – I would claim that precisely the ongoing barbarism of our technological epoch is precisely that it has failed to endure its voyage to Lethe, which is why it is committed to untruth and permanent lies at the same time that forces the human species to permanent memorization, while drying up its once opulent rivers of the West. And if rivers have become a scarce resource in our times, it only makes sense that the same can be said of human language, which is increasingly devoid of dialogic interlocution and the possibility of naming now replaced by automatized coding (some scholars have noted that Finnegans Wake’s “riverrun” also lodges “-ren” might be referring to the name). What happens when riverrun, which is the speculum of human experience in both language and water, dries up? This is the central question that arises from Porzio’s beautiful experiential essay.  

In the last pages of Ensayo del agua (2026), Porzio tells us that when an old man of her acquaintance was asked what he will miss most of this world he responded with great conviction: talking (Porzio 104). And as it is also quite obvious for Porzio that the necessity of conversation is not just an intrinsic institution of our social life; it is also the cave (to recall here Porphyry’s reading of the nymphs water caves in Homer) where the living and the dead enter into the purest of conversations, because “…ambos gesticulan, y en la fantasía de encontrarse, transporatados ilusoriamente en la cámara del tiempo, no cabe duda, se entenderían” (Porzo 105). If  language is always downstream, at the riverrun outlet, it is because it is both the communicating vessel as well as the immaterial gesture that flourishes without beginning and beyond the imagination of the end times. Avoiding the self-assigned role of the doctor of civilizational decay, Catalina Porzio’s  Ensayo del agua (2026) ultimately unfolds a unique choreography: a gesture of language that allows us to move throughout the epochs in order to feel at home anywhere.

The life of a sage. On Jacques Guigou’s Capital et Devenir Humain: Correspondance avec Jacques Camatte (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Roughly extending a little over fifteen years (2000-2016), the epistolary exchange between Jacques Guigou and Jacques Camatte is made available in a short book entitled Capital et Devenir Humain: Correspondance avec Jacques Camatte (L’Harmattan, 2026). Truth to be told it is an uneven correspondence at times, where the sustained conversation in time seems to be interrupted around some specific years, and in other moments there is an abundance of certain editorial requests (the publication and translation of books by Giorgio Cesarano primarily) that interfere from a more thorough substantive correspondence. Be as it might, this correspondence does bring to bear the reflexive consistence of the thinker behind Invariance in his last phase of his work, most specifically in the wake of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, which was already read by Camatte as symptomatic of the internal hostility of the human specifies embedded in the stasis of struggle as the central “engine of development of capital” (Guigou 20). 

Both autonomous capital and its regimes of representation (Politics) will only be sustained and driven by internal strife whose apocalyptic destiny has now become all too apparent; even more so than during the years when the Camatte & Guigou exchange was taking place. These historical mediations, however, are a bit of a misnomer, since the correspondence does show that Camatte’s undertaking of Hegel’s cunning of capital as the realization of the effective movement of historical accumulation was already part of the theoretical discoveries of the seventies in Invariance. The “effective end of Capital” seen through the mirror of Hegelianism meant that political reaction and its negation turned the essence of politics reactionary at its core. Later in the correspondence, in fact, we get a glimpse of the essence of “reactionary thinking” when Camatte tells his interlocutor that reaction can be understood as the continuation of a dynamic duality that is expressed in the very movement of autonomous Capital (Guigou 65-66). This is why Camatte’s horizon of reflection differed from the Debord’s situationism; it is not just because of a disbelief in the presumption of a remnant of the autonomy of art in their practices, but rather because their very dyad between art and life, public and private, contingency and necessity, language and the image expressed in many ways the insufficiency of an analytic expressed in the mystification of the commodity form. In other words, all reactionary posture amounts to a relational mode of the commodity form, but no commodity stripping and destruction can guide through a path that can exit the total transcendence of Capital towards life of the Gemeinwesen. We are left with refractory communities of belonging that find their necessary compensation in supplementary forms that allow for a distance to the fundamental question of exodus. 

Out of the many sequences of the correspondence the one dealing with the incapacities of poetry is of special interest. In one letter Camatte tells Guigou that he feels that poetry no longer is able to filter a moving tonality in the world, recalling how the end of the age of the poets (not a term expressly deployed by Camatte) has been understood by Amadeo Bordiga in a short text of 1953 that noted that the ancient power could sing in a voice of the community, whereas the modern poet in his solitude only amounts to the author of his work (Guigou 24). The correspondence exemplifies this by recalling Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, where the poetic is not personal lyricism, but rather a tone that runs through the whole dispensation of the community in its errancy (Guigou 30). And one wonders immediately after reading this moment in the letter, where the very work of late Camatte is not disinhibited of the poetic tonality; or, on the contrary, this poetic tonality insofar as it is a pure voice can only remain opaque and absence from the scene of writing and public reflection. The challenge in this question is to be able to balance the problem beyond judgement, which always hides a form of pathetic condemnation. 

In these pages concerning poetry and the philosophical aspiration of the poem, other names are invited into the scene: Giorgio Cesarano, Domenico Ferla, and Andrea Zanzotto. These are three figures where the challenge of poetry was taken only to be radically abandoned (perhaps less so in Zanzotto where the trace of the voice is already embedded in the poetic form, and thus there was not a need to execute the radical gesture of fleeing from poetry). Although one is also surprised that the question of poetry is not extended as a problem of thought and existence, which would allow for the collapse of the very separation of poetic form and the life of the community, perhaps because the voice that is carried in poetry is more originary dwelling of human existence than the human community, because ultimately the human community (Gemeinwesen) is refractory of an irremediable loss that is recasted as original. And Gianni Carchia saw in his “Glossa sull’umanismo” (1977), Camatte’s insistence on the original community and its negation through the anthropomorphosis of Capitalist revolution will necessarily result in an inverted or transfigured humanism; or, at least, a humanism that is always longing for the image of an originary community that can only be posited with an assertive knowledge that we do not know possess except as contaminated subjectivity. But perhaps the solicitation of originary community will always fail because it will be a displacement from abyss of non-belonging that we already inhabit – what Carchia called in the same text as “uscir fuori” – into the site of proper belonging of the human species fails to account for the impropriety that always marks the experience of errancy of life. As Endnotes has noted in their recent essay “Time is an invention of men incapable of love”, Camatte was aware of the Jewish form of life as a concrete experience “seeking a solution outside this world”. But this means that it is not enough to counterpose the community and state form (Jewish form of life precisely is not exhausted in community belonging, or in the memory of a community), but something other than the closure of the community if one wants to go beyond the eternal metabolic stasis of human belonging. Ultimately, as Camatte tells Guigou at the end of the correspondence, only Capital claims immortality in its universalist extension (Guigou 68). 

Perhaps this is a task that requires another modality of thought, perhaps a non-philosophical practice beyond community and humanity, but suspicious of the claims to immortality of the capitalist revolution. In a letter from 2016, Camatte citing François Julien, confronts philosophical thinking with a notion of wisdom that retracts from hostility and agonistic dispute, because it retreats into serenity of a peaceful sage (Guigou 65). I take this to mean something akin to Kojeve’s ‘voyou désœuvré’, the sage that in the Sunday of history harbors a passion of life where happiness is received not as a consequence of actions, but as a supreme grace of the unexpected. It does seem that this was also Camatte’s longing in life that although wanting to abandon this world, refused to abandon the interlocution with others; touching as if it were, an unbreachable state of wisdom.

The strain of waiting in the desert. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

3. Ibid., 220-221.

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

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