Virgil

Arcadia after the age of poets. by Gerardo Muñoz

Monia Ferrando’s archeological reconstruction of Arcadia as a “political paradigm” that retreats from the nomos of force and usurpation has as its fundamental condition poetry and the voice of the poets. Given the tripartite nomoi of Arcadia (as law of the heart, song, and meadows), which exceeds the autonomy of the polis in Athens, poetic voice functions as the mediation for the effective transmission of the mythopoetic figure that would guarantee another relation, a non-productive and authentic proximity with the world. Throughout the book, whenever Ferrando wants to take a distance from the polis as derivative from the polis she goes to the poets and poetry. Consider for instance, this moment (all the translations are mine from the Spanish edition) in the last chapter on the political paradigm of Virgil: “Poetry, then, is called upon, from its own painful present, to venture like a new Orpheus, but as a memore veggente [a memorious seer], into the darkness of the past, to give new form to love without being content with its mere image. To traverse the stratification of human experience that has shaped the world in order to reshape, in turn, a love reduced to a bloodless and deceptive phantom” [1]. The ‘pre-political’ site of Arcadia is in the poetic voice, whose fundamental task is to transform the ideal of triumph and victory to that of erotic enchantment and fascination that refuses the autonomization of the erotic image [2]. 

If one considers the totality of Il Regno Errante it is not all too difficult to discern that the transmission and ambivalent origin of irruption in the tradition – which Ferrando thinks with Overbeck’s urgeschichte  – is only possible through both a poetization of politics, and the substitution of the hēgemon by the poet when thinking about the afterlife of Arcadia in the genesis of the West, in the very passage from Antiquity to the modern epoch. In this way, poetics is not subsumed to political practice, guided by the classical figure of the ‘Dichter als fuhrer’ described by Max Kommerell, but a state of the via contemplativa in its distancing with the world. In a very elucidating moment Ferrando thematizes this as follows: “Eros is not a political practice in which thought is neatly concealed, but a poetics that culminates in the disinterested contemplation of beauty, in pure theoria. Here, poetry will be philosophical, and philosophy, poetic, without any distinction” [3]. But it is also here that poetry is acting as the supreme activity that can retrieve and connect existence in the world, which is the proper to the classical antiquity, which solicits the question: could this still hold for the philosophical predicament of the poem in modernity? Can the poet stand and mediate to the prophecy at the moment of the decline of the logos, positing the dichtung as an operative substitute? It seems to me that this presents us with an unavoidable difficulty about the transmission of the memory of Arcadia. And we should do well to articulate it.

In her recent biography of Paul Celan, Anna Arno mentions in passing and without no theoretical pretensions, that the young Jewish poet, still under the influence of his mentor Alfred Sperber, wrote a poem that while taking place in the meadows of Arcadia, there is a loose arrow that hinders and hunts the possibility and and shadow of death. The last verses of the poem titled “The arrow of Artemis” introduce something like an oblique and unfathomable shadow in the landscape of Arcadia, which Arno describes in this way:  

“The ‘born again’ poet dedicated “The arrow of Artemis” to his mentor. Celan rendered the Arcadian landscape, but in the final stanza he expressed his fear: “How should he who, above sky-blue pebbles…not ponder that Artemis’ arrow, still lurks in the forest and in the end will strike him?”. Introducing a sense of peril, the poem struck up a polemic: mythical lands provided no shelter against the shockwaves of historic barbarism. Celan was declaring a new path, unlike what Sperber could have chosen for him”. [4].

While on the surface there is a superficial way of reading this commentary in the manner of the typical proximity-distance of the “anxiety of influence”, I want to read this moment as emblematic and hyperbolic of the condition of the crisis of the age of the poets in modernity where the transmission of the Arcadian bliss is impossible in the wake of historical barbarism, which also shatters the structure of poematicity as it runs through the intricate work of Celan. How do we understand Celan’s ‘new path’ that seems absolutely heterogeneous to the divinization of the musical voice required to disclose the Arcadian myth? Perhaps modern poetry, and modern poets at large, cannot initiate the restitution of Arcadia because they can only recognize its own autonomy in a postmythic world after the fleeing of the gods and the absence of God (as verbalized in Hölderlin’s fragment on Oedipus).

This is what Giorgio Agamben has seen in his text on San Juan de la Cruz when discussing poetry to mystical theology:  “Indeed, San Juan’s mystical theology still presupposes the existence of a positive theology and of a Holy Scripture, from which it derives its own legitimacy and guarantee. Modern poetry, instead, does not recognize any other holy scripture but itself. For this reason, modern poetry—insofar as it is its own, sole guarantor—has been fatally led to question its own limits and its own adequacy and to search in its own incessant, ironic sacrificial self-negation for the only valid guarantee of its own authenticity” [5]. And more recently, this thesis has also been validated explicitly in Il corpo della (2026), where he recalls that all major poetic gestures of Western poetry in the twentieth century – from Pound’s Cantos to Eliot’s The Wasteland, from Mandelstam’s Fourth Prose to Celan’s own destructive poetry of the German language  – only manages to preserve the ruins and fragments of the tradition. The poet can only register those fragments, but he is incapable of building another world in the accumulated site of its ruins. 

In its possibility of bearing witness in language, experience might open up the trace of the voice in the non-place of death as the sole destiny of between beings, as Carchia suggests in his early essay on Celan’s “The Meridian” [6]. But poetry transfigured in this way entails that the figure of Arcadia can only be taken as the possibility that emerges from the event of language at the border of nihilism and madness. As emblems of this poetic experience without revelation, both Hölderlin’s madness and Celan’s suicide are perhaps instances of this ‘seeking’ in the shadow of Arcadia’s disinterested via contemplativa of beauty, where the nocturnal black that casts a shadow into the clear and sunny landscape of the memory of Arcadia. This shadow does not eclipse the myth of Arcadia; far from it; in its theistic passage disclosed by light of the eros daimon, the voice seems to be prolonged and eternal at the very end of the experience of modern poetry.

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Notes 

1. Monica Ferrando. El reino errante: la Arcadia como paradigma político (Adriana Hidalgo, 2024), 638.

2. Ibid., 595. 

3. Ibid., 538. 

4. Anna Arno, Paul Celan: A Life (Harvard Press, 2026), 60-61.

5. Giorgio Agamben. “La notte oscura di Juan de la Cruz”, in Poesie: Juan de la Cruz (Einaudi, 1974), xii.

6. Gianni Carchia. “Il Meridiano di Celan”, Rivista di Estetica, XVIII, May-August 1973, 196. 

A world without Virgil. by Gerardo Muñoz

I remember that around 2007 there was a graffiti in Venice that read: “Non c’è nessun Virgilio a guidarci nell’inferno”, which can be rendered as “There is no Virgil that can guide us in this hell”. Many street graffitis come and go, and are easy to forget, but not this one. What does it mean that we live in an epoch without the company of the Roman poet Virgil? The suggestion prima facie is quite clear: if our voyage in the present entails a concrete hell (the subjection into economic domination and nihilism), it is an evermore so repulsive voyage as we lack the presence of the poet who can bear witness to the passing of an epoch and the possibility of the coming of a new earth. 

But why Virgil? As Erich Auerbach already noted, for Dante the historical Virgil is both the poet and the historical witness, given that the Roman poet’s exemplary descent into hell was the preparation of a “terrene Jerusalem (earthy Jerusalem), the universal peace that came to pass during the Roman Empire, proposed and glorified in light of its future mission…Virgil led the way as a poet because of his description of the realm of the dead; he was thus a guide through the afterlife because he knew the way. But it was not only as a poet that was destined to lead. He was destined because he was a Roman and a human being” [1]. It would follow that an age dominated by the realization of  absolute indifferentiation – this is the frame of nihilism after all – highly repressive of any proximity with the dead, can have no use of any Virgil even if one would offer to open a path to leave hell behind. The artist will not be understood or recognized as either human or poet, but rather taken as fully inhuman and incomprehensible. And this perhaps speaks to the tonality of terror and blindness that defines the undifferentiated suspended posthistorical time. 

That there are no Virgils to cast a forward light outside the epocal hellish condition entails that we are left with an absolute politicization over life and death that takes the form of a novel technical imperium. We know that in Antiquity, political unhappiness and disarray was a common state of affairs (and also exile from civil life); life was conditioned, although not totally subsumed, by cycles of domination and insubordination during volatile civil stasis. But still in that historical epoch, a poet like Virgil, as both human and poet, was able to turn away from the “harsh and evil world, and sets out for Arcadia where he allows no hope, not even any desire to do something about the suffering world, to lighten his sorrow and despair” in the communion of friendship and concordia to retreat from static political absorption [2]. When we say that our predicament is that of a a world without Virgil, this should not be understood as a reiteration of Max Kommerell’s paradigmatic Jugend ohne Goethe (“a youth without Goethe”); but rather, more fundamentally, as the impossibility for the human species to imagine a sense of redemption in world that reduces itself to exchange and strife. In other words, the absence of the memory of Virgil speaks directly to the ever-increasing incapacity of existence to dwell beyond the imperatives of a calamitous attenuation of destruction and oblivion. We should keep in mind that Dante’s memory of Virgil was a symbol for the poetizing myths of a new life; and, in turn, Virgil’s own Arcadian nomos was the confabulation of reality and myth expressed in a language that measured itself against the orderability of imperial force. The triumph of total politicity, which is to say the coupling of the political into effective dispensation of technology, mutes not only the voice of the poets, as much the contact of speech and the passing of the world into nothingness. 

In The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch describes this very passage through the mystical death and cosmic transcendence of the Roman poet himself, who now enters “a primal darkness which had held itself hidden behind the furthermost starry orb and now, independent of the arching path of lights, indeed, without putting out a single one of them it filled the dome of existence with impenetrable darkness: the essential world-darkness burst forth, that uncreated darkness which is infinitely more than the mere loss of light or absence of light…” [3]. For Broch, the passing of the world in the wake of the death of the poet does not coincide with the silence constitutive of speech, but with the severability of a language transformed as fully transparent and unmediated, in Broch’s words “all understanding, consummating, might and commanding; the world of pledge, the pure word, becoming so overpowering that nothing could withstand it” [4].

Extrapolated to our times, the liquidation of language takes form of absolute theatricality of the word, ascending to rhetorical and computational transparency. And in this unnerving cacophony, where everything is communicated, is realized in the historical project of cybernetics and automatized languages. The ethical texture of speech becomes unattainable for both humans, as poetizing beings, as they become incapable of inhabiting the dislocated abyss between myth and reality, now pivoted to a linguistic closure that commands them into the high noon of despair. An endless despair that has relentlessly lost with the inception of the divine.

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Notes

1. Erich Auerbach. “Figura” (1938), in Selected Essays: Time, History, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 2014), 108

2. Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind (Dover Publications, 1982), 293.

3. Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil (Vintage, 1972), 471.

4. Ibid., 481.

Virgil in contemporary America. by Gerardo Muñoz

The well-established American Liberal historian of ideas, Mark Lilla, writes in his recent essay “The Once and the Now” an outlandish thesis: “the ideologies of modern fascism are all heirs to the Aeneid.” Any reasonable reaction should start not by disputing the content of such superficial assertion, but rather by raising the central question: what has taken place in America so that this level of intellectual putrefaction and conscious oblivion towards the past could take place, thus becoming permissible and reasonable? From where does the intellectual confidence emerge so that such a lethal rhetorical force can be deployed? At a high paced rate, the United States has become a beacon for an ongoing fascination over “fascism and anti-fascism” to the point of adapting an absolute form of parody in the “serious” forms of culture, academic production, and current event discussions.

Perhaps it is not that difficult to find an answer; and, one can say that once a culture repeatedly defines itself by the parameters of its parodic enactment is precisely a culture that has effectively ceased to exist. Carl Schmitt was up to something when he writes in Glossarium (an entry from 1953) that fascism after the war amounted to the ultimate victory of Stalinism over every other geopolitical actor in the Western world. The Cold War was also a battle for mimetic containment and pacification: the uttermost consummation to the highest case of metonymic endurance. The diffused “cultural war” in America in every symbolic dimensions of life (the media, the university, the political jargon, the legal profession, the community interaction, etc) shows that the victory has now reached definitive and unprecedented heights. It is true that fascism has always triggered a sort of libidinal drive – something that Susan Sontag knew well – in the societal attachment to symbolic production. In this sense there is little new here. But the novelty shows itself if one understands that the rhetoric of fascism has now become autonomous and sine qua non to cultural solvency into nihilism.

If Lilla’s remark caught my attention it is because it fully captures this transformation at the highest levels of the American elite. This transformation is nothing but the essence of Americanism as a fictive rhetorical parody of everything belonging to “Western culture”. This is why, regardless of ideological commitments (or precisely because of them), Americanism is in the business of an active forgetting of the West; while, at the same time, presuming credentials to be its most courageous defender. But it should be clear that Americanism’s defense of the West ultimately means the compulsive expansion of public opinion through a trivialization of the alienability of the past in its own ever-changing image.

In 1935, a short book appeared in Europe penned by Catholic intellectual Theodor Haecker that was entitled Virgil, Father of the West. This essay reminded its readers that culture in Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics is best understood as the possibility of dwelling in the land through the cultivation of the Eros itself. In fact, Haecker will go on to write that the paradigm of Virgil’s Georgica should remain well into the end of the epoch as a solid commitment to the iustissima tellus against the “mysticism of the machine and the glorification of technology”. Almost a century after, Haecker’s hope in the possibility of cultivating homecoming has literally vanished. To any attentive observer it is clear that American intellectual elites have abdicated their commitment to iustissima tellus, while the marching orders of Americanism, driven by the artificial hells of the Metaverse and planetary conflagration, have already animated the flock through the gate leaving behind nothing but resilient and uninterrupted destruction.