world

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

Aladdin’s lamp and world domination. by Gerardo Muñoz

In his 1982 novel Aladdin’s Problem (1982), Ernst Jünger defined planetary domination through the actualization of the trope of Aladdin’s lamp. Whenever a symbol of this sort is used, we know that it always carries weight of ambivalence more than that of synthesis. The mythic lamp is a trope for magic and enduring power; of countering visibility and invisibility, but it is also made from a material that has been extracted from the Earth. In other words, raw materials are manipulated as a reservoir of energy that dispense the world of forms. In the most succinct moment of the novel, Jünger writes: “Aladdin’s lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay. The lamp guaranteed domination as far as the frontiers of the traveled world – from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming towards us titanically” [1]. Aladdin’s lamp is no longer a tool deployed by governments and armies, it is rather the autonomous commanding force that opens to human domination and technological catastrophe that generates calculable objectivity in the world. 

In his conversations with Julien Hervier, Jünger stated that the “problem of Aladdin” is not a political problem, but rather one that involves the administration of energy and intelligence that is already beyond our hands, because it has been set loose by ongoing compulsion necessary to meet the indexes of production and transference of technology [2]. Of course, energy defined the broad design of modernity as the necessary condition to amplify historical forms and mediations (and deform, since it was always dialectic) of worldly events and relations. One should only be reminded that in the beginning of the 1920s three major texts by European thinkers – I am thinking of Pavel Florensky, Carl Schmitt, and Aby Warburg – saw the necessity to allude to the settled hegemony of electricity as the defining feature of the dominion of the world. 

As Warburg understood it prophetically in his lecture on the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians: “But myths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world, create space of devotion and scope for reason which are destroyed by the instantaneous electrical contact – unless a disciplined humanity reintroduce the impediment of conscience” [3]. And it goes without saying that this “instantaneous electrical contact” has become so thoroughly engrained in human existence, that it is now clear that life on Earth, as advanced by the latest phase of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is no longer point to the destruction of space but of the total disruption of electricity and energy that exceeds any sensible contact. Electricity as the paradigm of artificial mediation can only liberate the spiritualization of ongoing decline. 

It is no historical accident that empires and nations have always been driven by the accumulation of energy, although at its historical exhaustion, there is no longer a veneer of development and production between energy and empire, but only a unified empire of energy in a lamp that quenches and overruns itself towards extinction. This means that what defines the darkness of our times is neither disorientation nor political violence (although there is much of that too), but the blinding darkness of a translucent expropriation of the world of the living and the dead. It is through this assumption that Jünger makes the last business of the epoch of Aladdin – extractive energy as domination of objects and objecthood between worlds – as a large necropolis called Terrestra, financed by a banker named Jersson, where there is no longer any need for the liturgy or cults proper to myths, but naked exchange between gold and the material corpse that suppresses, via technological titanism, any possible relations to the irreducible. It remains to be thought whether the moment when the lamp goes off in the drained excess of its energy will also lead to the end of this world.

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Notes 

1. Ernst Jünger. Aladdin’s Problem (Marsilio Publishers, 1992), 118. 

2. Julien Hervier. Conversaciones con Ernst Jünger (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 100.

3. Aby Warburg. “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual”, Journal of Warburg Institute, V.2, April 1939, 292.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quod natis exitus. by Gerardo Muñoz

In Book V of his Latin Language, and immediately after commenting the duality of Earth and Sky, Varro writes an enduring and yet enigmatic gloss of worldly life. In Roland Kent’s translation from 1938 we read: “Inasmuch as the separation of life and body is the exitus, ‘way out’ for all creates born, from that comes exitium, ‘destruction’, just as when they ineunt ‘go into’ unity, it is their initia, ‘beginnings’ [1]. It is probable that Kent had to leave the latinized terms next to familiar reiteration of modern English in order to allow the text to breath in all of its complexity, for what is Varro ultimately attempting to tell us can very depending what we want to stress, and how we read in the scope of his discussion starting in section 58. Is it that life is always marked by the wound of separation with the natural world? Or that destruction and caducity (exitium) is a necessary condition for all new beginnings, as if life understood as an enclosed organism or entity is always insufficient, because of the order of excess at the very moment that it recognizes its propriety? This excess is what cannot be contained in neither life nor in social form or political mediation; it is the initia of thought in its relation to phenomena of the world but without ever being reduced in them. In this sense, there can only be a beginning in the passion that thought grants to the separation from the world. 

This is perhaps what Pindar had in mind when writing in Isthmian 8 – in clear tone of his disenchantment before political strife – of a need to return to a shared language among friends (a language that cannot be that of the rhetorical antinomies of the polis): “It is always best to look at each thing right at our feet / for treacherous time hangs over men and twist awry the path of life. But even those things may be healed by men if freedom is with them; and a man should give care to [that] noble hope” [2]. In his commentary on these lines C.M. Bowra notes that the awry and treacherous time of life that Pindar refers is not just a personal account, but rather a state of the world of his own generation and friends [3]. Politics brings to ruin; it brings fear, but more importantly it brings oblivion to the nearness of each and every thing that stamps irreducibility. But what Bowra does not thematize is the central stress of these lines; mainly, that the Ancient poet makes a plea to the examination of proximity and nearness “look at each thing right at our feet”. The plea to take care of a true life harmonized is preoccupied with this lying out before our feet is so inapparent that it provides texture and rhythm to every appearance; it is so invisible that it can disclose the very possibility of the beginning or end of a visible world. 

It seems that Pindar’s solicitation of proximity speaks to Varro’s initia; but not because there is something like a true origin or original position (a category that modern political thought later elevate to the physics of social stratification and positional distribution), but rather because another idea of “freedom” can be rethought from the excess of what appears spatially in the world; an absolute instance of appropriation beyond life. This is perhaps beautifully expressed in one of Cézanne’s most acute images of his creative process: “I breathe the virginity of the world…a sharp sense of nuances works on me. At that moment I am as one with my paintings” [4]. Before painting and creation there is a sensuous region in which the separation of objects and subjects do not longer sustain totality except as catastrophe or force.

This means that to disclose regions of life in the world is not just about the claim of autonomy and normativity of a place; on the contrary, it is the very inapparent, almost imperceptible, possibility that lies in the wrinkled proximity when we withdraw from things ad they seem. Quod natis exitus – because we are always exiled from each and every place, it is through the thinking of the inconspicuous of each and every being that revisitation of an ethical life calls on us from the outside. Ultimately, the ethical life is nothing but the imperative of «lech lechà» in a separation that unites when overcoming the deceit of time. 

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Notes 

1. Varro. On the Latin Language, Books 5-7 (Loeb Classical Library, 1951), 59. 

2. Pindar. “Isthmian 8”, in Pindar (Loeb Library, 1997), 211.

3. C.M. Bowra. Pindar (Oxford University Press, 1964), 114. 

4. Joachim Gasquet. Cézanne: A memoir with conversations (Thames&Hudson, 1991), 45.

The name Beatriz Viterbo. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The love of painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

2. Ibid., 39

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

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

Gethsemane as experience. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is a panel in the Museo del Prado titled “Agony in the Garden”, attributed to the French painter Colart de Laon (1377) whose religious work barely survives (this panel is, in fact, one piece from an original triptych). The scene portrays the well known stay of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsamane on the Mount of Olives, where solitude and abandonment prepares the interval for the moment of transfiguration. If anything, Gethsamane is an experience of inwardness outside itself, which the painter has marvelously captured in the figure of Jesus raising his hands in supplication to the starry skies and god. Or so we think. The crisp blue tone of the sky immediately reminds the view of the vault of the Villa Farnesina that Fritz Saxl has interpreted as the transmission of a previous pagan astrological faith in the pictorial composition. The intense blue tone coupled with the emphatic stars arrest our imagination, but also that of the humane and worldly Christ.

What kind of experience is to look up into the firmament from man’s place on Earth and the cosmos? And what are we to make of the inability of the civilized human being to look into the blue depth not as a mirror of Nature, but of the non-totalizable and irreducible experience of solitude? It must be said that in a post-mythical world, the increasing loss of the opening of the sky goes hand in hand with the boundless loss of the Earth. And this is why we are tempted to read Colart de Laon’s picture as a gesture that renders legible the passage of the same movement: the Jesus that raises his hands outwards to the sky; and, simultaneously, the dozing Jesus that inhabits the contemplative state at the center bottom of the picture. To live in the world is defined neither by the experience of the time of arrival of the sky nor by the inward experience of the soul, but by the ability of transiting from one state to the other. And only there the worldly divine can be disclosed beyond the sclerosis of form.

This might also explain why Søren Kierkegaard following the German hymnist Gerhard Tersteegen could write in a gloss of his diaries that Jesus arises from the love feat into the path of Gethsemane: “It is always this way: Gethsemane lies closest to the highest bliss” [1]. The highest place is not the moment of absolute transcendence through faith; it is the secret that for Tersteegen expresses a kenotic hymn that empties life in the direction of poverty and death. In other words, the “highest bliss” is the experience of expropriation of every life; making life and death become indistinguishable in the vacillating night. A night beyond time and without god.  

Perhaps not just the “religious experience”, but all experience has as its central paradigm, the highest bliss in the face of death in which language can only account for it in its muteness and reverence. This is not an experience of vital teleology of humanity, but of a furtive relation. “Hacía sobre ella la experiencia”, as a Chilean writer once put it in the imperfect tense. But this can only mean to do an experience on the dissolution of oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. Journals and Notebooks V.7 (Princeton University Press, 2014), 368.

Verónica Jaffé’s translation of the “Andenken”. by Gerardo Muñoz

Verónica Jaffé’s most recent Poesía, traduccion, libertad (2024), which gathers some of the translations already contained in Fredrich Hölderlin: Cantos Hespéricos (La Laguna de Campona, 2016), features an introductory essay where she reflects on translating Hölderlin’s poetry from the German into her own creative visual renderings of Spanish. Reflecting on the difficult task, if not utterly impossible, of translating “Andenken” (in Spanish she opts for “Recuerdo” and not “Memoria”), Jaffé departs from an important observation that we must take into account here: the fact that this late hymn has been catalogued as a proemial composition. What does it mean that “Andenken” is to be read as a proem? As we know from the Ancient sources, the proem is an oratory prelude to the topic deployed in a text; in other words, it is the persuasive caesura of language before any argumentative exposition. Hence, the composition of the proem is something like the pure mirroring of language. This could explain why Hölderlin’s “Andenken” while prima facie about memory and thinking does not have a guiding thread to restrain it; it unfolds the enactment of its own recollection through the sayable.

If “Andenken” is a long proem – the space where the poem and proem absolutely coincide – then this means any translation must keep the poetic possibilities of oration in preamble, in path of preparation. Jaffé offers two distinct trans-creations of the famous poem’s last lines. The first reads thus: “Un mar que guarda los recuerdos / que da amores, que los toma / para que solo queden después / como tesoros / en quienes recuerden y en quienes escriban” [1]. In the second version, even more elaborate and idiosyncratic, Jaffé writes: “de pensar con todos / mis amores, es decir / pensar fijando / papel y lápiz / sobre tela / en memoria de todos mis muertos” [2]. It is noteworthy that the famous literal last lines of the “Andenken”, suspended in an enjambment, appeals to a canvas that is splattered with the memory of the dead. It seems of all the dead of the human race. What does it mean that the act of remembrance is the recollection of all the dead? Poetic imagination, if a testamentary document, appeals to the archaic where the living and the dead inhabit the world through image [3]. For Jaffé – but this also an intuition that Hölderlin shared in his pindaric translations – the beginning is not a previous stage, but in media res of the event of language. 

The recollection of language within proem attests to the exilic dimension of language; the site where no one truly ever belongs to: “…la lengua en mi país que no me pertenece”, writes Jaffé [4]. This means that the authentic remembrance of language is not a national language, but always ex patria lingua, or a language outside the telluric fabric of the national community. Because we are always walking strangers in our own language, the contact with the dead repeatedly reemerges in the memorial grain of the voice. 

As C.M. Bowra has noted, Pindar’s allusion to Memory takes place in the context of the Muses: “[the poet] invokes Memory because she embodies the accumulated wisdom of the past, and the Muses because they pass on this wisdom to him. What he asks from them is the ability to deal properly with what they give….men are blind if they do not pursue wisdom with the help of the Muses” [5]. If the “Andenken” should be read as a proem, this is because recollection is always fixed in the irreducible experience of our voice that recalls language from its beyond.

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Notes 

1. Verónica Jaffé. Poesía, traducción, libertad (Editorial Blanca Pantin, 2024), 38.

2. Ibid., 40. 

3. Ibid., 40.

4. Ibid., 51.

5. C.M. Bowra, Pindar (Oxford, 1964), 33.

Enamoured psyche. On Pablo Oyarzun’s Hölderlin, el recuerdo (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

The concluding verses of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” (“Rembrance” or “Memoria”), “Yet what remains, the poets found” stands as one of the preeminent testaments of modern poetry, and in Heidegger’s famous characterization, as a declaration of the task of the poet. At least since the time of Stefan George and Max Kommerell, the figure of poet or Dichter, a hyperbolic figure of illumination and guidance caught in the net of poetry and philosophy, was already dependent on Hölderlin’s mysterious words. What remains in what the poet remembers and clears for foundation? What is the relationship between remembrance and what is ‘found’ or ‘established’? “Andenken / Remembrance” is a hymn from the late period, which means that it must be read in consistency with Höderlin’s poetological framework as it reaches its maximum degree of intensity in its declaration and deliverance. Pablo Oyarzun’s most recent Hölderlin, el recuerdo (Mudana ediciones, 2025) is a powerful and subtle contribution to the understanding of this poem that measures up to the task in its attention to lexicon and structure, metaphysical condensation, and the vortex of ‘memory’ that discloses the poem. One of the merits of Oyarzun’s philosophical hermeneutics, if we can call it that, resides in its refusal to incorporate philosophical doctrines to inform the major questions of the hymn; rather, he favors the very unfolding of the poem ramping its internal structure for possibilities (Oyarzun 18-19). Rereading “Remembrance” opens a path between philosophy and poetry in the dawn of the realization of metaphysics, whose price was paid by crushing the possible and the voice of the poem. 

For Oyarzun the poet’s remembrance is that of appropriation of what is proper, and thus inappropriable, and to which the hymn can only ‘thank’ in the way of thinking as figure in the face of the unfathomable. Following Heidegger’s reading to a point, to give thanks is also to welcome and greet that lets humans and things be in their truth; since greeting always assumes otherness as foreign into presence (Oyarzun 29-30). And in presence life acquires texture, depth, singularization, but also conversation; a reminder that will control the rhythm of Hölderlin’s hymn. What is brought to presence, then, is neither a possession nor a legible inheritance, but the non-synthetizable modulation of what is proper in virtue of being absolutely alien (Oyarzun 34). What is recalled in this poem that remembers and thinks the unthinkable? Is it just a stage for Hölderlin to poetically transfigure his well known travels in Bordeaux? Oyarzun tells us that even if that is to be taken into account, the foreigner path is only essential as a way of homecoming, making the site (and song) into the hymn (Oyarzun 42). There is relation to the absolute other, but only as transitory to becoming and divine destiny in the world: “…el espíritu ama, porque precisamente así, ensa autoalienación puede transitar a lo otro que lo otro, es decir, apropiarse de lo propio […] el pensamiento del Ereignis está condicionado estructuralmente poesía ex-propiación, por ese retraimiento, distracción o retiro (Entzug), solo puede el cual se da lo propio (Oyarzun 54-55). Höderlin’s poem sings from the lacuna of its own expropriation of the abode. And that abode is ultimately the unworking of remembrance and memory that is defaced in being absolutely intimate and irreducible.

In order to elucidate the contours of this memory and its oblivion, Oyarzun follows Dieter Heinrich observation that: “este movimiento [of remembrance as transcendence] conocedor de su propio curso y a la vez desviado del mismo, aspirando a un conocimiento en que algo perdurable (lasting), con gratitud, reine aún en la superación – esto es remembranza” (Oyarzun 61). What is remembrance if not what unweaves time? It is not an actual faculty of human psychology, nor a spectral incorporation of a missing object; rather, it is the non-syntheizable partition between language and the wound of existence; a separation that is only redeemed in the way of remembrance that deposes an ideal recollection of missing facts in preparation for recomposition. Oyarzun’s reading will depend on clearing the notion of severability as a condition for remembering and forgetting as it makes an entry into the poem’s final verse about the “fixating eyes of love” (den Blick heften). Helena Cortés Gabaudán translates it as “y el amor también fija aplicadamente los ojos” [1]. “Y también”, “but also”, a conjunction of persistence that Oyarzun reads as an inexorable attachment to memory and separation, and the memory of separation (Oyarzun 68). Because there is no sliding towards remembrance without departure, coming into the presence welcomes the memory that, in that very moment, has transformed our souls. 

Ultimately, for Oyarzun the vortex of Hölderlin’s “Andenken” is love understood as the supreme citation that enacts the place of both thanking and remembering: “Amar es recordar, frecuentar con el recuerdo (el pensamiento), lo amado, incluso allí donde lo amado está presente, porque así lo resguarda de la mera posesión y agradece su presencia. Amar es pensar-en, un modo, tal vez el más entrañable, de Andenken, amor” (Oyarzun 73-74). And this means that what remains and endures, as Adorno observed in his well known essay on parataxis in Hölderlin’s late poetry, is neither of the logical nor of the temporal indexes, but the event of language as originary creation and donation without contestation (Oyarzun 77). This is the instance where Hölderlin’s strange case of the divinization of the word – and this is the particularity of the hymn form, an element that is never teased out by Oyarzun – becomes absolute and intransigent. It is Höderlin’s absolute proximity with the classical world, but also its radical separation in the post-mythical world of dissenchantment. It can be said that that what endures ‘thanks’ the love of remembrance in its persistence of the word that does not allow history and the crisis of tradition: “en nombre de la cosa que queda, en la fragilidad de su tiempo, que es ese mismo quedar” (Oyarzun 79). 

The poem becomes the verbal and sayable site where the poetizing resides, as well as the greeting and farewell of departure, just like the spectral sailors of the poem. What endures intimately can be called love as a form of the immemorial (Oyarzun 80). And that is because in inscribing, or holding on to the irreducible origin, poetics becomes the supreme form of love – the love in separation – of an expropriated language that welcomes us home in conversation with friends. This attests to the spirit of Hölderlin’s well known letter to his friend Böhlendorff in 1802: “A los artistas les hace falta la psyche entre amigos, el nacimiento del pensamiento en la conversación y la carta. De lo contrario, no gozamos de nada de esto para nosotros mismos” [2]. And this intoxicated love in language that departs from separation situates Hölderlin as radically different from the Chirstian agape and its bond of perfect unity for securing salvation (Colossians 3:14). A salvation that Hölderlin overcame in the drama of Empedocles, enacting the impossible incorporation of the aorgic physis through the writing of the tragic myth. 

Now we are also able to understand why Hölderlin transited to the hymn as the supreme form of the poem; not because because it is the origin or its last stage, but a suspension of language retrieved is gathered in the two moments of salutation and farewell, celebration and lamentation [3]. The hymnal dimension of the poem becomes language as such, which Oyarzun calls the immemorial without ever alluding to the notion of hymn. Indeed, the love of remembrance only becomes possible as a disjointed factum of experience anchored in its abyssal noncorrespondence  (Oyarzun 84). Thus, to remember is to love the caducity of life – “este ya no es la signatura indeleble del amor”, as beautifully expressed by Oyarzun – in a world in which the testament of language awaits no resurrection. 

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Notes 

1. Friedrich Hölderlin. Poesía esencial (La Oficina, 2017), Trad. Helena Cortés, 129. 

2. Friedrich Hölderlin. Correspondencia completa (Ediciones Hiperión, 1990), trads. Helena Cortés & Arturo Leyte, 554. 

3. Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce: Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022), 246-247.

Seeleenlärm or soul noise. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a letter written in 1969 to her friend Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt provides a striking description of the solitary condition of thought in language: “The silent dialogue of thought goes on between me and myself, but not between two selves. In thought, you are self-less – without age, without psychological attributes, not all as you say “really are” [1]. Thinking, she goes on to claim, puts into crisis all identity and nonsense, so that the inward searching can fold “outwardly” into the world. Arendt immediately notes that the passage from interiority to the outwardness does not express a fixed purpose; it is rather a motion through which “words become part of the world”. Thought can be said to express the coming into relation between language and world.

Further exploring the depth of the language that characterizes the “inner life” of thought, the philosopher immediately emphasizes its acoustic or tonal qualities, that is, “an inevitable noise of our apparatus, which Broch called Seeleenlärm, soul-noise. It is what makes us tick”. To be in thought, or in a way to thinking, means allowing the soul noise to buzz from beneath the skin. The Seeleenlärm does not coincide with language as concept or signification; it is rather the tear that allows for the emergence of language as imagination and thinking. 

This operation is nothing more than the relation of language to its own impossibility or muteness in the region of the Seeleenlärm, and what artificial models of language cannot replicate. And although Arendt compares the soul noise to other functional organs of biological existence, it is only obvious that the harmony of the soul lacks a physical compartment, and can only be expressed in the possibilities that language bestows to thinking. The notion of Seeleenlärm, if we are to call it that, appears not in philosophical context, but in a literary one; that is, in Hermann Broch’s “Zerline’s Tale”, in which the soul voice is understood as the lacuna of sensation, having nothing special in terms of intellectual faculty or knowledge collectiom, it is the sensation that fill people’s empty and boring lives” [2]. Seeleenlärm determines thought, but it is not thinking as such; it is more like the suspension of temporalization and judgement in every living being. This is why it is not even coterminous with the passions, let alone love. Perhaps the Seeleenlärm can be said to occupy a third component (tertium comparationis) through which the human being structures the mystery of his spirit [3]. Is this third component that dissolves the self for the place for ethics? In Broch’s modernist aspirations, attuning to the noise of the soul meant the aesthetic reduction of a symbol to mediate “understanding from one person to another”.

But it should be obvious that the  transition of Seeleenlärm to metaphoric understanding flattens the void into a conglomerate of selves that come into being by setting aside thought through the communication or artistic repression. In the reverse, one could imagine then that there is only thought when the suspension of any conglomerate or community ceases to communicate by resting on proximity to the hole of the soul voice in expression. The communication between souls – beyond the transport of the symbol, beyond separation ordered by discourse – can only be understood as the incommensurable in language. This is the instance where thinking takes flight because the invisible seeleenlärm transpires from its depths. 

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Notes 

1. Hannah Arendt. Between Friends The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, 1995), 242-243.

2. Hermann Broch. “Zerline’s Tale”, in Selected Short Writings (Bloomsbury, 2006), 103.

3. Hermann Broch. “Some comments on the philosophy and technique of translating”, in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age (Counterpoint, 2002), 122.