world

You are the task. by Gerardo Muñoz

Out of all of the Zürau aphorisms of Kafka there is one that reads as follows: “You are the task. No pupil far and wide (Du bist die Aufgabe. kein Schüler weit und breit) [1]. It resonates profoundly in our days as the idea of “education” and its inherited traditions are liquidated by the essence of technology. What Kafka could have meant by the idea of “task” (in German Aufgabe or in Spanish tarea) is to be deciphered in the intellectual context of the time. In his gloss to this aphorism, Reiner Stach has emphasized something elementary and yet quite essential; that is, that the task is not an action of the subject, but the meeting place of both subject and object. There is only the task of existence, and only to this extent we are always students of life before everything else comes into being. In a later aphorism, Kafka seems to return to the question of task by adding: “Two tasks at the beginning of life: to keep reining in your sphere, and to keep checking whether you might have gone into hiding somewhere outside your sphere” [2]. Something escapes, and that which is other than what is appropriate in life might just be the infinite work of the task of existence. 

If there is a “theology” in Kafka it is something other than one conditioned by an efficacious action directed towards God. Again, these questions were up in the air in Kafka’s milieu at the time, and it suffices to remember Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (1915) as an emblem, when the old astronomer tells his pupil Kepler: “One thing alone: carry out my work; do not let this tremendous labor utterly perish…” [3]. Writing in close proximity to Felix Weltsch’s theology of transcendent action in Freiheit und Gnade (1920), Brod understood that humans are only legitimate and participating in the “good” if it assists in the poetic energy of God. Here the notion of the task corresponds to the higher and more geometrico order of God. For Kafka, on the contrary, there is no task that is oriented as a supplement to a divine order that must be realized; it is rather a sensible education that had no beginning and no end, learning without texture because it has no fixed object. This Kafka’s task is an exilic (galuth) practice that cannot be territorialized in a promise of nationhood or state authority. The paradigmatic figure of “this task” is Sancho Panza, because as a lucid and sensible fool he is able to enjoy life to the very end. To experience the task without a destiny is to be able to stretch experience to the end of life. 

This is precisely why Sancho Panza stands the paradigm of the task of a life that dwells in freedom. Let us recall carefully what Kafka writes in his short parable “The truth about Sancho Panza”: “Sancho Panza, a free man, maybe out of a certain feeling of responsibility, yet imperturbable, followed Quixote on his adventures and from them he had a grand and successful entertainment to the end of his days” [4]. The condition of ‘freedom’ that is proper to the task is imperturbable (gleichmütig), in which the pursuit of struggle and conflict is abandoned in order to complete and follow the task. But this “following” is not one of submission, but of segundear or sekundiere: “In the struggle between you and the world, second the world”, as he writes in another mysterious Zürau aphorism [5]. We remain in a state of the pure imperturbable when we second the world, because nothing appears to inflict us existence with the force of submission or obedience. Thus, freedom is not a substantive political category, but a lived and almost painterly instance in language that puts us closer (or apart) from our task. 

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Notes 

1. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 42. Translation modified.

2. Ibid., 186.

3. Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (Northwestern University Press, 2007),  124.

4. Franz Kafka. “The truth about Sancho Panza”, in The Complete Stories (Schocken Books, 1971), 610. 

5. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 106.

The last tzaddik. by Gerardo Muñoz


According to the Talmudic tradition there is a certain number of just persons, called the tzaddikim, that exist in every generation. Their divine and singular existence is known only to God, and according to the tradition if the world continues to exist it is only for their sake. They live in the desert of the world without ever being known by anyone in the public eyes. In this sense, the tzaddikim could be anywhere and everywhere as long as there is a nuance of humilitas. It is not clear, however, that the tzaddik is an ethical being in the polarity of thinking and action; but it is precisely this depth that renders him an opaque and mysterious figure. How many tzaddikim are there in each generation? 

Although Borges directs our attention to Max Brod as a modern source regarding the tzaddikim, it is actually Gershom Schlem who in an illuminating essay of this tradition records that it was the fourth century Babylonian teacher Abbaye who attached a number to these “saviors of the world” to thirty-six: “The world is never without thirty just men who daily receive the Divine Countenance” [1]. The world is not saved by the promise of redemption alone; what the tradition of the tzaddikim teaches future generations is that there is only redemption whenever something like a depth of existence is treasured as an embodied mysterium. In other words, it is almost as if in the tzaddikim the idea that “life is always elsewhere” is not only confirmed on the basis of faith, but on the inconspicuous existence that is divine in virtue of ceasing to be public and translucid. As Scholem says later on in his essay: “…these hidden just men belong to a higher order because they are not subject to the temptation of conscience which is virtually inseparable from public life”.

In a world pushed into full transparency, absolutely transformed into a reservoir of energy extraction and dispensation like the one that we are currently living, it is not all too difficult to imagine that even the secret lives of the tzaddikim are at risk of survival. And if the apocalyptic tone of our current gnosis has become predominant within the accelerated technological development, one could imagine that the opacity of the tzaddikim is slowly drying out, very much like the way that major rivers in the American desert are continuously being pushed to planned obsolescence and slow extinction. 

In fact, one could go further and say that there  is a clear analogy between rivers and the tzaddikim insofar as they are both pathways of generational communication of the human species with the world whose mouths that for millennia have made the condition of life possible. This means that in the same way that river mouths dry up, human language, with the advent of the barbarism of “Artificial Intelligence”, also becomes a new phase of desperate muteness, losing its capacity to pass forward its traditions and memories. Who is the last tzaddikim today? He or she will be the secret agent of language itself, the keeper of a divine surge that erupts even in the meanderings of a world out of tune. 

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Notes 

1. Gershom Scholem. “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men”, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schoken Edition, 1971), 252.

Language as a garbage heap. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is an extraordinary description in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes el memorioso” that depicts his state of absolute nominalism as literally a landfill, a pile of trash. We read the following: “Y también hacia el alba: mi memoria, señor, es como un vaciadero de basuras”, which James Irby translates as “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap”. The absolutization of memory without oblivion and forgetting renders all the possible and imaginable names as already present, but also useless to the point that they cannot be voiced, let alone retained at a distance. The world of Funes is analogous to that of the advanced world of technology that we are currently experiencing at an accelerated pace: the so called Artificial Intelligence remembers every name and all entities as if it were picking up items from a landfill container. It does not really matter if the names picked are correctly or falsified; it is precisely that naming as such no longer has any enchantment that is only granted by the divinity of the voice. As language becomes contained as a “heap of garbage” any relation between remembrance and the human voice that for centuries had been the source of affection is eliminated. 

Exactly two decades after the publication of Ficciones (1944) in his Seminar of Le Thor, Heidegger will also take note of Heraclitus’ Fragment 124 in relation to a heap of garbage as a definition of the cosmos: “…in its complete appearing as fire, “the most beautiful ordering of all is surely comparable to a heap of randomly spilled garbage. This means that the innaparent joining together is superior to every visible ordering, even if it is the most beautiful possible (fragment 54)” [2]. The emphasis is placed on the order of the random that in its inappearance discloses appearance as order (κόσμος). Immediately Heidegger notes that the archaic notion of “world” in Heraclitus, his “heap of trash”, is radically different from the standard of the world today that secures all possible predictions and calculation, where there is room for everything insofar as every-thing is taken as an extension of energy. 

This garbage heap realizes itself through the force of “speaking” in the name of technological orderability, efficiency, and promises of economic growth. The new order of the world as trash is proportional to the slow erosion of language that in its accelerating caducity loses its capacity to remember and forget. It goes without saying that in our present, and especially in the United States, the educational and academic institutions have been at the helm in the process of facilitating this compulsive destruction of language and memory, which evidences the intimate liaison of the technician and the pedagogue in the configuration of the immonde. 

Borges’ Funes will ultimately die from a pulmonary congestion, which is a testament of death in spite of the horror of a language incapable of naming and letting go. And in his lecture, according to the transcription of one of his students, Heidegger concluded with this recommendation: “What remains essential is to continue along the same path without having concern for any of the publicness around us”. A hidden and conjured language would be the only last standing order, a keeper of truth and beauty, because unlike the machine it voices the names while also exposing itself to the possibility of forgetting them.

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Notes 

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “Funes el memorioso”, in Ficciones (Emecé, 1958), 76.

2. Martin Heidegger. “Seminar in Le Thor 1966”, in Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2012), 8. 

Technology and thinking. A reply to Samuel Contreras. by Gerardo Muñoz

The recent response to Nelly Richard’s stance against infrapolitics, has prompted an ongoing conversation although not always public. However , there has been a public reaction in a column by Samuel Toro Contreras, “El poder ya no está donde creemos” published in El Mostrador. I do not think that this reply is necessarily critical of Contreras’ article, since I tend to agree with its main framework. I mean this comment as a sort of recalibration of Contraras’ observation, which ultimately hinges upon on two central elements: first, that there is no need for “cultural war”; and second, that a debate regarding the centrality of politics (the hegemonic position) or the non-centrality of politics (infrapolitics) is already a duality surpassed by the question of technology. 

Of course, I agree with the analytical intuition deployed by Contreras that the essence of concrete domination today is to be analyzed in the organization of infrastructure. The transformation of sovereign power into the molecular and administrative dispersion of control has been invariably present in what infrapolitics has tried to think through in its different approaches. And not only infrapolitics, of course, but also other theoretical positions that refuse the fantasy of hegemonic politics. I do think that infrapolitics does not think this problem factually; what we continue to call “politics” – inherited from the Greek dispensation of the polis, in contrast to the chôra and the Arcadia, just to name two counterfigures – is already functioning as proto-infrastructure of the social community of norms and reproduction and the economy. The meson of the polis is the infrastructural design, to use the terminology of Alejandra Castillo, in which life is only possible as determined by the equivalent. The problem of technology does not begin with the locomotive, “cybernetics”, “Artificial Intelligence”, or what have you.

When Contreras writes that “la pregunta de base seria anterior, sobre que infraestructura técnica produce hoy aquello que todavía seguimos llamando política”, he is inadvertently endorsing infrapolitical thought, with the caveat that infrapolitics is not merely invested in the objective conditions of politics, but on those conditions of thought cannot be absorbed by politics. To say that politics amounts to infrastructure in our time is to say that the “destiny as political” as defined in European modernity can be paragraphed today as “our destiny is geopolitical”. This is another way to say that politics is no longer organized around time and decision, but on space and administration. 

To simply call this “politics” responds to the inertia of language that tends to obscure the terms of exchange. Infrapolitics does not claim clarity, but in the wake of the absolutization of infrastructure of the Gestell, it does favor the possibility of thought rather than exerting a new political primer of action or reform. In light of this, it is not the relation between technology and politics what is at stake; the authentic step back is the difficulty presented by the non-relation of technology and thinking. This might be a slight displacement from Contreras’ own position about infrastructure, and it is one that never really wanted to align itself with either politics or culture. 

Panza de burro. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is always something deeply unnerving and mysterious about the end of summer, which is not a mystery of time, but of place and its relation to where we stand or lack standing. George Oppen has a couple of verses that capture this sensation, even though he was far removed from the summer in this particular poem: “the self is no mystery / the mystery is that there is something for us to stand on”. And where exactly do we stand in the passing of summer? How do we voice this passage? This surely not a geographical location or territory, but the most primordial place that humans have to stand on: the habitation in language. So, the clear and opening of summer is a specific type of relationship that brings us closer to its voice. This is beautifully treated in Andrea Abreu’s novel Panza de Burro (2025), where read moments such as these: 

“Y volvía pa detrás y pesaba de nuevo con el dudo ven vive una aventura agamos 1000 lokuras voy aserte caricias ke no san inventario. Y entonces miraba a Isora  pensaba que a lo mejor, como no era capaz de carcarila como se acariaban o se abrazaban otras niñas podía hacerle caricias ke no san inventao y pasarle la mano por la parte de atrás de las rodillas o deslizar los dedos por encima de las costra de sus ûnas de los pies o rozar los revoltillos de carne que le salían por encima de las bragas” [1]. 

If on the surface Panza de burro is about the bodily proximity with her friend Isora, what the climatological phenomenon of the “panza de burro” (literally translates as the belly of the donkey that refers to the insular descent of humid clouds into the landscape) brings to bear is the experience of the idiom. In this sense, the dialectical rhythm of Canarian Spanish of Panza de burro is a decisive reflection to free language as an experience of proximity in the wake of this inexorable climate condition of summer. In the English language – curiously not so in Spanish – the expression “dog days of summer” is the idiom that refers to the boredom experienced by the end of summer.

This is a one of a kind of boredom that is fully immersive, lagging in a time that is both dead and not yet alive; a time of stagnation or decay, which is why in Swedish language it is referred as rötmånaden or time of the rot. The panza de burro of dog days of summer cannot longer be conceived as the dies caniculares that guides one’s destiny as in the frescos of Villa Farnesina. On the contrary, these days of suspended action and boredom is an attunement to the interiority of language and how language can be felt similarly to those clouds that cut through the mountains in the Canary islands leaving behind a spectacle of grey and formlessness. 

In Abreu’s Panza de burro, this phenomenon is explored at the most visceral and somatic level, that of the skin. And yet, a more precise way to see these transformations in the coming and turning of language into the spiritual region of the world. It is this experience in language that automatic machines will not be able to translate, as it lacks the abode of that “perpetual holiday” in the words of Cesare Pavese, and that we feel as the fleeting eternity of summer. 

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Notes 

1. Andrea Abreu. Panza de burro (Barrett, 2025), 81. 

Sentence and prose. by Gerardo Muñoz

After more than ten years, I have recently reread several works of contemporary novelist Alan Pauls, and only now I have come to understand the precision of his language; a perfect combination of the rhythmic movement of a swimmer combined with a dry stroke of a brush on a canvas. This precision is not holistic, but found in every sentence of his prose. Aside from the content of his intuitions about literature or the almost microscopic development of frozen time of his characters, what Pauls ultimately teaches is that the unit of prose is the sentence, both its cadence and its ability to be severed and be brought to an end. This is precisely the meaning of the “period” (periodos) as the internal unit of the sentence: periodos is afterall, the circular moment of something that has a beginning and an end. The achievement of a good prose is the articulation of periods that can launch and make a sentence retire. 

For a novelist who is also a self-reflective essayist, it is puzzling that Pauls has not implicitly thematized the unity of the sentence in the craftsmanship of prose (although he has considered accentuation in an essay) [1]. But it is wholly absent in El factor Borges (2004), and his most recent collection of musings and glosses on reading and writing in a volume titled Trance (2014). It is perhaps too easy to overstate the fact that there cannot ever be a general theory of the sentence, because both tone and periodos are expressions of style. The construction zone of a well crafted prose can only be analyzed in the movement of the sentence. In a fabulous moment of his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the sixteenth century grammarian and poet Abrabham Fraunce writes the following regarding the sentence: 

“The beginning and the end of a poemt must not be the beginning or ending of prose. For the beginning, a little consideration will suffice, for the middle, less; but in the end the chief care is to be had, for it is most examine, and the longest in memory. It must therefore be sweetly contruied, that it seem not hasty and abrupt: it must also be varied and changed often time…if the same foot should in the end be continualed repeated.” [1]. 

In his treatise of rhetoric, Fraunce connects the end of the sentence, the coming to the periodos to the work of memory and sweetness. Perhaps because the cadence embedded in the sentence is the instance that allows us to connect past and present without hesitation or interruption; not the moment of suspension and surprise, but of landing in language, so that something, once again, can commence. This is also why a novelist in Spanish like Alan Pauls has not ceased to be fascinated by the idea of the past, especially in El pasado (2003), but also in his historical trilogy about his coming of age in the seventies. In other words, it is not enough to write the past in mere prose; the most important solicitation is to lodge its memory in the nest of the sentence. It is only here where memory arrives at a region called “home”.

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Notes

1. Alan Pauls. “Elogio del acento”, in Temas lentos (Random House, 2022), 52.

2. Abraham Fraunce. The Arcadian Rhetorike (Oxford University Press, 1950), 34.

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.

Lexis alia. On Miguel Valderrama’s Guerra y Democracia: Retrato, Stasis, Anonimia (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

How to think through the stasis as a figure of thought in an epoch of transition and decline? This is the task of the historian – perhaps also of the philosopher and the critic – at the threshold, according to Miguel Valderrama in his book Guerra y Democracia: Retrato, Stasis, Anonimia (Palinodia, 2025), where stasis is extended beyond its categorial inscription in the grammar of political thought in order to capture its oscillatory movement. Dispersion is a word at the heart of Valderrama’s scene of writing; a scattering of sense that radicalizes the enterprise of the historian’s task that cannot remain alien to the problem of language. In fact, it is at the conjunction where Valderrama wants to situate the problem of stasis. As he writes early on in the book: “Pasión en la dispersión, sí, sí con esta frase se nombre en secreto lo que en la errancia del vocablo stasis evoca una escena traumatizante, una herida, una punzada la escenificación de un acontecimiento y el orificio de su representación, la memoria de una stasis y de la anonimia que le es más propia, impropia” (Valderrama 15). 

For Valderrama the Greek term – which holds on to definitions of civil war but also conflict and internal stabilization – now welcomed in theoretical discussions, comes to name the errancy and wound of the endurance of war in the modern political project of representation and legibility. As a thinker of the local scene (and its counter-scenes), Valderrama perceives that in recent years the Chilean contemporary critical discussion, especially in the wake of the Chilean revolt of October 2019, has introduced the pulsating grammar of stasis to think this fissure in representation. Valderrama cites the essays by Rodrigo Karmy, and Alejandra Castillo, Juan Pablo Arancibia, Willy Thayer; but also publications like Escrituras Americanas and the now defunct Revista Disenseo, and the novelist Nona Fernández (Valderrama 31). Obviously, the list is not exhaustive. In the Chilean contemporary scene, stasis is removed from its hellenistic origins, in order to name the unmediated irruption of images, inscriptions, and languages as fragments in the interior of history (Valderrama 50). In post-dictatorship Chile these fragments gravitate around the impossible image of La Monada bombed in 1973, which is juxtaposed to the anonymous images of the revolt in Santiago in October 2019, where some are more monumental than others. 

One of the novelties in Valderrama’s Guerra y Democracia (2025) is precisely the insistence to think the problem of stasis as radially bound to the regime of visibility and legibility that organize the artifact of political representation. In fact, and following the canonical studies of the Leviathan’s frontispiece and its relation to modern optics, we know that modern political representation has relied consistently on material technologies where representation and the homogeneity of the social body coincide (Valderrama 79). From Thomas Hobbes at the birth of political liberalism to Carl Schmitt’s political theology in Weimar, the visual artefact has been the infrastructure in the making of political authority and the unity of civil society. The repressed containment of stasis at the heart of the modern liberal state is granted only if the regime of public legibility has been constructed. In this sense, all modern politics is necessarily heliotropic, revolving around the sun of sovereignty that will later transform into the electric and atomic form of energy reserves.

By the same token, following Valderrama, we can then say that what stasis names is precisely the breakdown of the helitropic movement in an epoch of absolute exposure and blinding transparency. More than a century ago, in 1913 Malevich could speak of the “Victory over the Sun”, but this can only make sense if such victory can allow for a regime of nocturnal seeing and generic anonymity, which is always on the ‘other side’ of political dominium (be it techno-capitalism or communal administration) where all identifications fails, because there is no longer a common body or a name as energy reserve for social organization. It is because of this rupture that there cannot be a stasis within the social, but also against the closure of the spatial arraignment of the Social understood as the site that requires energy (production) in order to produce a certain degree of comprehensive idealization. Of course, Valderrama is not oblivious to this, as he writes in one of his most programmatic definition of the stasis: 

“La revuelta, la stasis, se define contra esta dieta y contra este régimen de luz. Al bertillonismo que define los límites y la lógica del espacio público, la revuelta opone la multiplicación de máscaras, la suspensión del retrato, la proliferación de lo anónimo. El régimen diurno del aparecer opone la noche, las sombras y el humo de los enfrentamientos de cuerpos liberados del rostro y del retrato, de la ficha policial. La revuelta pone en movimiento una anonimia, un juego de máscaras que desata anónimos, pseudónimos, alonomios, sobrenombres, para nombres, antenombres….La anónimo guarda un secreto en la imagen, lo guarda como lagrima y caída de la imagen” (Valderrama 109-110). 

But is it just a festive game of defacement and creative destruction that would resemble the spirit of carnival festivities, in which masks evoke, in an exceptional time of inversion, the supernatural powers and the dead as studied by Karl Meuli? Is not the carnival a compensatory act of the logistics of expenditure and realignment for any community of social exchange? If true, then the notion of stasis would need to break from the polarity of social identification and instance of mask, in the same way that already in the classical period the stasis emerged as a zone of indistinction between domestic and public spaces, an unbreachable black hole between the oikos and the polis that is well beyond the exception (Valderrama 119). In other words, stasis needs to be rethought as something other than an interruption in temporality, which is still the negative duration that feeds negatively into the course of temporal order of social domination and its ‘economy of violence’. Valderrama reminds that for the poet Armando Uribe, this economy of violence names the very engine of historical development. And poets tend to be better than political analysts at imagining other worlds.

Towards the end of Guerra y Democracia: Retrato, Stasis, Anonimia (2025), Valderrama briefly glosses Armando Uribe’s 2000 lecture “El fantasma Pinochet” in order to introduce not only the problem of violence, but also language; a language that he calls uncanny, “une inquietante étrangeté” (Valderrama 120). These words are glossing Uribe who is also commenting a speech by former President Eduardo Frei, but that can also be used to thematize the central problem that Guerra y Democracia introduces in its scene: how to traverse a destitution of language if stasis is the capacity to traverse the moribund language that metaphoric and cataphoric politics speaks, without any possibility of saying anything at all? As an initial promise of the book, Valderrama had called for ‘another lexis’ (“otra lexis”) against narrativity and the hallucination of language towards a ‘language as such’, which is the language of naming approaching the coasts of physis. It is tempting to say that the revolt only appears liberating when understood as a problem of inventing and making space for this other language that ceases to be a metaphor of this world.

Starting all over again. On Massimiliano Cappello’s Lo specchio e la lama: Giorgio Cesarano tra poesia e critica radicale (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

One has to begin by saluting Massimiliano Cappello’s Lo specchio e la lama: Giorgio Cesarano tra poesia e critica radicale (Quodlibet, 2026) for being the first book on the Italian thinker that takes an obvious point of departure that for too long it has been ignored: the well known fact that first and foremost Cesarano was a poet. At the heart of Cappello’s argument in his short monograph, however, is the thesis of continuity between his later philosophical thought, located under what has become known as ‘critica radicale’ of Italian 1970s, and that of his poetic laboratory. A poetic laboratory that Cappello magnificently documents in its genesis with post-war Italian poets and critics. The young Cesarano of the late fifties and early sixties was an avid interlocutor with figures such as Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto and Eugenio Montale, and of course Franco Fortini, who introduced his first poetry collection L’erba bianca (1959).

 In the milieu thematized by Cappello first chapters, it is evident that Cesarano the poet was a bit of an outsider, not really the man of letters of Italian postwar culture, as he was already looking for something like a renewal of a sensible experience that was becoming increasingly commodified and dead (Cappello 29). Albeit the mannerist tropology of the early L’erba bianca, Cappello notes that already in subsequent books, Cesarano’s preoccupation was that of mirroring of language in world that was oriented towards the highest stage of human alienation and emptiness. For Cesarano the history of human civilization was the successive stages of the reification of the human towards “survival”; a wound that was overtly present in the very texture of language. And poetic language as no exception; remaining oblivious to this totalization could only make the poet an harlequin among ruins of his present, always hungry for fictitious meaning and illusory transcendence. 

Cappello tells us that already L’erba bianca staged the originary trauma of the impossibility of poetry, which shed lights unto his later transition into the prose of the ‘critica radicale’ – and in fact, one could only wish that Cappello would have said more about the transition between poetry and prose, which is also at the center of this intense autobiographical experience. In any case, the repression of the trauma starts to become more palpable in books such as La pura verità (1963) La tartaruga di Jastov (1966), and Romanzi naturali (1980), where the moribund plane of factical life not only becomes “apparent”, but it is situated at the very level of the fictitious appearance (some of the language is truly dreadful, and one can understand why Cesarano at some point could not longer follow that route without stepping into a vulgar expressionism, or, to that effect, the Lukacsian ‘naturalism’).

Cappello tells us that for Cesarano the evil of the experience of National Socialism and fascism, was not just a political system that took place at the heart of Europe; it was a phenomenon that extended into the totality of culture and life under total capital (Cappello 75). This is a bit like Pasolini’s position, except that for Cesarano there was no medium from which one could stay afloat and find an exit. Cappello cites these verses from La pura verità (1963): “…divorati dalla terre per / dal verme / che’sera / dal verme che s’era ricominciare” (Cappello 77). It does not come to a surprise, since for anyone that has read Cesarano & Camatte already in the stage of ‘critica radicale’ and ‘Invariance’, the only chance for the liberation of the generic human community (Gemeinwesen) was to start all over again, that is, from the point of view of the prehistoric inversion [1]. In the milieu of Italian literary culture, one has to agree with Cappello’s assessment: to start all over again means to start “dopo Fortini”, to leave behind the function of the critic and the writer, two beautiful soul functionaries (but functionaries nonetheless) mediating between the spheres of culture and politics in the public life. But to start again means to recoil to a hole in the temporality where the becoming of that social totality is no longer possible; even at the risk of losing the lyricism of modern poetry from Virgil to the present. This is most difficult task in a sense, because to “start all over again” seems to depart from somewhere else than language, but fundamentally we know that language is the event of every commencement. This is perhaps the aporia that runs through Cesarano’s own impossibility to effectively “finding a way out”, except a catastrophic one that we know all too well. 

Can there be another resource in the face of the mounting pressure of the Spectacle and what Cesarano later called the “un-essence” (inessenza) of the Capitalist international and nihilism? In La tartaruga di Jastov (1966), Cesarano opts to still name this nothing through a giant turtle that Cappello tells us that it is a symbol of gigantomachy very much like Melville’s white whale. It is a very intelligent parallel that needs to be unpacked. Of course, Melville’s Moby Dick is the monster of the new American dominance over land and water; the monster of the incipient industrial division of labour through the whales’ oil business that sedimented United States’ nineteenth century economic growth. In contrast, Cesarano’s enormous turtle is the symbol of what takes place at the end of formal capitalist subsumption, once surplusvalue colonizes the totality of human temporality. A seamonster slowly creeps into the land signifying absolutely nothing, and yet dominating every directive of sensible reality. In the formless time of the turtle, there is no epic to be written nor a lyricism capable of offering emancipation from its images – as Cappello tells us, there is a state of infancy and innate failure (Cappello 101) . And if poetics is anything it stands alone in documenting that failure, the irreducible site of the nascent fragment, as in Schlegel’s dictum. Cappello reminds us that Cesano thought it was be infinitely worse: poetry had become a game and a publicist “operation” (Cappello 110). The autonomy of lyrical poetry could not deliver to the highest task; that is, to “recover another sensibility with the world at the heart of the epoch”, as Cappello puts it towards the end of the book (Cappello 115). 

The interior of the world of un-essence (inessenza) for Cesarano will revolve around two competing figures of radical evil: the hitman (sicario) and the collector (entomologo). The first is the paid assassin that sees a price in anyone’s head, whereas the collector will be the administrator of corpses and moribund passing of beauty to be consumed. It is a world without possible evasion, because both living and dying have been rendered indistinguishable, and perhaps also unthinkable and unsingable (Cappello 127). This is Cesarano’s most extreme indictment to the late modern epoch, in which the hallucination of fictitious languages will still provide the illusion of actual living human beings. In this hellish world, it is not up for the poet to prepare a fresh start, and yet language still remains. Cappello concludes where our task begins: “Che il reale attenda una lingua non alienata per potersi esprimere compiutamente, può anche darsi. Questa lingua non sembra essere, in ogni caso, quella della poesia” (Cappello 138). And it might be the failure of language what awaits and invites the possibility of a different beginning. 

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Note 

1. On the notion of “inversion” in Giorgio Cesrano in relation to Jacques Camatte’s thinking on the prehistoric, see my conversation with the thinker in my book Pensamiento insumiso: Coloquio con la teoría italiana (Irrupción Ediciones, 2024).

Breathing in the pain of the world. On Paz López’s Pánico y Ternura (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Paz López’s Pánico y Ternura (2026) opens with an analogy between life and school that immediately places us in attention to her writing: “Entramos a la vida como entra un niño a la escuela: mirando hacia atrás, con los ojos llorosos buscando la mano de quien hace un rato nos había variado el pelo, la nariz, las rodillas heridas, los diminutos labios” (López 14). Although the synecdoche (“la mano”) does not reveal to whom it belongs, in a way the mother is spectrally present, a figure overtly present in Paz’s writing. We enter life in the wake of separation and caesura, and that is the site of the original wound that will lead to all sorts of civilizational and mimetic compulsions that unfortunately we know too well. And yet, López does not say we enter the “law” (although this is also presupposed of course), but rather we enter school. Our civilization has slandered and tainted the notion of “schooling” and “school” to such an extent that we have entirely forgotten the fact that school is schola; that is, time of rest and interruption, “free time”, a lagging duration of contemplation of language and being, and of being in language. And if the notion of “school” is under ruthless attack in our present by an infantry of pedagogues and technicians, it is mainly due to the fact that what is being threatened is the very possibility of a form of life. Of course, our epoch is one in which the chatter of “life” is continuous and intoxicating, but the form of life is something altogether different: it entails to inhabit a space of a convergent and planar movement between language and world. 

This is one of the regions that opens in López’s book; one out of many, allow me to follow it. As López says toward the end of the essay: “…cada vez que hay un corte tenemos la posibilidad de inventar una nueva lengua, de poner de movimiento el mundo” (López 128). It would be too convenient to follow up this claim and say that this is precisely what Paz López does in her writing; clearing language in order for a tonos or a vibration of the voice to unearth tropes that have been traced almost at the level of the flesh. This is something to this autographic practice that moves gently without fetishing the body and its materiality. Ultimately, a body is always more than surface. I want to retain from López’s scene of writing a responsive form of thought that in its inconspicuous relation to writing it refrains from the certitude of both philosophy and the letter. López’s search could perhaps be one of “tanteo”, a beautiful Spanish verb that refers to the hand that seeks and reaches out for something in space, and in my memory it immediately recalls some short stories of Carmen Martín Gaite’s fiction where this gesture figures in a cinematic fashion. Hence, for López ‘tanteo’ is to refuse the hell of a world of acrimonious security and confirmations that discards the inexorable presence of doubts and fissures (López 39). But the hand that seeks is also not a pure gesture in the void; it is one that asymptotically discloses an erotic mediation with the passing world without ever abandoning it; yet unequivocally assertive in the lamentation of the state of the world (López 56). 

In other words, because we can seek (here López is enrolled in the school of Hölderlin), there is no end to the world now configured as a fragile fishing net of relations, unsaid words, glances, and incommensurable distances that make up, without exhausting it, the spectacle of life. Not “this life”, of course. For López, the brutality of our times (I am less prudent and I will say ‘onto-theology’) is precisely the general concerted opinion that we are all owners of our own little and mediocre lives, the last avatar of a self-serving will to power. Rather, for López life is always elsewhere, and this is why the “escape” or “exile” from oneself is not a place of arrival or destiny, but precisely the disposition that is always traversing every relation and every touch between bodies and souls (López 65). We are creatures of the outside, and by extension, only the cohabitation of the outside, can redeem the pain of the original laceration, as in the first image of the infant walking his path to school with his eyes turned. This is not a messianic or monastic retreat, it does not depend on the parousia, but rather one of poetic dwelling in the spaces that are both familiar and strange. It is only in them (through them) that we can only cultivate through the garden of our language. López’s anti-messianic orientation, devoid of the fiction of future time and its anxieties, is proportionally a prose of hanging spaces, of curvatures of language that affects the reader deeply without ever renouncing to the beauty that thinking that defies being brutalized through the crushing weight of technical terms or philosophical concepts. 

In this sense, López’s writing is already an autographic writing at the threshold of onto-theology convinced that only style through the resources of the voice is the path that mitigates between poetry and philosophy, painting and memory, experiences and the unlived. López’s prose, if anything, is a lot about “gathering” through the tenderness; a contact where image and eros become the medium of life: “No es eso también la ternura, una forma de “recortar nuevos espacios en el vacío informa del exterior y conquistarlos a la medida de la vida (Claudio Magris)?” (López 94). To gather and to cut through the spaces: this is the highest task of the ethics of a form of life that requires a new theology of the sensible. Theology can be taken as a strange word in López’s lexicon, and I do not think that it appears even once in Pánico y Ternura. And yet, López’s proposal is completely theological if we take the theos as the highest and most beautiful light that can nominally allow for depth through the analogy of things in the net of the world. Hence, the importance of the sighting to the inner most depth in some moments of López’s writing, such as when she ponders on the fact that every time that she plunges eyes on a minuscule element or figure of the world, she senses that “se revela el elemento bestial que se enceuntra en el centro de nuestro mundo, como si la mirada fuera un cordon umbilical….amarrados todavia al vientre brumoso del origen” (López 121). And theology is not just the highest, but also the science of the first things: through the piercing expression of our senses, we elevate ourselves not with some revealed transcendence, but with the proximity with the things that have found us. 

And yet we have been automatized – this is the sensible devastation that Pánico y Ternura is responding to without ever taking a political stance, because politics is thoroughly insufficient – to see every-thing, and every being at all times; all entities realized in the feast of interchangeability and availability. The heliotropic force of modernity now truly blinds and burns our skin, which means that no access to the solar totality of social existence can guarantee anything except continuous conflagration and commanded muteness. We cannot but feel “panic” in this current predicament López is completely right. Thus, we must find the flickering light and flames elsewhere, such as in the lamp of a dark night that can illuminate the page of a book that keeps us in attention without any real purpose. Nabokov’s suggestion comes to mind: in the lamp of our study, we reject the nihilist demands of the cacophonous social world. Paz López has given us a delicious essay to read under this tenuous light. It is a present memory of an abode that keeps the secret of secrets, a resting place of the soul where still some melody is heard.