The legend of modern political theology is well known, and it has received extensive research and documentation. Less so is the legend of the theology of the visible as it relates to the problem of liturgy. For some time now some of us have pondered on a curious historical coincidence: the fact that in 1922 Pavel Florenski and Carl Schmitt, two epigonal figures that confronted head on Western modernity with its theological substratum, wrote parallel texts with strong positions regarding the same problem. I am of course referring to “The liturgy as a synthesis of the arts” (1922), and Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1922). From the strictly philological point of view, even the genesis of these two programmatic texts have a parallel development that go back to 1918, as can be seen in Schmitt’s only theological text entitled “The visibility of the Church” and Florenski’s “The reverse perspective”.
Why would two distinct thinkers confront the theological-pictorial in this specific historical dispensation of Western secularization? And, why does liturgy in the early twentieth century become a central problem for thought well beyond the walls of the Church and its ministries? What are the relations and divergences between theologia and visibility in the wake of the rise of European nihilism? If we press on the year 1922, it begs to ask why the problem of the “synthesis of arts” – theology as nothing more than the visible and a mode of seeing, to put it in Florenski’s own words – becomes so medular in European thought; and, under what conditions this emerges, given that already since the time of Johannes Vermeer, as Gregor Weber and Daniel Arasse have studied, the theological was already a fundamental topological injunction of specular understanding. These are questions that we hope to elucidate by closely examining both texts side by side with the working hypothesis that the theos – not theology as a science of Church dogmatics, which has little interest in the wake of the death of the unitary God, heis theos – but rather as a topological or choratic expression of facticity, as well as mediation with the disclosure of the world.
Almost parallel to the developmental height of the autonomy of art, it seems that both Schmitt and Florenski sought to come to terms in their own ways with the lagging energy of a specific topos of the theological trace: liturgy. It is then our task while reading these texts to ask why did liturgy become the site of inscription necessary to render legible the mediation, and possible transfiguration, of the theological as a first order question for the West. If theologian Laurence Hemming in Worship as a Revelation: The Past Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy (2008) is correct in saying that our age sees everything in terms of manufacture and efficacy mimicking the notion of “sacred worship” in liturgy, it becomes necessary for us today to understand the theological assumptions, as well of the possibilities, of the theos and the mystery at the very granular level of desecularization.
We thus propose a minor pictorial-theological legend of 1922 between Florenski and Schmitt – that is also that of the proximity and separation between East and West, theology and the pictorial, the visible and the invisible, revelation and authority – that could shed light on some of these concerns that continue to nourish discussions that have yet to find its proper treatment and productive assessment.
*
*This short text is meant as a working hypothesis for a forthcoming reading / study on Florenski/Schmitt and the question of the pictorial and liturgy set to begin in November 2025.
In the Spanish language there is a wonderful idiom that has gone out of fashion in our times to express a sudden silence: “ha pasado un ángel”, or an angel passed by. The phrase is commonly used whenever a sudden silence imposes itself in the middle of a conversation, which leads to obvious discomfort and embarrassment among those engaged. It is almost as if the invisible angel reminds human beings that conversation rests as much in words as in silence; and that the shadow of silence sooner or later interrupts any communicative practice. According to historians and lexicographers, the inception of this idiom into Spanish remains a curious enigma, since although used in early modernity it does not have a Latinized version, and its origins can only be traced to classical Greek antiquity. In fact, Plutarch notes in his De garrulitate that whenever silence is introduced in a meeting it is said that Hermes has joined the company [1]. The angel thus stands for the nonpresence of language in language, just like an icon is the sublimation of presence in pictorial representation.
We know that in Antiquity the angel as a minor divinity (angeloi) was a mediator between heaven and earth, only that in that moment that an ‘angel passed by’, it is not all clear on which side is there heaven and where earth [2]. In his beautiful book Angels & Saints (2020), Eliot Weinberger reminds us that for Saint Augustine the angels were first and foremost original gardeners of Paradise – given that they are free from felix culpa and sin – and that they are messengers between the living and the divine, as documented in the beggar Lazarous carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham [3]. Here it seems that the invisible inception of the angel relates fundamentally to the dead and conclusion, which also carries its aspiration in the lacunae of a conversation that reaches an impasse, and that for a moment effectively dies.
The angel that accompanies the dead and the poor – and thus our structural poverty in language, being in the language that always lacks a grasping signifier – is also confirmed by lexicographer Alberto Buitrago, who in his entry on the idiom writes that the expression has its origins in the fact that in antiquity whenever a dead person was mentioned or brought up in conversation there was a silence held, because it was thought that his “spirit” (his angel) had become present in its nonpresence of language [4]. Although Buitrago does not provide any documentation for his assertion, it does bring to bear that whenever we are in communication, whether we like it or not, we are in the communion of angels that are expressing the soul of the dead through the litany of their names.
This is why Antelme could suggest the similar enigmatic notion that being powerless and in poverty means to ‘have to forever be’ in a silence adjourned so that language can continue speaking. This is why perhaps the irruption of authentic silence has the effect of a certain petrification of the human expression, as masterfully captured in Velázquez’s Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630). It is through silence that we encounter the divinity that for a moment places itself outside of language in order to contemplate it, letting the angel make his entrance. The language of computational machines is not only a language that has renounced its poetic and ethical instance; it is also a form of gated communication that has expelled itself from the angelic visitation of its own contemplation.
In 1947, the very young Cuban poet Fina García Marruz published the liturgical poem Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Ediciones Orígenes, 1947), which stands in the modernist tradition series of attempts to probe the divine nature of language after the flight of gods and the triumph of the new secular jargons. If earlier in the century a well known Italian philosopher will predict that the international language of the future will be that of technical terms; the English Catholic poet David Jones, will reaffirm that we are “living in a world where the symbolic life (the life of the true cultures, of institutional religion and of all artists) is progressive eliminated – the technician is master. In a manner of speaking the priest and the artists are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs – for the technician divides to rule” [1]. And if “liturgy” originally meant “public service” and the sphere of gestures, as suggested by Lubienska de Lenval, then Transfiguración has to be read, even into our days, as an attempt for language to measure to the transfiguration of revelation, in which the poem is a sacramental form that retracts language to possibilities of retaining communication.
In fact, Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte, reinforcing the liturgical repetitions of an hymn and a sacred chant, enacts a flowing rhythm (“en tanto que”) that assesses the limits of the ineffable; a pure exteriority that is the negative or wound of language without ever being able to transcend it. In this sense, Marruz’s poem is only the poetic anabasis to the impossibility of a guided sacrament to organize interiority and visibility. Only the mystical can mediate between exteriority and the crisis of appearance. In an almost programmatic fashion, we read in the second part of the poem: “oh, difícilmente podríamos comprenderlo / Él se ha vuelto totalmente exterior como la luz; / Él ha rehusado la intimidad y se ha echado totalmente fuera de sí mismo” [2]. Transfiguration is the event that exiles oneself from the self (phygé), and in which language can generate contact with something other than its own conventions. This is why they [the witnesses and the martyrs] cannot provide an account about the transfigured revelation – just like anyone cannot truly provide a narrative, except by betraying the experience – except by their hearts as if being mysteriously called by a singular name (“ellos sienten que dentro de su corazón alguien / los ha llamado misteriosamente por su nombre”).
How can language disclose a sense of exteriority that is capable of moving past the autonomy of signification and self-referentiality of language? Can language befall into exteriority? Marruz provides an answer to this question, which can be taken as her contribution to the aporias of modern poetics: poetry can only attune to transfiguration as a cohabitual of a communicating being. In the year that the poem was published, Marruz also wrote in the winter issue of 1947 Orígenes a dense essay titled “Lo Exterior en la Poesía” (“The exterior in poetry) where she claims that “the heart of poem is always outside of it – it should not be that the poet can offer infinite variations of a secret self-possessed knowledge, but rather to rediscover the liturgy of the real; the extreme degree of visibility, which is also its great escape” [3]. What could the “liturgia de lo real” have meant for Marruz in 1947? Marruz does provide a clearcut theological definition of the exteriority as the “angelic”, which does corroborate the hymnological dimension of language, a transcendence between beings of the invisible. The liturgy of the real that defines the exteriority of the poetics of life does not entail a Romantic elevation by the Poet, but the effort to animate reality beyond an alienated monologue. This is why Marruz writes that “only a dialogue can realize an impossible communication, mystical, whenever it does take place in all of its purity” [4].
In 1947 Marruz went a step further than her fellow poets Gaztelu & Lezama Lima, who had defined transfiguration as a learning exercise of the potentia dei of the divine (“a todo transfigurarse sigue una suspension y el ejercicio del Monte era solo un aprendizaje”) [5]. Read side by side with Antelme’s Angel of Reims, one could very well say that for Marruz there is an event of transfiguration whenever transcendence delivers communication between beings, soul to soul; a relation that can one truly speak of the ungrounded and commencement. The liturgy clamored in language is not the memory of an original Adam severed from Nature, but the transfiguration of a linguistic relationship with the world. This might be the secret to Marruz last two verses: “como la infancia que acuña nuestro Rostro allí / donde no puede ser despertado”. If transfiguration also entails recapitulation, this means that this is not a process of forward becoming, but of retaining the atemporal detention that, like that of childhood, traces our silhouette as both figural and pure presence in the bushes of language.
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Notes
1. David Jones. “Religion and the Muses” (1941), in Epoch and Artist (Faber&Faber, 1959), 134.
2. Fina García Marruz. Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Orígenes, 1947), 6.
3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 19.
3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 22
4. Ángel Gaztelu & José Lezama Lima. Editorial: “Éxtasis de la Sustancia Destruida”, Nadie Parecía, Número IX, Nov, 1943, 1.
Surely friendship does not depend on obligations or frequency, but it does posit expectations on something like a movement of reciprocity. In fact, movement (κίνηση) and reciprocity are so intertwined that without it, there would not be any separation, only a compact bundle in unity without relations. But, what is at bottom reciprocity? If this notion merits anything thought at all, it must be removed from any conception of exchange in the manner of the quid pro quo and the the ius talionis, where at first sight reciprocity seems to reside as a form of levelling differentiated quantities. In social exchange there is levelling but surely there is no reciprocity except by the legal force enacted by the pressure of duties and obligations. Already in the nineteenth century, at outset of bourgeois society, Søren Kierkegaard with extreme lucidity denounced social levelling as a form of glittering vice: “The idolized positive principle of sociality in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida. Levelling is not a single individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power” [1].
What is reciprocal in social exchange is no longer the incommensurable relation between beings, but the enactment of language saturated by its own completion, which is the aim of social organization. If there is no reciprocity in the age of kallopismata orphnes as the reduction of rhetorical language it is because there is no longer a missing word in the event of communication, given that, potentially, everything has been already communicated (it is obvious that today this process can only intensify with the planetary deployment of Artificial Intelligence). The only determination of reciprocity that should be of interest is the one that accounts for the lacunae in language that halts force of social levelling. To reciprocate does not mean to give each his due that defines the Western legal operation; it is rather the mutual codependency in the unforfeited event of language.
At this point, an etymological observation might be useful. In On the Latin Language, Varro records reciproca as a condition of elasticity; that is, a present quality that allows a thing to return to the position from which it has started. Reciprocare thus entails to move to and fro, and to demand [2]. But if we adapt this observation into the sphere of language, we immediately notice that in language there is no previous position nor set origin, which means that reciprocity can only be the undisclosed and disclosed movement of language. Breathing, articulating, speaking: the animus that escapes from the mouth as a mirror of the god of words. The erosion of reciprocity in modern society, thus, goes deeper than the first appearance in fact that human beings are witnesses to a crisis of communication; more importantly, humans have ceased to sense reciprocity because they believe that there is only god where language is mute, and there is language when gods are extinct. Such is the long vigil of computing language as an idol that is neither divine nor of the essence of the human voice. To reciprocate today means to re-divinize the world through words; and through our words greet incoming worlds.
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Notes
1. Søren Kierkegaard. “The results of observing two ages”, in A Literary Review (Penguin, 2001), 76.
2. Varro. On the Latin Language, Vol.1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1938), 335.
A good place to start on Tetsuro Watsuji’s Climate (1935) is by considering how the very notion of the Japanese fudo as it appears defined in the first pages of the text, as a “structural element of human existence”. Augustin Berque has proposed a slightly different translation: the “structural moment” that speaks semantically to the prefix *-med, that also recalls mediality, metaxy, and also the French ‘milieu’. In any case, “fudo” discloses an expressive instance of existence, but it is not overtly determined cultural or historical teleologies; rather fudo like Heidegger’s fourfold (das Geviert), brings into gathering wind and earth in which existence can only appear to exist in between as exteriority. Watsuji writes: “The structure of “ex-sistence” is, thus, something rather than to exist in the reality of the cold; it is rather to exist within other persons. To designate this reality we prefer the technical relation of intentional reality, used by phenomenologists, the Japanese expression term aidagara (interpersonal)” (†27).
Unless we know the language, we can only take Watsuji at his word when it comes to the Japanese, but all things considered it is at least obvious to say that fudo is not strictly a descriptive objective reality, but a relation of Being. Watsuji calls it a few pages later a “movement of negativity”: “…this is a ‘movement of negativity’. This is how the spatial-temporal structure of human existence comes to being like that of the climate and that of historicity” (33). The notion of existential transcendence that Watsuji wants to hold on to dwells between reality and existence, generating kimochi, or tonality / stimmung (38). The first question here is what to make of Watsuji’s typology of regional climate setting if these are not to be taken geographically or culturally as expressing locational structures for specific kimochi?
There are three types of climate regions for Watsuji: monsoon, desert, and meadow. One could imagine that these three ideal types as environmental arrangements in the disclosure of kimochi. Each region has its surroundings. For instance, the monsoon is defined by its humidity (47). For Watsuji each of the climatic regions will fundamentally generate different forms of social organization, and it is from this perspective that he interprets the civilizational rise of the West beginning in Ancient Greece. The emergence of the polis is understood as a direct relation with harvesting and later to a social bond determined by production and struggle (war). In the most clear elaboration of his interpretation of the polis, Watsuji writes: “With a slave system as through-point as this, the small number of people who comprised the polis were freed from the labours of the herdsman-farmer. […]. With the building of the polis one may begin to use the word ‘Greece’. If this be correct, Greece began with the conversion of the farmer-herdsman gained freedom from the restraints of nature” (82, 113). This restraint of nature is not just productive in the practical sense (attachment to agricultural life), but it is also of the order of the sensible: this is why Watsuji claims that the Greek classical culture possessed a commitment to a visuality of clearing that is ingrained in their architecture and temples in the open (115). And being in the cleared visual spaces demands the question of technique: “The life of the polis has at its center the artificial-technique in order to dominate the Mediterranean. The emergence of this form of life was the powerful instance that determined the destiny of the “West” (116). In this line, modern science is nothing but a consequential reduction of technique for the Greeks (117).
There is definitely some ambiguity here, since later on and following Komei, Watsuji claims that the emergence of machines in the West was only possible as a retreat from cold weather in the North, and thus a product of interiority (130). Could this mean that the all-clearing established in classical Greece – with its vantage point and all too visible sculptures without oblique point of view – contributed to the later historical production of reserved interiority? Watsuji seems to contrast the clearing in classical Greece with the opaque and gloomy clime of the Germanic lands. In fact, Watsuji says later that only in the shrouds of Germany could pure music be created, where light is not so keenly embodied (141, 111). Returning to the question of existential tonality, or the kimochi, I wonder if Watsuji’s subtle yet recurrent positioning of Western destiny has to do with an originary ethical deficit that is maintained from the depths of fudo as within and outside the clearing of nature. There might be a clue about this in “America’s National Character” (1943): “The true hidden reserves are in ethical strength and not in the power of quantity” [‡]. Is living proportionally in the fudo the ability to master this ethical orientation?
Session 2 (continued)
Having laid out his climate interpretation of the West, I think it is fairly easy to grasp the orientation in Watsuji’s monsoon specificity as a sharp contrast to the condition of its “structural moments”. In particular, the political contrast is implicitly established – and I say implicit because Watsuji never confronts it as the guiding principle of differentiation, although it bends that way. It caught my attention that, following the scholar Kateke Fumio, Watsuji will note at the outset that Chinese (Asian) subjectivity refuses any positing of the legitimacy of the state, and especially the fiscal state (we know from Schumpeter that the modern European state is the fiscal state), and they can only flee from such submission, although they are submissive in other ways, to force (shoguns, for instance) (157). The monsoon structure, hence, has primacy over the political sphere projecting a sort of permanent stagnation for historical development. The notion of akirame or “no bearing, nothing we can do”, a sense of overwhelming resignation, becomes the social tonality of the monsoon surrounding, which ultimately (Watsuji does not say it like this, but perhaps we can push the text in this direct) entails enduring stagnation. This perhaps highlights, quite convincingly, of a certain caducity in Watsuji’s monsoon type in our present epoch.
In the order of the political register, one could read Watsuji’s emphasis on the Japanese home in this direction; that is, the monsoon resignation leads to permanent homecoming. The monsoon region is the region where the oikos triumphed over the polis (180-181). If in the Greek world, legibility and the transparency of the grasping logos made the domestic space an exception to the social life, for Watsuji the Japanese dwelling space is not just a space of familiar gathering, it is also a cosmology and an ecology: “The Japanese consciousness took shape in the totality of the home” (184). (As a side note, I cannot but read this in light of Xi Jinping’s notion of the ‘ecological civilization’ as the master key for the planetary relevance of the CCP). Elevated to the rank of cosmology, the monsoon retreat into the home, does not become an all too easy path towards natural domestication?
In the Japanese home there is no separation – there are no locks and keys – says Watsuji, which introduces as a paradigm for a different form of sociality that differs from Western individuality around appropriation, assignation, and separability (201). This is true to some extent if we think about a spatial figure of Western civilization and enclosure, such as the castle. This is fundamentally different from the tokonama. For Watsuji, the structural moments of ambiance and surrounding generates specific mentis types, and thus concrete organizations of said space. I derive from Watsuji’s second part of the book that Western civilization revolved around the movement of total legibility and clearing (Greeks) that unfolded to separation and thus control over nature, resulting in a machine utopia as Adolf Caspary rightly called it. What about the monsoon specificity? There is retreat and resignation over the surrounding, which allows another mediation or in-betweenness with the natural world and exteriority, although this will entail stagnation in world historical terms.
The contrast between the West and China was already well established during the Enlightenment in the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other luminaires according to Federico Chabod. In fact, Chabod claims that the civilizational divide between the West and China is crucial to understanding both [‡ ‡ ‡ ]. Asking why an ancient civilization like the Chinese had made such little progress in two centuries (XVII-XVIII), Montesquieu for instance claims that an explanation is to be found in the sacred respect of this civilizational mentis for the transmission of its tradition. It is easily inferred from Watsuji that the monsoon ambient allows for a civilization of “Wisdom” in the deep sense that it “thanks” all the elements of the tradition that it receives. This is also a form of “resignation” proper to mezuru, a form of wonder and surprise that adds nothing new. When Kojeve referred to the end of history in the form of American animality and Japanese snobbism, I think he was crediting this inner Wisdom in the wake of stagnation and released resignation. Of course, we also wonder what Watsuji will say about the “ecological civilization” driven by China’s modernizing planetary project that, if we are to believe Adam Tooze, possesses the master key for world transformation in the notion of “development”. If true, this can only entail the triumph of Western machination through the labor of its others.
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Notes
† All pages are referring to the Spanish edition, Tetsuro Watsuji, Antropología del paisaje: climas, culturas, y religiones (Ediciones Sígueme, 2016). All English translations rendered are mine.
The common Spanish verb “desvivirse” resists obvious translations. Could one translate “desvivirse” as “unliving”, “constructing by destroying”, or “fulfilled life”? It seems that none of them capture the full meaning of an expression that is anchored in practical use. It is important to note that when the term emerged in the intellectual discourse of Spanish twentieth century, its depth was intimately connected to its meaning (life, living, vocation) that it immediately took the life of a concept for cultural milieu and national character. In his lecture “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, Manuel García Morente suggested that “vivir desviviendose” was the singular form of life of Hispanic being that attained eternity while on the terrestrial world:
“Porque lo típico del hombre hispánico es, por decirlo así, su modo singular de vivir, que consiste en “vivir no viviendo”, o, dicho de otro modo, en “vivir desviviéndose”, en vivir la vida como si no fuera vida temporal, sino eternidad. El hombre hispánico no considera la vida eterna. O la salvación del alma como el remate, término y fin de la vida terrestre, sino como remate, término y fin de cada uno de los instantes y de los actos de la vida terrestre. La salvación eterna no es para él solamente un objeto de contemplación; ni tampoco solamente una norma de conducta, sino que es, ante todo y sobre todo, lo que da sentido y finalidad concreta a cada uno de los actos en que se descompone la vida terrestre” [1]”.
For García Morente, the specific meaning of “desvivirse” entails a tension between interiority and exteriority; and, by extension, between life and death, and in fact of death in life that leads to resurrection and a new life. He writes: “La vida del alma hispánica es un constante morir y resucitar para volver a morir; hasta que la última resurrección” [2]. “Desvivirse”, quite literally, happens at the level of the soul when life continuous through finitude and concrete death. This is why the notion of “desvivirse” has a clear theological underpenning that one can pair with the divine apocatastasis in intramundane life. “Desvivirse” is never about personal salvation and the economy of election, which is why Americo Castro would emphasize that this vocation does not align well with modern individualism, because the “vivir desvivido” experiences its own ruin like a joyous and exuberant Saturnalia” [3].
As in the indication by García Morente, for Castro “desvivirse” entails something like an external perspective in which life can ultimately only take place from its transcendence with a relation to what’s outside ofitself. This outside is neither determined by politics nor rhetoric [4]. To live “desviviéndose” entails an intensity that persists not just as an interior affirmation of self-preservation, but as an erotic relation with what is most desired and venerated (many Spanish thesaurus of the nineteenth century would define desvivirse as “to love or desire with eagerness”, “amar con ansia”). If extracted from the cultural and identitarian historical context, “desvivirse” appeals to the object of passion that overflows the senses of human life.
This overflow is embedded in the word itself. The great Spanish scholar of Benedictine monasticism, García Colombás, in his book El monje y el Misterio Pascual (1984), made a simple, and yet remarkable lexicographical observation about the word “desvivirse”. Colombás noted that while in most of monastic literature the prefix “-des” donates privation and deficiency, the function of this prefix in “desvivirse” suffered a complete inversion, since now it entails to love intensively and thoroughly, as in “se desvive por complacer a todo el mundo” [5]. As a theologian, it should not have passed Colombás that the term in question is a triad of three linguistic units: -des/vivir/-se. This means that it is not just that the prefix exerts the meaning of privation of “life”, but also makes room for the reflexive “se”. It is curious that in in Spanish grammar “vivirse” is often used in relation to location (i.e. “el va a vivirse al campo”), and never as a conventional reflexive action (i.e. “él quiere vivirse solo”, “el se vive solo” = this would be incorrect). Taking this cue, one could perhaps say that the inversion so keenly perceived by Colombás acts upon the living so that they can repeatedly making space for the unfolding of life, rendering possible the soul’s crossing the inside and outside in every form of life.
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Notes
1. Manuel García Morente. “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, in Idea de la Hispanidad (Espasa-Calpe, 1947), 215.
2. Ibid., 216.
3. Américo Castro. España en su Historia: Cristianos, Moros, y Judíos (Editorial Losada, 1948), 45.
4. Ibid., 279.
5. García M. Colombás. El monje y el Misterio Pascual (Ediciones Monte Casino, 1984), 132.
Anyone somewhat familiar with the writing of Josep Rafanell i Orra knows that we are in the company of a wanderer and itinerant in an infinite pursuit of what the experiences of worlds might offer [1]. A mad endeavor for a groundless epoch oriented towards planetary reduction and confinement, so obsessed with infrastructure and security, most recently through the reiteration of the politico-theological program of national sovereignty, one more desperate reaction to unrestrained planetary decline. We can say with Hölderlin that we are vagabonds in a destitute time, a poet who figures prominently at the entrance of Josep’s Traité. In our posthistorical epoch we are confronted with the thicket over the dominion of life, which means that the question of exteriority becomes pressing as existence enacts a path beyond the endless rubble of representation bestowed upon the human species in every point of the globe.
The book that the Spanish reader now holds in his hands thanks to Luciole Ediciones will immediately let in a dimming light of a singular style or maniera that dislocates the modernist assumptions of political thought into what one could what I am willing to name an analytics of sensible hybridizations between languages and thought. This analytic of the sensible refuses immediately Social normativity as well as the melancholic hangovers of the modern revolutionary tradition (always caught up between constituent and constituted power, representation and humanism, growth and production). This is why Josep will redefine communism as the nonprogramatic event that irrupts through hybridization of surrounds and regions capable of overcoming the ontotheological adequation of subject and object that has led an entire civilization astray (33). The project of the critique of metaphysics finds in Josep’s Traité a powerful schematic cartography that raises questions precisely in those spaces where the rationality of the science of political economy has never dared to enter.
If the critical projects of High Modernity were fundamentally temporal (including that of Messianism and its overemphasized trance towards absolute immanentization), Josep’s writing also has the virtue of displacing the focus to the spatial formation and the thinking of the creation of spaces understood as dwelling, once populated by the gods of the events and which modern ontotheology obliterated through integrated objectivation and technological positionality. We know that the greatest nearness of the last god eventuates only when the event is elevated into refusal, especially when it manages to become too near [2]. As a shorthand, this drift towards objectification in the liquidation of modern politics is domination of the Social totality; ultimately, it is through the plasticity of the social bond that the reproduction of biopolitical life is temporalized, legally ordered, and rhetorically subsumused into an apparatus of predatory accumulation. It is the Social (not the State, or this or that concept of the modern grammar of political thought, or even fascism) that we must refuse. The collapse of the modern secular state and its moral guarantees, is the beginning of an autonomized social bond that now coincides with the total administration of world forms. The hegemony of the Social reduction is what allows Josep to claim that the opposition is no longer between Society and the State; but rather between community as a process and praxis against the static formation of the Social. Thinking today drifts from social domination to communities of encounters, heteronomic relations, communication, and interdependence in a web that characterizes the exotic movement of the imaginative possibilities of exteriority for manifold worlds.
The notion of community in Josep’s thinking is neither about ecstatic groups or “little platoons” of identitarian belonging (as once famously defined by Edmund Burke); nor referring to filiation and propriety reductions that can subsist quite nicely under the heatwaves of the ongoing conflagrations of Empire. For Josep communities insofar as they are exposed to their excess (ubermass) are processes of external contact between souls as rites of passages. The community is formless, and in this sense it ceases to be a problem of Chistological stereology in order to become one in the order of ethics and language (50). In this sense, very much like the late Mario Tronti looking at the collapse of the modern revolutionary experiment; for Josep the ruinous fragmentation of the worlds has a silver lining: that all human, and non-human, souls are dwelling on the outside world calling for worldiness, and thus potentially sharing a sense of intimacy that re-enchants the appearance and knowability of the world through the invisible attunement to the outside (un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro) [3].
Beyond the subject and the narcissism of the Ego, the light of a “spark of the soul”, in the words of Meister Eckhart’s memorable sermon, a new animism returns not because there is a transcendental revelation to be asserted, but because the encounter between souls brings forth the concatenation of worlds that are entangled with other worlds (68). If Jünger described the epoch of planetary machination as “soul murder” (seleenmord) it was because there was no longer any contact with the unfathomable opacity between the soul and any possible worlds [4]. Josep with an elegant mannerist style enhances this intuition: “We are no longer exiles on Earth, as the romantic moment freighted by the loss of world. We ended up forcing the Earth into exile after so many deadly abstractions (108). The modern age has not ceased accumulating abstractions against the human species until becoming a whirlwind of soul murdering that has extended into the current ecocide of the worlds.
It does not come as a surprise that throughout Petit traité de cosmoanarchisme (2023) Josep appears more than skeptical about political critique (and to say skeptical might be an understanding). There is a clear imperative that is mobilized in the book and that it should not be taken for granted: political critique should evolve into the negation and abandonment of politics, which also includes the always anachronistic anarchist politics. We know that ever since the Greek polis the autonomy of politics partition and distribution was waged against the incommensurable topos of the chora, the ungovernable and infrapolitical hinterland of the new substantive community of rights and obligations posited by the logistics of representation [5]. As we know, this is what forced Heraclitus to resolutely remain playing knucklebones in the temple of Artemis: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the polis?” [6]. The knucklebones of the ancient anecdote of the presocratic philosopher is symbolic to what Josep demands of existence: the liberation of environments and surrounds for multiplicities of experiences. The experience of gaming always starts in the middle, expressing the ineffable ethics of how I become what I am already on my way of becoming (142). The maximization of politics into the very thicket of life (this is biopolitical administration) have increasingly defaced the experiential practice of existence that now extends over the course of the historical dispensation of civilization. This is the vortex of the struggle against the realist validations in the interregnum.
Against and beyond the force of abstraction and the prison of individuality, Josep situates the stakes: “It is there, where the fierce struggle we can lead today: to find the intimacy of our soul in the welcome of other souls to hear their silences and their voices. To participate in the animation of the world is to perceive the outside. And gently find the inside of the outside” (145). And between the process of the community and the soul there is no longer struggle or enmity, but only solvent philia; the influx of creation that, insofar was enmeshed in solitude, allows pain to speak in the time of transition, in the skirmishes between worlds. Ultimately, the experience of the itinerant is not that of learning to live in places; rather, it is the one that intensively yearns the presence of encounters. This remains the only ethopoetic imperative [7]. As Carlo Diano observed in an erudite study on the notion of the chora, the attunement of the soul with the world is not a conceptual entelechy; it runs materially through the sensorium of this body as it traverses the world towards its renewal [8]. To grasp this chiasmic region that dispenses the harmony of the soul as it flees the prison gates of an objective world, is the enduring letter and spirit that Petit traité grants to the ongoing task of thought.
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Notes
1. Gerardo Muñoz. “Escuchar las llamadas del mundo: diálogo con Josep Rafanell i Orra”, Disenso: Revista de Pensamiento Político, N.3, July 2020, 134-158.
2. Martin Heidegger. Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2012), 329.
3. Mario Tronti writes in “Disperate speranze” (2019): “È necessario trovare un nuovo modo di essere fuori e contro. Io posso farlo nel solo modo in cui so farlo: tirando l’arco al punto che permette di cogliere il bersaglio più raggiungibile. Realistica visione.”. CRS, October 2019: https://centroriformastato.it/disperate-speranze/
4. Ernst Jünger. The Forest Passage (Telos Press, 2003), 93.
5. Julien Coupat. “Dialogo con i morti”, in Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019).
6. Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic (Bloomsbury, 2018).
7. Josep Rafanell i Orra. Fragmenter le monde (Divergences, 2020), 70.
8. Carlo Diano. “Il problema della materia in Platone: la chora del Timeo”, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, V.1, 1970, 335.
The essay “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, by Spanish poet and essayist José Bergamín, should be read as a wartime reflection on the historical impasse of the Spanish Civil War. First published in Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic journal Esprit in the 1937 April issue, the essay in its final version featured in Bergamín’s Mexican exile collection Detrás de la cruz: terrorismo y persecusión religiosa en España (Lucero, 1941). While on the surface Bergamín is responding to the struggle between secular political anarchism and traditionalist Spanish Catholicism intertwined at the heart of the civil war, the essay is also highly idiosyncratic in laying out the poet’s theological vision that permeates his entire body of work, and which can already be found, in nuce, in the fragments and aphorisms of his first book El cohete y la estrella (Índice, 1923). “Reality is the spirit, imagination, and thought…there is religiosity when it claims space positively”, he would write in the first pages of that book.
The 1937 essay, along with his defense of illiteracy in “Decadadencia del analfabetismo” (1933), Bergamín argues for a living theology of the Spanish people (pueblo) that is neither imperial nor clerical, but rather always an excess to the imperial political theology that dominated the long historical narrative of Spanish modernity since the Reconquista. It was thanks to Bergamín’s genius that Catholicism appears connected to a habitual form of life of everyday people, their shared language, symbols, and experiences; and, ultimately the common imagination that grants them access to the world through the mystery of living and dying. In fact, as in “Decadencia” (1933), it is important to highlight the centrality of the term “pueblo”, which although translated as “people”, it coincides neither with the “People” of the unity of civil society nor the common historical identity of the Nation. For Bergamín, these determinations, in fact, were corrupted notions of pueblo. The pueblo is always the event that remains from the abstraction of political theology, and always pueblo minoría, a ‘minor people’ that dwells in the house of God within and beyond the mundane. This is why Bergamín would claim in the text that the pueblo is always ancilla mundi. In this light, Bergamín thought that political anarchism incapable of a revelation to the divine, and an imperial Church in charge of the administration of the “nothingness”, were two poles of the same vectorial force of modern nihilism. That was the color of his corruptio optimi pessima with clear echoes of Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris.
In “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, Bergamín’s theological position emerges as a third way to exit this historical poverty of relating to the theos. As Giorgio Agamben observes in a 1973 entry of Quaderni (Quodlibet, I, 2024, 46-47), for Bergamín the divine entails a corporeal cohabitation of a demon and an angel that expresses appearance of life, and thus the sensible and poetic mediation with the world of forms. In this sense, Bergamín’s theology differs fundamentally from the rational and canonical traditions, fostering the sensorial path of dramatic and divine beauty. This goes to the kernel of the 1937 essay: the rise of the Totalizing State (historical Fascism), was a corrupting form of theos insofar as it aimed at regulating the “nothingness” against the possibility of appearance and truth. But the word of God and the angelic hymns linger in the time of wreckage and devastation in its impatient drift towards anger in the world, which is still very much our own. Ultimately, Bergamín was convinced that the pueblo’s mute voice, resurfacing from the depths of pain, could dodge the abysmal fall into the tribulations of radical evil always too congenial with the survival of ‘this world’.
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* This gloss was written to accompany the English translation of Bergamín’s “Por nada del mundo” forthcoming at New Personalism, summer 2025.
Michael Lobel’s new monograph on Van Gogh’s work, Van Gogh and the End of Nature (Yale University Press, 2024) undertakes a systematic effort, brilliantly argued and researched, at showing the redeeming visual capacities of the nineteenth century painter towards the natural world. If we call it redeeming it is because in more than one way, Van Gogh, in the last three decades of the modernizing century, was painting at the threshold of nature that soon enough was assaulted by the copious designs of modern industrialization, energy production, and the application of its effective scientific techniques over all spheres of life. It is the final culmination of the disenchantment of the world, and so also the moment of great temptations, such as standing up against it through the metaphorization of the imago naturae in one last desperate attempt at salvation through a reified ideal representation. Lobel’s art historical work shows us along the way that Van Gogh’s situation was far more complex, and that a French critic’s quip that he merely “captured nature with a soul” in his pictures requires specification and analytical comprehension within the context of the century of steam (Lobel 2).
In other words, Van Gogh is not a painter of a return to the conscience of the “Beautiful Soul” that has interiorized the exhaustion of artistic imagination; implicitly throughout Lobel’s monograph is the well grounded intuition that Van Gogh was an artist of the depth of vision without necessarily translation their specular commitment to the efficacy of realism. Immersed in his age as every artist obviously is, Van Gogh’s vision is mediated and conditioned by the effects of modernization that will severely affect the act of looking and gazing. This is not exclusively reduced to the new subject of labour production of the industrial age, although certainly there in his mining drawings, but also ecological transformations such as pollution, gaslight, geographical sites, the new chemistry of color pigments, and the tonality of human expressivity (the hues of a human face) in its new surroundings. Although there is no ambition in offering (or modifying) a theory of modernity in Lobel’s account of Van Gogh, one is reminded in the historical documentation the total and integral dimension of modernity in terms of its spatial totality: the essence of modernity was a revolution in the immanence of forms and perceptions that transcended the mere mechanization of the atmospheric designs.
Thus, when Van Gogh gazed at a peasant field and saw the isolated and orderly harvest he was simultaneously preferring the composition of the color palette of a painter that is now conscious of the material elements of his process of production (Lobel 9). But the colors return to the field, and this already provides us with a symptom of Van Gogh’s pictorial signature – which again runs implicitly throughout the book without ever coming to the forefront – about retaining the outlook towards nature and the natural world, which for the painter it becomes the enduring task to be resolved in manifold ways. But there is one way in which Van Gogh tries to tackle this drift to the infinite vanishing of nature: the capacity to move visually through space. To this end, Lobel does well to remind us that Van Gogh, perhaps more than any other artist of his time, was able to travel places thanks to the new rail system efficiently connecting regions and cities that made his work possible (Lobel 28). But besides the autobiographical standpoint, what is noteworthy is how Van Gogh trained his vision to capture industrial air pollution, trainlines, malformations of the land the end of Parisian Montmartre, and of course, the starry skies of Arles transformed by the new coal driven modern gas lamps. In all of these figural vistas, Van Gogh is always situated somewhere above the territory looking outwards, and in this way, attentive to the transformation of the exterior world; insisting whether there is any exteriority out there in the world at all (it does seem he thought there were).
Van Gogh prefigures as a painter of the eclipse of the world because it is a world in which the very notion of horizon (and thus of landscape) enters into a terminal crisis. Lobel brings to our attention Avenue de la Gare with Plane (1888) that captures this problem: here is a picture where the line of the horizon in the foreground mutates into the main PLM train line from Arles to Marseille (Lobel 33). The rail line cuts through the horizon becoming the new transcendental vector of progress; the axis of movement that carries the world forward. And yet there is something visually “earthly” in Van Gogh’s pictorial works that drives our gaze downwards; it is a symptom of its grounded vision, but also, for Lobel, of his tense relation with the temporal mobilization of modernity, as if seeking rest and detention (Lobel 43). What are the sources of this tension? Does it mean that it is never resolved? These are questions that are poorly tackled in Lobel’s book, and that remain attached strictly to art historical documentation and archival sources. But these are nonetheless fundamental questions de ayer y hoy, as the Spanish saying goes.
One could linger in the question of visual grounding in Van Gogh’s work – a perspective (although not just an optical question) that permeates his work, even when there is no outside field as a visual referent, such as the well known The Night Café (1888), where the billiard table seems to slide down towards the spectator, making the true and ultimate actor of the painting the intense and palpable wooden floor (Lobel 90). But the same could apply to the perspective of the Roi Canal or the starry skies over the Rhône, the examples abound. Is there something about vision and grounding that offers a point of entry into Van Gogh’s proposal to look into the cage of modernity one last time in order to find some non-space solace of the resting gaze? Could one argue that this “tension” – between horizontal closure and downwards grounding – his personal response to what T.J. Clark called when analyzing Pissarro, the “ongoing vileness of our epoch of transition”? [1]. It is hard to tell because, unlike Pissarro, Lobel tells us nothing about Van Gogh’s political views.
However, we do know that at a young age Van Gogh wanted to pursue theological studies that he soon gave up for visual arts (Lobel 74). Could it be that his insistence towards the ground is resolutely theological, as if he wanted to retain the god of place (theos aisthetos) as the ungraspable region for extraction and production, the new axiological order of the industrial age? Lobel’s does well to cite Victor Hugo at the beginning of the second chapter “Earth” about the outskirts quarries and sewages of Montmartre: “a variety of those misshapen fungi from the underside of civilization” (Lobel 68). It all seems that even when he was not attending to capture the limits of Montmartre, the fields of Arles, or the domestic spaces, Van Gogh’s provokes a downward descension into the ground that invites any participating space. Looking at the vanishing world one last time needs a ground from which to stand and retain a sensible distance; that very distance that the nascent bourgeois world will effectively dissolve giving up on the cohabitation between life and nature into generic and massive alienation.
The question of the ground perspective is also corroborated by Van Gogh’s interest in strong and emphatic hues for his picture, learning from the previous generation of artists that “all the colors that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable” (Lobel 149). In other words, the effect of color for the Impressionists, including Seurat and Pissarro, is too dialectical, which means that the tension evolving from the ground is immediately resolved between color and form, the orderly and the interdependence of the composition for stable appearance. This allows us to consider that one of Van Gogh’s key signatures – his almost bombastic and expressive use of colors – have something intimate, and perhaps also secret, to the spatial-temporal closure of modernity and its contingencies. I do accept Lobel’s suggestion that Van Gogh seized the opportunity of new industrial non-natural hues in order to mitigate the coming lackluster world oriented towards production, extraction, and human survival. For Van Gogh color becomes the barrister to gaze firmly upon the fleeting temporization of the highly visible and transparent world of disenchantment and total organization.
But to say color is also an artifice or short for the insistence on light, which is not the light of the new immanent world, but certainly a painterly light that transcends immanence by insisting on the irrevocable character of places, arrangements, inhabitation, and contingency of phenomena. This is painting at its best against the vile epoch of transition, that has extended itself as the transition of the end of the modern epoch into our present. The ruins of Van Gogh’s industrial materials allow Michael Lobel to come full circle about Van Gogh’s inscription in the modern age (Lobel 153). But we should not let go of the idea that while materials do decompose and rot, the painter’s ultimate material utensil is nothing but light, and this means “a thinking of light, an image that is aware of the relation that light has with things. This matter is equally concrete”, as Monica Ferrando has recently advised [2]. Is not the descending lux the sensorial condition for disclosing the gradual proximity between vision and ground? It is with this exterior lighting as pictorial praxis that Van Gogh stood as a madman and a witness to the endless night of our disappearing our world.
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Notes
1. T.J. Clark. “We Field-Women”, Farewell to an idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999), 109.
2. Monica Ferrando. “From History to Anarchy: The Painting of Louis Comtois in the Thought of Reiner Schürmann”, Philosophy Today, Vol.68, Fall 2024, 875.
In his old book The Art of Cézanne (1965), the German art historian Kurt Badt makes a remarkable affirmation in dialogue with Hans Sedlmayr’s indictment about the crisis of modern art: “In him [Cézanne], in fact, painting ‘emerges as the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism – Nietzsche’s view of the great art of his time in general” [1]. Badt’s affirmation must be first understood contextually as a response to Sedlmayr’s thesis laid out in Verlust der Mitte (1951) that argues that the post-impressionist painter was the last attempt at visual order within the convoluted modern crisis of art, still committed to “represent what pure vision can discover in the visible world…without adulteration” [2]. The subtlety of Badt’s disagreement with Sedlmayr is notable, since for him Cézanne does not stand for a painter of chaos and subjectivity; on the contrary, the painter unequivocally enters in relation to nihilism. At that instance painting and nihilism are positioned polemically face to face. So, what could painting as the last metaphysical activity mean after all? Why is it that painting obstructs or stuns the total exposure of nihilism? Instead of retracting painting to an ‘origin’, what if we understand its ontological contour as an excess within and beyond nihilism?
In his recent book Tiempo roto (2024), Alberto Moreiras returns to Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor Seminar of 1969 to emphasize how in the epoch subsumed by the Gestell, and thus nihilism, the fundamental opening that exceeds the frame is an übermass, or overabundance of presence [3]. This might be a productive way to think about ‘painting as the last metaphysical activity’ in the era of Gestell, because it inscribes a relation to the visible always in relation to the appropriation of its excess. In the Zähringen seminar (1973) Heidegger will call this relation a phenomenology of the inapparent, which one could very well extend to the praxis of painting as the relation between unconcealment and concealment in the way that Daniel Aresse discusses it in the pictorial world of Vermeer (a polarity that in Cézanne no longer pertains to play of optic illusions but of the disclosure of the world). This cojoining of the inapparent is more beautiful than any possible world visible ordering, because it exceeds the frame of the visible [4]. In this way, Cézanne is not just a painter that exchanges roles with the thinker (as in the relationship between dichter and gedanke) it is rather that he remains the most faithful exponent of painting as the ontic region of the phenomenology of the inapparent or übermass.
In a session of the Zollikon Seminars (May 1965), Heidegger introduces Cézanne’s landscape as a counterpoint of the hermeneutical circle of perception and calculative intuition. Heidegger writes quite succinctly: “For instance, a painting by Cézanne of Mont St. Victoire cannot be comprehended [erfassen] by calculation. Certainly, one could also conduct chemical research on such a picture. But if one would like to comprehend it as a work of art, one does not calculate, but sees it intuitively. Is the painting, therefore, something psychological, since we have just heard that the psychological is what can be comprehended intuitively? No, the painting is not something psychological. Obviously, the above-mentioned “simple principle” for distinguishing psyche and soma is not simple at all” [5]. This is so because for Heidegger the figure of the mountain (a figure among others) in Cézanne’s work is not the cause of the decision of painting; it is rather the ground (Grund) that orients a certain disposition towards the opening of any given form. One could say that the motif of the mountain is the ground that dispenses the relation to the excess or the inapparent while being entirely visible.
As such, the activity of painting is not just a capacity or disposition that allows representation; on the contrary, the pictorial praxis qua praxis remains attached to the notion of truth as unconcealment and concealment in the hegemonic structure of Gestell and the objective sciences for which there is none. This allows to throw light into the rather underworked suggestion advanced by Badt that painting remains the last metaphysical activity of the arts, which does not presuppose understanding the “painterly” as a quality or autonomous sphere of human action, but rather an original gesture of presencing the non-presence, and in this way to remain in what I am willing to call the imperturbable.
It has been registered that at one point during the sessions at Le Thor, Heidegger also made the curious assertion that only Cézanne had taken a path towards thinking (in painting) similar to his own turning away from Western ontotheological dispensation into another beginning [6]. This might be because painting is neither the archaic residue of the human hand, nor the pictorial index of image; its fulfillment lies in the excessive proximity to truth that eternally reveals the permanence of the invisible.
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Notes
1. Kurt Badt. The Art of Cezanne (University of California Press, 1965), 181.
2. Hans Sedlmayr. Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (Transaction Publishers, 2007), 131.
3. Alberto Moreiras. Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024), 113.
4. Martin Heidegger. Four Seminars (Indiana University Press, 2003), 8.
5. Martin Heidegger. Zollikon Seminars (Northwestern University Press, 1987), 79.
6. Giorgio Agamben. Il tempo del pensiero (Giometti & Antonello, 2022), 57-60.
*Image: Mont Sainte-Victoire, by Paul Cézanne. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph from personal archive.
Infrapolitical Reflections 