The Angel's Corpse (Semaphores and Signs)

The Angel’s Corpse

Paul Colilli

The Angel’s Corpse

Semaphores and Signs

General Editors: Roberta Kevelson and Marcel Danesi

SENSING SEMIOSIS Toward the Possibility of Complementary Cultural “Logics” Floyd Merrell THE SENSE OF FORM IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Michael Shapiro ARCHITECTONICS OF SEMIOSIS Edwina Taborsky OF CIGARETTES, HIGH HEELS, AND OTHER INTERESTING THINGS The Semiotics of Everyday Life Marcel Danesi ART, CULTURE, AND THE SEMIOTICS OF MEANING Culture’s Changing Signs of Life in Poetry, Drama, Painting, and Sculpture Jackson Barry ELEMENTS OF SEMIOTICS David Lidov THE ANGEL’S CORPSE Paul Colilli

The Angel’s Corpse Paul Colilli

THE ANGEL’S CORPSE

Copyright © Paul Colilli, 1999. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colilli, Paul, 1952The angel’s corpse/Paul Colilli. p. cm.—(Semaphores and signs) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-22150-9 1. Poetry. 2. Semiotics and literature. 3. Semantics (Philosophy) 4. Meaning (Philosophy) 5. Logic in literature. 6. Angels. I. Title. II. Series. PN1031.C568 1999 808.1’01—dc21

Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: October 1999 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

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Probings into an Irreparable Order of Signification (Which Signs Itself as a Reawakening)

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CONTENTS Preface A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

ix Idea of the Work First the Mortal Remains Poetology in a Time of Destitution Lyric Philosophy Apparitions Transcendence Falls from the Sky Fragments of a Recumbent Figure Lyric Fragments of a Reawakening Encrypted Signs The Earth Has No Way Out Other Than to Become Invisible Idea of the Name Decayed Logic of the Eternal Return Human Terror Angelus (I) Angelus (II) Madonna with Child De Amore Fragili The Angel of Death Is All Covered with Eyes The Fixed Gaze of Melancholy The First and Last Sign of Human Life The Unrepresentable Community Anti-Annunciation The Angel Signs Its Name Kabbalistic Theses An Occult Kind of Ascesis Annunciation

Notes Bibliography Index of Names

1 2 11 13 21 30 41 43 52 57 64 65 74 76 82 89 95 101 106 110 120 124 126 141 143 162 163 179 187

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PREFACE

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hrough the cognitive and epistemological lens of poetic logic (alias lyric philosophy and poetology), this study offers a new world of meaning rooted in the critical dynamics of a movement that links the form of the visible with the formlessness of the invisible. The principle figure in this movement is the Angel. The claim this book puts forth is that the figure of the Angel and the mode of thinking called poetic logic share the same fate. Both were at one time important modes of communication and thought; however, with the advent of Cartesian rationalism and of empiricism their epistemological properties were confiscated. As a result, they have both been transmitted to us today as ruins deprived of any functional value. But is it appropriate to speak about the restitution of the confiscated properties to the Angel and to poetic logic? By critically rethinking the signifying nature of the Angel and by probing into criticophilosophical attributes of poetic logic, this book attempts to offer an answer to this question. In its most important respects, this study continues my probing into the complex nature of poetic logic begun in Signs of the Hermetic Imagination (1993) and The Idea of A Living Spirit: Poetic Logic As A Contemporary Theory (1997). Revised pieces and fragments of this book have appeared as “Theses on the Corpse of Poetry,” Yale Italian Poetry, vol. II.1 (Spring 1998), 113–129; “What is Poetic Logic? (or, The Remains of A Forgotten Italian Human Science,”) in Italian Politics and Society no. 51 (Spring 1999), 32–37 and “Scholia on Angelological Cognition,” in Essays in Honor of Albert N. Mancini, ed. P. Giordano and A. Tamburri (Lafayette: Bordighere Inc. 1999). Earlier versions of units S and T were read at the Wake Forest and Chicago meetings of the American Association for Italian Studies and the Philadelphia meeting of the American Association for Teachers of Italian. This book was conceived and written in two different geographical locations. The research and writing began in the fall of 1996 at Laurentian

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University, while the structure was “discovered” during the summer of 1997 when I was a visiting professor at the Scuola Italiana, Middlebury College. My students at both universities provided me with the intellectual energy for this book. I extend my warmest thanks to Michael Flamini and Mara Nelson of St. Martin’s Press; to Semaphores and Signs series directors the late Roberta Kevelson and Marcel Danesi; to Enid Stubin, Meg Weaver, and Rick Delaney for their sharp editorial eyes. My wife, Diana, my daughter, Olivia, and my sons, Andrea and Giuliano, provided me with the unconditional emotional support that gives meaning to any intellectual enterprise. Sudbury, Ontario June 1999

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IDEA OF THE WORK Man is dead and the angel is risen or, rather, the fallen angel is dead and a man is born.1

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here is a painting by Marino Marini called The Fallen Angel (1963) where the Angel is characterized by the look of that moment that immediately precedes death. The Angel is announcing its own demise and prefiguring its corpse. However, this is not the Angel of history; but rather the messenger/interpreter who is purported to have existed somewhere between the sensorial domain of historical experience and the cold abstraction of the ratio-logical mind set. But this moribund Angel has its own perspective and it contains traces of human cognition, in the way that the pale memory of angelic vision is entombed in the human psyche. How the Angel sees the world is most effectively, but not exclusively, represented in the lyric form, as in the case of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s An Angel Comes to Babylon (1953). In this poem we are witness to a radical contamination of matter with hyperreality. “I see moulded in the plants, the animals,” the Angel in Dürrenmatt’s poem states, “that which lives in the formless stars / enraptured and burning with visions / I elevate and lower myself in the light.” But in the end there is a ceaseless search for a place other than the present. An unending investigation (at once poetic, philosophical, theological and aesthetic) into the nature of an “otherness” that is within grasp yet seemingly ungraspable. This inquiry into the light that the “otherness” offers by means of meditation and interpretation is a constant objective, and like the figure in Oscar Milosz’s Psalm of the King of Beauty we desire to fall asleep on “this throne of time,” and “fall from the bottom toward the top into the divine abyss.”

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his book explores the possibility of attributing a “new name” to the idea of the comprehension and production of signs. The path we take to realize such an objective entails coming to terms with the “name” of the Angel. Regardless of the cultural angelic fads today, there is one issue that is, to say the least, very problematic: that of verifying and documenting human contact with “real” Angels. The fact is that today an angelophany is judged in the same way as a purported sighting of aliens and UFOs; as neural convulsions whose end product is the experience of psychosis. This is how the ratio-logical mind set distances itself from the nightmare of a bizarre past. But the problem is that all contemporary intellectual practices in the West belong to the same genealogy that the alchemic-hermetic thinking mind, for whom the Angel constituted something much more than merely a sign of contact with the invisible, established centuries ago. For example, Michael H. Keefer has convincingly argued that Renaissance hermeticism is at the base of Descartes’s search for a new way of understanding the world; the meditations that the French philosopher experienced during November 1619 are informed by the spirit of hermetic philosophy. Descartes’s intention in the meditations was to sever his mind from his body with the goal of achieving “disembodied knowledge.” The fact is that the first and thirteenth dialogues of the hermetic Pimander find their hub in a dualist ascesis in which the final aim is that of being witness to a visual epiphany.1 Moreover, in 1936 the economist John Maynard Keynes examined manuscripts belonging to Isaac Newton that were to be auctioned off at Sotheby’s and discovered that the scientist was greatly imbibed with and influenced by alchemical philosophy. But the reference here is not limited

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solely to the domain of philosophical and scientific thought. In the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin reminds us that historical materialism is nothing more than a “puppet” who is able to master the “game” of history only with the occult expertise and assistance of theology. Thus, if the angelophanic experience is nothing more that the residue of an ancient psychotic impulse, then it is also true that the thought paradigms that prevail today trace their ancestry to a similar psychotic convulsion, which continues to haunt us this very day. While there are bones to attest to the existence of dinosaurs that are now extinct, there is, many argue, no similar empirical evidence for the Angel. Others, however, would argue that art objects from the past depicting angels, for example, are the ancient traces attesting to the existence of this intermediary being lodged somewhere between sensorial life and the transcendent. The fact remains that we have lost the ability that civilizations in the past apparently possessed—that is, to see the Angel as something much more than an abstraction, as something “real.” The sophistication of the thinking mind has come about at the cost of a figurative “lobotomy” where the part of our psyche that allowed us to come into direct contact with “real” angels was liquidated. Unlike previous eras in human history, when angels were vital to human culture by means of their ability to transmutate the invisible into the visible and vice versa, today, during these final months of the second millennium, the Angel is dead. The mortal remains of the Angel are signified by the overpowering predominance given to rational abstraction. What this means is that we have lost the cognitive faculty that in the past allowed humans to experience an angelophany. In other words, if the Angel is a corpse, then so is part of our psyche, which, in reducing the Angel into mortal abstraction, has in turn annihilated itself in the wake of the angelic death. Henry Corbin, the French Islamist who dedicated a lifetime to interpreting the significance of Sufism for the West, cultivated an angelological gaze that was able to move beyond the concrete visible and on to the suprasensorial. Corbin’s research on angels helped retrieve a significant and long-lost dimension of human cognition. His general thesis is an unabashed challenge to the ratio-logical and techno-scientific modes of thought that dominate our age: “The inability to conceive of a concrete suprasensory reality results from giving too much importance to sensory reality; this view, generally speaking, leaves no alternative but to take the suprasensory universe as consisting of abstract concepts.”2 With reference

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to the philosophy of Sufism, Corbin speaks of a signifying world, the mundus imaginalis, a concrete spiritual realm that has nothing to do with being a place of concepts, paradigms, and universals. The authors of the Sufi texts, Corbin reminds us, are prone to repeat many times the fact that “the archetype of a species has nothing to do with the universals established in logic, but is the Angel of that species.” In the context of this discussion Corbin formulates one of the most disquieting representations of the figure of the Angel since the time of antiquity, an image of sublime mortification: “Rational abstraction, at best, deals only with the “mortal remains” of an Angel . . .”3 The fact is that, as Corbin continues to explain, the realm of archetype images, the self-sufficient domain of visionary figures and forms, is located on the plane of angelology. However, from the perspective of the rational abstraction that generally typifies the modes of thought that prevail in our day, the Angel is not alive as in the Sufi text, or in any other work, but indeed dead. In an attempt to restore to poetic logic its long-lost cognitive and epistemological privileges, this book offers itself as the crypt that entombs the Angel’s corpse. Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’i states that the tomb represents the first phase of a movement toward the seculum venturum, but it also signifies the nature, life, and innermost desire of the individual it holds.4 But with what deceased angelological entity are we dealing here? In essence, what we have is a bag of bones with no known origin or history, as far as the empirical and ratio-logical sciences are concerned. But as we will see, this corpse is a signpost (similar to the herms found in the roadways of classical antiquity) that shocks us into reawakening. According to a certain tradition, the mortal remains of an Angel are characterized by a beautiful floral scent; moreover, according to the Apocryphal Testament of Levi. (III, 5–6), an important function of the angels is to offer the transcendent Being “the perfume of good scent.” (Let us magnify this image with the figures found in the sequence of images uttered by an Angel in a work of Fernando Pessoa’s: “The body of my true life is a white rose-bush which is fulfilled Elsewhere . . . I am a rose-bush in darkness . . . I am a fragrant rose-bush. . . . the body of my essence is a rose-bush”). The Angel’s perfumed corpse is the sign of the unrepeatable instant of being in human time; the instant, that is to say, that has freed itself from the bonds of the repetitive logic of history. (Contrast this with the corpse of the deity of the underworld Roberto Calasso describes: “Racing toward us in time, the powers of repetition are gradually abro-

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gated, as with the goddess of the Underworld: at every threshold a cloak and diadem are torn from her by the Invisible Hand. In the end, we see not a dazzling nakedness but an empty carcass, an animal legacy that the coldness of the mind would like to dissolve.”5) No critical or philosophical metalanguage has ever been able to articulate this idea comprehensively. Corbin came as close as anyone to understanding the meaning of the Angel’s corpse. Again we turn to Sufism and particularly the philosophy of Suhrawardi. In the Suhrawardian theory of light, Platonic ideology is filtered through Zoroastrian angelology. The important point here is that precisely because it articulates itself as a metaphysics of essences, “the Suhrawardian dualism of Light and darkness precludes the possibility of a physics in the Aristotelian sense of the word.”6 This being the case, a physics of Light is in essence an angelology “because Light is life and Life is essentially Light.” Moreover, what constitutes the material body is in the end night and death; “it is a corpse.” By means of the varying degrees of their lucency, the angels spawn the many species that the human body could never provide an explanation for. In the end, Corbin concludes with reference, again, to the Angel’s corpse, “What Aristotelianism considers as the concept of species, the logical universal, ceases to be anything more than the dead body of the Angel.”7 It would be by no means an exaggeration to adopt the description of the deceased Angel offered to us by Corbin in order to articulate the notion that we live in a phase of the history of Western ideas in which, as in Rafael Alberti’s “Soul in Pain” from the collection entitled Sobre los Ángeles, the world of the angelological is presented to us in the form of an infinite series of shards and ruins: “Celestial catastrophes hurl ruins to the world. / Broken wings, harp strings, / the remains of Angels.”8 And just as in Rafael Alberti’s “Lost Paradise” from the same collection, we are tempted to think imperatively and order the resurrection of the Angel: “Dead Angel, awaken! / Where are you?”9 But inevitably the eye and mind that live in the threshold linking two different millennia are conditioned by a sensibility we find in a poem “Here and There” from Satura by Eugenio Montale. The problem is that we lack the visual sense necessary to perceive the Angel, to experience an angelophany: “I think about Angels / scattered here and there / unobserved . . . and if no one sees them / it is because other eyes are needed / which I do not have / and which I do not desire.”10 But if it is a question of “eyes” that are needed to look beyond what is immediately present, the Angel itself offers us the model

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of hypervision. According to John Chrysostomos, the Angel’s eyes are a sign of profound vision, of its closeness to the transcendent Being, of an infinite vigil that is not interrupted by sleep.11 John Chrysostomos stresses the fact that as far as angels are concerned, seeing is equal to knowing in that they possess neither pupils nor eyelids: “When you hear that seraphims withdraw their gaze and cover their faces as if with a wall, and that cherubims do the same, do not think that they have eyes and eyelids, as these are characteristic of corporeal beings; instead, you should understand that with this the prophet wishes to underline their faculty of knowing.” What interests John Chrysostomos here is underscoring the fact that “Gazing fixedly is equal to knowing.”12 As L. Shestov writes, “the Angel of Death is all covered with eyes.” In other terms, the Angel of death, traditionally associated with the figure of Azrael, not only arrests or freezes the movement of time for living humans and separates their body from their souls, but indeed this messenger possesses a vision that penetrates through human time and is able to perceive both the eternal as well as the hybrid space that rests between transience and timelessness. Thus, imagining the Angel, or more precisely, thinking about what rests beyond the Angel’s mortal remains requires a heightened critical vision, one that is not distracted by the objections and roadblocks offered by the ratio-logical and empirical mind sets. In this way, any interpretation of the Angel’s corpse participates in what Slavoj Zizek calls a “dialectic of mortification.” According to the Slovenian philosopher-psychoanalyst, psychoanalysis is not a recent version of a reliance on the traditional authority of knowledge against the excess of modernist thinking, nor is it a variation of expert knowledge that does not seek verification in tradition, and that is rooted in a synchronic act of reflection. If anything, psychoanalysis is a “modernist meta-theory of the impasse of modernity.” What is interesting in all of this is that the conflict between traditional authority and expert knowledge is characterized as being progressively more reflectively mediated, and there exists a double movement of reflective mediation: “ . . . (the return to) tradition itself becomes the object of modern expertise; modernization itself becomes the ultimate (in traditional) magic—is this not analogous to the opposition between movement and image, where the movement of life itself is conceived as the magic comingalive of ‘dead’ images, while, simultaneously, the ‘dead’ statue or photo is conceived as the ‘frozen, immobilized movement of life?’”13 (We should also keep in mind that Zizek and others have acknowledged the fact that

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aesthetic postmodernism is in a number of ways an attempt to reincorporate pre- and early modern magical realism or enchantment into the strategy of modernization. As we will see, hermetic semiosis, the signifying pivot of pre-modern enchantment, constitutes the Angel’s semiotic signature and is at the root of the idea of reawakening). The dialectic of mortification is echoed in Paul Virilio’s thesis that still life was the most realized form of art in the sense that the immobile world it houses allows us to “ . . . dream of the repose in which the deceased becomes an exposed object that one can contemplate at leisure, taking one’s time, since they are now still.” In other terms, our imagination, whether a ratiological paradigm is superimposed on it or not, instills in us the sense that the mortal remains, “the person who has stopped being alive exists more fully than when actually alive.”14 Just as in James Whales’s Invisible Man, in which the protagonist of the film is invisible in vita, but visible in morte, the Angel’s corpse shocks into life the things that are closest to it. In this way, the mortification of the Angel leads to a reawakening, along the lines of what is found in a poem by Nelly Sachs: “The petrifacted Angel / still dripping with the memory / of a previous universe / without time / erring amongst the infirm / locked in an amber-coloured light / visited by a primigenial voice / prior to the advent of sin / singing about truth / in the dawn.” The Angel’s corpse is a figure for ratio-logical thinking, but it also represents the signpost beyond which there exists an uncharted and unimagined territory of human signifying practices—hence, the new name of signification. The language of the space beyond the signpost is lyric-philosophic and it speaks the nature of the Angel’s corpse. But in order to think what is beyond the Angel’s remains we need to imagine critically the nature of the Angel whose secret is hidden in its remains—that is, in rational abstraction. Although we attempt to recall what has been said concerning the living Angel, the aim of this book is not to recompose the living Angel, a task that is essentially impossible; as Rilke reminds us, the living Angel would be unbearable for us, like a violent flood, I would add, of blinding light. (This is the sort of language Thomas Aquinas employs when illustrating the difficulty of the cognition of the transcendent Being for humans: “God is not unknown on account of obscurity but on account of the abundance of brightness.”)15 Rather than a reconstruction of the Angel, this book offers, among other things, an autopsy of its mortal remains. In a general sense, an autopsy seeks to determine, among other particulars, the cause and time of

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death, as well as describing the state and condition of the deceased body. Ultimately, the aim is to present the corpse as it actually is at a specific moment in time. The angelological autopsy that the present study undertakes probes into the corpse of the Angel from the point of view of the history ideas to which it belongs. Through the mediation of the critical autopsy, we are offered a radically different view of the world. We are allowed to envision the world through the Angel’s eyes. For Rilke this possibility exists in the form of a pure questioning: “The Angel’s view: perhaps the tips of trees / are roots that drink the skies; / and in the earth the beech’s deepest / roots look like silent summits. / For them, is not the earth transparent / against a sky full as a corpse?”16 All of this offers the possibility of a new philosophy of culture and interpretation that is free from metaphysical idolatry but that pivots its cognito-epistemological premises on the idea of reawakening. The image of the dead Angel, which paradoxically signifies both the unrepeatable instant of meaning and the decayed properties of ratio-logical thinking, is a strong figure for the intellectual and cultural climate and ecology we currently live in. A time in history, in other words, that feeds at once on the ratio-logical and the poetico-eidetic (that is, the fascination with images, advertising, the video screen, and so on). But what is the meaning of the seductive scent emanating from the angelological cadaver? The perfumed corpse of the Angel is also the cadaver of reason, and it traces a path that moves in the direction of new interpretative constructs that help us understand the world we live in. The constructs are categories of poetic logic, while the perfume that adorns the corpse is the joy that the ratio-logical could never be able to provide. Along with the image of the “autopsy,” there is also that of archaeology: an archaeology of the unrepresentable and of what is not real. The task entails searching for elements, shards, fragments that appear unintelligible to the person who discovers them. This unearthing of what is dead, both in material form as well as in nonmaterial form, requires an interpretative strategy that is at once critical and poetic, as in the case of the study of ancient Rome described by Michel Serres: The history of religions frequently furnishes us with full and dense constellations. Here it lets us see knowledge and its strategies, its incorporated epistemology. We seem fickle, we moderns, in abiding by partial, splintered reason. As if history had been for us a slow unfolding of these involved for-

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mations. But if we were to go back in time, our sporadic flashes of reason would be reunited in the round temple, under the harbored light of Vesta. We have finally reached the prehistory of our knowledge. Here I am writing the prehistory of the sciences. And I am writing it without knowledge’s current concern for the mother who engendered it, without the murder of Alba by Rome. Here Rome shows us the reverse of our practice of reason. It shows us, while hiding it, a blind practice of implication. It conducts itself as if it knew, at its origin or at all times, that our time or our science explains, exploits, analyzes, separates, excludes indefinitely; as if it knew that first it had to prepare the enfolding and re-covering. You will only discover what we have re-covered before you. We unearth what Rome inters, we open the tombs and it closes them, it erases the tracks. Rome is the city of tombs. Rome is the closed space of implication. Can we finally write history or prehistory without putting our predecessors to death?17

These insightful words from Serres deserve a commentary. There is one form of thinking that we cannot avoid if the entirety of things is what we seek to achieve, namely, archaeology. Not just the literal unearthing of things, but an onto-archaeology, a type of thought that moves toward a knowing of the ontic nature implied in the act of unearthing. If we focus on the pure materiality of the unearthing, the archaeological becomes nothing more than a pale metaphor, a substitute for thinking. Onto-archaeology allows us to see unearthing as the act of being and of knowing. But there is a sense of terror that could result from the act of disinterring, as is implied in Serres’s quote: the horror of seeing your opposite that has for centuries been hiding beneath the surface of the earth. This is analogous to the Neoplatonic correspondence between the idea in the hyperuranian world and the form in the terrestrial realm. But the correspondences among what is above the earth’s surface and what is below follow a different trajectory of thought and practice.Everything was originally entombed in Rome, so to speak, and brought forth from the tomb by the power of the archaeological. As a consequence of the fact that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein affirms, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,”18 humans have had to deal with the overwhelming weight of the idea of transcendence, or a transcendent Being. We read about figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche who sense the eerie presence of signs that do not belong to this world: “I look up ahigh, / there seas of light resound: / oh night, oh silence, oh deafening sound mute as death! / I see a sign / from

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the most remote distances.”19 Moreover, as Henri Meschonnic informs us, “The model of the sign is the model of the sacred: a relation to the Absent, to the Other,”20 that is, the understanding of the process of semiosis has its origins in attempting to divine the relationship between what is concretely visible and what is invisible. Ultimately, the attempt to probe the Angel’s mortal remains is at the same time a critical meditation of how it is possible to move back and forth between visibility and invisibility. In the end, we come up against the risk Montale eloquently articulates: “O black Angel reveal yourself! / but do not kill me with your brilliance, / do not dissipate the halo of fog, / imprint yourself in my thought (“Black Angel” from Satura). In other words, knowing the Angel is closely linked to an unknowing; cognition exists alongside its opposite of cognitive impossibility (the brilliance that kills). The closest we can come, then, to knowledge of the Angel is in its imprinting of itself in human thought. That is, an idea of the Angel has a corresponding “realness” for which we are cognitively empty. It is exactly this emptiness that constitutes a main theme of the present study. It is a realm of void that is housed in the poetic sign and that is at the heart of lyric philosophy.

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POETOLOGY IN A TIME OF DESTITUTION

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eidegger opens his reflection entitled “What Are Poets For?” with the following quote from Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine”: “ . . . and what are poets for in a destitute time?” This question, in Heidegger’s mind, is unintelligible to us today. In an attempt to answer the question Heidegger claims that the “destitute time” refers to the “default of God,” which “means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it . . . the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history.”1 As the result of such a default, the world is bereft of a “ground that grounds it,” and the epoch that remains groundless wallows in the abyss. “In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.”2 However, it is one mortal above the others, namely the poet, who is able to touch the abyss and correctly read the signs found there as the “traces of the fugitive gods.” Heidegger formulates a concise definition of the office of the poet when he remarks that poets “are the mortals who . . . sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning.”3 The ultimate role of the poet “in a destitute time” is to collect in poetry “the nature of poetry.” When that occurs, Heidegger tells us, it is appropriate to surmise that there exist poets “who are on the way to the destiny of the world’s age. We others must learn to listen to what these poets say—assuming that, in regard to the time that conceals Being because it shelters

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it, we do not deceive ourselves through reckoning time merely in terms of that which is by dissecting that which is.”4 What Heidegger affirms here about the nature of poetry is not all that different from Aristotle’s idea that poetry is a theoretical activity that meditates and acts upon all that may or could happen. (It is pointless to state that the Greek and the German philosophers are separated by the toxic abyss of metaphysics. This ignores the fact that the two actually believe that poetic utterance and thought plays a critical role in anticipating and inventing the future.) But is it possible today to prove in a convincing manner that the poetological is endowed with cognitive and epistemological traits that are relevant to all spheres of human activity? And what are the sources, documents, materials and ideas for such proof? Are we moving against the current of time, convention or fashion in attempting to do as much? Giacomo Leopardi’s poetico-philosophical reflections are apropos in this case, especially the words found in “Dialogue of Fashion and Death”: Fashion: Madame Death, Madame Death. Death: Wait until the time arrives, and I will come without you having to call me. Fashion: Madame Death. Death: Go to hell. I will come when you do not want me to come. Fashion: As if I were not immortal. Death: Immortal?5

Thinking the poetological, and, for that matter, the angelological, means understanding the fact that certain ideas transcend the inescapable cadaverization of conventions and practices.

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LYRIC PHILOSOPHY

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ith the great merit of Aristotle’s Poetics, the scientific study of poetic utterance and thinking progressively assumed an unquestioned status of privilege, especially in periods such as the European Renaissance. Aristotle, in polemic with Plato, viewed the poetological as being endowed with an important cognito-epistemological dimension. The poet differed from the historian, for example, since while the latter was concerned with relating past events, the former’s vocation rested on excogitating what could happen (Poetics 9, 1). Aristotle concluded that poetry is both more philosophical and elevated an activity than history in that its work is more general and it is concerned with the probable and with necessity. Of equal importance is the fact that poetry’s significance is not a result of being linked to the mythological tradition or its making use of the verse form (Poetics 9, 2ff ). We are reminded by Franco Rella (who has dedicated a lifetime contemplating the qualities of poetic logic) that with Aristotle the poetic becomes a “theoretical activity which has a philosophical nature” and it is “‘more philosophical’ than the pure representation of existence.”1 In our own time, however, while Aristotle’s elevated position in the history of Western Ideas has resisted the savage assault of change and mutation, the scientific respectability of a poetic logic has been greatly demoted on the ontological scale. What does it mean when we say that the poetological serves a ‘higher’ function than the description and analysis of events that occur in human time? We are not just speaking about the genre of poetry, if anything, we are dealing with all expression that originates from metaphor, figurations, sounds, movements, pathemas and so on. But for the specific purposes of this book we investigate a poetic logic, that is, a mode of

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critico-philosophical utterance that is grounded in the experience of the lyric. A major objective of this book is to perform the experience of a poetology that, in its most important respects, fits into Aristotle’s general definition. We attempt such a task, however, not by rehearsing his views presented in the Poetics and in other works; instead, we think the poetological through the figure of the Angel’s corpse. The Angel’s corpse is a semaphore beyond which there exists an uncharted terrain of human signification. This terrain is expressed in terms of lyric philosophy, and its universal trait is a reawakening symbiotically linked to the dissolution to the repetitive logic of history. The fact is, the disappearance of the Angel roughly coincides with the demise of a variety of thinking that conjugates the lyric with the rational. The domain in which the angels were purported to have lived, the mundus imaginalis (which has remained vacant for centuries), is the same as the supra-empirical world of poetic invention. Dante is an important example of this world. Many of his critics struggle with the relationship between myth and history in the Divine Comedy. What has instead been forgotten is the suprasensory world, which is neither myth nor history, but which constitutes the concrete nonempirical reality that houses his divine poem. Dante research that quibbles over history and myth while forgetting the mundus imaginalis will always risk forgetting Dante. Among other things, this book navigates the trajectory linking a poetology of the morning to a philosophy of the late afternoon characterized by the eternal return of the same, or of a flat rationalism. The navigation is undertaken through conceptual, epistemological, and textual ruins, and what is offered is not only a commentary on the epistemo-verbal relics but a critical wandering within their constellation: similar to the individual who roams through the ruins of an ancient city with the intention of not so much offering an archaeological explanation of the artifacts as critically imagining the ruins, much as Petrarch did as he wandered through the urban corpse of Rome during the fourteenth century, as the expression of unrepresentable life. The movement in this book is toward a lyric philosophy that transforms the logic of the eternal return into a ruin. The Angel’s corpse is offered as a figure for the present time, which is suffering from the withdrawal symptoms caused by the death of the poetological imagination. Knowing the Angel’s perfumed corpse means coming into contact with the future of what is currently silent, namely poetic reason. This is not a form of uncommunicable mysticism, nor is it an en-

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couragement to abandon the metalanguage of sanctioned critical discourse. It is more a question of thinking about what has lost the value of serious currency, or at least what no longer speaks a language that is audible or intelligible. If we were to follow the logic of the postmetaphysical mind set, Hölderlin’s poetic-philosophic claim that “that which remains / Is established by the poets” would appear as an android delusion that was unmasked once the purported death of God was announced. But why attempt to justify the importance of poetic reason in an age that privileges modes of thinking that are rooted in the ratio-logical? Where poetic value has been replaced by the economic value of the commodity? Where, in other words, poetic knowing is seen as an unusable archaeological fossil that belongs only to the past? Why bother reviving a mode of cognition that has a purely antiquarian significance? Could it not be said that any endeavor to give contemporary importance to poetic thinking is like selecting the Coliseum in Rome as the venue for the next Super Bowl or World Cup final? The Coliseum, which once stood in imperial grandeur, is today nothing but a beautiful ruin deprived of any functional value, save its use as a tourist attraction—in other terms, as an object of gazing. Even the most elementary understanding of what is taking place in the university curricula, in the decision-making of ministries and departments that fund education, in the work that many academics are currently producing, will lead us to conclude that the poetic sign has today become a ruin (much like the angelological corpse) in the landscape of cultural practices. But is this actually or necessarily the case? We need to rethink the whole question of poetic thought. Poetic logic is a way of interpreting the signs of our world that is still important today; it has the potential to constitute the basis of a theory of reawakening. For example, in the movie Contact the astrophysicist played by Jodie Foster finally reaches the extraterrestrial spatial and temporal dimension that she had sought to understand through quantum physics. But on first contact with this new world that haunts modern science, the language of science fails her. Foster’s character tries to explain this new place and finally states that she wishes she had a poet with her to describe the new and unimagined world that stood before her eyes. The implication here is that the poetic logic becomes our default mode when ratio-logical expression is muted. A second example: the visual sense recites a crucial role in poetological thought, in which knowing is symbiotically linked to seeing. This

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characteristic is lodged in the stratigraphy of modern thought. In a passage from his autobiography, Albert Einstein presents us with a description of the thinking process that pivots on the ability to visualize: What, precisely, is “thinking”? When, on the reception of sense impressions, memory pictures emerge, this is not yet “thinking.” And when such pictures form sequences, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not yet “thinking.” When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such sequences, then—precisely by such return—it becomes an organizing element for such sequences, in that it connects sequences in themselves unrelated to each other. It is by no means necessary that a concept be tied to a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign; but when this is the case, then thinking becomes thereby capable of being communicated.2

Scientific thinking as here described by Einstein begins in the ability to manipulate images that we are able to collect from the gallery of our psyche. What results in ratio-logical thinking is at the outset poetic knowing. One of the aims of this book is to illustrate the great extent to which poetic logic or lyric philosophy is a mode of signification that engulfs our daily experience. The intent is not to argue in favor of poetic logic against the ratio-logical. If anything the two are intertwined, and often the one makes no sense without the other. Nor is poetic reason exclusively linked to poetry (in fact, many of the works I discuss are not poetic writings). Poetic logic functions from the perspective of an interdisciplinary mind-set that is particularly sensitive to the properties and potential of metaphorical utterance. But in a very general sense, is the demise of the metaphysical tradition at once the death of poetry? Are poets and teachers of the poetic tradition essentially the invigilators of a monumental corpse we call poetry? The aim of this book is to provide answers for these and other questions with the intention of illustrating how the poetic sign provides access to a human cognitive domain that has been painted over, so to speak, with the violent brush of techno-scientific thinking. In many ways this cognitive domain has been replaced with the prosthesis of audio-visual technology that gives a material, scientific context for imagining. Gianni Vattimo offers one of the most original interpretations of the role of the poetic in our everyday existence. To be sure, Vattimo goes to the point of claiming that one of the characteristics of the postmodern is that

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our everyday existence has been totally aestheticized. What is interesting in all of this is that nihilism is the element that has made this aestheticization possible. “The process of making the world ever less real,” Vattimo claims, “may not only take us towards the rigidity of the imaginary, and toward the establishment of new ‘highest values,’ but also toward the mobility of the symbolic.”3 The most advanced form of nihilism “calls us to a fictionalized experience of reality which is also our only possibility for freedom.”4 An accomplished nihilism offers essentially two things: it unmasks the fictive guise of all truth, but in order to do so it must recognize that everything is the offspring of a fictional mind-set, the idea of nihilism included. Within this context truth and tradition are understood as fables, or transmitted messages. As a way to deal with the “crisis of humanism” that is provoked by the realizations of nihilism, Vattimo proposes a sort of “crash diet for the subject.” In other words, the subject would attempt to hear the call of Being that has ceased to emanate from a perennial foundational ground and that instead “dissolves its presence-absence into the network offered by a society increasingly transformed into an extremely sensitive organism of communication.”5 The fiction of the poetic sign becomes, in such a scenario, the central paradigm for any definition or verification of distinctions between the real and the unreal. Thus, the thing that the poets invent and that then remains is an unrepeatable morning, an unprecedented call to an awakening (Heidegger and others would possibly employ the term “unhiding,” or “unconcealing”)—namely, the hermeneutic invention and discovery that what is real is poetry. The lyric philosophy described in this book allows us to achieve an important understanding of the relationship between the eternal return of the same and the unprecedented or unheard of instant of being and meaning, a relationship that is crucial to the idea of poetic logic. When everything is said and done, and after all of the different ideological positions have spoken (from the extreme right on through the center to the extreme left), the ashes of the history of ideas leaves us with the following conflict of directions: one path that leads toward the eternal return of the same, the other that brings us toward the unrepeatable instant of being and of meaning (however, I do not exclude the possibility of an intersectioning of repetition and unrepeatability). The intention here is not to reduce everything to the traditional left-versus-right battle. Rather, we are moving beyond ideology into the realm of an immanent transcendentology (or transcendent immanentology), a domain in which traditional ideological thinking

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does not recognize itself. As we will see, one of the most powerful framings of this discussion (the eternal return of the same versus the unrepeatable moment of being) is to be found in the writings of Walter Benjamin. An Italian semiotician has recently suggested that we move beyond the idea of the sign. According to Paolo Fabbri, “we should discard the concept of the sign in order to begin occupying ourselves with efficacy. When we watch a film we do not make distinctions between iconic, musical, or theatrical sign. The signified are not the sum of the signs and above all they are not neutral. A great part of language, understood in a wide sense, has the power to transform people. Overlooking this aspect leads us, for example, to persevere in the myth of a system of mass communication where simple and neutral information is passed on. But reality is not so innocent.”6 One could argue that there are indeed many things at stake and not simply the cataloguing of semiotic procedures and processes. With this in mind the view presented in this book is that semiotics, among other things, offers us the possibility of understanding and exploring the “unrepeatable instant of meaning.” Is it possible, however, to formulate a theory of the unrepeatable instant of meaning, which is unrepresentable and unprecedented? In the poem “Nothing Twice,” the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska writes that nothing is repeatable, but everything is unheard of: “In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice. No day copies yesterday.”7 The issue involves realizing that as we approach the demise of the twentieth century, “the most pressing questions / are naïve ones.”8 The possibility of answering the naïve questions is one that has as one of its rewards the redemption from the language that we know. In essence, this possibility is the “coming meaning,” where the quest entails finding the other language of human existence. The issue of the unrepresentable is key to Jean-François Lyotard’s reflections on the postmodern. Finally, it should be made clear that it is not up to us to provide reality, but to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable. And this task should not lead us to expect the slightest reconciliation between “language games.” Kant, in naming them the faculties, knew that they are separated by an abyss and that only a transcendental illusion (Hegel’s) can hope to totalize them into a real unity. But he also knew that the price of this illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us our fill of

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terror. We have paid dearly for our nostalgia for the all and the one, for a reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, for a transparent and communicable experience. Beneath the general demand for relaxation and appeasement, we hear murmurings of the desire to reinstitute terror and fulfil the phantasm of taking possession of reality. The answer is this: war on totality. Let us attest to the unpresentable; let us activate the differends and save the honor of the name.9

But is totality synonymous with entirety? If it were, then poetic logic would be nothing but pathetic nostalgia for a destiny that (apparently) came and passed away. But within the economy of our poetic logic, entirety and totality are not the same thing. Totality has an absolute sense; the total floods everything that exists and reduces the irreducible to an unrepresentable death. The total is not syncretic; it is not concerned with reconciling but with homogenizing. Entirety does not have an absolute sense; it refers to things as they actually are—that is, the entirety of a thing as it actually is. Entirety, along with intimacy, means knowing the thing as itself, without the need of any variety of mediation. If anything, entirety is closer to syncretisms, the need to reconcile, rather than to ravage with the intent of conquering. Lyric philosophy must pivot on this understanding of entirety; otherwise it conforms to the death-squad of clarity. The approach here is one that privileges the particular relationship that the lyric and philosophical voices share. The poet Giacomo Leopardi was extremely sensitive to the kinship linking poetic legacy with philosophical vocation, and he expressed this affinity by means of the idea of an “ultraphilosophy.” In an entry dated June 7, 1820, we read in Leopardi’s Zibaldone that “our regeneration depends on, so to speak, an ultraphilosophy, where by knowing the entirety and intimacy of things, we are brought back closer to nature.”10 The term “ultraphilosophy” refers to a state of melancholy for a philosophy of the morning, a nostalgia for an uninterrupted reawakening, a way of seeing the world, in other terms, that is untouched and unaffected by the eternal return that is at the heart of any advanced form of ratio-logical thinking. “Ultraphilosophy” coincides with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “messianic idea of universal history”: what this means, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben, is that the philosophical enterprise will have realized its final objective by having reconciled itself with the “poetic legacy.” The yoke of writing will have been dissolved and the spectral signs that haunt

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language and which signify our “imprisonment within language” will have been eliminated.11 Let us gloss this notion with an idea borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: by grasping the constellation that one’s era “has formed with a definite early one,” one then “establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”12 In a fragment from 1919, Benjamin associates what he called “the currently effective messianic elements” with a form of art that possesses characteristics “that cause perceptions to accumulate.”13 The messianic, then, is the chronothetic encyclopedia of history that can be taken in doses of unspecified quantity; the messianic is the sudden surge of a common yet occult energy whose fate is to dissipate only to surge again. During messianic times there are messengers, bringers of signs whose signature becomes faint to the point of submerging into interpretative anonymity (which is not the same thing as unintelligibility or vagueness. If anything, it is the rigor that is part and parcel of any attempt to open the gates of a new time). The signs are meant only to produce meanings. The unsigned information is the basis of a new philosophy of culture and interpretation in which the joy of anonymity is measured by the unquantifiable and unprecedented effects to which the unsigned message gives rise. However, within the context of this book unsigned/anonymous does not mean that we do not know the identity of the individual who announces the message. The “author,” Michel Foucault reminds us, is “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning”;14 it follows, for the French philosopher, that the “author” is to be divested of his or her role as originator, as what actually counts is the discursive act that is at the core of any microphysics of reality. By “unsigned message” we mean a sign that is so much a part of the unexpected and unprecedented formation of a constellation of other signs that its authorial identity disappears once the messianic surge takes place. In essence, the identification of the message’s source is invisible in the same way in which the Angel’s corpse has no name.

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oetic logic and the figure of the Angel shared the same fate, like parallel lives. The idea of fullness that they offered was gradually emptied out of any significance. In a definite sense, this book contaminates the angelic with the poetological, and for a specific reason. One of the intents is that of recovering the terrifying strangeness of the Angel (as Rilke would term it) and move beyond the harmless, naturalistic, and all too familiar idea of the Angel, or what Harold Bloom calls the “current debasement” of angels.1 The other focus is that of coming to terms with the strangeness of the poetological, which itself has been, like the angelological, reduced to a fleeting memory. What would a “grave” study of the Angel look like? What is it we have to know in order to get an idea of the Angel that is not limited to the facile and acritical musings of the current trend in Angel spirituality? Goethe wrote that the individual who “cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” Let us contextualize this quote and state that understanding the Angel means knowing why and how it appeared and disappeared from the history of the world of ideas. The lucubrations on the Angel are not an end in themselves; rather, we are interested in establishing a grounds for understanding the relationship between the Angel and the poetological. This relationship sets the stage for the invention of a “new name of signification.” The three monotheistic religions of the world have an important element in common: the reliance on an angelological tradition to explain their origins and their central doctrinal tenets. The Angel is not only a “messenger” (as crucial as this function is) but more importantly a figure for a power, reality, and intelligence whose existence could never be

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measured, or, for that matter, proven by means of our current instruments of reason. In basic terms, the Angel is (or, more appropriately, was) that entity gluing together the visible domain of human temporality with an invisible dimension that has received a variety of different names. However, in the eyes of a number of philosophers and theologians writing in the twentieth century, the Angel died with the advent of modern science and with the dissolution of a mode of cognition rooted in the mythological. Rudolph Bultmann (1884 – 1976), for example, believes that the Angel is a residue of a fossilized and prescientific mind-set belonging to the past and no longer relevant today. In Bultmann’s own words, belief in angels “is liquidated by the knowledge of the powers and laws of nature,” and again, “one cannot use electric light and the radio, use modern medical and chemical instruments in cases of illness, and yet believe in the world of spirits and miracles of the New Testament.”2 A thinker such as Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965), moreover, interprets angels and demons as being no more than poetic signs of the good and evil present in the world, and not actual beings. But by no means is the liquidation of the Angel a unanimously accepted idea. To be sure, there exist philosophers such as Massimo Cacciari who are convinced of the cognito-epistemological need of the idea and existence of the Angel in the human quest for truth and being. In a study dealing with angelology seen from the combined perspectives of theology and physics, Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake reach the following conclusions concerning the nature of angels.( These are traits and properties associated with the traditional idea of the angel. However, the Angel’s corpse as described in this book provokes a different reaction, foremostly reawakening): —Angels are very numerous; they exist in astronomical numbers. There are many other kinds of consciousness in the cosmos besides human consciousness. —Angels have been present from the origin of the universe. —They exist in a hierarchic order of nested levels within levels. —They are the governing intelligences of nature. —They have a special relationship to light, fire, flames, and photons. There are astonishing parallels between Aquinas and Einstein with regard to the nature of Angels and photons: in their locomotion and mode of movement, their agelessness, and their being massless.

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—They are musical in nature and work in harmonious relationship with one another. —They have a special relationship to human consciousness. We human beings help link the earthly world with cosmic intelligences. —Angels have played a special role in the birth of language. —They inspire prophets and awaken human imagination and intuition and thus befriend the artist in a special way. —Angels are amazed at us, and our actions through the Angels can affect the entire cosmos. —They have a variety of functions in their relationship with human beings, including inspiring, message-bearing, protecting, and guiding. —They do not have material bodies but can temporarily assume the appearance of human or other bodies for the sake of communicating with and helping human beings. —They accompany people from this life to the next.3

What is indeed interesting about this list is that it combines insights emanating from a number of different disciplinary directions: from the theological to the artistic and on to the scientific. While it would be fair to say that some of the conclusions would be palatable to theological and/or artistic thinking, it is equally true that scientists would characterize these insights as belonging to a world view that is far from being scientific. The sort of discourse with which we ultimately need to establish a pact of solidarity is that of critical imagination. It is a discourse that leads to utter intelligibility or to radical understanding. Corbin has offered one of the most informative explanations concerning the necessity of the Angel for the philosophical and theological traditions. His position may be summarized in the following manner:4 —The Angel’s role is “theophanic” in nature. By means of hermeneutic mediation, the Angel allows humans, the philosopher and theologian to know and name God without compromising God’s transcendence with respect to humans. —The Angel is a buffer for monotheism against the threats of agnosticism (the impossibility of humans to know the divine) and anthropocentrism (the representation of the divine in human forms and terms). —The agnostic threat refers to the moment when a philosopher concludes that the mystery of the transcendent Being is hidden and unknowable and thus ends up denying the names and the divine attributes in that they are unknown and ineffable.

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—The anthropocentric threat is the philosopher’s interpretation of the transcendent Being as the highest of beings and furnishing it with names and attributes originating from a lexicon pertinent exclusively to humans, or a collapse into allegorism that weakens the “revealed world.” Corbin calls this metaphysical idolatry. —The role of the Angel is to unconceal divine names and attributes as they make the Divine manifest. The transcendent Being is revealed through angels. The “name” of the Angel is the revelation of the Divine name. —Through the work of the Angel the hidden Being is no longer unnamable or ineffable. The names that express the transcendent Being are the names of its theophany but not the names of its essence in a direct way, which contain traces of transcendence and infinity. The names are those of the angels. Thus, any theophany or manifestation of the hidden Being involves an angelic presence or action. Without the mediation of the Angel it is impossible to grasp the signs of the transcendent Being.

In a more specific sense, Corbin claims that any philosophy of nature is a phenomenology of angelic consciousness. Moreover, precisely because angelic intelligence is the mirror reflection of the intelligence that comes before it and that gave birth to it by means of an act of contemplation, the world, “which is brought about by an act of contemplation by the Angel, is its mirror, its apparitional form.” The human race is thus the thought of the Angel who is its parent and guide.5 The Angel is the spirit of the world that guides humans in their quest for a spiritual knowledge, which brings humans into contact with worlds that remain hidden to them on earth. However, Corbin is careful to contrast the angelic spirit of the world with the absolute typical of Hegel’s philosophy. From the point of view of Hegelian thought, it is in history and through the finite Spirit, the spirit of the human, that God reaches absolute knowledge about God. But from the perspective of a phenomenology of angelic consciousness, history and humans play a very different role. History is the place where the knowledge of the transcendent Being occurs; however, the contact between the divine and history takes place between Heaven and earth. The theophany that the Angel makes possible for humans occurs outside of historical time.6 The place of the theophanies is the mundus imaginalis, an idea we will consider at a later point. When it comes to the idea of the apparition of the Angel, with Rilke’s poetic meditations we touch upon the terror of seeing the Angel. But why would Rilke interpret the Angel as being “horrific”? The fact is that “hor-

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ror” is not to be understood in the contemporary sense of an image of disfiguration or abomination that instills fear. Rather it is a horror that originates from the sense that one is before something that is immeasurable. An angelological trait that stands out “horrifyingly” in this regard concerns the sphere of cognition. Thomas Aquinas has meditated at length on the abyss that separates the human cognitive faculty from the Angel’s. What follows is a citational condensation of Thomas Aquinas’s views on angelological cognition: The Angel Has No Imagination “Intellect in us is agent and potential, because of its relation to the imagination or to the phantasms. Forms in the imagination are related not to the potential intellect as colors to the sense of sight but to the agent as colors to light. Now there is no imagination in angels; hence no reason to divide their intellects in this way.”7 The Angel’s Single and Intellectual Cognitive Faculty “If angels had no knowledge of individual things they could exercise no providential government over events in this world, since these always imply individuals at work . . . As a man knows all classes of things by faculties that differ from each other—knowing by his intellect, universals and things free from matter, and by sensation the particular and the corporeal—so an angel knows both kinds of beings by one and the same intellectual power. For such is the order of the universe, that the nobler a being is, the more unified and at the same time, the more wide-ranging is its power . . . Since then the angelic nature is superior to ours, it is unreasonable to deny that what man can know by one of his various faculties, an angel can know by a single and intellectual cognitive faculty.”8 Aquinas’s angelogical insights underline the fact that angels possess an unmediated cognitive faculty that is compared to light: “This is why angels are called intellectual beings, beings who understand. For even in our case the things we grasp immediately we say we see intellectually, we give the name understanding to our latent habitual capacity to intuit first principles. If our human souls were endowed with an angelic abundance of intellectual light, then in the very act of intuiting first principles, we would

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understand all their consequences; we would know by intuition all that reasoning can deduce from them. We humans have a dimness of intellectual light in our souls. But this light is at its full strength in an Angel who, as Dionysius says, is a pure and brilliant mirror” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 58, a. 4.). Following this logic, then, the Angel is able to know, to understand without the benefit or need of testing or experimenting. In truth, we are not dealing with a form of cognition that is parallel to the spontaneous and corporeal knowledge characteristic of the first age in Giambattista Vico’s theory of ages. The Angel’s knowledge is spontaneous but utterly disembodied, and it has its source not in the domain of the sensorial but in the unrepeatable instant of intuition. The name of Descartes, however, deserves an angelological digression that thickens the plot of the story of poetic logic and the Angel’s corpse. Thomas Aquinas writes that the “activity of understanding is wholly nonmaterial . . . The act of understanding is not an action of the body or of any bodily energy. Hence to be joined to a body is not of the essence of intellectual being . . . Not all intellects are conjoined with bodies; there are some that exist separately, and these we call angels” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 51, a. 1). Angelological cognition and epistemology have no links whatsoever with the sensory perceptions typical of human beings. Angels work with disembodied knowledge, while humans root their cognition in the experience of their bodies in contact with the external world, as Giambattista Vico would have phrased it. In the history of Western ideas, Descartes was the most important proponent of knowledge totally divorced from the contingencies of the body. Fox and Sheldrake qualify Descartes’s scission of mind and body as favoring the angelic side of humans, namely that of abstraction.9 The idea, then, is that with Descartes humans expelled the Angel from the realm of cognition by substituting for the Angel themselves. However, if we accept the notions that the Angel resided in the suprasensory world of the mundus imaginalis and that abstraction contains only the mortal remains of the Angel, the link between Descartes’s disembodied knowledge and the angelological does not hold. The French philosopher was not interested in the interworld between the senses and abstraction but rather in abstraction itself. The relationship between language and cognition did not escape the attention of those who meditated profoundly on the Angel. For example, Hildegard of Bingen wrote that “The omnipotent God spoke to Adam in the words of the angels, because Adam knew their language well and could

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understand it. Through the reason which God had given him and through the spirit of the prophet’s talents, Adam possessed the knowledge of all the languages which would later be invented by humans.”10 However, the angels are unable to utter a comprehensible language, and as a consequence, linguistic communication is “therefore a particular mission for humanity.”11 In the end, an important issue is that of the human’s ability to perceive the Angel’s apparition, but in Hildegard of Bingen’s mind it is more appropriate to speak of the human potential to see only the disapparition of the Angel: “The three angels who appeared to Abraham as he sat at the entrance to his tent showed themselves in human form because in no way can humans see angels in their true form. Because of their altering forms, humans are unable to see an unalterable spirit.”12 This last comment of Hildegard sums up the angelological problem, a least as far as the contemporary rational or empirical mind set is concerned. Unless something can be concretely seen and measurable by means of mathematically based instruments or methods, the question of the truth of its existence is placed in abeyance if not totally dismissed. Thomas Hobbes played an important role in demythifying the Angel, whom he saw as lacking any form of reality and as being no more than signs or symbols through which God is made manifest in the world. In fact, in the Leviathan Hobbes denies the existence of angels as messengers of God; angels are not spirits but merely a figure of speech to describe the attitude or disposition of an individual. But the problem is not solely from the point of view of the ratio-logical mind or the empiricist. What we have heard from Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, and others seems to us today improbable, infantile, psychotic, mindless, irresponsible, irrational, or pseudoscientific. But to articulate the issue in responsible terms, let as say that for us today the question of the Angel rests in accepting the fact that we have, if anything, lost or misplaced the context for understanding the Angel. Put otherwise, appropriating what can never be appropriated is essential to knowing the meaning of the Angel’s corpse. But what context are we talking about? If we accept the premise that the paradigms of the mind condition the way we perceive external reality and history in general, then it would be fair to conclude that the disappearance of a given cognitive paradigm entails at the same time the disappearance of the particulars and universals whose truth-value were upheld only by the same paradigm. This holds true for the question of angelology. One of the most convincing illustrations of the cognitive

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context that purportedly housed the reality of the Angel is the one proposed by Henry Corbin, which deals with the mundus imaginalis, or cognitive imagination. This has nothing to do with the “imaginary,” with its meaning of “unreal” and “false.” Rather it is an “interworld” lodged somewhere between the world of sensorial data and the domain of abstraction. Not only is the mundus imaginalis the lost country of the Angel, it is also the place where the poetological is qualified as possessing a vibrant and powerful cognito-epistemological trait. Corbin’s research on esoteric Islamic thought (influenced as it is by a Platonic idealism) led him to a number of important conclusions, one being that there existed an intermediate world of perception that has for centuries remained vacant. What Corbin calls the world of the Image or mundus imaginalis, is a domain “as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition.”13 In outlining an Identikit of what Corbin intends by mundus imaginalis we could say that It is a world of images in suspense. Forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not exist in a similar fashion to the empirical realities in the sensorial world, nor can they exist in the abstract world of the intellect, since they have extension and dimension. Within the context of esoteric Islam the mundus imaginalis is a metaphysical necessity in that the cognitive operations of the Imagination depend upon it.14 The active Imagination is the organ that allows one to enter into the mundus imaginalis. The active Imagination is the organ the brings about the metamorphosis of internal spiritual states into external states, “into visionevents symbolized with those internal states.”15

The visions that Corbin speaks about are those of an Imaginatio vera that possesses a well defined cognitive value. In an attempt to deal with the problem of the empirical reality of the mundus imaginalis, Corbin cites from the prologue of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s L’ Annonciateur in which there is reference to a Messenger with eyes of clay who “could not be perceived except by the spirit. Creatures experience only influences that are inherent in the archangelic unity.” Villiers tells us that “Angels. Are not, in substance, except in the free sublimity of the absolute Heavens, where re-

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ality is unified with the ideal . . . They only externalize themselves in the ecstasy they cause and which forms a part of themselves.”16 Corbin comments on the passage from Villiers and states that there is no empirical reason for the revelation of the Angel other than the revelation itself: “The Angel is itself the ekstasis, the ‘displacement’ or the departure from ourselves that is a ‘change of state’ from our state.”17 The issue of the relationship between the visible and invisible (a central theme in angelological discourse) is key to any theory-making that involves poetic logic as the central actor. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s mind every visibility rests in a critical relationship with an invisibility: “When I say that every visible is invisible, that perception is imperception, that consciousness has a ‘punctum caecum’ that to see is always to see more than one sees— this must not be understood in the sense of a contradiction—it must not be imagined that I add to the visible . . . a nonvisible . . . One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a nonvisibility.”18 Poetic signification arises from the blindness toward reason as it is rooted in frenzy, fury, and mania. But it is its blindness that makes it indestructible, an indestructibility that flat reason can never provide. As Derrida tells us, blindness is inherent in any act of communication: “What happens when one writes without seeing?” Derrida asks in Memoirs of the Blind. A hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly delimited space; it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight. It is as if a lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers, as if one eye too many had just grown right next to the nail. This eye guides the tracing or outline; it is a miner’s lamp at the point of writing, a curious and vigilant substitute, the prosthesis of a seer who is himself invisible. Language is spoken, it speaks to itself, which is to say, from/of blindness. It always speaks to us from/of the blindness that constitutes it. At once virtual, potential, and dynamic, this graphic crosses all the borders separating the senses, its being-in-potential at once visual and auditory, motile and tactile. But for now, at this very moment when I write, I see literally nothing of these letters.”19

The trope of blindness moves in a parallel way with the idea of invisibility and the divine silence announced by the Angel. A space is opened that transcends anything that the seeing human eye could ever witness. But the point is that the Angel is perceivable only to those who do not trust the truth that the eye claims to irreversibly verify.

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orbin dates the beginning of the disappearance of the mundus imaginalis in the West at the moment that Averroism discarded the Avicennian world view replete with the animae or angeli caelestes who possessed cognitive power. Once this took place, the distinction between the Imaginatio vera and fantasy was dissolved. However, Massimo Cacciari is convinced that the demise of the mundus imaginalis “does not mean the end of all encounters with the Angel—it means that every encounter will now have to begin by putting ourselves at risk.” What risk? That of knowing in advance that any encounter with the Angel is “theoretically” impossible and that in the end there will be a non-encounter, if not some variety of hallucination? Cacciari, who faces the responsible challenge of reconciling the unsemiotizable name of the Angel with the sign of critico-theoretical inquiry, poses a series of questions that are of great relevance for any probing into the angelological: “What is the relation between an autonomous logic (no longer reverberation, resonance, medium) and the thing? In what way can a logos that is metaphysically detached from every presupposition represent a thing that is different and heterogeneous from it? How can the logoi stand for the thing itself if no common origin is expressible; if the logos, in breaking the net of demonic destiny, has defined itself absolutely or autonomously? . . . How can one represent that which is absolutely opposed to the untrembling heart of Aletheia?”1 In commenting on the series of questions posed by Cacciari (and that we are forced to ask before the strange angelological affirmations of the likes of Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, and others), we could speculate that the issues at hand deal with how we understand what cannot be assimilated into the way we perceive the real; how we judge those visitors

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who do not take a part in our generation of knowledge; the location of the other-world from which the other-worldly arrive; the history and culture of those who have no known history and culture to participate in, and so on. These questions are by no means new as they have, in one way or another, been posed for centuries, even if for different reasons and in different ways. While the content of these questions are ancient, the context in which we pose them today is, to say the very least, radically different. Thus, one can speculate that the answers have the potential to be new. Let us put forward some preliminary observations by way of meditating on the question of semiosis. Floyd Merrell notes that it would be fair to hypothesize that the process of semiosis has its origins in “some sort of distribution of point-signs as possibilities, and the semiotic agent, fabricator of thought-signs, is, quite properly speaking, a Deleuze-Guattari ‘nomad,’ with neither retrievable origin, absolutely stable centre, nor determinate destiny.”2 It would at first appear that we could apply this originary paradigm of signification to something such as angelology and observe that we really do not have the cartographic coordinates that indicate to us where angels live, nor are we sure about any fixed nucleus that is characteristic of angels, and for that matter, we have no idea what the destiny of any Angel is (unless, of course, we understand the Angel as being a corpse. Yet, its purported death does not negate the continued possibility of a destiny, in that the mortal remains constitute the means of reawakening within the purview of a new terrain of signification). This being the case, it would be reasonable to conclude that among the orders of signification that have been documented for us throughout the vast continent of different disciplines, there must be either one or a combination of many that could somehow allow us to penetrate the extra-empirical nature of angels. A figure, that is, that in its most important respects is an unmeasurable projection of the human imagination (another possibility includes a projection of a suprasensorial world into the mind of humans), unlike a slab of rock in the geologist’s laboratory, which is not a projection of the human imagination but rather the quantifiable projection of the natural world. The process of semiosis that Merrell has in mind is one that is essentially, but not exclusively, rooted in any attempt to understand what is quantifiable in relation to what is not quantifiable. Merrell’s main contention is that “everything that is is a sign, that whatever anything is other than its being a sign, it is also a sign.”3 In stating this Merrell is thinking about things that range from measurable objects to

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thought-signs. The Angel, as we will see, is an icon (at times a window, at other times a mirror or other things) through which humans perceive extraordinary states of being. But precisely because the Angel is purported to occupy an interworld located somewhere between heaven and earth, or, to be more exact, where transcendence collapses from its height and folds together with immanence, imagining the Angel implies finding the point at which immanence and transcendence are in a relation of juxtaposition. For this reason, one of the aims of this book is to illustrate how the intersectioning of signifying ecologies constitutes the basis for the elaboration of poetic logic as an alternative mode of cognito-epistemological experience and practice. The semiosphere of transience and of eternity are the two principle signifying worlds that allow humans to create and interpret meaning. In a general sense, transience refers to the immanent realm of birth and decay, while eternity refers to the transcendent domain of fixed or circular stasis. While it is common to speak of a demarcated differentiation between these two realms, it is equally true that the demarcation is often very weak or absent altogether. Moreover, there are interpretative models that encourage us not only to direct close critical attention to both transience and eternity but also to concentrate on the spaces where the two intersect. Disciplines such as theology and comparative mythology, to cite only two examples, encourage such a practice. There is an approach that helps elucidate the signifying possibilities offered by such a model, namely the idea of the “fold,” as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. In addressing the “fold” we need to pose a question that is as relevant to fields such as astrophysics as it is to the cultivation of a lyric philosophy: how it is possible for something (in our case the Angel and the poetic sign or metaphoric utterance) to produce signifying movements that do not coincide with or which run against spatiotemporal barriers? One of the most suggestive examples of a type of thinking that is characterized by the same sort of obliteration of all varieties of limits that many see inherent in the poetological is the notion of the “fold” as developed by Gilles Deleuze. In Foucault Deleuze outlines a definition of the “fold” in an attempt to explain the notion of subjectivation within the context of Michel Foucault’s writings on sexuality. There are four foldings, Deleuze writes, “like the rivers of the inferno,” which “operate beneath the codes and rules of knowledge and power and are apt to unfold and merge with them, but not without new foldings being created in the process.”4

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The first concerns the material part of ourselves which is to be surrounded and enfolded: for the Greeks this was the body and the pleasures but for the Christians this will be the flesh and its desires. The second is the fold of the relation between forces; for it is always according to a particular rule that the relation between forces is bent back in order to become a relation to oneself. The third is the fold of knowledge, or the fold of truth in so far as it constitutes the relation of truth to our being. The fourth is the fold of the outside itself, the ultimate fold: it is this that constitutes what Blanchot called an “interiority of expectation” from which the subject, in different ways, hopes for immortality, eternity, salvation, freedom or death or detachment.5

The foldings of subjectivation as here described by Deleuze pivot on a mode of thinking and interpretation that cannot rely exclusively on any sort of socio-political rationalism, that is to say, a variety of thought that speaks in the presence of concrete and material bodies and objects but that is silent before all that which is in turn silent, such as the psyche with the dead and lost images and pulsations it encrypts. Judith Butler, for example, has argued that on the one hand the life of the psyche is conditioned by the social discursiveness of power, while on the other hand the social articulation of power is hidden and generated by the psyche.6 The point here is that the domain of the psyche, whose contemporary study was born out of Freud’s and Jung’s (respectively different) attempts to fuse science and poetry (with the latter often being the last resort for a given explanation), can never be overlooked. Deleuze provides a much fuller development for the idea of the fold within the context of the Baroque (in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque). “The Baroque refers not to an essence,” Deleuze writes, “but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds.”7 Moreover, the Baroque fold moves along two levels characterized by infinity, the pleats of matter and the folds of the soul: “Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are ‘differently folded and more or less developed.’ Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them, since ‘this communication stretches out indefinitely.’”8 In the chapter entitled “What is Baroque?” Deleuze provides us with the six traits of the Baroque, which are included in the operative concept of the fold:

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1) The fold: the Baroque invents the infinite work or process. The problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity . . . the fold . . . determines and materializes Form. It produces a form of expression . . . the genetic element or infinite line of inflection, the curve with a unique variable. 2) The inside and the outside: the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside. Because it is a virtuality that never stops dividing itself, the line of inflection is actualized in the soul but realized in matter, each one on its own side. Such is the Baroque trait: an exterior always on the outside, an interior always on the inside. An infinite “receptivity,” an infinite “spontaneity”: the outer façade of reception and the inner rooms of action . . . 3) The high and the low: the perfect accord of severing, or the resolution of the tension, is achieved through the division into two levels, the two floors being of one and the same world (the line of the universe). The façade-matter goes down below, while the soul-room goes up above. The infinite fold then moves between the two levels. But by being divided, it greatly expands on either side: the fold is divided into folds, which are tucked inside and which spill onto the outside, thus connected as are the high and the low. Pleats of matter in a condition of exteriority, folds in the soul in a condition of closure . . . 4) The unfold: clearly this is not the contrary of the fold, nor its effacement, but the continuation or the extension of its act, the condition of its manifestation. When the fold ceases being represented in order to become a “method,” a process, an act, the unfold becomes the result of the act that is expressed exactly in this fashion 5) Textures: As a general rule the way a material is folded is what constitutes its texture. It is defined less by its heterogeneous and really distinct parts than by the style by which they become inseparable by virtue of particular folds . . . Texture does not depend on the parts themselves, but on strata that determine its “cohesion.” The new status of the object, the objectile, is inseparable from the different layers that are dilating, like so many occasions for meanders and detours. In relation to the many folds that it is capable of becoming, matter becomes a matter of expression. In this respect, the fold of matter or texture has to be related to several factors, first of all, light, chiaroscuro, the way the fold catches illumination and itself varies according to the hour and light of day . . . 6) The paradigm: the search for a model of the fold goes directly through the choice of a material. Would it be paper fold, as the Orient implies, or the fold of fabric, that seems to dominate the Occident? But the point is that the composite materials of the fold (texture) must not conceal the formal element or form of expression . . . 9

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The fold is based on an aggregation of monads that produce folds of time, space and movement. The universe is perceived as a corpus of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space. Deleuze understood that one does not have to expel the transcendent in order to overcome the Western metaphysical tradition. But the real and the unreal never intersect, or at least are never meant to intersect. The real and the unreal are two infinities moving in parallel fashion. The point of intersectioning can come about only once the parallel infinities are disrupted. Once this occurs, transcendence falls from the sky; the stratum of spatio-temporality comes down crashing like the Angel in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire who decides to “de-angel” himself by taking a fall from a height (which was mimicked by the Angel in City of Angels, whose palimpsest is Wenders’s film), and by doing so descends into the realm of fragility. The idea of fragility (a theme developed later on in this book) sets the interpretative stage that leads to an understanding of the meaning of the Angel in life and in death. The cognition of the meaning of the Angel, much more than being a harmless ancillary of severe theological inquiry, is the event that conjugates the materiality of the real with the phantasmatic unreal (from the perspective of the mundus imaginalis, let us also add, the phantasmic of the real with the materiality of the unreal). The fall of transcendence allows us understand the angelogical as a realm that opens up unheard-of interpretative possibilities. In his meditations on Klee’s Angelus Novus, Cacciari focuses on the idea that this new angelology permits humans to experience the unrepeatability of being and signification: “This is how Klee imagines the New Angel: irrevocable only in that it has been once, has sung for an instant. This instant produces an Openness without closure, which cannot be filled or repeated—free from the cycles of rebirths. The empty-handed freedom of this ‘poor’ instant is granted to us. We are still e-ducated to it by the last Angel, the oldest and the youngest of them all: the New Angel.”10 What Cacciari sees as unique in the new angelological cognition is that it produces a solution to the problem of the eternal recurrence of the same, an idea dear to Nietzsche and that suggests that the same events that have taken place in the past will inevitably recur in the present and in the future. The Angel’s gaze breaks the circle of the eternal return by opening the cognitive space that surrounds the unrepeatable instant. Among other things, this implies a total overcoming of any rationalistic paradigm rooted in the objective of antic-

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ipating or regulating outcomes on the basis of quanto-logic. We will discuss the issue of the eternal return of the same in unit “I.” Cacciari proposes a reading of the figure of the Angel that is at once sensitive to the theological tradition and immersed in the cultural and philosophical issues that characterize the present century. Cacciari gives us an understanding of the angelic in which the Angelus is the key player in any strategy we employ in a formulation of a philosophy of culture. “Angelological cognition” refers to a mind-set that is conditioned by the phantasmagoric effect that the idea of the Angel has on the way we interpret the world. This is not a retreat into incommunicable mysticism; rather, it is an attempt to understand what lies at the axes that bring the real into contact with the unreal. But how does one articulate the space of radical cognitive and perceptual difference that separates the human from the angelogical? Cacciari formulates the difference in the following terms: “To entrust ourselves into the hands of the Angel would mean to be ravished into the pure unsayable.”11 In other terms, cognition of the angelic sphere exacts a precise choice—namely that of disavowing the ordinariness and banality of the communicable everyday routine detail and replacing it with the wonder of what cannot be said or ever repeated. In many ways this notion underlies the central intent of The Necessary Angel—that is, Cacciari is concerned with dealing with the most important issue in angelology, the epistemological scission lodged between knowing and contemplation. The task of the angelology is to explain in what way it is possible for humans to understand and to be in a relation of correspondence with “that Invisible which the Angel safeguards precisely in the instant in which it is communicated through its forms. The paradoxical character of this relation haunts and dominates Angelology.”12 But in this context thinking the invisible implies dealing with a “Land-of-no-where,” as Cacciari terms it following Corbin, the place in which the Angel exists. Humans have access to this place by means of their imagination. According to Maimonides, “Angel” is the term used to identify the faculty of the imagination after it has undertaken active verbal commerce with the cherub. As the faculty engaged in dialogue with the invisible, the imagination constitutes an epiphanic space of the future—the place, that is, where the juncture that holds the real with the hyperreal opens itself into infinity. Cacciari had something like this in mind when in an earlier book he sought to articulate the function of art. In fact, in Icone della legge (Icon of

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the Law, 1985), within the context of a discussion on the problem of art in relation to the invisible as presented in the thought of Paul Klee, Cacciari hypothesized that art had the ability to unveil the idea of the invisible through its infinite materiality: “The infinity of visible things is the momentary gathering of the Invisible and the Unperceivable.”13 The invisible inhabits the infinity of what is immediately perceivable by the human eye because what is materially present is itself imperfect, a fragment of absolute timelessness. Moreover, on Klee’s authority, Cacciari suggests that a function of art is to make visible the essence of the Visible, which is “a moment, ‘a case’ of the Invisible and the Unperceivable embraced and made up by the universality which is in their powers.”14 Cacciari concludes the discussion on art, Klee, and the invisible by formulating a semiotics whose final image is the Angel: “Just as any being is an individual substance and reflects within itself, as opaque as it might be, the entire universe, so all signs and all meanings are connected with all of the other ones . . . Difficult equilibriums, suspended polyphonies and yet the works are here. A clear and ungraspable Being-there, like one of Klee’s Angels.”15 This passage, which is also the very last passage of Icone della legge, anticipates the research Cacciari was to undertake for his book on the figure of the Angel, and it effectively sums up what could be tentatively called an angelological semiosis: that is, where signification is pushed to its most daring limit, one where the distinction between a sign and a non-sign undergoes an unprecedented transformation. Franco Rella has meditated upon Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus.16 It is Rella’s view that the image of the silenced Angel is not the final message in Benjamin’s work. In Rella’s own words, “The image of the Angel marks the passage from words, from the indiscernible world of linguistic fragments, to the ‘age of things,’ to the moment of a new and different relation with the world.”17 The Angel is a figure for the ultralinguistic gesture that involves a movement from reason rooted in the logic of a grammar, to a mode of thought that moves within a certain cartography housed in the imagination and that inhabits things. In a general sense the Angel plays a key role within the economy of Rella’s poetic thinking. Rella is convinced that a task that belongs to our age, or what he terms the “new modern,” is to understand the meaning of that space resting between two beings or two things: “The ‘just as’ which establishes a relation between two beings or two things, also establishes the irreducible difference: that middle space which Scholastic metaphysics

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sought to nullify through the virtus unitiva of love, and which modern philosophy sought to dominate, reduce, defeat or colonize, with the instruments of conceptual abstraction.”18 The interpretative challenge facing Rella is that of defining the irreducible differences that exist between being and things, but doing so in terms that do not transcend or phase out the irreducebility. It is here that the Angel—more precisely, the crimson Angel—exercises a critical role. Rella elaborates the idea of the scarlet Angel within the context of a reading of Marcel Proust’s Recherche; at a certain point in the work Proust inserts Vinteuil’s Septuor: “In the Verdurin drawing-room begin the notes of the Septuor, the ‘new work,’ the ‘auroral rose’ which introduces an ‘unknown universe.’ Its is a red, harsh voice, the call of the eternal morning.”19 The septuor is a reddish light that somehow brings to the fore the element that holds together scattered fragments. Rella characterizes the reddish light of the septuor as a radically new cognitive experience, one that brings us into contact with “an unknown homeland,” a realm lost somewhere in the horizon that divides the visible world from the invisible world. The defining element of this new knowledge is a conflict “that has neither winners nor vanquished. It is only that conflict which allows us to see both the elements confronted in their difference, which constitutes a new beginning.”20 The hermeneutical gesture rooted in the cognition of the Angel is one that involves overcoming not the idea of a conflict but in a more specific sense the conflict whose rationale for being is the elimination and/or subjugation of what is different. The authentic conflict is the one that is rooted in the difficult task of understanding what appears at first impossible to be perceived, let alone understood. Rella, however, continues his identification of the septuor and claims that it is the crimson Angel of the morning. This Angel is defined in terms that Rella borrows from Nerval and Henry Corbin. In Nerval’s Aurélia, Rella observes, there is reference to an Angel who is reddish in color, and who unconceals a knowledge of the mystical that leads to a “knowledge of all.” Corbin has compared Nerval’s Angel to the crimson Angel found in a tale by Suhrawardi. In the tale a pilgrim encounters a Sage and asks him about his crimson color. The Sage, who turns out to be an Angel, states that his actual color is white but he makes himself visible in the form of crimson because when the whiteness of lucence is mixed with darkness, the result is a reddish color. Dawn and dusk inhabit a middle space separating

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the whiteness of daylight from the blackness of nighttime. Hence the crimson-colored skies of dawn and dusk. Rella relates this tale with the objective of underlining a central point, namely, that the septuor that appears in Proust’s work belongs to an angelic genealogy in which the redness of the Angel is contemporaneously the redness of dawn. This Angel is the Angel of the cognitio matutina, “knowledge of the morning,” a reawakening. The duties assigned to this Angel, Rella informs us, is that of revealing things, of exegesis, of recomposing what was fragmented. The color red, in being a color of mixture, stands for the middle space, or “the knowledge which links heaven and earth, the many forms and the many fragments by which the world offers itself to our experience . . . this knowledge is the knowledge of ‘reawakening,’ cognitio matutina . . . It is given in the pilgrimage in foreign land, in the search of the forgotten homeland, a pilgrimage which dis-places us from any routine, in the very heart of atopia, where, however, we discover the marvels of the world.”21 The fact is we find the topos of an angelic cognitio matutina in the works of a figure such as St. Augustine. Angelological cognition, we are told, is of three varieties and in conformity with the kinds of light found during the three phases of the day: the light of day, the light of evening, and the light of morning. In the light of day the Angel comes to know the things that are part of the Verbum before their creation. During the time of evening light the angels come to know the things that are part of the Verbum after their creation. By means of the matutina lux, “morning light,” the Angels achieve knowledge of the things in themselves and of their relationship with the transcendent Being.22 Angelic cognition is in this way a guiding light that makes visible the invisible path that leads to a strange understanding of the world, to an “extraneous” explicatio of what we thought we could not know. To know the unknowable we need to abandon our common and comforting way of understanding things and move across the fractured and fracturing space of difference with the objective of experiencing the fracture as the contaminated light of other-life. The Angel’s talent for bringing together what is irreconcilable by unveiling the unreal cartography of irreducebility of the differences that exist between things is articulated by Paolo Valesio in the poem “Il viaggio di coyote.”23 Images evoking the concrete and at the same time phantasmatic nature of the Angel’s healing touch are underlined by Valesio. There is clearly a sense of nostalgia in the poem for a time, like the days of Tobias,

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when the presence of the Angel could somehow be assured. Instead one is left, like the figure from Valesio’s passage, wallowing in an eternal desire for the touch of the invisible hand. But this eternal desire is countered in Valesio’s poetic work by the ability of poetological language to collect all the incompatible and jagged elements of human experience in the “stanzas” of the poetic form. In this way, poetry becomes a grammatographic transposition of what inheres in angelological cognition; in other terms, poetological semiosis provides a figuration (which is of central importance to angelological inquiry) of those axes from which suspend the ordinariness of the real and the terrifying signs of the hyperreal.

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FRAGMENTS OF A RECUMBENT FIGURE

“T

he whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is: how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place?” This question posed by F. W. J. Von Schelling1 is in the same spirit as a statement by Vladimir Solovyov: “But reason is only a means, an instrument, or a medium of knowledge; it is not the content of knowledge.”2 The concern expressed in these two citations (that is, the implicit accusation that some other form of thinking has had its powers confiscated) assumes a different guise in Wittgenstein’s meditations on what can and what cannot be the object of intelligible signification. The final series of propositions found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deals with the ultimate limit or failure of linguistic convention (“When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words” [6.5]. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” [6.522]. “The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, that is, propositions of natural science—something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give meaning to certain signs in his proposition . . .” [6.53].) In the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus Wittgenstein advises that the reader must “transcend these propositions” in order to see the “world aright.” But let us magnify and extend the context in which Wittgenstein’s thinking takes place and ask ourselves whether or not the unsayable is instead merely the invention of a linear rationalism grounded in the purest forms of abstraction. It is not a question of ascertaining whether or not humans can think, know, and speak “infinitely.” It is rather a question of

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illustrating the extent to which those “things” that are now unsayable were once (or in the future will be) able to be made manifest through the medium of verbal semiosis. Poetic logic is the patron saint of the unsaid and the unsayable, of those words, images, ideas that are now destitute and laying recumbent on the ground as in some painting or statue from the Renaissance depicting a moribund figure. What Wittgenstein states about the unsayable at the end of the Tractatus is true about the figure of poetology. What was once perceived (under the aegis of Aristotle) as being a “strong” form of philosophizing, must now be passed “over in silence” [7]. What we are dealing with here is that which cannot be repaired; however, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, “At the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendent.”3

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LYRIC FRAGMENTS OF A REAWAKENING

“N

ietzsche,” Walter Benjamin reminds us in his massive collection of textual ruins entitled Passagen-werk, “defined the earliest stages of his thought as philosophy of dawn and of the morning, in order to distinguish them from his philosophy of high noon— the doctrine of the eternal return.”1 In many ways the formulation of a lyric philosophy follows a trajectory that involves a movement tracing the path linking a philosophy of the morning with the Angel’s corpse, which is figured in the guise of the idea of the eternal return of the same. But is it a question of looking forward, backward, or rather upward, downward, or within something? In other terms, what are the critico-topologico coordinates of this trajectory? The coordinates are rooted in our potential to see what is present but at the same time what is not present in a material form. But ultimately, what is at issue here is an essential reawakening that occurs in the morning. As Benjamin states in the Passagen-werk, “Just as Proust begins his life story with the moment of awakening, so every presentation of history must begin with awakening; in fact it actually must not deal with anything else.” Marina Cvetaeva, in fact, makes a clear connection between the idea of a reawakening and the Angel in “The Song of Angels” from Le Gars: “The voice of dawn, the voice of the host; / the voice of dawn, the voice of being.” The lyric fragments of a reawakening are similar to thieves hidden by the roadside who attack passersby and make them lose the weight of their conviction, as Benjamin would have it when he describes the function of citations. In another passage on the nature of citations, Benjamin writes: In the quotation that both saves and chastises, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from

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its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously in the structure of a new text. As rhyme it gathers the similar into its aura; as name it stands alone and expressionless. In quotation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they interpenetrate—in quotation—is language consummated. In it is mirrored the Angelic tongue in which all words, startled from the idyllic context of meaning, have become mottoes in the book of Creation.2

And so the function of a sea of citations is to force one to move toward a conjugal closeness with a constellation of signs pushing from different directions, with the final aim of being reawakened from the slumber of the brothel of history. There is a connection between our ability to move towards a new cultural-historical time, and our capacity to see fragments of quotations as a new invention. The Copernican turn in the historical point of view is this: one used to take “the past” as the fixed point and saw the present as attempting to lead knowledge gropingly to this firm ground. Now this relation shall be reversed and the past should become the dialectical reversal, the sudden thought of an awakened consciousness. Politics is granted primacy over history. Facts become something that hit us just now; to establish them is the task of memory. And indeed, awakening is the exemplary case of remembering: the case in which we succeed in recalling the nearest, the most banal, the most obvious. What Proust means by the experimental rearrangement of furniture in the half-slumber of the morning, [what] Block understands as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what we should determine here, on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a notyet-conscious-knowledge of the past, whose furthering has the structure of awakening.3

The potential reawakening carries the signature of an unnamable hand— that is, a hand whose authentic imprint is pure potentiality. A reawakening, in other terms, that is rooted in a chronologically vast remoteness whose main theme is unrepeatable nothingness. However, while “reawakening” possesses a semantic currency that makes it understood in a variety of contexts, what exactly is “unrepeatable nothingness”? Giorgio Agamben phrases the idea of reawakening in a way

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that pivots on the notion vacuity: “If instead you patiently dwell in the emptiness of representation, this, O blessed one, is what we call the middle way. Relative emptiness is no longer the image of nothing. The word draws its fullness from its very vacuity. This peace of representation is the awakening.”4 In Leonardo da Vinci’s mind, “that which is called nothing is found only in time and in words” (Leonardo, Cod. Arundel); and again, “Within it nothingness contains all the things that have no being; within time it resides in the past and the future and possesses nothing of the present; and within nature it has no place” (Leonardo, Cod. Arundel f. 132v). Commenting on Leonardo’s artistic practices, Freud (who wanted to get to the heart of Leonardo’s nothingness) wrote: When he dissected cadavers of horses and human beings, and built flying apparatus, or when he studied the nourishment of plants and their behaviour toward poisons, he naturally deviated from the commentators of Aristotle and came nearer the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories the experimental investigations found some refuge during these unfavourable times. The effect that this had on his paintings was that he disliked to handle the brush; he painted less and, what was more often the case, the things he began were mostly left unfinished; he cared less and less for the future fate of his works. It was this mode of working that was held up to him as a reproach by his contemporaries, to whom his attitude toward his art remained a riddle.5

Leonardo knew that the most radical dimension of lived experience was the nothingness that it housed, a nothingness that could never be abstracted or structured as an aprioristic entity. And Freud was keen to observe that Leonardo’s affinity with the hated alchemists was at the root of a passive, ante litteram nihilism that at a certain point conditioned Leonardo’s attitude toward his art. The alchemists, after all, concretized nothingness to it most dangerous extreme. Leonardo felt the devastating weight of nothing, whose galaxy no one was able to escape: “Among the magnitude of things that are around us, the being of nothingness holds the highest position and its grasp extends to things that have no being, and its essence resides within time, within the past and the future, and it possesses nothing of the present” (Leonardo, Cod. Arundel, f. 131r). Freud himself was fascinated by the gazing that nothingness could inspire. His psychoanalytic thought was surely an attempt to find a material

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guise for this nothingness. The vacuity offered by Michelangelo’s Moses reawakens such an awareness about the unrepeatable nothing: The figure of [Michelangelo’s] Moses, therefore, cannot be supposed to be springing to his feet; he must be allowed to remain as he is in sublime repose like the other figures and like the proposed statue of the Pope (which was not, however, executed by Michelangelo himself ). But then the statue we see before us cannot be that of a man filled with wrath, of Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai and found his people faithless and threw down the Holy Tables so that they were broken. And, indeed, I can recollect my own disillusionment when, during my first visits to San Pietro in Vincoli, I used to sit down in front of the statue in the expectation that I should now see how it would start up on its raised foot, dash the Tables of the Law to the ground and let fly its wrath. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, the stone image became more and more transfixed, an almost oppressively solemn calm emanated from it, and I was obliged to realize that something was represented here that could stay without change; that this Moses would remain sitting like this in his wrath for ever.6

That which is nothing is everywhere. Once we attempt to provide a figure for this “nothing” we are left wondering why the only signs that it transmits to us are signs that point to a distant eternity. The point is that nothingness is so ubiquitous that it is never present; or rather, if we try to dress nothingness with an a-prioristic rational guise, we come to the conclusion that as a presentness it does not exist. So we can stare at the Being of nothingness and hope to make it move by way of an active imagination, but soon enough we see that it is eternally transfixed. In the beginning there was nothing, which multiplied itself until nothing became the infinite nothing of the speed of light. Any attempt to understand nothing corresponds to an archaeology of the community’s soul. The community is the place where the value of nothing is invented. Nothing is the heart of poverty, a poverty brought about by the need to create the idea of indifference. But more than a useful convention, poverty is the mortified voice of no will to power. The greatest indignity one could do to poverty is to aestheticize it into an event or object of happy familiarity. The Angel of history from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is the figure of poverty for a new age, a poverty that is rooted in the hatred of a difference that never existed in the morning.

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Another path to explaining the meaning of “unrepeatable nothingness” (which is at the center of any attempt to interpret the strangeness of the Angel’s corpse) involves tracing the cognitive space that leads from phenomenology to a noumenal logic (a logic, that is, focusing on the thing or object, in itself inaccessible to experience but to which a phenomenon is referred for the basis or cause of its sense content. The noumenon is the object itself that is to be distinguished from a phenomenon or object as it appears). P. D. Ouspensky developed a line of thinking that gave or rather restored life to precisely a noumenal or what he termed “higher” logic. He called the system the Tertium Organum which somehow followed the tradition established by Aristotle’s Organon and continued by Bacon’s Novum Organon. In fact, in Ouspensky’s view, the “third organon” existed before the other two. The axioms of Ouspensky’s “higher logic” are supralinguistic as they belong to a signifying realm that is unreconcilable with the logic of conventional language. As a result of not having any concepts, “the ideas of higher logic are inexpressible in concepts. And when we come up against this inexpressibility, it means that we have come into contact with the world of causes.”7 According to Ouspensky, higher logic existed before the advent of both deductive and inductive logic, but it resembles a logic of intuition, infinity, ecstasy. Traces of higher logic are preserved in poetry, mysticism, and idealistic philosophy. One of the most powerful formulations of this logic is to be found in Plotinus’s “On Intelligible Beauty.” In describing the gods and their celestial abode, Plotinus writes:

All gods are venerable and beautiful, and their beauty is immense. What else however is it but intellect through which they are such? For all things there are diaphanous; and nothing is dark and resisting, but every thing is apparent to everyone internally and throughout. For light everywhere meets with light; since every thing contains all things in itself, and again sees all things in another. So that all things are everywhere, and all is all. Each thing likewise is every thing, there each part always proceeds from the whole, and is at the same time each part and the whole. For it appears indeed as a party; but by him whose sight is acute, it will be seen as a whole. And the life there is a wisdom; a wisdom not obtained by a reasoning process, because the whole of it always was, and is not in any respect deficient, so as to be in want of investigation. But it is the first wisdom, and is not derived from another.8

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As we will see in the latter part of this book, what Ouspensky is theorizing about on the basis of Plotinian philosophy participates in the same genealogy of what Umberto Eco calls hermetic drift or semiosis. We discuss hermetic semiosis at greater length at a later point, but for the moment let us say that higher logic constitutes a lost and forgotten frontier of inquiry as far as semiotics is concerned. On the one hand it could be labeled as “primitive” in that it ignores the ratio-logical distinctions that govern much of contemporary thinking, but on the other, and this is this potential paradox, “higher logic” is the interpretative frontier that was quickly disposed of with the advent of Cartesian rationalism. Ouspensky speaks in the clearest terms of the limits that must be overcome (he never uses the expression “ratio-logical” but instead the “idols of dualism”). The first limit is the belief that what we see and sense is what in fact exists; it is important that we sensitize ourselves to the incorrectness of the representation of the world and to the idea “That the real, new world must exist in some quite different forms, new, incomparable, incommensurable with the old.” Moreover, we must realize that the divisions of the world are not necessarily correct: “things which appear to be totally different and separated from another, may be a part of some whole incomprehensible to it, or that they may have much in common, although this may not be noticed; whereas things which seem one and indivisible, are actually complex and manifold.”9 But an essential factor in Ouspensky’s explanation of higher logic is one’s ability to entertain a cognitive strategy that leads toward an awakening that consists in recognizing the previously unknown or unheard of common properties of things, “which result from their similar origin or similar functions, incomprehensible on a plane.”10 To sum up Ouspensky’s supralogical noumenal world, the following observations can be advanced: 1. Time must exist spatially—that is, temporal events must exist both prior to and following their accomplishment. Effects and causes must exist contemporaneously. 2. There exists nothing that could be quantified by means of our methods of quantification. 3. There is neither matter nor motion, nor is there anything that can photographed or formulated in terms of physical energy.

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4. There exists nothing that is dead or unconscious. To the contrary, everything is conscious and is able to speak. 5. Precisely because there exists nothing finite there, mathematical axioms could never be applied there. 6. This world is outside the laws of logic. 7. The multiplicity and the divisions that it brings are alien to this world. Everything is the whole. 8. There is no duality. For example, “Being” does not rest in opposition to “non-being.” This world is based on the notion of the unity of contraries. 9. As a result of there being no difference between the unreal and the real, the idea of unreality of that world is to be coupled with the idea of unreality of the world we live in. 10. The world we live in and the other world are not, in the end, two different domains. What we call our world is but a flawed figuration of that world. We sense that world as being opposed to the reality of our own world. However, as we state this our terrestrial world assumes a guise of unreality.11 On the basis of this discussion on Ouspensky, it would seem that we are dealing with a variety of thinking that is alien to the ratio-logical and materialist philosophies that dominate the present time. If anything, higher logic seems to have much more in common with ancient philosophies that are no longer, as some erroneously claim, of use to us. However, the history of ideas occults all kinds of unexpected and unheard of relations or analogies: for example, Ouspensky’s higher logic bears an uncanny resemblance to some postmodern philosophies. I am specifically thinking of the idea of rhizome as conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. On the one hand the rhizome is an upside-down mirror-reflection of higher logic, but on the other hand it is an application of higher logic to our terrestrial world. Deleuze and Guattari borrow the figure of the rhizome from the botanical world to explain the relationship between things and beings. In the French philosophers’ own words, a rhizome “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also

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perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs and specialized languages.”12 The main features of the rhizome can be summarized as follows: 1. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. 2. It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. 3. It has neither beginning nor end but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills. 4. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is short-term memory, or antimemory. 5. The rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced and constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible. 6. The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.13 An important feature of the rhizome is the absence of a transcendental element or Being that brings about a unity of the many scattered in multiplicity. However, while there is no “angelic or superior unity” there is something else in its place, namely the figure of the rhizome itself. The element that brings about a relationship between itself and all things, as well as between all things themselves is the rhizome, which at any given point “can be connected to anything other, and must be.”14 While this is quite different from the idea of a monad, it is equally true that it establishes a potential relationship of affinity with higher logic; that is, while there is no transcendent unifying force in the properties of the rhizome, there is an immanent one that allows a multiplicity of different units and dimensions to come into contact with each other. The rhizome can be seen, at once, as both a topsy-turvy version of higher logic and as a materialization of it. Even the manner in which Deleuze and Guattari explain the book-asrhizomatic figure bears an unquestionable resemblance to the “diaphanous truth” that Plotinus talks about and that Ouspensky uses as a basis to claim, as we saw, that time must exist spatially—that is, temporal events must exist both prior to and following their accomplishment: “The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determina-

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tions, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.”15 Moreover, like Ouspensky, Deleuze and Guattari expel dualism from their scheme of things (“That is why one can never posit a dualism of dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad”).16 My point in this comparison between Ouspensky and Deleuze/Guattari is not to suggest that they are linked by some sort of genealogical relationship, nor is it to claim that somehow the tertium organum and the rhizome are the same thing. They clearly are not. Instead I am searching for that frontier that has been the object of a millennial quest, and, in my view, that frontier is located somewhere between the world of noumenal logic and the materialist schizophrenia of the rhizome. This frontier belongs to neither but partakes of both, and its signpost is the dead Angel. The defining feature of this frontier is that it “deterritorializes.” Here again I make reference to Deleuze and Guattari, who made deterritorialization a key element in their philosophy. In A Thousand Plateaus, they write, “Signs are not signs of a thing: they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements.”17 The French philosophers are interested in finding a way of articulating not so much the total collapse of systems (be they political, economic, social, or intellectual and so on) as the fact that processes of creating meaning are almost irretrievably lost in the epistemological crevices that are located in the ever changing boundaries that divide these systems. In another passage we read that “every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum. The limitlessness of significance replaces the sign.”18 In other terms, the deterritorialization of the sign consists in the fact that “it is thought of as a symbol in a constant movement of referral from sign to sign. The signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of signs.”19 And finally, “The most deterritorialized element causes the other element to cross a threshold enabling a conjunction of their respective deterritorilizations, a shared acceleration.”20 What is the message here? We invoke the deterritorial in attempt to articulate, to figure that frontier existing somewhere between the noumenal and the rhizomatic. It is a place that turns the ratio-logical into a “slippery” logic but that encourages a materialist mysticism that is unintelligible. The solution, so to speak, is the deterritorial, which opens (by virtue of an immunity to any conceptual or epistemological limit or boundary) the possibility of a reawakening through sensing the semiosis that is inscribed in the Angel’s corpse.

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o one has ever seen a living dinosaur, but the skeletal remains of the various species are on display in many museums throughout the world, and so no one doubts that these prehistoric animals ever existed. Many people claim to have seen “real” angels, but there is no scientific proof that they ever existed, the way there is empirical evidence for the existence of dinosaurs. However, the comparison between the dinosaur and the Angel is misleading. The proof for the existence of dinosaurs exists on a cognitive plane, that of physical and empirical evidence, which is part of our everyday, quantifiable existence. Moreover, the physical/empirical is the plane on which dinosaurs are said to have existed. As we have seen, the Angel is purported to exist on a cognitive plane that we have lost, the mundus imaginalis, which is the perceptive space lodged somewhere in between the perception of abstract ideas and the perception of the physical/empirical world. The unquantifiable world of the mundus imaginalis, which according to tradition is the home of the Angels, is lost to us, and as a result the only contexts we have for thinking and figuring the Angel are the contexts of abstraction and of the measurable world of the senses. What is truly astounding about Corbin’s claim according to which “rational abstraction, at best, deals only with the ‘mortal remains’ of an Angel”1 is that he is suggesting the “skeletal remains,” so to speak, of the Angel are not to be found in the empirical world, as in the case of the dinosaur, but in the realm of abstract thinking. Rational abstraction contains within its genealogy the trace of a living Angel; abstraction reveals the corpse of the Angel, but at the same time it hides the signs of its life. Thus a critical imagining of the Angel necessarily entails a critical imagining of

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the cognitive space in which it is housed, namely, the mundus imaginalis. But rather than recomposing the living Angel, let us rethink the evidence of its life, which means gazing at and beyond the mortal remains that rational abstraction offers us. Precisely because we no longer perceive the mundus imaginalis, we are put into a situation whereby we must necessarily conjugate the critical with the unimaginable; thus the interpretative activity becomes a late form of alchemical practice. But which “alchemy” are we speaking about here? It is definitely not the ethereal musing of a late twentieth-century New Age mind; nor is it the trendy resurrection of some harmless esoteric hobby. In other terms, it is not the discredited and mocked occult bookstore alchemy that no longer makes a difference. Instead, it is a case of reinventing alchemy as an epistemo-cognitive category. In doing so we select the most disquieting elements of alchemical practice, the bizarre and often noxious contamination of different substances, including metals, gases, and the various types of human and animal secretions and excretions—the attempt to take nature apart and then to reassemble it. The point is that the aggressive contamination at the heart of alchemy is what Deleuze and Guattari would call deterritorializing, a dissolution of all types of boundaries leading to a marriage of the chemical and the metaphysical. Alchemy, in its most radical sense, was the attempt to disclose the space that existed between the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and the material, the noumenal and the rhizomatic. Moreover, alchemy was a mind-altering experience, a scientific high, as the alchemist who gazed at the substances he sought to transform inevitably ended up ingesting the fumes of the intoxicating gases that were part and parcel of his craft. The contamination that alchemy encouraged was also bio-psychic in nature, one that involved ripping apart the boundaries that separated the mind from the body. The alchemist projected his psyche into the matter that was the object of his gaze. Hence the relevance of psychoanalytic discourse to gauging the presence of the Angel’s corpse. The mortal remains of the Angel rest at once in conscious rational abstraction and in the unconscious. The task is that of discussing the unimaginable, the unsayable; the elements that come into play here are that of the haunting phantom, the crypt and the secret entombed there. The lyric psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok is a point of reference here. Abraham and Torok developed the notion of transgenerational haunting,

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which purported the idea that repressed secrets are handed down from one generation to another if they are “encrypted” as traumatic data. Freud had already noted the presence of communication between the unconsciouses of two individuals: “It is a very remarkable thing that the Unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Conscious. This deserves closer examination, especially with a view to finding out whether preconscious activity can be excluded as playing a part in it; but, descriptively speaking, the fact is uncontestable.”2 As Nicholas Rand observes, the idea of the phantom as elaborated by Abraham and Torok displaces the focus of psychoanalysis much beyond the individual being in that it proposes that some individuals unknowingly inherit the entombed psychic substance of their ancestors. “The phantom represents the interpersonal and transgenerational consequences of silence. The concept of the crypt designates a secret psychic configuration arising from an individual’s own life experiences; the idea of the phantom concerns itself with the unwitting reception of someone else’s secret.”3 Abraham and Torok’s theory may be summed up in the following manner: 1. The phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious. 2. The phantom works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography. 3. The phantom counteracts libidinal introjection; that is, it obstructs our perception of words as implicitly referring to their unconscious portion. 4. The words used by the phantom to carry out its return do not refer to a source of speech. Instead, they point to a gap, they refer to the unspeakable. 5. The phantom is alien to the subject who harbors it.4 Let us ask, then, what does the Angel’s corpse have to do with all of this? Since the advent of Cartesian rationalism the Angel’s ability to offer messages has become obfuscated, voided of any “serious” meaning and ultimately unrealized and unfulfilled. The Angel’s specter, which assumes the guise of a corpse, is like the analysand whose message has not been perceived, as in Abraham and Torok’s description: “those whose message

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they [the analysts] failed to hear, those whose deficient, mutilated text they have listened to time after time—the riddles with no keys—those who left their analysts without yielding up the distinctive oeuvre of their lives, those people return forever as the ghosts of their unfulfilled destiny and as the haunting phantoms of the analyst’s deficiency.”5 The Angel’s corpse is more than the figure for something else—it is itself the thing haunting the present time that has not resolved the conflict that the angelic remains provoke. The provocation takes the form of a traumatic experience, or, more precisely, a “secret.” I am here using the word as Abraham and Torok use it: that is, a “secret” as a traumatic experience whose destructive psychological consequences are occulted in a tomb and thus delivered to internal silence by the sufferers. But for the psychoanalysts, “reality” in its metapsychological sense, is linked to “secret”: “Reality can then be defined as what is rejected, masked, denied precisely as ‘reality’; it is that which is, all the more so since it must not be known; in short, Reality is defined as a secret. The metapsychological concept of Reality refers to the place, in the psychic apparatus, where the secret is buried.”6 The secret that the Angel’s corpse encrypts is its own traumatic death. How is this trauma articulated in cultural and intellectual practices? By means of a consistent search for the unnamable that engulfs the material. Freud himself was well aware of the strange places in reality in which secrets hid themselves. Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis, I learnt that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff, had caused a revolution in the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty, and constructing hypothetical artists for those works whose former supposed authorship had been discredited. He achieved this by insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artists executes in his own characteristic way. I was then greatly interested to learn that the Russian pseudonym concealed the identity of an Italian physician called Morelli, who died in 1891 with the rank of Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. It seems to me that his method on inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and

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concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbishheap, as it were, of our observations.7

Truth is found somewhere in the refuse of lived experience. It is found in the folds of the psychic waste that we often deem unsemiotizable. But for Freud it is the paleopsychic refuse in particular that allows us to divine the hidden secrets of Being. It is the Recording Angel who runs his fingers through the documents of lived experience only to find that humans hold dearly their fragile remains, their scattered parts. Humans have abandoned that nostalgia for a sense of total gathering that was purported to be found in the idea that the human race is the singular thought of the Angel.

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he Angel offers humans the impossible science of transformation into invisibility; in fact, as Rilke writes in a letter of 1912 addressed to Witold von Hulewicz, the destiny of the Earth will be realized by means of a transmutation from the guise of visibility to one that is no longer perceived by the senses: “The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here—in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion of the visible into an invisible . . . The Angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, appears already consummated.”1 But the transformation of the visible into the invisible necessarily involves an intermediary stage, a place where something is at once real and unreal. The metamorphosis that Rilke is encouraging must pass through a state where invisibility is an object of desire but where visibility has dissolved—that is where a being or a thing is at once visible and invisible. Giorgio Agamben, using a very prophetic tone, suggested that the space of transformation, similar to the one just described, is an “ . . . intermediate epiphanic place, located in the no-man’s-land [where] the creations of human culture will be situated one day, the interweaving (entrebescar) of symbolic forms and textual practices through which man enters into contact with a world that is nearer to him than any other and from which depend, more directly than from physical nature, his happiness and his misfortune.”2 The claim being put forward here, within the

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spirit of Agamben’s prophecy, is that a place where this transformation unfolds itself before our eyes is in the space of the angelogical. But any imagining of a new, unheard state of being involves a radical understanding of the many paradigms of the world that the imagination can invent. Ultimately we need a science of the “making invisible,” something that Corbin proposes in his meditations on an angelological philosophy, which constitutes a poetological hermeneutic. The Angel is the source of prophetic philosophy and hermeneutics, as Corbin tells us (but not only Corbin; for example, in “The Angel’s Interrogation,” Zbigniew Herbert represents the Angel’s prophetic sense as something that literally oozes from its body: “from the Angel’s hair / there fall drops of wax / and they form on the floor / a simple prophecy”). Corbin uncovered the presence of a “trans-sensory” organ of perception in his research on the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. This organ, which Corbin calls the theophanic Imagination, is the instrument “of a prophetic hermeneutics, for it is the imagination which is at all times capable of transmuting sensory data into symbols and external events into symbolic histories. Thus the affirmation of an esoteric meaning presupposes a prophetic hermeneutics.”3 This sort of interpretative mode is accompanied by a prophetic philosophy that orients itself toward a realm of “pure theophanic historicity, in the inner time of the soul.” As Corbin explains, prophetic philosophy “looks for the meaning of history not in ‘horizons,’ that is, not by orienting itself in the latitudinal sense of a linear development, but vertically, by a longitudinal orientation extending from the celestial pole to the Earth.”4 The Angel is the fount of this philosophy and hermeneutics in the sense that it allows humans to perceive the trans-sensory world for the essential reason that the Angel resides in that dimension. Thomas Aquinas as well underlined the significance of the Angel’s ability to reveal and make prophecies: The spirit works grace in people by means of the angels. The divine enlightenments and revelations are conveyed from God to humans by the angels. Now, prophetic knowledge is bestowed by divine enlightenment and revelation. Therefore it is evident it is conveyed by the angels. Prophecy is a perfection of the intellect, in which an angel can form an impression. Prophetic revelation which is conveyed by the ministry of the angels is said to be divine revelation. Prophecy is between the angels and the people.5

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The Angel has the ability to tear us away from the limits of a rationalized idea of sense perception, thus permitting us to come into contact with the world that remains unheard of for humans. Corbin reiterates this idea in another passage: “The Angelic function, the Angel’s mediation, which precisely liberates us for undiscovered, unforeseeable, unsuspected transcendences and prevents us from becoming immobilized in definite, definitive happening.”6 More than being a messenger of the divine, the Angel is endowed with the capacity to fluidify for humans the space and time of understanding and thinking. To suggest that today this is a radical idea is beyond doubt. It is equally true that the trans-sensory nature of interpretation shares similarities with Aristotle’s idea of the poetological, namely, that it has the potential to bend the barriers established by time and space. In the end, the issue we are dealing with here is one that pivots on the problem of cognition, of understanding. Our ability to comprehend how, outside the laws of a rational physics, something can move back and forth between visibility and invisibility is conditioned by our “understanding” of understanding. Corbin writes that “all our acts of understanding are so many recommencements, re-iterations of events still unconcluded.”7 Any attempt to probe into the meaning of the visibility/invisibility dynamic must necessarily keep in mind, among other things, the notion that there are certain events, ideas, intuitions, sentiments, and so on from the past that, for whatever reason, never achieved a sense of closure. To a definite extent, it is a question of thawing out certain ideas or meanings that have been frozen for centuries in the landscape of intellectual consciousness. Let us take as an example of an “unconcluded event, idea or meaning” a quote taken from G. T. Fechner’s On the Question of the Soul, where the author describes the Earth as being an Angel: I was walking in the open air on a beautiful spring morning. The wheat was growing green, the birds were singing, the day was sparkling, the smoke rising; a transfiguring light lay over everything; this was only a tiny fragment of Earth and yet the idea seemed to me not only so beautiful, but also so true that she was an Angel—an Angel so sumptuous, so fresh, so fresh, so like a flower and at the same time so firm so composed, who was moving through the sky that I asked myself how it was possible that men should have blinded themselves to the point of seeing the Earth as nothing but a dried-up mass to the point where they go looking for Angels above them, or somewhere in the emptiness of the sky, and find them nowhere.8

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The point is the that figuration of the Earth as Angel is not limited to an ornamental poetic image or technique. We are dealing with a cognitive perspective that does not adhere to any interpretative grid offered to us by the empirical or rationalistic sciences. The event of perceiving the Earth as an Angel is a psycho-cognitive occurrence that happens in neither the domain of conceptual abstraction nor in the realm of the sensory perception of the physical data. In Corbin’s mind, “The perception of the Earth Angel will come about in an intermediate universe which is neither that of the Essences of philosophy nor that of the sensory data on which the work of the positive science is based, but which is a universe of archetype-Images, experienced as so many personal presences.”9 What the angelological philosophy encourages us to do is not pose questions concerning the essence of something in the form of “what is it?” but instead ask questions dealing with individual persons in the guise of “who is it?” or “with whom is it in correspondence?” By undertaking such an interpretative route we move from the mind set of quantification to that of qualification; this constitutes a transportation from the domain of a quanto-reason that places the emphasis on the aim of discovering the only truth, that which resides either in the frigid realm of conceptual abstraction or in the concrete sensorial of everyday life. These two worlds are able to answer the problem of quantum of any inquiry. But once we pose the problem of qualis (“who is the Earth?”), the response to this question, Corbin tells us, “causes an Image to appear and this Image invariably corresponds to the presence of a certain state.”10 The fact is that the mental apparition of the Angel of the Earth is not an experience that occurs within sensorial reality. But what we have to ask ourselves is whether or not the nonvisible forces that assume their material guise in the world of nature are the catalysts of mental powers that have been atrophied or marginalized by the changes in human practices and conventions, and whether these mental powers come into contact with an Imagination, which, as Corbin reminds us, is the same as the Imagination called Imaginatio vera by the alchemists.11 What is interesting about this active Imagination is that it does not give way to an arbitrary or poetic form of mediation between the individual and reality; instead it operates “directly as a faculty and organ of knowledge just as real as—if not more real than—the sense organs.”12 Corbin is careful to explain that the organ is not a bio-physiological sense but an archetype-Image, and the attribute of this Image is that of making sensory perception undergo a transforma-

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tion, a dematerialization: “it changes the physical datum impressed upon the senses in a pure mirror, a spiritual transparency; thus it is that the Earth, and the things and beings of the Earth, raised to incandescence, allow the apparition of their Angels to penetrate to the visionary intuition. This being so, the authenticity of the Event and its full reality consists essentially of this visionary act and of the apparition vouchsafed by it.”13 What we are dealing with here is the mundus imaginalis, the interworld, the intermediary reality occupied by archetypal images to which only the Imagination has access. The Imagination does not invent something unreal; instead it unhides the concealed reality. It is the organ of transmutations, and the metamorphosis “of the Earth into the substance of the resurrection body depends upon its manner of meditating upon the Earth.”14 The question to be asked at this point is in what context does the Angel unveil itself once the elements of sensorial cognition are elevated to a translucent form by the active Imagination? As Corbin explains, it is a question of understanding how the active Imagination transforms things by means of unmediated perception, how once the transmutation has occurred, “things reflect its own image to the soul, and how this self recognition of the soul brings into being a spiritual science of the Earth and of earthly things, so that these things are known in their Angel,” as Fechner illustrated in his visionary hermeneutics.15 The key element here is the “Light of Glory,” which is —The organ by which the soul perceives a world of light that is of the same nature as itself, and through which, originally and directly, the soul effects the transmutation of physical data, the very data which for us are “positive,” but which for the soul would be “insignificant.” —It is by this projection of its own Image that the soul, in effecting the transmutation of the material Earth, also establishes from the beginning an Imago Terrae that reflects and announces its own Image to the soul. —It is at that point—and by this double reflection of the same Light of Glory—that the Angel of the Earth is revealed to the mental sight, that is to say, that the Earth is perceived in the person of its Angel.16

But after having listened to Corbin’s angelological exegesis, we ask ourselves how it is possible for us today to “know” the transmutation into invisibility that he so painstakingly describes. Narcosis comes close to

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imagining and experiencing this unheard of state. Spinoza tells us that “The first thing which forms the actual Being of the human mind is nothing else than the idea of an individual thing actually existing” (Ethics, Prop. XI). The intimacy of the mind’s being is rooted in the idea of something that exists. Being is thus grounded in material concreteness, rather than in some hyperuranian abstract notion. If nothing exists, there is nothing that gives rise to Being in the mind. Narcosis, in other words, is the nothing that gives rise to a nothing-Being—an idea of narcosis, however, stripped of its jurisprudential encrustations and humbly restored to its radical cognitive intentions. Benjamin was greatly interested in the cognitive possibilities offered by the state of narcotic ecstasy, as this passage from “Hashish in Marseilles” attests: “To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne’s thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread. And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of trance, as to that of creation.”17 But just how responsible is it to bring the question of narcosis into the picture of our investigation? Again we turn to Benjamin: Any serious exploration of occult surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectic optic that perceives everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention the most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.18

Heidegger has spoken about addiction in Being and Time. “Dasein’s hankering as it falls makes manifest its addiction to becoming ‘lived’ by whatever world it is in. This addiction shows the character of Being out for something. Being-ahead-of-oneself has lost itself in ‘just-always-alreadyalongside.’ What one is addicted ‘towards’ is to let oneself be drawn by the

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sort of thing which the addiction hankers. If Dasein, as it were, sinks into an addiction then there is not merely an addiction present-at-hand, but the entire structure of care has been modified. Dasein has become blind, and puts all possibilities into the service of addiction.”19 The gazing of the Angel’s mortal remains takes place at the same time that there is a fall or downward plunge reaching a realm of nothingness. The fall has a narcotic effect in that it allows one to detach oneself from the pain of the world. When this happens, then one has reached the netherworld that exists between being and non-being. But the narcosis cannot be the end in itself. If anything the narcotic effect is an anaesthetic that protects one from the disruptive nature of what is the value of truth. The narcosis plays a role similar to what the Angel recites in being an intermediary between the divine and the human. The Angel protects humans from the violent lucence of the transcendent Being, but the narcosis of non-being, if it is really to be this, fulfills its goal when it allows us to rejoin understanding and the projection of authentic possibility. Once hermeneusis is rejoined with the ontological, then we are able to proceed toward the terrain resting beyond the Angel’s mortal remains. Ultimately, the contemporary thirst for narcosis has essentially one ambition: to annihilate experience, reduce its meaning to a hollow shell, anything but a desire to transmutate oneself into a state of perfected invisibility. In Agamben’s words, “What distinguishes modern addicts from the intellectuals who discovered drugs in the nineteenth century is that the latter (at least the less lucid among them) could still delude themselves that they were undergoing a new experience, while for the former this is nothing more than the discarding of all experience.”20 Thus we are far away from the possibility of a cosmic narcosis, a recovery of something the ancients experienced as a radical reawakening. “The cosmic forces,” Benjamin writes, “ have only a narcotic effect on the empty and fragile man.”21

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“W

hen it is believed that the nature of a thing is comprehended in its name, then on the one hand emphasis is laid on the idea that knowledge of the name mediates a direct relationship with the nature, and on the other the name is regarded as such an extent an expression of the individual character of its owner that it can, in fact, stand for him, become a concept interchangeable with him.”1 This statement from Walter Eichrodt supports what Jacques Derrida asserts about the human ability to know and understand the signs of a transcendent Being, about whom nothing can be affirmed that might hold, “Save his name . . . Save the name that names nothing that might hold, not even a divinity, nothing whose withdrawal does not carry away every phrase that tries to measure itself against him.”2 But in the pages of the Old Testament we find references to the fact that the Name of the transcendent Being appears as an angelomorphic figure: “Behold, I send an angel in front of you, my Name is in him” (Exod., 23.20). In other terms, the unsayable “is not that which is in no way attested to in language, but that which, in language, can only be named.”3 In this way, the name is the source of the ecstasy of communication in that it encases the fleeting and mercurial joy whose description defies the slow pace of human thought.

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f, as Benjamin maintains, “allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things,”1 then it would hold that the cartography of thought is populated not only by the edifices of living, actual, contemporary ideas but also by strata of decayed ones. Yet in the debris that has accumulated over time we are bound to find relics that have resisted the violence of erosion. What makes these ruins of special importance is that they function as a vehicle of interpretative mediation as we seek to envision critically the geography that rests between transience and eternity. The challenge is that of finding the space and/or the time in which these two realms intersect, or, for that matter, in which the element that safeguards the divide between the two dissolves. The idea, then, is that of witnessing the dissolution of the spatio-temporal logic that supports and defines the eternal recurrence of things. In a confessional moment Paul Valéry writes that the poetic sign opens up the path that leads to antirepetition: “ . . . the cyclomania of our being. But for me the poetic is the opposite of this sad drudgery, which is as mortally circular as the diurnal rotation of the other . . .”2 In his attempt to formulate a rhetoric of walking, Michel de Certeau states that it is true that the operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of

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walking, wandering, or “window shopping,” that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhere of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.3

The act of walking is synonymous with the act of thinking. “Method” finds its etymological origin in “hodos,” “wandering.” The peripatetic tradition is a testimony to this practice. But why is cartography necessarily at odds with the human action that allows for the possibility of geographic figurations? Is this a displacement of the poetry/philosophy antinomy? How can a cultural practice deeply rooted in everyday life be erased by its schematic representation? The problem is that we have in a priori fashion torn the trace from the practice. We have disengaged the sign for understanding the practice from the act itself. This strategy of separating things participates in the same genealogy that gave rise to divorcing the body from thinking. However, walking is what allows us to at once invent and think the moves we make in the spatio-temporal dimension. The point is that breaking the bonds of the eternal return necessitates breaking a specific pattern of movement, of “walking” within the heart of the spatiotemporal, and of cultivating a logic that dissolves and transforms the “return” linked to the eternal return of the same. “I am about to see the maga, daughter of the great Sun, who comes forward. You will go free in Circe’s abode which is certainly not confined to a very tight space. Finally, you will arrive at home, you will be on the verge of re-discovering the domestic things.” This passage from Giordano Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus (1582) refers to the need to prepare oneself properly before being initiated into the occult art of memory. There is a promise of a liberation, a coming freedom from the darkness of oblivion. But for us today this promise is weighed down by the yoke of a metaphysics that has become unintelligible. The sort of metaphysics that makes sense for us today, for example, is the metaphysics of ether. Ether allows for the transmission of material signs that we are able to grasp in all of their clarity and ambiguity. Is it merely, then, the substitution of one meta-

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physics for another? This is indeed the case, but it is equally true that the new metaphysics is inauditum (‘unheard of ’) and untouched by the flat reason of the eternal return of the same. In the Yogavasistha (2, 3, 11) we read that “The world is like an impression that the telling of a story leaves behind.” On the trail of this citation Roberto Calasso4 critically imagines that everything which begins from the human mind is realized in it as well, almost as if, to remember what Marcel Proust said, “the universe were a prisoner and lost in my consciousness.” But how many times does one have to re-think history in order to achieve such a form of consciousness? Morever, what is it that must be forgotten or accomplished so as to see the history of the world in such a manner? To a great extent it is a question of moving away from the signifying structures of the language, which is our routine, toward another language. It is not a case of recovering a language that is lost or misplaced; rather it is a question of imagining a language that does not yet exist. But how does one break the chains of the eternal return of the same? By eradicating the mythical infrastructures that hold together our understanding of history? (“The ‘eternal return,’” Benjamin writes, “is the fundamental form of mythical and prehistorical consciousness” in that mythical being does not involve reflection.”5) But once this is done, then everything comes apart. Or rather, nothing is the same. At that moment eternal repetition will become an expression devoid of life and actuality. But the desire for morning, whether repeated or unprecedented, will never disappear. It is a desire, at worst a nostalgia, for the most revered name. The most revered name is everything that belongs to it; that is, a “name” that is at once the compendium of its own history and the synchronic flash of an absent context. In other terms, this name is both the delirious joy of narcosis as well as the clinical techno-rationalization of all that can be vivisectioned. The most revered name then is everything, an encyclopedia of the human that some have sought to express in one word, in a poem, in a painting, a movie, a scientific theory, and so on. One of the most accessible paths to his name is by way of negative theology. The most revered name is a relic of a faith in the fact that “everything can be articulated.” It is, however, inconsistent with the notion that only what is immediately perceived or perceivable by our physical senses can be understood and explored. The Italian literary tradition is itself a vast commentary on the revered name; beginning with Francis of Assisi, Dante, Michelangelo, Bruno and

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so on until reaching the names of figures such as Gadda, Calvino, Pasolini, Levi and others of this century. One figure who has been subsumed and has thus become the revered name is Petrarch. His poetry becomes the poetry that was, is, to be; his poetry burned time by becoming the greatest absolute fragment in the Italian lyric tradition. Petrarch’s lyric became the name that offered itself for sacrifice throughout the centuries. His name was killed but it was also resuscitated. As an emanation of the name Petrarch is the gatekeeper for the descent into the inferno of modern Italian lyric. Those who enter pay him the coin that is his—this because of their faith in eventually being able to see the morning. Benjamin’s reflections on Baudelaire in Central Park are an engaging example of how one deals with the tragic demise of traditional aesthetic/poetic value and the advent of a new aesthetic value rooted in the economic value of the commodity. “Neuroses manufactured mass-produced articles in the psychic economy. There it has the form of the obsession. These appear in the household of the neurotic as the always-the-same in countless number. The idea of the eternal recurrence transforms historical events into mass-produced articles. But this conception carries also in another way the trace of the economic circumstances to which it owes its sudden actuality. These announce themselves in that moment in which the security of the conditions of life drastically diminished by the accelerated succession of crises. The idea of the eternal recurrence draws its lustre from this: that the return of conditions could not be reckoned with within shorter periods of time than those eternity used to grant.”6 The substitution of the traditional aesthetic value with the commodity value pivots on the dynamics of the eternal return. This would lead one to suspect that the eternal recurrence is then the prison house of the new value; moreover, one breaks away from this condition only by smashing its infernal logic: “The course of history as represented in the catastrophe has no more claim on the attention of the thinking man than the kaleidoscope in the hand of a child which, with each turn, collapses everything ordered into new order. The justness of this image is well-founded. The concepts of the rulers have always been the mirror by means of whose image an “order” was established.—The kaleidoscope must be smashed.”7 The invention or advent of the unrepeatable instant of meaning and being multiplied infinitely is the potential end of the poetic as commodity value. But it would not, could not be a return to the traditional poetic value. If anything it would be a foraying into unrecognizable, yet always present, terrain.

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In the movie Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray plays the role of Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh TV weatherman who becomes locked in the infernal dynamics of the always-the-same. February 2, Groundhog Day, is repeated over and over again for Murray’s character (and only for him). Regardless of what Murray does or does not do, and irrespective of how many times he does or does not do it, February 2 shows up every morning at 6:00 A.M. Events happen over and over again without there being any consequences for what occurred in the previous embodiments of February 2. While Murray’s character is free to acquire an artificial but nonetheless effective foreknowledge of what happens, and while he becomes the master editor, splicer, and censurer of reality, he realizes that he is living in hell. The infernal is the eternal repetition of the identical in historical time. Even the power of foreknowledge acquired in an underhanded way dissolves once February 2 begins anew. Murray does eventually break away from the chains of the eternal repetition but only after he has sculpted an ice image of his love object, namely, the character played by Andie McDowell; that is to say, only once he has turned the object of his erotic desire into a ruin, a statue that will melt. A ruin that is an ultra-ruin, it moves from the material to the metaphysical. Murray’s character gives himself in the ice sculpture to McDowell’s character. This ruin becomes the liquid that floods the eternal return of the same and gives way to a new reality of meanings. We find a similar situation in the movie The Truman Show (1998), in which Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, is trapped in the infernal logic of repetition. However, when a stage light falls, like a burned-out star from the heavens, Truman begins to suspect that there is a reality amassed outside of his own. One of his most important discoveries is that his unreality is nothing but a repeating loop of events: “If I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.” Reality as well as unreality are eternal repetition. Roberto Calasso is sensitive to the issue of eternal repetition in Freud’s psychoanalytical thought; to be sure, in commenting on the presence of this theme in “The Uncanny” he writes: “It is errant, indomitable repetition: that of random signs that accumulate, that hint at a connection, a ‘mysterious significance.’ Here the repetition is hybrid, at once part of the changing scene of the outside world and part of the psychical scene, where it claims a place. The repetition of a sign in the outside world transforms that sign into an omen—an allusion to the presence of a meaning whose

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origin we do not know and of which we cannot rid ourselves. Every meaning that we have not established or produced ourselves is disturbing. Coincidences are disturbing, because they hint at a fate, at a network of meanings that precede us, accompany us, trick us.”8 However, the process that involves the repetition of the dispersed signs of the world until they are distilled into numerous omens has an inverse phenomenon; the concerted repetition of a word that eventually becomes bereft of all meaning.9 In Calasso’s words, “In these two experiences we find, in the private and secret space of our mind, the original schism. This was the schism that appeared when the world became too charged with meanings: even as those meanings took on a life of their own . . . If we fear repetition in the signs that come to us from the world, it is because in that repetition we discover that the world’s powers are always there . . . ready to swallow us as if we were a word in their language.”10 Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary representation of the Angel offers us the figure we need in order to move through the shards and ruins of history with the aim of breaking free from the bonds of the ratio-logical but also from the structure that abstract reason silently safeguards, namely, the eternal return of the same. Moreover, Benjamin’s Angel could be seen as a corpse rather than the living entity we have described so far. And precisely because it is a cadaver, as I am suggesting, it is much closer to us than any living Angel. Benjamin’s Angel is described in the ninth thesis of the “Theses of the Philosophy of History.” He understands Paul Klee’s drawing called Angelus Novus as being a devastating sign of silence.11 The Angel looks back at the past with the failed hope of playing a role in history as did the Angel Gabriel who communicated with both the Virgin Mary and the Prophet Mohammed. But while we humans would see a logical chain of historical events, the Angel sees a past in total and desperate ruins. The Angel, as Benjamin sees it, can no longer play a role in history; he would like to awaken the dead and piece together the fragments, but he has become completely ineffective. A storm has overtaken Klee’s Angel, Benjamin tells us, and it is blowing the debris of the past toward the sky. The Angel is blown toward the future although he continues to gaze at the past. Benjamin equates the storm with progress, while the Angel stands for another world, although he is of this world. The Angel is the human faculty of the imagination that has been supplanted and buried like an archaeological relic by transgressive and victimizing reason. So while historically the Angel has been a figure for our ability to grasp the real

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through the unreal, in Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s drawing the new Angel can only name one possession, passive silence. Moreover, the Angel has become a motionless corpse, and it is at this point that Benjamin’s Angel enters into a relation of juxtaposition with the mortal remains of Corbin’s Angel. In both cases the angelological becomes a figure for the power of the ratio-logical. But it is a reason that lives through the form of a corpse and is thus itself a pathetic paradox: reason, as I have described it, is a corpse that promises to give birth to truth. Benjamin offers another figuration of the Angel in “One-Way Street” (1928): “Florence, Baptistery.—On the portal, the Spes [Hope] by Andrea de Pisano. Sitting, she helplessly extends her arms toward a fruit that remains beyond her reach. And yet she is winged. Nothing is more true.”12 Even in this case the Angel is unable to achieve realizing her objective, as she seeks to grasp something that remains ungraspable. Yet there is a difference between the two angels. In the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” the Angel looks backwards, while the Angel of One Way Street extends herself toward the future. But both angels are ultimately the victims of unappropriability as neither one is able to make anything their own. The mute and passive Angel of the ninth thesis is not a sign of closure as far as Benjamin is concerned. If anything, this angelological cadaver is an important link with the seventeenth thesis, which, according to Benjamin, is the key to a comprehensive project that was to organize the many fragments of the Passagen-Werk into a complete and unprecedented opus. According to Franco Rella, the Angel is a figure for the transition from the signifying domain of a fragmented verbal semiosis to the “age of things”— in other words, toward a new and different relation with the signs that perfuse the world.13 As many have noted, the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and the essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” are the works that best inform Benjamin’s massive textual corpus and corpse, namely, the Passagen-werk. The reader of this work assumes a relationship with its pages that is analogous with the one the Angel of the ninth thesis assumes with the debris and ruins of the past that surround it. Yet we are on the verge of entering a “one way street” where there are no returns or detours; where, in other words, nothing can be repeated and where every single instant is unprecedented and unheard of. Any attempt to move toward the unrepeatable instant of being must involve the arresting of the eternal return of the same. In the seventeenth

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thesis Benjamin states that thinking involves not only the movement of ideas but also their arresting. When thinking abruptly yields in a constellation charged with tension, it crystallizes into a monad, and in this structure the historian “recognizes the sign of a Messianic arresting of events, or, put otherwise, a revolutionary possibility in the struggle for the oppressed past.” Arresting the moment means derailing an epoch from the homogeneous tracks of history. But which moment do we need to arrest in a messianic fashion in order to find the new time? Eduardo Cadava tells us that we ultimately need to realize that once the past and the present come into contact with each other, there is a dissolution of everything that is part of the algorithm that holds past and present together: “The present no longer struggles to lead knowledge, as one would lead the blind, to the firm ground of a fixed past. Instead the past infuses the present and thereby requires the dissociation of the present from itself. In other words, the past—as both the condition and caesura of the present—strikes the present and, in so doing, exposes us to the nonpresence of the present. If it is no longer a matter of the past casting its light on the present or of the present casting its light on the past . . . it is because the past and the present deconstitute one another in their relation.”14 Benjamin knew that time had to be arrested in order to dislodge the logorrheic mechanism that allowed history to repeat itself. But Benjamin sought to transform the repeated meaning of words into the unrepeatability of signification by patiently and feverishly copying by hand thousands and thousands of quotations, as he did for the Passagen-werk. By dislodging the quotation from its original context into a new network of signs, Benjamin was in effect tossing the quotation into a constellation of previously unassociated citations that announced the coming of a unheard of sphere of production of meaning. Yet, for Massimo Cacciari, it is a new configuration or vision of the Angel that tears open the path that leads humans to understanding the significance of antirepetition: “The New Angel is, so speak, the image of the Angel immanent to the most singular and unrepeatable individuality of the creature—better, the New Angel is the name of the force that makes this single being-there unrepeatable and unique.”15 But this idea finds its semiotic genealogy in Thomas Aquinas when he discusses, first, the instantaneousness of the Angel’s movement (“An angel can move in discontinuous time. He can be now here and now there with no time-interval between. When an angel moves the beginning and the end of his movement do not take place in two instants between

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which there is any time; nor again does the beginning occupy a stretch of time which an instant at the end terminates; but the beginning is in one instant and the end in another. Between these there is no time at all. Let us say then that an angel’s movement is in time, but not in the way that bodily movements are”16), and, second, the unique nature of the Angel’s presence (“No two souls exist in the same body and similarly no two angels exist in the same place. Two angels cannot be in the same place at once because it is impossible that one and the same thing should depend entirely and immediately on two causes . . . In so far as its power is applied to a given place, and so is containing it completely, we can conclude that only one angel can be in that place at a given time.”17)

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rnesto Grassi understood the overbearing weight of ratio-logical thinking as a means of annihilating the meaning of the “individual,” who was to be replaced by a “non-individuality” that had nothing new to “say” or to “find.” An antecedent for such a form of rationality is found in the thinking of Classical times. On the Delphic coins bearing the image of Emperor Hadrian (117 – 138 C. E.) and Faustina (died in 141), there is a depiction of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Between the two central columns there hangs a large letter, E. Plutarch in the De “E” in Delphis1 testifies to the fact that there were many interpretations of this mysterious verbal sign. The interpretative possibilities include: a historical meaning: the letter E was the fifth letter of the alphabet and thus a sign for the number 5 which in turn denotes the five sages of Greece. a cosmological meaning: E, precisely because it is the second vowel, is the figure for the second planet, the Sun. a sacred meaning: E is the symbol for the Delphic form of religious supplication. a philosophical meaning: E is the grammatical element that stands for “if ” and thus plays a key role in the deductive process. That is, “if ” the premise is true, then conclusions will be drawn by means of a rational process.

In Grassi’s view, the philosophical meaning of E is the essence of the ratiological mind-set in that it represents the processes of deduction. Plutarch, in fact, clearly states that “reasoning is the tripod of truth. By establishing

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the nexus between the consequence and the antecedent and, then, adding the verification of the existence, it brings the completion of the demonstration” (387 c). Grassi comments on this by observing that the prophetic tripod is made analogous to the three parts of the syllogistic process, and, as a result, we have “a secularization, demythicization and rationalization of the prophetic faculty. The fount of knowledge, in the Apollonean sphere, is no longer identified with the mantic, evangelic phenomenon, which speaks through signs, but instead with a rational process which substitutes divinity.”2 When Plutarch states that the individual who is able to make the rational connection between a cause and its effect is thus legitimately capable of foretelling “what will happen, what is, and what was,” (387 b) he is, in Grassi’s mind, giving credence to a rational interpretation of the divine and sacred. The question that rests is whether or not the “if ” that governs the rational process is valid. This is exactly the sort of issue that Wittgenstein dealt with in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is conditioned by the notion that scientific thinking can occur only when universal truths and the general govern the reasoning process. Moreover, these truths are valid only within the context of the laws that are dependent upon the relations that exist between terms within a system, and once we move outside of such system we encounter silence. “In a manner of speaking,” Wittgenstein writes, “objects are colourless” (2.0232). This implies that anything that rests outside of a relation governed by laws and a system becomes un-thought, unable to be expressed in a tangible way. What all of this means, Grassi tells us, is that the only legitimate language is ratio-logical language and any form of utterance that is non-logical is also a non-language in that it communicates outside of systematic laws and the rigor of precision.3 This leads to the marginalization of rhetoric, the language of passion, and, we could add, the poetological. In section 6.124 Wittgenstein writes that “logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself.” In other terms, the only authentic language is thus calculus, as Frege was to argue. As a result of all of this, Grassi reminds us, the ratio-logical becomes “the expression of a human terror.”

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o the question “Why should we be interested in Angels nowadays?” Michel Serres replies as follows:

“Because our universe is organized around message-bearing systems, and because, as message-bearers, they are more numerous, complex and sophisticated than Hermes, who was only one person, and a cheat and a thief to boot. “Each Angel is a bearer of one or more relationships; today they exist in myriad forms, and every day we invent billions of new ones. However we lack a philosophy of such relationships. “Instead of weaving networks of things or beings, let us therefore map some of the interlacings of paths. The Angels are unceasingly drawing up the maps of our new universe.”1

Serres, in being true to his vocation of philosopher of science, understands the role of the Angel in terms that belong to the semantic sphere of information theory. But while Serres’s optic is indeed rooted in such a mindset, it is also true that what he has to say about the function of the Angel is consistent with what Cacciari, Rella and others, as we have seen, have to say. Namely, by communicating the invisible to us the Angel is the figure that glues together beings and things, in the same way, for example, that the network of roads built by the ancient Romans kept the then-known Western world in a state of cohesion for a period of centuries. But Serres’s point is that we have yet to fully understand the significance of the Angel because the many interlacing paths in the universe are still unknown to us. In this regard, the cartography that still needs to be drawn up is one of a

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realm that exists, as has already been suggested, somewhere in between the materiality and visibility of everyday life and the immateriality of the eternal unreal. (When we intersect Serres’s quote with one from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [“Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come”2] it becomes evident that thinking the angelological necessarily entails thinking the infinite possibilities about what can and cannot constitute a signification that is readily evident or unintelligible in human signifying practices) Nietzsche’s genealogical philology plays a role in an attempt to come into contact with the locus that rests between the visible and the invisible. Nietzsche’s philology, in fact, is a “science of the limits of language.” Genealogical philology is foremost rooted in “reading” and “listening.” In the Foreword to Twilight of the Idols, the reader is witness to the author’s predilection for the sonorous and the phonological in any interpretative act. To be sure, Nietzsche aspires to “sound out” idols: “ . . . that is my ‘evil eye’ for this world, that is also my ‘evil ear’ . . . For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels—what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears—for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence of whom that which would like to stay silent has to become audible.” Eric Blondel is correct in suggesting that for Nietzsche listening implies not just hearing sounds but also possessing “an ear”—that is, having the capacity to perceive other sounds, “a resonance of harmony behind the sound.”3 Nietzsche believes that the philologist critic must be at once a musician with a “fine ear” and a physiologist who hears the life resounding in the human body. Thus, in order to hear the dimension that houses the Angel we too must listen for what is not readily present. The problem here is that more often than not when listening for this dimension we encounter utter silence, for that matter, a silence beyond silence. In Ascoltare il silenzio (Listening to Silence), Paolo Valesio offers us a theory of listening to silence that opens up possibilities for any attempt to hear the voicelessness of the Angel’s corpse. We can summarize Valesio’s theory in the following manner: —For Valesio, the relationship to be investigated is the one linking silence to the incoherent and disjointed events of everyday life. And the question is one that concerns the relationship between human speech and silence. —Valesio offers us an alternative to the gazing in the form of listening to silence. However, in his quest for an “ontology of silence,” Valesio employs

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the experience of the quotidian as the ultimate illustration of the fact that the ontics of silence are rooted in and in fact are the discontinuities of everyday existence. Specifically, Valesio distinguishes between silence as interruption and silence as plenitude. But the type of silence that establishes itself as a challenge for a theory of poetic logic is one that is based on interruption. —The most recognizable feature of Valesio’s silentarius theory is that of the everyday; to be sure, the ontological heart of silence rests in the practice and the happening of the quotidian. This is all too evident in the examples: the worker on the job, the banal dimension of the artist, scientist, thinker; the legal, the political. —Listening becomes the decisive element in a potential opening up to the future. Moreover, to the rhetoric of plenitude Valesio counters an open hermeneutics of auscultation. He qualifies this sort of rhetoric as being “oblative.” —This added dimension allows for the presence of a spiritual exchange. But the idea of auscultation is not left to wallow in the confusion of terminological vagueness. For example, Valesio specifies that listening as a form of thought does not entail a passive way of gazing at the text but rather the restructuring of the space around the text.4

We are witness to two kinds of listening or auscultation; one that forces silence to utter its name (Nietzsche), a second one that encourages the reading subject to gaze at the disjointed muteness that silence offers as “a gift” (Valesio). But how much closer does all of this bring us to the Angel’s corpse? By way of an apparent linguistic ludus, Thomas Aquinas stressed the Angel’s ability to announce silence: “Angels are announcers of divine silence. For it is clear that a clear conception of the heart or of the intellect that is without voice is with silence. But it is through a perceptible voice that silence of the heart is proclaimed . . . Angels are always announcers of divine silence. But it is necessary after something is announced to someone that they understand the announcement. In addition, therefore, because we can understand by the intellect the things that are announced to us through angels, they themselves by the brightness of their own light help our intellect grasp the secrets of God.”5 For John Chrysostomos, the silence typical of angels is a sign of the fact that for the spirit that thirsts for knowledge, un-knowing is the “only science.”6 Let us transpose this notion into the present context and state that an unknowing that involves dissolving the crust of the ratio-logical with which

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the Western mind has become laden allows us to realize that the one science that allows us to talk in an intelligible way about the dead Angel is the poetic. Silence is the time-place of the inaudible (inaudible), but also of the unheard of or unprecedented (inauditum). The silentarius is in this way the topo-chronic realm at the basis of unheard of and often unhearable inventions. Achille Bocchi’s emblem for hermetic silence is the figure for the unsignable conjunction that makes way for the posthumous production of signs and meanings. But we should also keep in mind that, as Basil of Caesarea observes, the act of listening to the revelation of the mysteries enveloped in silence is proper to the functions of the Spirit-Angel Gabriel.7 What this means is that the auscultation of silence is the cognitive path best suited to deal with the science of transcendent ineffability. Strata of silence accumulate. In his 1834 history of Italian art, Luigi Lanzi, writing during the period of Romantic fermentation, reminds us that imitation was the only way through which a Renaissance artist could reach a state of “original genius.”8 Imitation was the sole means for detaching oneself from the past, the implication of course being that imitation is at once the continuation of the historical sign but also its destruction. Rilke was able to sum up this paradoxical relationship between the artist and the past in The Book of Hours I, 3. Rilke first talks about the magisterial nature of Italian Renaissance art, which, through the genius of imitation, transforms God into an “ardent flame.” However, the poet confesses to us when I lean over the chasm of myselfit seems my God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don’t know, because my branches rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.9

The historical sign, here expressed by the botanical metaphor, is dominated by a silence that is itself eternal. The poet’s genius consists in tempering, in controlling this silence almost as if it were a musical instrument. The less the silence appears as silence and the more it seems to be the innocent rustling of the wind, the greater the poet’s ability to orchestrate the historical sign as a spectrally silent instrument.

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The enigmatic nature of lyric philosophy is the sign of its apparent unrepresentability. But its representability is obfuscated by the mute signs that haunt language: Let us suppose that all signs were fulfilled, man’s condemnation to language purged, that all possible questions were answered and that all that might be said had been uttered—what then would be the life of man on earth? You say: “But our vital problems wouldn’t even have been touched.” But supposing we still felt the desire to laugh or cry, what would we cry or laugh about, what would that cry or laugh be, if, while we were prisoners of language, these emotions were no more, and could be no more than the experience, sad or blissful, tragic or comic, of the limits, the insufficiency of language? Where language were perfectly fulfilled, perfectly delimited, there would begin the other laugh, the other cry of humanity.10

But signs can be fulfilled only through other signs—that is to say, a postsemiotics is defined by the semic valence of “post” as well as the disappearance of a traditional element. Is the fulfillment of a sign the return of an originary, infantile state, or is it rather a projection into an unknowable, unprecedented, and unheard of future? In any event, the release from the imprisonment of language is a projection into a different language. In the end, silence is both the beginning and the end of the destiny of humans. Wittgenstein writes that his Tractatus “ . . . consists of two parts: what I have written and moreover everything that I did not write. And it is precisely the second part which is more important” (Wittgenstein writing to Ludwig von Ficker). In Franco Rella’s mind, “What the great words expressed has now become unsayable. For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus it is what we must pass over in silence.”11 But for Otto Weininger this silence was impossible and to be avoided at all costs. If anything, what Wittgenstein suggests we must pass over in silence must be, according to Weininger, formulated in the grammar we know. But what is this unsayable? It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same). (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.421)

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In Sex and Character Weininger sought to “speak” the impossible union of ethics and aesthetics, at the cost of being outdated and, ultimately, of death. Indeed he committed suicide. But we are still before the problem that Wittgenstein and Weininger dealt with in different ways. Lyric philosophy entails speaking of what has been silenced as far as cultural practices and public policy are concerned. Poetic logic cannot be put into words—that is, it cannot be articulated by means of words that have been bled dry. Lyric philosophy cannot be spoken by words that are corpses; it can be uttered only by ripping out and recasting collections of words or quotations; lyric philosophy performs an unoriginal act on a new horizon. The fact of the matter is that thinking the angelological means moving in the direction of poetic reason. With this in mind let us correlate what Martin Heidegger says with the previously cited insights by Henry Corbin concerning the mortal remains of the angels as being rational abstraction. In commenting on Nietzsche’s expression that states that “God is dead,” Heidegger affirms that “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” What is significant is that Corbin and Heidegger are stating something very similar; namely, that rational thinking is only one variety of intellectual expression. Moreover, if this fact is overlooked then we become blind to the truths or insights made available to us by other modes of thought. Heidegger himself privileged, especially later in his life, what could be called poetic thinking.

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he stanzas imagined here are understood and figured by a movement of thinking that shares the characteristics of Heidegger’s poetic thought and the imaginal thinking that Corbin describes. In other terms, we come to know and understand the signs of the living Angel and the meaning of its mortal remains through the signifying properties of the stanza. In offering the stanza as the unknown and unseen cartographical space of signification characteristic of the angelological, we are here following Dante’s definition of the term: “And here one must know that this term (stanza) has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza, that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft. For just as the canzone is the container (literally lap or womb) of the entire thought, so the stanza enfolds its entire technique . . .” (Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia II.9). The stanza is the element that contains and safeguards all those irreconcilable differences; it is the form that holds together the real and the unreal in whose juncture the angelological resides. It is the topological domain that allows the meaning of angelological signs to be as intelligible as they possibly can. In Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Agamben puts forward one of the most challenging discussions on the relationship between the real and the unreal. The reader of Agamben’s book is encouraged to understand the idea of place not as something that is defined by spatio-temporal coordinates but rather as an entity that is “more original than space.”1 A place, that is, where the impossible is possible and, conversely, where the possible is impossible. Such a topological inquiry, Agamben complains, always tends to be undertaken with the view of finding a utopia.

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The point is, however, that such an investigation is a perfectly legitimate one, and it is sanctioned by a history of seeking to discover the hyperreal as something that, once found, could be understood. The muse that governs Agamben’s quest is the idea that “whoever seizes the greatest unreality will shape the greatest reality.”2 Among other things, what Agamben has in mind is the dissolution of a barrier which has not always existed, the one separating poetry from the critico-philosophical. He is interested in cultivating a form of writing that abolishes the boundaries between disciplines, one that infinitely extends the limits. Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama is cited by Agamben as being the most concrete and successful example of this type of writing. In my view, Stanzas is in many ways a rewriting of Benjamin’s book, but not just because Agamben draws many of his themes from this book (melancholy, the emblem and others). Hannah Arendt, George Steiner and others have referred to Benjamin’s writing as being informed by a “poetic logic,” and a similar assessment could be made of Agamben’s approach—that is, one grounded in the attempt to conjugate the lyrical with the critico-rational. A comment on Agamben’s poetic logic is indeed in order, as it sheds a great expanse of interpretative light on the meaning of the space where the real and the unreal enjoy a conjugal closeness and where, moreover, the face of angelogical cognition makes itself visible. Agamben’s most efficacious depiction of the relationship between poetry and philosophy is to be found in The Idea of Prose. This short book is peculiar in that it assumes the forms of different genres of writing: the apology, the aphorism, the short story, the riddle, the fable, and a variety of others that at one time had a defined currency but that today have been banished from the realm of theory-making. The other interesting particular, as the back cover of the English translation tells us, is that in the place of a concerted and overt attempt to make theory, The Idea of Prose is instead informed by a strategy to reawaken the reader to some lost experience. What is meant by this, and it becomes quite clear throughout the pages of the book, is that Agamben is interested in finding that place of intimacy that beings once shared with other beings but that now has been supplanted by something else, such as the exchange-value that Agamben discusses in Stanzas. In the introduction to the English translation of The Idea of Prose, Alexander García Düttman sums up the intention of the work in the form of a question: “Is the constellation of ideas that it forms the product of a

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poetic vocation, or a thought that seeks to liberate truth from its linguistic reification?”3 The answer, of course, is that it does both. By unmasking the poetic genealogy of what we commonly assume to be pure ratio-logical discourse, The Idea of Prose puts forward the disconcerting suggestion that the only unique, untranslatable (because it is understood by everyone), originary, and common language is not to be found in the plethora of natural languages but in poetry alone. Agamben articulates this notion in “The Idea of the Unique,” one of the thirty-three fragmentary ideas that make up The Idea of Prose. Agamben quotes Paul Célan to explain the peculiar nature of poetry: “Poetry is uniqueness in that it is the destiny of language. . . . it cannot, therefore, be doubleness.”4 This quote is from a passage in which Célan adamantly insists that poetry cannot be bilingual. Translation is impossible because in being the destiny of language—that is, in being the unmediated expression that a natural language cannot be— poetry is that type of experience that encourages a form of sharing that does not require the mediation of linguistic utterance. Agamben’s thinking moves in this direction when, for example, he claims that, “The language for which we have no words, which doesn’t pretend, like grammatical language, to be there before being, but is ‘alone and first in mind,’ is our language, that is the language of poetry.” It would not be difficult to read political implications into this quote. But while I am not concerned here with constructing a political thought rooted in a poetic phenomenology, it would be fair to suggest that just as Heidegger’s philosophic enterprise is rooted in a de-struction of the ratio-metaphysical tradition and moves in the direction of poetic thinking, one could speculate on the possibility of a political thought that is not grounded in ratiological paradigms, but rather in something quite different. Düttmann sees the problem of history and politics as being an issue in the question of the relationship between poetry and philosophy. In fact, Düttmann summons the testimony of Benjamin to explain the nature of this problem.5 In his thinking on the concept of history, Benjamin makes a connection between the idea of language and the “messianic idea of a universal history.” In a much more specific sense, Benjamin refers to such an idea of language as the “idea of prose”; moreover, its relation to the messianic idea of universal history is marked by the total dissolution of the many and differentiated languages along with the dissolution of the multiplicity of histories. In Benjamin’s words: “The messianic world is the world of general and integral actuality. Universal history exists only in this world. But this

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history is not written; it is a history celebrated as a festival. As a purified festival, however, it does not have the character of a ceremony and does not know any hymns. Its language is free prose, a prose which has broken the chains of writing.”6 The destiny of language, and by implication that of signification also, is thus marked by a release from the constraints of a ratio-grammar whose function is to conventionalize language. Following Benjamin’s thinking, Agamben contemplates the possibility of a way of being and expression that is not rooted in presupposition but in “ . . . itself, the thing no longer separated from its intelligibility, but in the midst of it, is the idea, is the thing itself.”7 The idea of a newly discovered immediacy is central to the critico-poetic dynamics of The Idea of Prose as in the case of the fragment called “The Idea of Matter,” where we read that the outer limits of language do not provide the threshold that leads to the realm of the unsayable. The extreme limits of verbal semiosis is instead the threshold that opens the “woody substance of language, which the ancients called silva”; moreover, those entering this realm are liberated from representation.8 Lyric philosophy is an unconsummated destiny, whereby the unity of knowledge is seen in its most terrifying, destructive familiarity. (Stephen Hawking is dealing with his own lyric philosophy, one rooted in the astrophysical attempt to discover the theory of everything.) But what are the problems intrinsic to thinking poetico-philosophically? According to Maurice Blanchot, “Poetry is a question for philosophy which claims to provide it with an answer, and thus to comprehend it (know it). Philosophy, which puts everything into question, is tripped up by poetry, which is the question that eludes it.”9 But what is the “question (of ) poetry”? “R. C. [Réné Char] is so much a poet that after him poetry shines like a fact, but he is such a poet that after this fact of poetry all facts become questions and even poetic questions.”10 Blanchot is telling us that poetry is the most originary mode of “putting everything into question,” a mode that philosophy has appropriated for itself. But any attempt to think philosophy as a poet runs the risk of collapsing into the illusory void that poetry safeguards. In fact, “A philosopher who would write as a poet would be aiming for his own destruction. And even so, he could not reach it.”11 Only in an illusory way is poetry a fact. The truth of the poetic sign is that it is empty, but at the same time it embodies anamorphosis, which is “ . . . any kind of construction that is made in such a way that by means of an optical transposition a certain form that wasn’t visible at first sight trans-

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forms itself into a readable image. The pleasure is found in seeing its emergence from an indecipherable form.”12 Benjamin’s approach to interpretation and reflection is at its minimum a lyric philosophy, as George Steiner reminds us: At other points it [The Origin of German Tragic Drama] is a poetic-metaphysical meditation unique to Walter Benjamin’s intellectual world and private feelings. The Jewish facets make this obvious. Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung had appeared in 1921. It seemed to articulate, as no other book had, the unstable glories of the German-Jewish connection and of the bearing of that connection on the Jewish past and on the enigma of the messianic future . . . And what of the Kabbalah? The question is relevant to the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede (The “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” . . .) This is, together with Heidegger’s work of whose beginnings Benjamin was uneasily aware, one of the more impenetrable pieces in . . . any modern language. Gershom Scholem reports that Benjamin had said of this prologue, to the scholar-critic Max Rychner and to Adorno, that it could be understood only by a reader who also knew the Kabbalah.13

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico was one of the first in the post-Renaissance age to qualify critically the nature of poetic logic, which he sees as the founding mode of thought for the Western tradition of arts and sciences: “Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as [the] first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations); born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of wonder made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything” (Vico, New Science, P. 375). But to return to the meaning of the expression “idea of prose” as Agamben adapts the notion from Benjamin, let us say that it is in fact neither poetry nor prose but their middle term. Enjambment becomes the metrical term used to explicate the nature of this “middlenness”; as a metrical figure its role is to unhide the disjunction that characterizes the relationship between prose and poetry. “In this way, enjambement brings to light the original gait, neither poetic nor prosaic, but boustrophedonic, as it were, poetry, the essential prose-metrics of every human discourse, whose

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early appearance in the gatha of Avesta, or in Latin satire, bears out the non-coincidental character of the Vita Nuova on the threshold of the modern age. The versura, the turning-point which displays itself as enjambement, though unspoken-of in the treatises on metrics, constitutes the core of verse. It is an ambiguous gesture, that turns in two opposed directions at once: backwards (versus), and forwards (pro-versa). This hanging-back, this sublime hesitation between meaning and sound is the poetic inheritance with which thought must come to terms.”14 The destiny of language, then, is the poetic inheritance to which Agamben refers. We are not dealing with the eternal return of the same here. The issue is a different one. It is more like the event that has yet to occur and that can never be duplicated. This because there are no ratio-grammatographic chains that exercise control over events. As if to counter or halt the movement of the eternal return in favor of the unrepeatable instant we see Agamben formulate a strange assessment of the poet’s vocation. The office of the poet, as it were, involves transmitting things to oblivion, to forgetfulness.15 Thinking and being will move backwards and forwards, not according to some inherent law of movement (a law that regulates and anticipates and presupposes events). The movement will be unmediated, untranslatable, and transparent for all to witness. Poetic utterance is rooted in the dynamics of memory, both natural and artificial (mnemonics): “ . . . there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. ‘If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. . . . Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilation (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties)—all this has its origin in the instinct that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 2.1–3) But the highest form of support for mnemonics is the corpse of an idea. The living idea is too unreal, and the only way it can be approached or grasped is through its corpse. Anything else would be too immature or unreal. Today the poetic sign is a corpse for many reasons: its historical constitution as a cadaver, the current cultural practices

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and public policies that are able to interpret the poetic sign only as a dead idea. For very different reasons, the poetic has consistently recited the role of a corpse in the history of human culture. The lyric is much too unreal. We try to make it accessible by exchanging traditional aesthetic value for the economic currency currently associated with the commodified object. But in the end, we inevitably find ourselves with a carcass in our hands.

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n Plotinian philosophy the icon brought about a nostalgia for Beauty and Eros. (In the end, Hölderlin tells us, the wise move toward Beauty.) Is it possible to think of Beauty as the most privileged of epistemological categories given that knowledge follows a trajectory that has Beauty as its end? The aesthetic, in its most originary manifestation, as the caput mundi of thought? “Beauty,” Rilke tells us is only the first touch of terror we can still bear and it awes us so much because it so cooly disdains to destroy us. (Duino Elegies, p. 19)

The beauty in this context is of course the beauty of the Angel, next to whose existence Rilke claims he cannot survive. Among the many questions Rilke’s poem poses is, how could beauty be so horrifying (“every single Angel / is terrible”)? Beauty, within the context of understanding a destiny that is yet to emerge, rests outside the purview of quantifiability. It is not the beauty of (un)symmetrical ratios, of (un)measured order. The idea of beauty that is part and parcel of the answer to Rilke’s questions is characterized by an opening up of new worlds and realities. Michelangelo praised the beauty that once was, and in doing so he implied that we are left in its oblivion. Michelangelo was in many ways an epochal poet-thinker; his lyric poetry was a meditation on the demise of

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the life he understood as being unrepresentable. The epochal nature of Michelangelo’s poetry did not escape Rilke. In the Book of Hours (I, 29) Rilke tells us that Michelangelo was a titan who, in being above all measure, “forgot immensurability.” That is to say, the Italian artist-poet remembered for his age (and for us today) the moment at which the limits and bounds had not yet been imposed. He is the person, Rilke continues, who always returns when an epoch that is about to come to an end rediscovers its own value. It is the epochal characteristic of beauty that needs to be rethought. The first question we need to pose is: apart from the aesthetic dimension circumscribed in the history of art, what exactly does the Angel have to do with the idea of Beauty? In a general and reductive sense, the Angel brings to mind images of delicateness, innocence, and youthfulness. One of the sources for such an artistic interpretation of the Angel is to be found in Federico Borromeo’s De Pictura Sacra, where we read that “to indicate its speed we give it wings, a garment for decorum, a human aspect because there is none other as perfect, the figure is youthful, so as to indicate the force and vigour that no senile decadence can attack.”1 But this icon of fragility is also one of the darkest signs of psychological terror. As already anticipated, we owe the most efficacious depiction of Angel-as-horror to Rilke, in whose work the fragile sign of the Angel is transformed into the icon of a coming existence that, for now, is too much to bear. Is it possible today to provide a new response to a bewildering (and to some unanswerable) question that Rilke poses at the beginning of his Duino Elegies: “If I cried out / who would hear me up there / among the Angelic orders?” As some people would say, the response is that one would be accused either of being a mindless believer in the spiritual world or of being afflicted by some form of psychic dysfunction. This is so because we have limited our points of reference to the sensory domain of the body and the cold abstraction of reason. The point is, however, that in a theological and philosophical sense the Angel and Beauty are holders of the same communicative function, namely, the unveiling of a transcendent silence. The base of departure for understanding the angelic link with Beauty is the figure of the Holy Spirit. In an analysis of Suhwravardi’s Book of the Temples of Light, Corbin makes reference to the fact that for the three monotheistic religions, the Holy Spirit and the Angel of humanity are one and the same figure. The Paraclete-Angel helps humans in their at-

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tempt to understand the transcendent truths that are unreachable by any other means.2 In his study on the theology of beauty, Pavel Evdokimov, with reference to Greek patristic writers such as Maximus the Confessor and Evagrius, brings to our attention that divine Beauty is revealed by the Paraclete.3 Moreover, Cyril of Alexandria maintains that one of the traits of the Holy Spirit is that of being the Spirit of Beauty.4 But the Divine Beauty that the patristic writers meditated upon appears almost like a flash of bright light in the work of Dostoevsky when he claims that “Beauty will save the world.” In The Demons Dostoevsky had written that Beauty is indispensable to the world because without it there would be “nothing more to do in this world.” Evdokimov finds the justification for the importance given by Dostoevsky to Beauty in a prayer addressed to the Theotokos by the Pseudo-Dionysius: “I desire that your icon be continuously reflected in the mirror of the souls and that you also preserve them until the end of the centuries, raise those who are curved down toward the ground and give hope to those who consider and imitate the eternal model of Beauty.”5 The Angel is the means by which the Spirit of Beauty is revealed to humans. Franco Rella provides us with an explanation of beauty that is not only relevant to our understanding the nature of angelological semiosis discussed in this book. In a more general sense his thoughts on beauty constitute an originary basis for understanding it as a category of a coming poetology. Much more so than an angelology, what is of particular interest to Rella is the question of beauty, and this of course leads us back to the devastating beauty of the Angel of which Rilke spoke in the first elegy of the Duino Elegies. Rella expounds his ideas on beauty in L’enigma della bellezza (The Enigma of Beauty), and he sets the interpretative matrix for this book in place in the Prologue when he refers to “ . . . Orphic cells that are dormant in the brain of the West.”6 At first reading, the meaning of this expression would describe a segment or stratum of cultural practice that is hidden in the voluminous heap of history and memory. But to be consistent with the neuro-physiological metaphor Rella uses, we could also say that through a process that would inevitably involve psychoanalysis, these Orphic cells, which in some way must ground the intellectual practices of the West, must be brought to the surface level of consciousness as part of the historical project that involves recovering a civilization’s most intimate histories (as well as that of others). But is all of this indeed possible or, for that matter, actually relevant at this point in

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history? In a discussion on “The Idea of Music,” Agamben writes that “The human soul has lost its music—music understood as the scoring in the soul of the inaccessibility of the origin.”7 This is linked to the notion that the present is without a destiny—that is, the activity of documenting new sentiments and moods (or what Agamben calls “the listening to and the transcription of the silent music of the soul”) has ceased for some time now.8 Moreover, the inability to express a new time in human history is figured, in Agamben’s terms, in “the leaden light of our apathy [which] is the never yet seen sky of an absolutely non-epochal situation in human history.”9 If all of this is indeed the case, then of what cultural significance is the mnemonic resurrection of the Orphic cells that lay asleep in the human psyche? Have we, as Agamben suggests, indeed lost the will to excavate in the direction of unhiding the originary because it might appear as a naïve idea, or because we are terrified by the possibility of discovering, like Nietzsche, a monkey standing at the gates of the origins? Looking for the Orphic cells constitutes a search for the silent music of the soul. This search does not necessarily imply a regression, or a movement toward the superfluous and the unintelligible. If anything, it is a movement toward an unheard-of destiny, one that moves counter to the ratio-linear direction of measurable time. To be sure, it is a destiny liberated from the chains of linguistic grammar and residing instead in the emptiness of the poetic image. Empty, that is to say, in that one of its central roles is not to contain the meaning of but to give meaning and thus origin to lived experience. The void inherent in the poetic word is not a manifestation of calculated nihilism but the emptiness of an unreached and never-before inhabited destiny that exists on some unidentified horizon. So what horizon is this, if it is indeed a horizon as the term is generally understood? It is the horizon of beauty, and as Schiller suggested, we enter the land of knowledge through the auroral gate of beauty. In Rella’s own words, “ . . . beauty is not only the splendour of Being in its appearance: it is being itself, the sought after object of knowledge.” With the advent of the new reason of Novalis, Hölderlin, and Schelling, Rella reminds us, the Orphic cells dormant in the psyche of the West suddenly awoke. Moreover, these Orphic cells assume a particular figure, that of Dionysius, the “coming god,” as Hölderlin writes in Bread and Wine, who “unites in himself day and night.”10 The point Rella is seeking to make is that the Greek deity is at once the multiplicity and the unity of the divine:

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“the middle space” which is the point of departure for philosophy itself. This coming deity is also the god of Eros and of Beauty, he opens a path to the real that remains unsayable through philosophical language. It is within this cultural context that the idea of Beauty assumes a characteristic of fragility that empowers it to flood our critical imagination. This is not the metaphysical Beauty that was defined in terms of relationship whereby components were assembled together to form a harmonic entity, it is instead the Beauty which is the explanation and “the visibility proper of the world.11

As a result of the poetic philosophy of Schlegel, Novalis, and Leopardi philosophy was eventually to become the reason of Beauty: “ . . . thus ‘the highest act of reason’ is ‘an aesthetic act.’ A philosophy that does not have this ‘aesthetic force,’ typical of the poet, is Scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of the literal: it does not accede to truth, but only to the order or the classification of the existing. ‘The poetic art will become, thus, in the end, what it was in the beginning . . . the guide of humanity.’” 12 This is to be understood in connection with the idea of “beauty saving the world.” On more than one occasion, poetry has saved the world. A phrase circulated in the early to mid-1970s that went something like this: “Rock ‘n’ roll prevented World War Three.” That is to say, given the East-West tensions that dominated the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the grounds for a clash of the titans, the United States versus the Soviet Union, was set. The apocalyptic war never took place because, among other reasons, Western youth were seduced by music, drugs, and sex. Aesthetic and corporeal pleasure along with cosmic intoxication won the day over military instinct. While I do not deal with a modern version of poetry, namely rock ‘n’ roll, I am claiming that the same poetry that prevented World War Three will also save the world from itself. Poetry is what brings us closer to ourselves, to the cosmic reality we inhabit. In fact, in Rella’s meditation on beauty we witness the conjugation of politics with philosophy and poetry when he claims, in the spirit of Dostoevsky, that “Beauty will save the world”: what we need to focus upon today is the very meaning of thinking: . . . in order to think the reality of the world, and the reality of the subjects of the world. The thought of beauty has taught us this. Concepts can tell us much about us and about our destiny, but concepts do not exhaust reason, thinking, nor the experience of reality.

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Beside the “sun” of the philosopher and of the scientist there still remains the other sun of my individual experience, of many individual experiences. Only a form of thought that moves through concepts and figures can give us the form in which these two experiences are offered as a complex experience of the world. A form in which the unexpressible of difference can finally make itself visible. Philosophy has always moved as an equalizing force. . . . Today I believe it is important, necessary, to think the difference. To arm oneself with a thought that cannot only, as Simone Weil said, think things separately, “but think thoughts that think separately.”13

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f one were to describe Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic hermeneutics of love, we would see a line that flows from the lower level of human desire and passion, and on to the perfect and de-sensed Idea of love. But if one were to offer an graphic explanation of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, we would have a line that moves from an image that is erased down into the phenomena of everyday existence. God is “dead” for Heidegger because the eternal space of the Idea is erased from the cartography of the life-world. What matters for (and since) Heidegger is the lower level from which Ficino sought to rise. The world that Heidegger (following Nietzsche’s suggestion) erased is intelligible only to the devoutly religious and to Jung and his followers, to cite some examples. Following this necessarily brief sketch, one would conclude that Ficino and Heidegger have very little to say to each other as they each follow different directions. Heideggerian reflection has no time for the metaphysical and ethereal quality of Ficinian thought. In fact, Ernesto Grassi believed that while Heidegger finds a natural affinity with a number of Renaissance philosophers who were interested in the ontological nature of language, once we get to Ficino’s ahistorical Neoplatonism, Heidegger’s affinity with the Renaissance ceases to be. Moreover, we are told that Paul Oskar Kristeller had originally intended for Heidegger to direct his dissertation on Ficino, although Heidegger had no knowledge about the Medicean philosopher. But the listing of elements that add up to an absence of possible affinities between Heidegger and Ficino is ultimately a useless exercise, as it becomes the obsessive repetition of the same idea. What would not be repetitive is looking at Ficino’s erased world in relation to the non-erased version of the same world and at the same time looking at Heidegger’s new

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world of every Dasein in relation to Ficino’s lower world of desire. Heidegger inverted Ficino’s upward moving world in which the bottom became the top; he virtually stood Ficino on his head. So what does this upside-down Ficino look like? Is he the same as Heidegger now that he is upside down? Is Heideggerian philosophy essentially an inverted version of Ficinian thought? What would Ficino look like if we read him upside down? What would Heidegger look like if he were comparably inverted? The answer is somewhere in between. Love is a fragile sign that is the category of a destiny hidden on some horizon. Love, Rilke tells us, “is the possibility of one unveiling their destiny to the other.” For Giorgio Agamben these words would mean something like this: In love, the loved one arrives, at the same time as the lover, to the light of his / her veiled Being, in an eternal facticity and beyond Being. These are seemingly cryptic words that belong to the Heideggerian philosophico-semantic sphere. If we follow Agamben’s trajectory of thinking, there is no sense in distinguishing authentic love from inauthentic love, celestial love from mundane love, the love of God from the love of self. Why? Because love, as this philosophicosemantic sphere suggests, is the “opening up and closure to an opacity.” We thus need to remove all adjectives and qualifiers from love, but what we are left with are two polarities of human existence: origin and destiny. Love is not to be perceived as a relation between subject and object, or as a relation between two subjects. Love needs to find its niche in Being-already-alongside-the-World which, as Agamben reminds us, is what characterizes the transcendence of Dasein. In The Coming Community, Agamben provides a reading of love that is the outcome of his Heideggerian meditation on the question of love: “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such—this is the lover’s particular fetishism. Thus, whatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence of an intelligibility.”1 In order to gloss this passage we should keep in mind what Agamben states about the relationship between the “common” and the “singular”: “it is the Most Common that cuts off any community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate

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only in the empty space of the example without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They are expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign E.”2 But what does Agamben mean in his critique of the “Most Common,” whose debilitating force we need to overcome to achieve a real community? The key to finding an answer rests in commenting on the notion of the ordinary or whatever Being. In a fragment of an “idea” Agamben underlines the notion that what is implied in the “idea of love” is our seeking to understand something as what it actually is, not as what we would want it to be. In Agamben’s own terms, the idea of love means “To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent—so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off.”3 Agamben is here playing on the notion of a somethingness that is irreducible, something that is itself and nothing else, but which ceases being so once it is contaminated with extraneous elements. Is this a hermeneutic challenge on Agamben’s part? A provocation to interpret the signs that perfuse the world by weakening the overwhelming matrix or framework of an interpretative strategy? To a great extent this is surely the case, as Agamben wants to highlight the dangerous fragility of love. The peril rests in the fact that once the weight of the extraneous imposes itself on an understanding of love, it will consequently dissolve into an indifference that will have lost any inkling of the idea of love. However, in any way we look at the issue an interpretative strategy or attitude will always be present. Agamben’s reading of Heidegger’s thinking on love4 unveils the necessary strangeness that is love; that same strangeness is the medium through which any understanding of the unrepeatable semiosis of love becomes possible. Agamben quotes the Scholastic cataloguing of transcendentals (“quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum”—‘whatever entity is one, true good, or good’) and suggests that the “whatever” here refers to the idea of singularity in being something “such as it is.” In this way, singularity is freed from “the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universe.”5 Moreover, the being-in-question is freed from possessing the given properties that allow it to belong to any group or community;

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rather, it is reclaimed “for belonging itself.”6 The idea of a “being-such-asit-is” is key to understanding the radical notion of love that Agamben has uncovered. Agamben’s understanding of love is in its most important respects a troping on Heidegger’s treatment of the problem of love. The fact is, Agamben’s writings support this Heideggerian treatment of love. Agamben observes that a number of philosophers have commented on the fact that in the analytic of Dasein, the issue of love is absent (Koepps, Binswager, Jaspers). Heidegger was having a love affair with Hannah Arendt between 1923 and 1926, the period during which he was writing Being and Time. Arendt herself claims that the writing of this work had taken place under the sign of love. But why, Agamben asks, “does Being and Time remain so obstinately silent on the subject of love?”7 Agamben begins to answer the question by claiming that Heidegger was in fact very sensitive to the idea that love recites a critical role in making available the possibility to approach knowledge and truth. Agamben bases this conclusion on two fact: firstly, in Being and Time, within the context of a discussion on Befindlichkeit and Stimungen, there is a note that contains a quote from Pascal and a second one from Saint Augustine. The two citations underline “a sort of ontological primacy for love in its being the access to truth.”8 Secondly, Agamben cites a 1928 Marburg seminar in which, following the intuitions of Max Scheler, Heidegger says that “love and hate found knowledge.” Agamben stresses the notion that the reason for which Heidegger is convinced of the importance of love, yet does not treat it thematically, is that the way of being of the most original opening up that is all knowledge (which, according to Augustine and Scheler, takes place in love) is in a certain sense the central problem of Being and Time.”9 Agamben’s main point is that if love is to be perceived from this opening, it cannot be understood “as a relation between a subject and an object or as a relation between two subjects. It should rather find its place and its own articulation in Schon-sein-bei-der-Welt, which characterizes the transcendence of Dasein. We are here at the beginning of a radically different way of understanding love. But according to Agamben, this radically new way of perceiving love hinges on the answers provided for the following set of questions: —What is the mode of Being in Schon-sein-bei-der-Welt? —In what sense is Dasein always close to the world and the things that surround it before even knowing them?

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—How is it possible for Dasein to open itself to something without making it the objective correlate of a knowing subject? —How is it possible that the intentional relation itself is brought to light as far as its mode of being is concerned, and in its primacy in relation to the subject and the object?10

Agamben proposes that the path that leads to the answers of the these questions crosses through Heidegger’s understanding of the problem of “facticity.” Heidegger makes a clear distinction between the Faktizität of Dasein from Tatsächlichkeit, the simple factuality of worldly beings. Agamben suggests that the Heideggerian definition of “facticity” is derived from Saint Augustine (“facticia est anima”); the human soul is factical in that it was “made” by God. Agamben also reminds us that in Latin, facticus is the contrary of nativus and means that which did not come into being itself. For Heidegger, the experience of the factical is the only point of beginning for thought. Agamben then quotes a passage from Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Book 10/chapter 23), which Heidegger cites in a 1921 seminar on the Bishop of Hippo and Neoplatonism. Agamben is correct in commenting that what catches Heidegger’s attention here is the interplay between hiding and non-hiding, which informs the experience of facticity: “Facticity is the condition of that which rests hidden in its opening, of that which is exposed by its own withdrawal. From the outset, facticity is in this way characterized by this very co-belonging of latency and non-latency, which marks for Heidegger the experience of truth and being.”11 In a 1921 – 1922 Fribourg seminar (entitled “Phänomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles”), Heidegger writes that “the determinations of the factical . . . are indifferent qualities that could be ascertained in a trivial manner, as when I say: this thing is red. They are alive in facticity, that is to say they contain the factical possibilities, from which they could never free themselves—never, thanks be to God; as a result, a philosophical interpretation which aims for that which is most important in philosophy: facticity, this interpretation, and this in such a way in its being philosophico-factical, it radically gives itself the possibilities of decision and, by this it gives itself. But that it can only do if it exists—according to the mode of its Dasein.”12 Unlike Husserl’s and Sartre’s interpretations of facticity, Agamben comments, in Heidegger the factical marks the traits of Being and the emotion of life.

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But ultimately it is in the intersectioning and not in the vivisectioning of Heidegger and Ficino that we find a world with which we are familiar. An intersectioning would resemble the contents of the following sentence: “ . . . the divine eros is ecstatic; it does not permit lovers to be among themselves but bids them to be among their lovers . . . Thus, the great Paul who came to be inspired by the divine eros and participated in its ecstatic power, straightaway declared: ‘I live no longer but Christ lives in me’. He says this to God as a true ecstatic lover; he does not lead a life for himself but he lives the life of a lover, a life which is exceedingly beloved.”13 These are the words of the Pseudo- Dionysius and they constitute a midway path, so to speak, between the Neoplatonic idealism of Ficino and the postmetaphysical analytic of Dasein that characterizes Heidegger’s work. The Pseudo-Dionysius is interested in rehabilitating “eros” and attributes to it an importance equal to agapé; moreover, he writes, “it would seem that for some of our sacred writers the name of eros is regarded as more divine than that of agapé.”14 Eros is that ecstatic experience that assigns to the moment of ecstasy a high cognitive and epistemological value. Here thinking and being are inseparable, what is known is both possessed and a source of joy. “A simple, self moved, erotic motion—/ active of itself, / Before being, in the good . . . The divine eros is like an everlasting circle—/ moving around in unerring convolution.”15 A notion such as this one constitutes the genealogical between an early Christian and Thomistic understanding of angelic love: “The will of Angels is by nature loving. Angels cannot help loving, by force of nature” (Thomas Aquinas ST I, q. 60, a. 5).

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SVLPICIVS MARTYR. SERVILIANVS MARTYR –Inscription from the catacombs of St. Calixtus in Rome I “Even if the necessity for accepting ideas were not based on clear logical foundations, we would still have to accept them on factual grounds, which give them the certainty of universal-human experience: the reality of ideas and of intellectual intuition is indisputably proved by the fact of artistic creation. Indeed, those ideal images that artists embody in their works are neither a simple reproduction of observed phenomena in their particular and accidental reality nor general concepts abstracted from that reality. Both observation and abstraction, or generalization, are necessary for the working out of artistic ideas, but not for their creation. Otherwise, every observing and thinking person, every scientist and thinker, could be a true artist, which is not the case. Anyone familiar with the process of artistic creation is well aware that artistic ideas and images are not complex products of observation and reflection but appear to mental vision all at once, in their wholeness . . . Everyone knows that both abstract rationality and the servile imitation of external reality are deficiencies in artistic creation.” (Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. Peter Zouboff, ed. Boris Jakim [Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995], pp. 61–62) Solovyov intuited that the moment of aesthetic creation would vanish or dissolve once we attempted to rationalize it. This moment is like a flash of lightning that stops for no one. The spontaneous aesthetic moment is as close as humans get to angelic cognition.

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II “The angel of death, who in some legends is called Samael and with whom it is said even Moses had to struggle, is language. Language announces death—what else does it do? But precisely this announcement makes it so difficult for us to die. From time immemorial, for the entire duration of man’s history, humanity has struggled with this angel, trying to wrench from him the secret he restricts himself to announcing. But from his childish hands one can wrench only the announcement he had in any case come to bring. The angel is not at fault for this, and only those who understand the innocence of language likewise grasp the true sense of the announcement and may, in the event, learn to die.” (Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 129) The Angel of Death is language in that it communicates a message that only humans are able truly to understand. The main trait of human language is not its communicability but rather its reflexivity. Thus, the Angel of Death is the reflexive moment that weighs down wingless humans with the gravity of pondered meaning. III “I should like to know what is this phantasm, this unheard of monster, this human portent, this extraordinary brain, and what is the fresh news brought by him to the world? Or rather what are these ancient and obsolete views thus renewed, what amputated roots sending forth fresh shoots in our age? They are amputated roots which germinate, ancient things which return yet again, occult truths which are discovered; it is a new light which after the long night rises over the horizon in the hemisphere of our knowledge and little by little approaches the meridian of our intelligence.” (Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, p. 348) The Angel of Death signals the reawakening that occurs once humans are finally disembodied. But the disembodying powers of death lead to a realm of signs that humans are able to comprehend only with the innocence of a child. IV “In antiquity when a man had to direct a prayer to the statue of the god, he stepped upon a stone that was erected at its side to enable people to shout their prayer into the ear, so that the god would hear them; and then he stared at the image until the god nodded his head or opened or shut his eyes or answered in some way. You see this was an abbreviated method of active imagination, concentrating upon the image until it moved; and in that moment the god gave a hint, his assent or his denial or any other indication, and that is the numinosum.” (C. G. Jung, “Psychological Analysis of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,” from privately mimeographed 1937 seminar notes of Mary Foote, cited in M. Watkins, Waking Dreams [New York: Interface/Gordon and Beach, 1976]p. 43)

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The true sign of despair is the impatience we bring with us when we seek to interpret what remains unreachable. Impatience is the refusal to yield our perceptual faculties over to the critical, intuitive imagination. But once the yielding takes place, the signs that fill the world assume a new color. C. G. Jung constitutes an example of angelological consciousness operating in the twentieth century. Jung, who asserted that all of his writings were rooted in the testimony of empirical evidence, emphasized that regardless of the “occult” nature of his work, its hub was the lived experience taken from the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. He made reference to the figure of the Angel in order to explain the nature of the human psyche. For example, Jung claims that the fall of the angels constitutes “a premature invasion of the human world by unconscious contents. The angels are a strange genus; they are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord. Angels who fall, then, are exclusively ‘bad’ angels. These release the well-known effect of ‘inflation’, which we can observe nowadays in the megalomania of dictators.”1 For Jung, the mental gaze was endowed with cognitive properties that are not defective or ratio-logically impaired. If anything, the mental gaze was as epistemologically privileged as other roads to knowledge. With this in mind, let us consider the parapsychological experience Jung had in Ravenna, which he claims to have been “among the most curious events” of his life. Jung paid a visit to the tomb of Galla Placidia located in Ravenna in 1913 and again in 1933. On the occasion of both visits the tomb had an unusual effect on him. But what was particularly strange is that during the second visit, Jung tells us in his own words, “I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remember having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten.”2 As we are going to see, Jung is not confusing his memories, the presence of the mosaics was verified by a woman who accompanied him on the visit. To be sure, he is quite certain of what he thought he saw: The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It might have shown Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan . . . The

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fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all . . . It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves . . . I retained the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the sea, individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scrolls proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ . . . 3

Immediately after leaving the baptistery, Jung decides to go to buy photographs of the mosaic but is unable to find any. Upon returning to Switzerland Jung asks an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to seek out photographs of the mosaics. As it turns out, the friend informs Jung that the mosaics do not exist. Jung was sure that he saw what is in fact not there, as was the woman who accompanied him on the visit. Before being informed by his friend of the nonexistence of the mosaics, Jung had gone to the extent of discussing them at a seminar.4 Jung provided a tentative explanation for this bewildering experience by recalling that during a dangerous sea voyage from Constantinople to Ravenna, the empress Galla Placidia vowed that if she arrived at her destination safely she would have a church built in which the dangers of the sea would be portrayed. Her voyage did turn out to be a safe one and she did build the Basilica of San Giovanni in Ravenna which was furnished with mosaics. However, Jung reminds us, the basilica was eventually razed to the ground because of a fire, but a depiction of Galla Placidia in a boat is to be found in the Ambrosiana in Milan. Jung confesses that Galla Placidia is what he terms a “suitable embodiment” of his anima. “The anima of a man,” Jung writes, “has a strongly historical character. As a personification of the unconscious she goes back into prehistory, and embodies the contents of the past. To the individual, the anima is all life that has been in the past and is still alive in him.”5 What I am interested in exploring is the most originary reading possible of this event—originary, of course, from Jung’s point of view. Once we move in the direction of the most primordial interpretation possible of Jung, we will find what all manuals on the history of psychoanalysis have excluded from the museology of the science of the psyche, namely, the fatal gaze of Renaissance hermeticism. An important bridge between Jung and the hermetic past is Friedrich Creuzer (1771 – 1858), a student of Schiller’s. According to Attilio Momigliano, Creuzer’s sought “ . . . to give a scientific basis to the Neoplatonic interpretation of Greek mythology.

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Though soon dismissed by responsible philologists, it was greeted with enthusiasm by philosophers like Schelling, lastingly influenced the erratic genius of Bachofen, and altogether played a very important part in the development of mythological studies.”6 Creuzer’s interpretative strategy was rooted in a search for the symbolic meaning of an image, statue, text or any other product of the cultural imagination. To be sure, he was not interested in historical, causal, or naturalistic explanations but rather in the hidden symbolic meaning that could be reached by means of a mythological imagining. Creuzer was thus a Neoplatonist as he afforded interpretative privilege to the essence hidden within the veil of the image.7 We are offered an important insight into the parapsychological event at Galla Placidia’s tomb by way of a footnote that Aniela Jaffé provides. She relates that Jung had confided to her that the vision of the mosaics was “a momentary new creation by the unconscious, arising out of his thoughts about archetypal initiation. The immediate cause of the concretization lay, in his opinion, in a projection of his anima upon Galla Placidia.”8 This is the essence of Jung’s angelological consciousness: probing beyond the weight of thought and death into the unnamable land of knowing-withoutreflection.

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he stanza allows a “conscious representation” of an enigma that consists in the fact that philosophy is not able to enjoy what it possesses, while poetry is not able to know what it enjoys. Hence the figure of the Angel’s perfumed corpse, a sense of enjoyment that can never be correlated with a sense of presence or possession. In other words there is a scission that keeps joy apart from knowing, but the bond between pleasure and scientia is available in the form of the stanza, which creates a new space of reality and human culture. Thus the problem is as much a topographic or cartographic one as it is anything else, in that the locus of cultural and intellectual activity conditions the results. Ultimately, as we will see, it has everything to do with the ‘black sun of melancholy, which emits paralyzing rays, as Julia Kristeva testifies: “Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?”1 (And here we would have Georges Bataille respond that “The sun is black” and that, such a solar icon goes hand in hand with the image of “the beauty of an Angel at the bottom of the underground”([“L’Archeangélique” 1944]). It is at this point that Agamben’s thought intersects with Corbin’s research on Sufism, to be sure; for the French Islamist the problem of knowledge, or at least the problem that the West has with other forms of knowing such as Sufism, is in many ways rooted in how different cultures understand the geography that governs knowing. The essence of Agamben’s quest to understand the phantasm that accompanies the “word” is synthesized in the closing remarks of Stanzas, which shed light on alternative possibilities for understanding the process of semiosis: “ . . . the

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human is precisely this fracture of presence, which opens a world and over which language holds itself. The algorithm S/s must therefore reduce itself to simply the barrier (/) but in this barrier we should not see merely the trace of a difference, but the topological game of putting things together and articulating . . .” and a model for this is the “melancholic profundity of the emblem . . .”2 In other words, the fracture separating the space of the signified from that of the signifier must be “healed” or overcome, thus transforming the difference or barrier into the place where the signifier and the signified are collected and no longer differentiated as a result of the newfound invisible harmony. Agamben is concerned with articulating the idea that acedia, and in a more specific sense melancholy, was a psycho-physiological attempt to transform the object of desire into something seemingly real. Agamben begins by reconstructing the medieval phenomenology concerning acedia. He cites a number of provocative passages whose words announce the essence of the pathological and philosophical dimensions of the unreal’s attempt to become real. In the first passage the gaze is fixed upon the window; the imagination takes possession of the victim who imagines that someone is about to visit him. He fixes his gaze upon the wall and spends time doing seemingly idle things. The accent is upon what is not immediately present and specifically on the powers of the imagination, which is able to invent things by transposing images wandering in the realm of the unreal to the domain of the real that remains nonetheless a fictional construct. The second passage that Agamben focuses upon is that of alienation. Once the “demone meridiano” invades the mind of the victim, the first obsession it inculcates is a “horror of place.” The victim is convinced that unless he abandons the place in which he presently finds himself, he will never be able to function in a productive manner. The victim imagines distant or nonexistent monasteries where he is sure he would find peace of mind. The loathing of the present place and the longing for the place that possibly does not exist lead to a sense of total confusion and leave him completely empty and inert. What we have here is an attempt to appropriate the unreal by transforming it into a semblance of the real. Central to this process is a knowledge of the repulsion of place coupled with an imagination that is not bound by the logic of time and place. It is indeed a question of privileging the absent over the present, and there is here an uncanny resemblance to

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Derrida’s grammatological project, which is in many ways a poetics of absence. The analogy comes to a halt, however, once we realize that while Derrida believed he had overcome the metaphysical tradition by uncovering the great lie of presentness, in these patristic writings the opposite occurs. That is, what is overcome is not the metaphysical world but the material world whose concrete sign or grammé dissolves in the imagination of the acedioso who in truth imposes the unreal on the real. Agamben believes that Western thought has yet to overcome the phantasmalogical past, which is necessarily intertwined with the metaphysical tradition of which it is an important, even if forgotten, dimension. As Agamben implies in the final pages of Stanzas, by privileging writing over speech, Derrida is only working within the “other side” of the metaphysical tradition. No one, including Derrida, has been successful in overcoming the metaphysical tradition. Acedia, in Agamben’s view, is not necessarily a form of laziness, but rather one of anxiety and desperation. The acedioso is directed into hiddenness as a result of a sense of anxiety vis-à-vis the world created by God. The anguish is cultivated into a sense of despair as the acedioso does not feel an affinity with the world God has created, and as a consequence he conceals himself from the view of God by rejecting the path created to reach Him. As Julia Kristeva reminds us, the melancholic mood is made up of “inscriptions, energy disruptions, and not simply raw energies.” In other terms, moods direct us to a process of signification which, although resting on the limen of bioenergetic constancy, “insures the pre- conditions for (or manifests the disintegration of ) the imaginary and the symbolic.”3 To say that melancholy is a source of poetological invention would be to repeat ideas expressed by Ficino half a millennium ago. The fact is, there is a psychiatric component to poetic logic, and it consists in the conjugal closeness linking the poetological strategy of excogitating things belonging to different temporal realms and the black sun of an originary sadness. Kristeva, in fact, has something similar in mind when she writes that “literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect—to sadness as imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol’s sway.”4 In Benjamin’s reading of melancholy within the context of Baroque allegoresis, the emphasis is placed on the fragmentary nature of the signifying process:

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The deadening of the emotions . . . the distance between the self and the surrounding world to the point of alienation from the body. As soon as this symptom of depersonalization was seen as an intense degree of mournfulness, the concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks in any natural, creative relationship to us, was set in an incomparably productive context. It accords with this that in the proximity of Albrecht Dürer’s figure, Melencholia, the utensils of active life are lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation. This engraving anticipates the baroque in many respects.5

We have in this scenario a radical alternation as far as the use of a given thing is concerned, and in the case described by Benjamin the alteration is in its most important respects due to the psycho-pathological properties of melancholy. It has been argued that depression is the most common form of mental pathology in these, the last years of the second millennium. Thus the Age of Aquarius is more saturnine than many would expect. An interpretative mind-set rooted in a saturnian humoralogy is in many ways informed by the above passage from Benjamin: that is, the relationship between the voice that utters an interpretation and the textual or other materials (or ruins) is conditioned by the “deadening of affects,” by the alienation of things from each other, but ultimately also by the creation of radically new contexts for the production of meanings. Peter Burger has something similar in mind when he comments on Benjamin’s Baroque meditations. “The allegorist,” Burger writes, “pulls one element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function. Allegory is therefore essentially fragment . . . The allegorist joins the isolated fragments of reality and thereby creates meaning. This is posited meaning; it does not derive from the original context of the fragments.”6 The rupture separating things (signifier from signified, and so on) is the new space of semiotic invention. And yet Benjamin meditates on the possibility that it is “the melancholic above all whose gaze is fixed on the ideal” and “that it is the images of melancholy that kindle the spiritual most brightly . . .”7

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ragility is at once the first and last sign of human life. Everything else is a threshold between the fragile poles linking conception and birth to the dissolution that accompanies death. The vitreous nature of the human is present in Peirce’s thought. Peirce wrote that the human is essentially a transparent sign, and more specifically a “glassy essence” and not unlike a word. The human and the word share a common nature and a common destiny as their essence, their meaning, and their essential significance depend on a future interpretant.1 In her research on the illness of mourning, Maria Torok discovered that those who lose a love-object experience an increase in libido;2 in other terms, the fragile corporeal ecstasy that accompanies the act of conception is repeated immediately after the event of death. The experience of the fragile was one of the last things to which Italo Calvino gave critical reflection. The initial image of his Lezioni americane is that of Perseus who places Medusa’s head in a bed of algae, and the marine reeds in contact with Medusa (who is the figure of pure horror) “are transformed into corals, and the nymphs, in an attempt to adorn themselves with corals, rush to bring the reeds and the algae closer to the terrible head.”3 In Calvino’s view, this image somehow reflects an attitude that Eugenio Montale makes manifest in Piccolo testamento, where “very subtle elements which are like emblems of his poetry” are compared to “a frightening infernal monster.” As never before, Calvino continues, Montale has portrayed a vision of apocalyptic proportions—in other words, Montale’s poetry highlights the “minimal luminous traces that he contrasts with dark catastrophe.”

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But the central point of Calvino’s reading of Montale is to be found in the answer to the following question: “How can we hope to save ourselves in that which is most fragile?” Franco Rella, in consonance with what Simone Weil, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin had already intimated, suggests that “ . . . fragility is the truest, the greatest sign of existence.”4 Moreover, Calvino himself recognizes that Montale’s poem is “a profession of faith in the persistence of that which most seems to be destined to perish, and in the moral values invested in the most tenuous traces.”5 “Fragile” is a central category of the coming lyric philosophy I am elaborating in this book. By “coming” I am referring not only to a moment in the future but more particularly to a threshold that can at least be defined in the period of years that link the end of one millennium and the birth of a new one. In this sense the fragile sign is that of a philosophy of a threshold. “Every icon is a revelation,” Pavel Florenskij tells us.6 The icon represents the fragility of human nature as it prepares itself for a transfiguration. Evgenij Trubeckoj explains that icons aim to represent humans in their state of weakness and hunger but with the expectation of spiritual nourishment that is superior to biological nourishment, which entails the subjugation of nature and humans. The emaciated faces of the saints found in the icons are to be seen in contrast to the violent subjugation but also as the “new norm in existential relations.”7 The Angel itself, John Damascenus alerts us, “is an icon of God.”8 Massimo Cacciari expounds on an idea such as this one and states that “ . . . the Angel . . . icon of the ad-verbum . . . can undertake long journeys from the invisible No-where . . . toward the interior temple of man, enter his darkness, and help him recover his proper Orient.”9 The fragile, then, is a sign that brings or holds together the things that reawaken in the aftermath of the Angel’s death. These things are not exhaustive; if anything, they make up an absolute fragment. The problem with the fragment is that it is immensely difficult to theorize it. While thinking about the work of Bataille, Rella comes to this conclusion: “In fact, we do not find ourselves before that which is usually defined as an ‘oeuvre,’ but instead an immense accumulation of fragments, which appear not to be constructed according to any logic, unless it is possible to hypothesize a logic of the fragment.”10 To be sure, the elaboration of a logic of the fragmentary is a theme in the theoretical plot of this book. The fragile icon, the expression with which we designate the name of the Angel, points to the interpretative possibilities that belong to the fu-

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ture, and is an elusive figure that is nonetheless present in what we do. Peirce elaborates a definition of the icon that is particularly fitting in this case: “In contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream—not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon.”11 In a more specific sense, Peirce is here thinking about a pure icon, which as a sign conveys “ . . . no positive or factual information; for it affords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature.”12 In another context we read that a pure icon is limited to being “ . . . a fragment of a completer sign.” This string of Peircian quotations sheds light on what is intended by a “fragile icon”: a sign that is a fractal of something greater but that in itself is empty of any content or information, a sign that exists in the netherworld between the unreality of what has not occurred and the reality of what has taken place. The fragility of this icon rests in the fact that it exists simultaneously in the state of nascence and of death. The poetological theory I cultivate in this book belongs to a similar state of being. Thus, it is “coming,” which does not necessarily mean that it is not rooted in the interpretative strategies of the present. If anything, it participates in the infinity of the present moment, an infinity we often neglect precisely because it is hidden in the actions and the matter that are a part of the quotidian. A critical gaze at the semiotic issues involved in the “theology of the icon” opens the door to an enriched understanding of what is intended by the “icon” in ‘the “fragile icon.” Put interrogatively, how is the ineffable, the unsayable, the inexpressible expressed? Or to put it in terms employed by Cacciari, “ . . . is the unrepresentable, that which is conceived as Other with respect to any determination of essence . . . thinkable in the act of giving itself?”13 As we will see, these questions touch upon the topic of angelology in a very direct way, but they also, as Cacciari correctly observes, bear upon any “theology of the icon.” The theological nature of the icon sheds light on the semiotic qualities and properties that allow it at once to produce signs that speak to the process of making the unsayable sayable, and also be the medium through which the unrepresentable achieves its most radical degree of unrepresentableness through an “unprecedented”/”unrepeatable” (inauditum) semiosis. L. Ouspensky indicated the paradoxical nature of the theological icon: “Although it may appear

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strange, for the Church the sacred image derives precisely from the absence of image directly from the Old Testament: it is its result and fulfillment.”14 What is of course of interest here, among other issues, is the fact that the theological icon does not root its genealogy in the pagan icon. Instead it is grounded in the absence of image. The fact is that the Incarnation of the Verbum can somehow reconcile the Old Testamentary absence of the image by disassembling the rational philosophy of the icon that Plotinus had a role in cultivating, a philosophy rooted in a nostalgia for beauty and eros. A defining feature of the theology of the icon is the way in which the Pauline passage where Christ is portrayed as the Eikón (Col.1.15) is interpreted. In Cacciari’s words: “The theology of the icon puts everything at stake in the commentary of that eikón of the Invisible, and precisely: in the possibility of commenting on the Pauline text without allegoricallymetaphorically reducing its tremendous engagement. All would fail if that eikón were simply the reflection of the Invisible, or if it solely concerned the pre-existing Christ; the incarnation would be a vain image, the resurrection a tale, the New Testamentary eschatological dimension would be reduced to nothing.”15 What is clear here is that the icon is far from a simple fragmentary representation of something more complete. To be sure, the icon of Christ is not a sign that is a series of grades removed from an ultimate signified: if anything the iconic Christ is the absoluteness of the eikón, one that gathers together conflicting elements. As Cacciari notes, the icon does not have equivalents in the realm of discourse, instead it has the challenge of revealing itself as the Showing, beyond any limit of rational explanation.16 In other terms, the icon is a sign that transcends the logical rationalization that grammatical language is able to provide. Pavel Nikolajevic Evdokimov offers an important distinction between the concept of “sign” and that of the “symbol” when dealing with the theology of the icon. “The sign informs and notifies. Its content is the most elementary and empty of any presence.” Evdokimov includes here the signs belonging to domains such as those of algebra, chemical formulas, street signs, and so on. In all of these cases there exists no relationship of communion and presence between signifier and signified. Evdokimov includes allegory in this category as its function is purely of an illustrative nature. “Neither the sign nor allegory are in any way ‘epiphanic.’”17 On the other hand, the symbol, according to liturgical tradition, actually contains that which it sets out to symbolize. The symbol, in Evdokimov’s own words, “fulfills the function of revealing the ‘meaning’, and, at the same

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time, erects itself in the expressive place of the ‘presence.’”18 Symbolic cognition calls upon the vera imaginatio and encourages it to find the message of the symbol and to grasp its epiphanic role of allowing the transcendent to come into presence. The purpose of the icon, like the Angel, is to permit humans to come into contact with the invisible transcendent. To explain his point the Russian thinker makes reference to the paleoChristian art found in the catacombs. There we find mural drawings, paintings, etchings that take their themes from sacred history: Daniel among the lions; images of fish, bread, and wine; the Good Shepherd, and so on. Evdokimov’s point is that the catacombal depictions are not intended to be art (very little care is taken in perfecting the forms) but the representation of the act of salvation. “The ‘Good Shepherd’ does not represent the historical Christ, but instead means: the Saviour truly saves.”19 The catacombal art is meant to offer a direct meaning, a direct intuition of the transcendent Being. In Evdokimov’s mind the catacombal depictions were to find their fulfillment in the art of the icons: a visual theology that is the symbol of a divine presence. The icon opens the door, like the Angel, to a theophany; the idea of “art” and “artist” dissolves in the presence of a tradition that speaks. There is no place for aesthetic spectacle but in its place an experience that obliterates the space and time of human history. To be sure, the theophanic event that the icon provokes does away with history, leaving only enough to recognize the face of the saint, or the event from sacred history.20 Pavel Florenskij also has meditated on the signifying qualities of the icon. In describing the nature of the iconostasis (in the Eastern Church a partition or screen on which icons are placed and that separates the sanctuary from the main part of the church), he defines it as the limit placed between the visible world and the invisible world. “The iconostasis is the vision. The iconostasis is the manifestation of the saints and of the angels—an angelophany . . .”21 In order to explain the antinomic content of the icon, Florenskij uses the image of the window. The icon is the window that opens itself in the most unprecedented way (that is without traces of signs of a contamination from spatio-temporal extraneity) on the originary mystery, and the icon safeguards is unexpressibility.22 Moreover, Florenskij employs the figure of the magnet to characterize the essence of the icon. An important element in Florenskij’s theology of the icon is the idea that the visible is “abstracted” from the invisible, a signifying process that begins with the window of the icon, which in itself creates a maelstrom in

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the invisible. To use Cacciari’s words, “The icon . . . imagines the force of the magnet, in the purity of its principle: lines, forces, energies that come from it and which it unleashes . . . The natural dimension [of the invisible] is not denied, but, literally, abstracted . . . by the invisible force of the magnet, which transforms it into eros-movement, dynamics, the pure composition of signs, colours, forms. . . . The form of the visible becomes the complex of the traces, the paths, the signs that the invisible produces by extracting the visible from itself.”23 Thus the semiotic relationship between the visible and the invisible is “clarified” by the icon whereby there exists a signifying relationship that pivots not on the signifier/signified paradigm but on a more originary matrix, one that does not privilege one component of semiosis over another but that instead gathers the different antinomic signs in the essence of the icon. The theological nature and implications of the icon do not fall within the purview of this study. Yet what has and what can be said about the semiotic processes that are properties of the theological icon have a great bearing on the iconic in general. An important consideration is that while the icon could be seen as being “frail” or “fragile” (that is, following the Peircian definitions in which the icon is the fragmentary piece of something else), it is equally the case that this frailty is also a completeness or absoluteness that resists the grammatical machinations of verbal semiosis. But can we have it both ways? Is it legitimate to interpret the icon as an incompleteness that achieves its fullest exposition by way of a greater and more complete sign, on the one hand, and read the icon as the most intact and incommunicable essence, on the other hand? Let us say that the icon is both the weakest and the strongest sign in that it abstracts, in a way that defies communicability, the many polarities that are signs of life on earth. The icon, as understood within the context of the theological tradition, is a sign of “transcendental instants,” which Sergej Trubeckoj described as the moments when the anima mundi unhides itself. Looking at the world through the perspective of the icon, as N. A. Morozov and later P. D. Ouspensky wrote, has as a consequence the entry into the fourth dimension. Florenskij opens himself to the fourth dimension; moreover, he sees science and philosophy as belonging to the umbrella of “transcendental instants.” As Elémire Zolla observes, at the basis of Florenskij’s thought there is a very particular way of understanding things; everything is at the service of the promotion of Knowledge (Sapientia). Florenskij, Zolla writes, understood Knowledge as the “fourth hypostasis,” that is to

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say, “the originary substance of beings,” and Sophia itself is the living idea of all creation.24 But the idea of the transcendental instant is by no means the exclusive domain of theological discourse. To be sure, in notes that he took during his lifetime, we find Nietzsche describing something that has great bearing on the transcendental instant that is connected to the fourth dimension and ultimately to the icon. During the period before his nervous breakdown, which was to result in insanity, Nietzsche makes the following annotation: “Five, six seconds and no more: there you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony. You cannot bear it [any longer] in your mortal body. You would need to form another [superior] body or die. It is a clear and unmistakable feeling. You seem to be in contact with the whole of nature and you say: ‘Yes, this is right!’ . . . This is not emotion, this is [pure] happiness. You do not forgive, because there is nothing to forgive. You no longer love—oh, this feeling is higher than love . . . In these five seconds I live an entire human existence, for them I would give my entire life and would not have paid too much.”25 This type of expression is by no means unique or rare in Nietzsche’s writings, as we find a similar passage in Ecce Homo: “An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one’s steps now involuntarily rush along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside oneself with the distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and trickles down to one’s toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as a condition, demanded, as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light.”26 The icon is a window that opens onto the transcendental instant through which we see fragments of a total being that resist the signifying razor of verbal language. But to continue with the window metaphor, the icon is necessarily fragile in that the transparency it provides is frail beside the signifying force of ratio-logical language. The translucence of the icon, like glass, is easily fractured by modes of interpretation that do not “know their own strength.” The icon, thus understood, must safeguard its own frailty, which is its greatest possession. Experiencing and knowing the fragile as the fragile is the beginning of knowledge. “All cognition of the All,” Franz Rosenzweig writes in The Star of Redemption, “originates in death, in the fear of death.” In Massimo Cacciari’s view, philosophy is oblivious to the anguish of individuals and is always seeking to flee the sepulchral gates that open themselves at every

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move philosophy makes. “Only the Individuum can die,” Rosenzweig continues, “and all that which is mortal is alone.” But this solitude of the single mortal individual is exactly what philosophy must overcome and abolish. Moreover, the nothingness, which is the last word that death pronounces, should be for philosophy the new beginning: “ . . . in truth, death is not what it appears to be, or what it has appeared to be in the philosopher’s mirror, it is not nothing, ‘but an inexorable, uneliminatable Something’ . . . a re-claiming voice . . . that breaks the expected unconditionableness of philosophy, which turns to us in order to re-turn us to ‘the obscure presupposition of all life.’”27 In being Something, the Presupposition that comes “before” philosophy, death is what philosophy has sought to overcome. The fragility that is the heart of death is the icon of the boustrephedonic movement between the signposts that enclose life and culture. The fragile, the fragmented, the shards that are left over and claimed by no one are the strongest signs of life past and life to be. What is at issue, however, is the question of metamorphosis: how does this fragility change into a powerful sign without losing its irreducible qualities? The fragile is a state in the narrative of metamorphosis; to know the reason of a metamorphosis is to understand the absoluteness of the fragment. The hidden logic of transformations is an object of knowledge Rella searches for throughout the entire gamut of his writings. Rella’s relationship with the “scene” and “event” of metamorphosis is twofold: in one sense he traverses a vast array of texts intent on uncovering the mysteries that underpin the event of transformation; in a second sense he is himself the agent of the transformation. An eloquent example of the latter is to be found in a study that deals with Montale and Saba, La cognizione del male, in which Rella states: “ I have, in a word, transformed some poetic sequences into a tale.”28 In essence, Rella plans to undertake the construction of a textual montage consisting of fragments, quotations, and images so as to let emerge the main figures that “ . . . weave within themselves a plurality of meanings, of Montale’s work.” In other terms, the interpretation of signs becomes symbiotically bound with metamorphosis, which in itself is essentially “alchemical” since any transformation is also a transmutation. The interpretative act, the act of understanding involves, in Rella’s case, transmutating a given author’s words and images into something that might be understood and transmitted to the community and to posterity. But the first move in such a gesture is that of collecting the fragments that the au-

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thor leaves behind, fragments and shards that are icons of the destructibility that threatens any cultural act. The point of departure of any logic of transformation, it would seem, is the coming to terms with the most disconcerting indices of fragility, death and decay: to this end Rella asks, “things, humans and events, do they not perish perhaps in order to be transformed into something precious and new?”29 Is this some variety of Christian soteriological discourse that pivots on the need to suffer and die in order to enter the Kingdom of God? Or is it a nonteleological fascination with the death and decay of materiality in its own existential context? In other terms, which is the object of privilege, the transformation into something new, or the decay that precedes it? If anything, it is a recognition of the fact that the signs that perfuse the world are not so much unstable as they are icons that speak to the need to experience the event of the “fragile fragment.” While Rella is indeed intent on transforming what he reads, he is equally fascinated by the face and character of impermanence. To begin with, Rella initiates his metamorphosis of Montale by seeking to understand the nature of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who “ . . . seems to be overtaken in a continuous and inarrestable oscillation. And this oscillation impresses upon things a vertiginous movement, which makes everything unstable, apparent and unapparent, along the line of a shadow, along the precarious limit between being and nothingness.”30 Rella is intrigued by Hamlet’s attempt to freeze life magically in its impermanence, and makes use here of the still life image that in Italian is translated as natura morta. In a general sense, Rella is seeking to come to terms with what he terms elsewhere “the new modern,” in which people live in “ a perverse rapport with space and with time.” What is perverse about the spatio-temporal relationship is that the massiveness of the modern metropolitan obliges people to have only fragments of perceptions, “an atomization of experience without precedent in the past.”31 (Paul Virilio is acutely sensitive to the revolution of the senses of perception that is currently taking place. “Before long,” Virilio writes, “we will be forced to undergo a lacerating revision of our figurative conceptions. This ‘reconstruction’ involves more than physicists and philosophers. It embraces architects, urbanists, and other geometricians, because the product of today’s man/machine interface, the overexposure of screens, is also the product of the man/environment face-to-face encounter, the exposure of immediate vision. If, in the physics of the infinitesimally small,

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the appearance of surfaces hides a secret transparence that is a thickness without thickness and a volume without volume, then the greatest lengths of time and the widest expanses no longer occult direct vision. Today, the perception of facts has given way to unprecedented facts of perception. While these facts of perception can readjust the components of consciousness, no one can apprehend their sensate reality.”32 We are on the verge of a radical overhaul of the way in which we perceive everything that can possibly be perceived. And yet, we behold all of this without any sense of wonder or marvel. If anything, we are spellbound by a form of narcosis that protects us from the shock of falling into the radical overhaul. The “lacerating revision of our figurative conceptions” assumes the same sort of banal triviality that driving to the closest mall to buy an unnecessary object inspires in the economy of everyday ordinary experience. But whether we accept the revision as lacerating or not, the fact remains that change moves at a pace that we are not able to detect through our sensory faculties. In the same way, we are not able to perceive the speed at which our planet rotates as it revolves around the sun). Alberto Moravia’s The Indifferent was published in 1929, two years after Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. No one has ever paid serious attention to the possible affinity linking these two works. But in many respects Moravia’s book is a rhetorically reorganized version of Heidegger’s monumental philosophical reflection. The two books share a central notion: the deluge of a radically banal quotidian existence. Indifference is the beingbeside-the-world that has de-sensitized us to the point where apocalypse is no longer possible, and where wonder is nothing but the insignificant residue of a dead metaphysics that had God at its center. Indifference is the posthumous dissolution of a signifying process that distinguishes the virtual from the nonvirtual. Similar to the objects in still life paintings, the people who populate the space of the modern are immobilized in a perverse ontology; that is, the fiction of being alive is undermined by the atrophic frame of non-being. This is the space that functions as limen, as threshold between the two fragile poles of existence, which are the bases for both the eternal return of the same, and the unrepeatable instant of being.

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ince the time of antiquity there has been a tendency to perceive a strong link between poetic language and the political community. Renaissance humanists such as Angelo Poliziano praised the value of metaphorical utterance precisely because it was believed to have a civilizing factor in that it led to the foundation of communities and to the maintaining of civil order. But putting aside the Classical and Renaissance point of view, how do we today understand the relationship between language in its most originary or poetic sense and the community? When thinking about the unthought dimension of human language, Agamben writes, “Only because man finds himself cast into language without the vehicle of a voice, and only because the experimentum linguae lures him, grammarless, into that void and that aphonia, do an ethos and a community of any kind become possible.”1 That is to say, between “voice” and “language” there exists a void caused by the inability of phónè and logos to communicate with each other. Any attempt to find a path of articulation between the two leads to “a radical revision of the very idea of community.”2 However, as Maximus the Confessor affirms, “language is the symbol of the soul’s cognitive energy.”3 What this means, according to Christos Yannaras, is that the “cognitive energy” of the soul constitutes the individual’s possibility to accept the logos of things and of other people, and it announces the ecstatico-logical unhiding of the individual to the community of others.”4 In other terms, language is at once the voice of a pneuma and the pneuma itself that bridges the gap existing between individuals. The void that Agamben speaks about is inhabited by this pneumatological figure, which, in being unrepresentable itself, becomes the means to approach “unrepresentability.” But how does this abyss of unrepresentability

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make itself manifest in the diurnal exchange of humans? Augusto Illuminati’s reflections on “unrepresentable citizenship” sheds light on the political nature of the silent semiotic space resting between voice and language. According to Illuminati, to remain at the margins of politics and history is the place of the observer who has a long history behind him or her but who assumes specific characteristics in being the figure of modernity. The spectator rather than the actor is able to know and understand what is given as a spectacle for gazing. The spectator holds the key to the significance of human cultural practices by keeping the distance from the locus of events and from the viewing public. The spectator guarantees the plurality of interpretations by discussing within an audience and not by identifying himself or herself individually.5 The idea of community brings about a situation whereby singular beings are dispersed. In Illuminati’s own words, “Politics in a strong sense is the trace of ecstatic communication of the singularities, wherein their common-being manifests itself in an appearing together, in reciprocal exposition. The community is not the collective sum or preliminary essence of individuals, but the communication of singular separated beings which only by means of it exist as such; it is a being in common and not a common being. It is the Arendtian space of appearing, where the political actor appears to the others and the others explicitly appear to him, not limiting himself to exist as do the other living or inanimate things, where the power is formed and conditioned by the plurality of the agents.”6 After claiming that the modern community pivots more on simulation than transparency, Illuminati quotes the following passage from Georges Bataille: The fundamental right of humans is to signify nothing. It is the contrary of nihilism, the meaning which mutilates and fragments. This right to not have meaning is in any case the most misrecognized, the most openly placed under foot. (Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure)7

Illuminati comments on the quote by observing that we are at the “ambiguous limit between communication and communion, which is the being-in-common of the singularities, and also the repartitioning of territory and property subsumed under immanent collectivity. By community I mean not the counter-utopic community that is always mourned as recently lost, but the thought of the being-in-common of

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the singularities, of their alterity. In turning toward the community democracy creates its very experience from its impossibility, from the impossibility of constraining the excess of desire to fit in an immanent representation.”8 The point here is thinking the idea of community in such a way as to encourage the flow of multiple interpretations. Not a community of chaos and disorder but rather one that rigidly upholds the need to allow meanings to remain unlatent and unhidden. This becomes possible when we consciously experience the articulated void that creates the “unthought” gap between voice and language. Illuminati offers a chilling and disturbing example of the difference between remaining oblivious to the unthought abyss and consciously experiencing it. The latter is an invitation to open up to the difference, while the former closes itself to difference. The refusal of difference articulates itself in the thought of violence: In the museum of the history of German Jewry, housed in Berlin’s Martin Gropius-Bau, with a view on the ex-Wall and on the ruins of the torture chambers of the Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, there hangs a synoptic image of the persecutions. The last punitive measure is a January 1945 decree that prohibits all of the Jews in the Reich territory from stopping in the heated waiting-rooms of the railway stations. Naturally, at that time there were no longer living Jews in Germany nor coal for heating or stations that were in operation. And, nonetheless, the State imaginarily reconstructs by way of decree the scenario of persecution, it legally revives the victims and the executioners for an infinite torture. One is appalled more by the stupidity than by the ferociousness and one has the impression of being admitted into the essence itself of domination, into the meticulous perversity of bureaucracy, where the logic of exclusion survives the concrete capacity to achieve it. The gloomy determination of the Sophoclean Creon or of De Sade’s characters to want a “second death” for their victims, yields to a metaphysical farse of horror. And yet, the Nazi perversion that wishes to extinguish difference belongs to the logic of representation as much as the liberal grotesqueness that overlooks it, thus equally prohibiting the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges. In the idolatrous adoration of the pure means this could without distinction be power or money, with variable effects on the concrete political regimes.9

In the end we are dealing with destitution, with extreme poverty of the body, psyche and soul, with a prelinguistic state. All of these barbaric ac-

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tions reduce the victims to the state of utter wretchedness. But as Michel Serres writes, “The wretched of the earth are messengers of an extraordinary state which is unknown to us.” Radical destitution forces one to wander aimlessly in the streets, to assume a very low profile, one becomes mute and a mendicant. Utter poverty constrains one to disappear and then out of nowhere to reemerge on some street corner. The destitute are specters that are real “in the sense that they pierce through our illusory reality.”10 Radical poverty opens up for us an existential space that defies our notion of common sense. “The absolutely destitute of the earth,” Serres tells us, “risk seeing even the seeds of humanity destroyed in them and around them by the horror of this assault.”11 What all of this means, according to Serres, is that the individual who challenges the risk of the destruction of his or her humanity is an archangel, in the etymological sense of arche—namely, source, origins.

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I

Metaphor and passion, the basic material of lyric utterance, have vanished into the night of history.

II

It is impossible to speak of a poetic philosophy (harmless lip service will not suffice) when ethics is understood as being only a science of manners.

III

If the lyric is only the aged and sick grandparent of the ratio-logical, then it needs to die a thousand deaths.

IV

Myth and meter are not the content of the poetological. They are the means that allows us to rationalize how it is possible for humans to invent at all.

V

Orpheus, Dante, Benjamin, and others descended to hell, whether the supersensory one or the empirical one, only to discover that there exists an unrepresentable meaning of hell on earth.

VI

After all, the otherworldly ecstasy that the erotic offers humans is the event that allows a glimpse of the eternity housed in our own bodies.

VII

“ . . . first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question” (Martin Heidegger at the incipit of Being and Time). Contrary to what Heidegger implies at the beginning of Being and Time, the question of being was not the most important

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concern of Plato or Aristotle. It was instead the question of the soul. Such a sleight of hand (or exaggerated reawakening) on Heidegger’s part set twentieth-century thought off onto an unanticipated and labyrinthine course. VIII

“To be out-of date at the risk of death . . . The death which situates itself as the actual and extreme limit of any discourse” (Franco Rella commenting on Otto Weininger in Il silenzio e le parole). Such an interpretative attitude is indispensable when dealing with that which refuses the benediction of convention and fashion.

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One of the most intoxicating depictions of the epistemology of the scent is found in “The Perfume” from Baudelaire’s poem “A Phantom” contained in The Flowers of Evil: “During your lifetime, reader, have you breathed, / Slow-savouring to the point of dizziness, / That grain of incense which fills up a church? . . . Out of the phantom’s dense, resilient locks, / Living sachet, censer of the alcove, / Would rise an alien and tawny scent”).1

X

“ . . . what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok).2 Even the most materialist and anti-transcendentalist of philosophies is forced to recognize the idea of “secrets that haunt,” not unlike phantoms.

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“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again . . . every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Walter Benjamin);3 “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Walter Benjamin).4 The ghosts of the past escape the mechanics of a logic that seeks to homogenize or rationalize the various movements and irrational tensions that add up to what is generally called history.

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I The Angel’s semiotic signature resembles most, but not exclusively, the interpretative paradigm of hermetic semiosis. The Angel’s philosophy is a hermetic reason. But the ethico-political dimension of this paradigm has been the object of sharp criticism. Geoff Waite, for example, from the point of view of political ideology, criticizes what he terms an “esoteric semiotics,” which in his view conceals truth for an elite. Hermeticism is a form of exclusivistic politics in that it deals with a false truth, that is, something which cannot be rationally explained to a multitude.1 But Waite’s critique had already been anticipated by Adorno in the “Theses Against Occultism” and “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column.” “The attraction to the occult,” Adorno writes, “is a symptom of the retrogression of consciousness”; and “Occultism is a reflex to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification.” At other points Adorno states that “occultism is the metaphysics of dopes,” or “they bitch about materialism. But they want to weigh the astral body.” Finally, “the cardinal sin of occultism is that, by making existence an attribute of spirit, both become contaminated.”2 We need to be, however, very sensitive to Adorno’s perspective; the German Jewish thinker was condemning the occult primarily, but not exclusively, for its association with Nazi-Fascist anti-Semitism, as Adorno makes explicit in the fifth thesis (“Like fascism, the power of the occult is not just a pathos—the two being related by a model of thought as in the case of antisemitism”).3 Umberto Eco was to level a similar accusation against the despised ideologies of Nazism and Fascism.4 But while the link between

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Nazi-Fascism and anti-Semitism is more than evident, the nature of the occult/hermetic/esoteric is not defined as easily. Suffice it to say that Adorno was ambivalent about the intellectual orientation of his friend and mentor Walter Benjamin, for whom “it is difficult to say to what extent he was influenced by the neo-platonic and antinomian-messianic tradition.”5 Benjamin was at once a materialist and an occultist in a way that was to cause anxiety for his Marxist readers. The hermetic signifying paradigm, or hermetic, drift as Umberto Eco terms it, is one of the most problematic issues in the contemporary study of semiotics. But what exactly is the problem? Most of the critiques of hermetic semiosis in the wake of Eco’s writings have approached the question in a limited, often superficial way. In almost all of the cases, the critiques took what Eco had to say about hermeticism at face value and limited any understanding of the hermetic tradition to what one finds in Foucault’s Pendulum—that is, in the forms of titles of books and names of authors, which Eco cites in great abundance. There exists no scholarship on Eco’s theory of hermetic semiosis that makes use of a sustained and comprehensive understanding of the historical dimensions of the hermetic tradition, from Hellenism on to late antiquity, up to the Renaissance and thereafter. The defining feature of hermetic semiosis is, according to Eco, the idea of the “Hermetic drift,” which he defines as the “ interpretative habit which dominated Renaissance Hermeticism and which is based on the principles of universal analogy and sympathy, according to which every item of the furniture of the world is linked to every other element (or to many) of this sublunar world and to every element (or to many) of the superior world by means of similitudes or resemblances. It is through similitudes that the otherwise occult parenthood between things is manifested and every sublunar body bears the traces of that parenthood impressed on it as a signature.”6 Eco stresses that according to the hermetic paradigm, not only is there the possibility of acquiring knowledge of the similar by means of the similar; moreover, there exists the possibility of a connection among all things by way of an excessively flexible conception of resemblance. After all, Eco reminds us, Peirce did conjecture that “any two things resemble one another just as strongly as any two others, if recondite resemblances are admitted.”7 Eco’s fascination with hermeticism is best articulated in the cultural artifact known as Foucault’s Pendulum; this is Eco’s second novel and it traces and explores a

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dead space lost somewhere in the Western psyche. It is the empty space lodged somewhere between sense perception, which is validated by the empirical data it collects and organizes in its various archives, and the intuitions and categories that are properties of the intellect. This forgotten domain, the mundus imaginalis, is where post-Enlightenment poetic imagination finds its home. But the artifacts originating from this imagination is understood by most today as being unreal, irrational, illogical, and worst of all, not relevant to human culture. However, Corbin encourages us to rethink the meaning of this dormant psychic space: On this account there remains no hope for recovering the reality sui generis of a suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the senses nor the abstract world of the intellect. It has furthermore for a long time now seemed to us radically impossible to rediscover the actual reality—we would say the reality in act—proper to the “Angelic World,” a reality prescribed in Being itself, not in any way a myth dependent on socio-political or socioeconomic infrastructures. It is impossible to penetrate, in the way in which one penetrates into a real world, into the universe of the Zoroastrian Angelology . . . we would say as much as of the Angelophanies of the Bible.8

The space that Corbin describes here is what Eco not only traces but indeed also parodies and ironizes in his second novel. The space is a graveyard of ideas and ruins of the imagination. Seen in this light, Foucault’s Pendulum is a landscape replete with ruins in the form of words, ideas, names, titles of works that have lost any critical currency, just as the buried and unearthed edifices and objects of ancient Rome have no contemporary functional currency. In the end Eco’s novel is not only a parody but also an imagining of what this dead space would be like if it were to come back to life. The major obstacle to this is that we would have to forget four hundred years of intellectual history in order to be able to see, for example, what Renaissance hermeticism was actually like. This imagining is a melancholic act, as Walter Benjamin would suggest: “To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is not better way of characterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it

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flares up briefly . . . Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: ‘Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.’”9 One of the main reasons why Eco is able to parody and ironize the hermetic tradition is that he is supported by several centuries of intellectual history. The ultimate deconstruction of Foucault’s Pendulum would be to read it as if Cartesian rationalism and the persecutions of the Church had not yet taken place. But as Eco admits in “Ars Oblivionalis” forgetting is extremely hard, often more difficult than remembering. The fact is that if we could “unremember” the several centuries, Eco’s second novel would resemble a “theatrum philosophicum hermeticum,” a hermetic philosophy theater, much like Giulio Camillo’s Idea del theatro and Giordano Bruno’s memory treatises. Foucault’s Pendulum is filled with ruins, and to a certain extent it is itself a ruin like the hermetic texts it makes reference to. Of course the major difference between Eco’s book and the hermetic works is that while the authors of the latter took hermetic thought quite seriously, Eco (on one level at least), wants to expel hermetic reason from the domain of legitimate science and philosophy. But on another level Eco has implicated himself in the hermetic project by constructing the edifice of his novel upon the architectural ruins of the hermetic tradition. We need to recall what Linda Hutcheon stated about Eco’s use of the trope of irony in Foucault’s Pendulum: “Without irony, Eco’s novel would be an exemplar of hermetic semiosis; with irony, it becomes simultaneously both an exemplar and a critique.”10 The point that needs to be stressed here is that the paradigm of hermetic semiosis as practiced in the past is different from the interpretative paradigm that is genealogically linked to it and that constitutes a major element of poetic logic. In other terms, the hermeticism of, say, the Renaissance is not to be confused with the hermetic reason of late capitalism which is a strong form of poetic logic. The Corpus Hermeticum has been transformed into a hermetic corpse, which is to say that the hermetic tradition of Ficino, Bruno, and many others has today assumed a different guise; it has become the signifying substance of the poetic sign. The evil, irrational, Nazi-Fascistic hermeticism that Adorno, Eco, Waite, and others speak about is nothing but the unmediated and uncritical transposition of the tradition of the occult sciences from one historical period to another. The fact is that all unmediated spatio-temporal translocations are doomed to madness and catastrophe.

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We are dealing with something quite different; the mutation, filtering, metamorphosis, adaptation, acclimatization, integration, and assimilation of the hermetic past into the cultural codes of the now, and made manifest through the signifying properties of poetic logic. So when we say, for example, that Benjamin is a hermetist, what is meant is that his interpretative mind set is rooted in a logic that privileges images, figures, pathemas, dreams, silence, marginal relics of the everyday. It is ultimately a question of practicing “apocatastasis,” the ancient theory of reconciliation, by salvaging all that can be salvaged and restored. Benjamin elaborates a form of historical apocatastasis, which is a mode of criticism that does not discard any element in an absolute sense but rather makes a distinction between the positive and negative in every element with the final objective of saving everything. II But let us descend into the night of the world and attempt to come up with an alternative reading of hermetic semiosis, one that is inconsistent with Eco and his followers but that has been sculpted according to the idea of an apocatastatic act. But why this insistence on hermetic semiosis? The reason, again, is that the semiotic signature of the Angel’s corpse is usefully articulated by way of hermetic semiosis, and that it is a key element in the stratigraphy of poetic logic. Moreover, angelology and hermetic semiosis have an important feature in common, namely, a reliance on the Neoplatonized/Gnostic tradition in order to explain their origins. The term “gnosis” literally means “knowing,” but within the purview of Greco-Roman culture the Gnostics gave it a meaning, the meaning of a salvational knowledge revealed by a divine or semi-divine B/being. The revelation can also be achieved by means of uncovering the hidden meaning of a text or teaching. Gnosis leads to a “true truth” to which only the “pneumatic” or spiritual people have access. The “true truth” of the Gnostics can be qualified in the following manner: Man fell from a state of grace, characterized by the fullness of light, and awakens to find himself in a fallen state, where matter and shadows are the chains and prison that keep him captive. The quest of fallen human beings is to rediscover the original condition of grace. However, an important distinction must be made when dealing with gnosticism in relation to the hermetic tradition. The Hermetica, the body

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of writings that constitute the theological and philosophical “bible” of the hermetic movement, are greatly influenced by two varieties of “gnosis,” pessimist gnosis and optimist gnosis: —For the pessimist (or dualist) gnostic, the material world heavily impregnated with the fatal influence of the stars is in itself evil; it must be escaped from by an ascetic way of life which avoids as much as possible all contact with matter, until the lightened soul rises up through the spheres of the planets, casting off their evil influences as it ascends, to its true home in the immaterial divine world.11 —For the optimist gnostic, matter is impregnated with the divine, the earth lives, moves, with a divine life, the stars are living divine animals, the sun burns with a divine power, there is no part of Nature which is not good for all are parts of God.12

Neoplatonism plays a key role in shedding light on not only gnosticism but also on the signifying role assumed by the Angel. An underlying structure in the signifying process typical of Neoplatonism is the “ternary theory,” a triadic dialectical mode. In other terms, the rules that dictate the generation of all things and beings in their most minute details are articulated in three phases. First, “permanence” (móne), in which the immovable and unchanging Cause produces beings. Second, procession (proódos) in which the beings are emanated from the Principle, which generates them in accordance to a process of multiplication of itself in its function of generating power (dynamis). Third, there is the “return” or “conversion” (epistrophé)—that is, the beings generated have an affinity with the Principle and thus desire to return to it. This entire signifying process is circular; the three phases are not successive or chronological as they coexist side by side. In the mind of Proclus, the last great Neoplatonist, the dynamis of the second phase is the “central point of every triadic dialect, that is, the point of expansion of all that which subsists in itself.”13 Moreover, Proclus made the metaphysical principle of dynamis the main trait of the intermediate world of intelligences resting between the historical time of beings and the transcendent Being. In fact, the Pseudo-Dionysius employs the expression dynamis and the relevant terminology from Proclus to express a divine attribute of angels. The Pseudo-Dionysius explicitly states that from the dynamis of the transcendent Being there “derive the deiform powers of the Angelic orders (De divinis nominibus VIII, 4, 335). The idea of dynamis as

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theorized by the Pseudo-Dionysius is, in Corsini’s words, a response to the “need, implicit in Proclus’s system, to mediate the transition from the Uno to the multiple, from the intelligible to concrete existence, from God to the world.”14 Basilides’s thought is characteristic of the Gnostic reflection on angels. In Basilides’s mind, from the innate transcendent Being there come forth an infinite number of eons, beginning with the Nous (Christ), and following with the Logos, the Fronesis, the Sophia, and the Dynamis. The union of Sophia and Dynamis brings about the generation of angels.15 Hermetic semiosis is not pure transcendence; it contaminates the visible with the invisible; it seeks the noumenal in the material and vice versa. Alchemy, itself a hermetic science, is an illustrious example of such an interpretative mind-set. Moreover, hermeticism/occultism is not the exclusive domain of the New Agers, of the weird esoteric cults. Nor is it the exclusive property of those who practice a form of cultural spirituality that bases its premises on a permanent mental vacation. As we will see, figures such as Benjamin and others were intrigued by the epistemological possibilities that occultism offered. Hermetic semiosis offers us a useful glimpse of how the dynamics of reawakening, as provoked by the Angel’s corpse, operate. One of the limits of scholarship on hermetic semiosis is the resistance to rethinking the signifying process as it relates to the pre-modern world— the period, that is, when hermeticism reached its highest point of theorymaking. There has been a tendency to understand hermetic drift strictly from the vantage point of the present; what is needed is a re-evaluation of the question from a perspective that owes as much to the world that elaborated the hermetic mind-set as to the present time. Hegel offers a useful “allegory” to explain the nature of the signifying world that characterized the periods during which hermetic thought was elaborated. In a passage from Jenaer Realphilosophie, the German philosopher makes use of the expression “night of the world” to describe the experience of pure Self as “abstract negativity,” the “the eclipse of (constituted) reality and the contraction into self of the subject: The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none happens to him— or which are not present. This night, the inner nature, that exists here— pure self—in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white shape, suddenly

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here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings into the eye—into a night that becomes awful.”16 Slavoj Zizek comments on this passage first by observing that the language of reason “can only emerge from the experience of this abyss”;17 however, by juxtaposing the quote from Hegel with the philosophy of F. W. J. Von Schelling, he underscores an important insight of German Idealism, namely that “the real, material world is not merely a (distorted) reflection of suprasensible Ideas in the mode of Plotinus’s emanation but involves a violent reversal of the proper hierarchical relation between ideas . . . Schelling’s crucial point is that the domain of Ideas becomes actual Spirit only through its ‘egotist’ perversion/inversion, in the guise of the absolute contraction into a real Person . . . reality emerges insofar as the true ideal order gets inverted in itself, runs amok—in Schelling’s terms, the inertia of external material reality is a proof of the divine madness, of the fact that God himself was ‘out of his mind.’” 18 This insight sheds light of the epistemological break that took place and that separates our present world views from the pre-modern one. A defining feature of the Neoplatonic subtext of hermeticism, as we will see, is the hierarchical relationship that exists between the Eternal Idea and its terrestrial mutable ratios. Once this cognitive and epistemological hierarchy is disrupted, in the way, for example, as described by Zizek, then the semiotic process is necessarily bound to reorganize itself. In the simplest of terms, the semiotic processes that govern our current world views necessarily clash with the one rooted in the Plotinian notion of “ideas that offer transient emanations”—a notion which is of pivotal importance to hermetic thought. This shift in paradigms is what underscores the contemporary trend, evinced in the critics of hermetic semiosis, the temptation to brand hermetic reason as weak, deficient, and—why not?—infantile. Dealing with the past is always problematic in that we speak about it from the point of view of the present. Critics of hermetic semiosis accuse hermetic reason of not being reliable because of its interpretative excesses. But many forget or are not aware of a singularly important point: namely, that the ties to an epistemological framework that established the Eternal Idea and the transient emanations as the poles of existence, also established rigid limits of interpretation. But one can reach such a conclusion only after having paid very close attention to the semiotic processes that characterized the premodern world view.

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The passage from Hegel bears somewhat of a resemblance to a passage from Vico from the first book of the New Science: But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind (New Science, P. 331)

This passage is autobiographical, Antonio Corsano suggests, as it describes the process of Vico’s work “with that character of auto-finding or rebirth of the buried and rediscovered experience of origins.” According to Corsano, the passage finds its archaeo-genealogical matrix in the hermetic side of a Renaissance culturology.19 A way of articulating Vico’s link to Renaissance hermeticism is found in the last part of the quote cited from paragraph 331, namely, in the idea that the key to understanding humans and the culture produced by them are the changes that take place in the human mind. Vico is thus raising the imagination to the status of privileged hermeneutical, cognitive, and epistemological entity. This is in consonance with the Renaissance hermetic world view that based its thinking on the image and that proposed the human mind as the place where the real and the unreal are transformed. Vico, as does Renaissance hermeticism, roots his philosophical activity in a “science of seeing,” in which the eidos is both the source and the processor of thinking and creation. In fact, in answering the question of what metaphysics means for Vico, Mario Papini tells us that for Vico metaphysics is, “in an eminently Platonic sense, the science of the eidos, that is of the mental gaze: the one that allows us to see, beyond objects and events, their meaning: that which discerns, beyond the things that are in flux, the ‘table’ on which such a state of flux is allowed and dignified; that which succeeds in integrating the single fragments . . . of temporality, which indicate a multiplicity of traces or of trajectories for human events, and shapes them into a circle (eternity); that which, finally, suggests, beyond transience, perpetuity.”20 Papini offers this assessment as a comment on, among other things, a passage from the New Science (paragraph 502). In his study Papini makes others evaluations concerning the idea of “seeing” in Vico’s major work, as in the case of the Vichian meaning of “providence.” There is a connection that Papini makes that opens up the door for another

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Vichian confrontation with the hermetic tradition. In the conclusion to his study Papini claims that certain geometric figurations and mandalas found in Giordano Bruno’s Articuli adversus mathematicos call to mind the visual guise that one could attribute to Vico’s modus speculandi. What is of course interesting and of relevance is that Papini comes to these visual guises after having applied the idea of the quaternio to Vico. Papini is however careful to caution the reader that he is by no means suggesting that Bruno’s logica fantastica is somehow shared by Vico, for “while in Bruno the mind is projected towards infinity in an attempt to identify itself with it, in Vico there is instead that circle of conversion between verum and factum, which . . . concretizes human history.”21 But while Hegel’s “night of the world” points to a need to move away from the abyss where there exists an obscene and demonic contraction of the self into everything that exists around it, Vico’s “night of thick darkness” locates a point in the past that rational humans must rethink in order to arrive at the truths of history and civilization. The relevance of the Hegel passage to rethinking the hermetic is this: if we try to overcome the ruins left by the night of the world we would have, as Vattimo might suggest, the sterile metaphysics of the “end,” of “overcoming.” The direction to follow is one that involves walking through the night of the semiotic world and observe the ruins as they are left to us. Deciphering their inscriptions is akin to interpreting arcane, illegible hieroglyphs. Our interpretative task is circumscribed by an ethical idea: that of not desecrating the tombs of the dead. And it is out of this sign of respect that we plunge into the night of the world. (However, the irony, or paradox, is that we do not actually plunge nor are we thrown into this place. We are already there). In the pages that follow we consider the issue of hermetic semiosis from a critical angle nourished by Peirce’s insights into the nature of the sign: specifically, by offering a macrosemiotic account of the three subdivisions of “qualisignification,” “sinisignification,” and “legisignification” concerning the historical development of Western art, science, and narrative.22 Floyd Merrell has offered an explanation of the dynamics of Peirce’s semiotic thought that invites us to critically envision a dialogue between signifying practices of the past with those of the present. Merrell sums up a neo-Peircean idea of semiosis in figure W.1. Qualisignification is made up of signs as they exist in relation to themselves; sinisignification consists of signs that exist in relation to something

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Figure W.1 QUALISIGNIFICATION quali-

Sini-

legiA

ICON

WORD B

index

symbol SIGNIFICATION

C

sentence

text

LEGISIGNIFICATION

“other”; legisignification includes mediary relations of signs as they exist in relationship to themselves and to something “other.” According to Merrell, qualisignification pertains mostly to: 1) artworks that relate chiefly to themselves and only secondarily to the physical world; 2) scientific metaphors, models, and theories before they are placed alongside the teeming field of empirical objects, acts, and events; and 3) narrative portraying no particular perspective, much like that of medieval writing . . . and to self-referential narrative of the “postmodern”

Sinisignification instead refers to: 1) artworks presumably “representing” the “real world,” which, as it invariably turns out, are by and large false to their very premises; 2) scientific theories and their respective observation statements arising from empirical

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“data,” which, if at all viable, are destined sooner or later to be “refuted” and replaced by other theories and observations; and 3) so-called mimetic prose, which is likewise over the long haul false to itself.

Legisignification deals with: 1) art as “text,” “texture,” to be “read” and as such says what it is not more that what it is; 2) the language of science, which is invariably and implicitly meta-linguistic (it speaks about the nature of its utterances) and it is not concerned with saying what the real world is, and 3) textuality and intertextuality, the holistic field of written signs making up the self-organizing, bootstrapping universe of narrative.23

Merrell offers a further explanation of these three categories by suggesting that from a semiotic point of view qualisignification resembles a “dream-like existence as if the subject were in possession of nothing more than subsidiary awareness.” On the other hand sinisignification appears as a “wide-awake, focal awareness, with the subject supposedly ‘here’ and the object ‘there.’ But what eventually occurs is that the semiotic agent awakens to realize that she had actually been a glassy-eyed somnambulist all along, unaware that her ignorance had been taken as rock-solid knowledge.” Legisignification instead is a mixture of sorts of focal and subsidiary awareness, and it is of primal importance to consciousness and the life process. In Merrell’s own terms: “There is purpose to this knowing, but the endgame is never precisely and concisely in sight: it is on the whole a sort of purposeless purpose. There is thought, to be sure, but it is perpetually up for grabs, and change is always just around the corner: in the best of all worlds it is sort of perpetual unthinking of thinking. There is also knowledge, but it is never both consistent and complete, and there is no absolute certainty that it is right: it is a sort of unknowing knowing. The subject in this case is thoroughly twisted and tangled up in herself, the product of a complex trinary world far beyond and out of tune with the conventional binary world of eithers and ors, ifs and thens, blacks and whites.”24 When we correlate Merrell’s Peircean insights into semiosis with the pre-modern practice of alchemy, light is shed on the nature of this hermetic art. In a preface written to a catalogue of alchemical books, Carl G. Jung makes observations about the occult science of alchemy, which makes use of semiological metalanguage to explain its arcane significance:

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Alchemy is the forerunner or even the ancestor of chemistry, and is therefore of historical interest to the student of chemistry, in so far as it can be proved to contain certain recognizable descriptions of chemical substances, reactions, and chemical procedures. . . . The peculiar character of this literature lies, however, in the fact that there exists a comparatively large number of treatises out of which, apart from the most superficial indications, there is absolutely nothing of a chemical nature to be gained. It was therefore supposed—and the alchemists themselves wished, at any rate partly, to lead us to believe—that their mysterious semeiotic language (i.e., language of signs) was nothing but a skilful veiling of the chemical procedures which lay behind it. They implied that the adept himself saw through the veil of the hieroglyphics and recognized the secret chemical process. Unfortunately, however, alchemists of repute have destroyed this legend by admitting that they themselves were not in a position to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, for they complained that the old authors, such as Geber and Raymundus Lullius, had written in too obscure a fashion. A careful examination of the content of such treatises, which perhaps form the majority, can in fact reveal nothing of a chemical nature, but something which is purely semeiotic as symbolic, and thus the fact emerges that it is not a known content which is suggested, or suggests itself. This content can only be psychological. If one therefore analyzes these symbolic forms of speech, one comes to the conclusion that archetypal contents of the collective unconscious are projected here. Consequently alchemy gains the quite new and interesting aspect of a projected psychology of the collective unconscious, and thus ranks with mythology and folklore. Its symbolism is in the closest relation to dream symbolism on the one hand, and to the symbolism of religion on the other.25

When we bring Jung’s account into juxtaposition with the neo-Peircean categories proposed by Merrell, we come to the following conclusion about the semiotic nature of alchemical practice specifically, and generally also the nature of the hermetic mind: —qualisignification was hypertrophied and raised to a shrill pitch of medieval feeling, emotion, sentiment, faith and belief. —legisignification, what could be if only the proper conditions were to prevail, became an ideal aided and abetted by the hopes and desires invested in qualisignification, with relatively little regard for the actuality, the existent “semiotic objects,” of sinisignification.26

Qualisignification best typifies the semiotic process that characterizes the practice of alchemy. Although alchemy was presented by way of its

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constituent parts, it was understood by its practitioners as being a “science” that was part of the “whole,” which included the human subject, nature, and God. In alchemy there existed an unquestionable sense of total presence that was verified by the emotions and faith. Alchemy was a self-reflexive, self-contained, self-sufficient corpus of practices and beliefs that instilled a sense of continuity in those who practiced it. In essence, there existed no differentiation between alchemical work and the world in which it occurred and for that matter no distinction between the alchemical product and the individual who oversaw or perceived its creation. Nor was there a subject/object or mind/body division that came about in the aftermath of Descartes’s philosophical revolution. The art of Giotto di Bondone (1276 – 1337), which has little to with the hermetic tradition but much to do with the human mind projecting the union of noumenal and material onto works of art, is of assistance in helping understand how the pre-modern semiotic process worked in that art is a figuration, if you will, of this process. If one considers, for example, his Lamentation (ca. 1305) it gradually becomes clear that the way in which early-fourteenth-century Giotto perceived the relations of things in the world shares little in common with us today. In the Lamentation there is a depiction of a dead Christ surrounded by terrestrial figures in mourning below and angelic entities above. What is characteristic of this work is that the images appear to be unreal and exaggerated. In Robert D. Romanyshyn’s words, “ . . . they appear to be like cartoon figures we are so familiar with today . . . Giotto’s bodies . . . are bodies which shape, define, gather, give form to, and/or outline an emotional situation. Or more directly said, these bodies are the emotional outline and form of the situation. If they seem unreal to us, it is because we have become accustomed to defining the body apart from this situation . . . It is because within that neutral, abstract, and geometric space of linear perspective vision we have invented a neutral, abstract, and anonymous body to place within that space. Giotto’s figures, however, are not in space. On the contrary, they are the genesis of a space, the pivot around which the emotional space of situations appears. If they seem unreal to us, it is because we have become accustomed to regarding the body as being in a situation and have thereby forgotten that the body is a situation. Giotto’s figures can remind us of this fact, if we can open ourselves up to and reclaim the experienced sense of an embodied life which still exists for each of us beneath the anonymous and neutral body we have invented.”27

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While Giotto does not belong to the canon of the hermetic tradition, what this citation suggests are the many ways that are valid to make an extended definition of hermetic semiosis. The problem of perspective and the relation of body to space discussed in art history is not limited just to the domain of the figurative arts. If anything, art becomes a figure that offers a visible representation of how humans perceive the way in which they are linked to themselves and to the world. In fact, one could replace Giotto’s Lamentation in the quotation from Romanyshyn with the word “alchemy” and little would change as far as the semiotic perception is concerned.

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I

When the Kabbalists talk about the light under the candelabra of the seven arms that shines greater than the light that has been left to us, they are thinking about an idea that coincides perfectly with the new arithmetic that has been completely forgotten.

II

Before the advent of the unsayable word, people would announce messages by way of the idea of infinity.

III

After announcing the message by means of this idea, people spoke with the aid of the daughter of the Voice.

IV

No one knows where the sepulcher is since it was raised to the level of the highest joy, and in that joy it grounds its roots.

V

Any pneuma that receives the breath of goodness is a new pneuma that arrives from the Orient.

VI

Angels with six wings are the Seraphim. They never take on a form other than their own as they do not come into contact with the terrestrial world.

VII

When the light of the mirror that gives reflection will come to resemble the mirror that gives no reflection, the distinction between day and night will be dissolved.

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VIII A Renaissance hermetic philosopher relates that while in Bologna he once saw a corpse placed in a box and left in a river as part of an experiment. After a few days the flesh totally disintegrated, thus leaving behind a skeleton. The philosopher claims that a poet should always have a skeleton as a model, a model/skeleton transmitted from the past. The role of the poet is to dress the skeleton with the appropriate body forms. The skeleton is thus the essence of poetic creation. Onto-poetics has an ossified ground. The destiny of the onto-poetic is for this reason catacombal: things come full circle when the skeleton returns to be a skeleton and placed in a subterranean world of the dead who share space with the living who are concealing themselves from persecution. IX

But the poetic sign is rooted in the cultivation of the nonevident. Sextus Empiricus, in his Adversus Mathematicos, conjectures that given that there are things that are evident and those that are nonevident, we necessarily have to make recourse to signs and demonstrations. Sextus Empiricus suggests there are two types of sign: the common (or the commemorative) and the proper (or indicative). Any understanding of the sign, however, pivots on an analysis of the nonevident. The nonevident includes within its purview the unreal. The more we analyze the nonevident, the more it becomes evident that unreality is not necessarily hyperuranian but rather hidden in the presence of the immanent.

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I In a study on the spectral dimensions of cyberculture, Erik Davis offers evidence concerning the link between cybertechnology and the hermetic philosophy of the Renaissance.1 The past and the present, as it were, establish a relationship of seamlessness. However, as research in psychiatry will tell us, confusing the present with the past or not being able to distinguish between the two could be a sure sign of a pathological psyche. But we, like Davis, invoke the name of Benjamin to establish a critical framework for envisioning the past and the present as being partners in a network of seamless relationships. The issue here is not that of outlining a genealogy rooted in the dynamics of cause and effect—that is, of demonstrating the continuity linking a specific hermetic element rooted in a precise historical moment with a later element based in a different epoch. The point is rather to explain how two different historical epochs can come into contact with each other. In an attempt to underline the decayed nature of any logic that seeks to link a cause to an effect, Benjamin, in a previously quoted thesis from “These on the Philosophy of History,” writes that the historian who understands that an event can be only in an arbitrary sense the cause of a posthumous and disjointed effect “grasps the constellation which his own era formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” In other terms, history is not flat and linear but instead resembles a labyrinth or a Chinese box in which the unthought relics of the past come into contact, unbeknownst to us, with the present. As a result we maximize

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the possibility of encountering unpredicted and unheard of links and connections. In Richard Sieburth’s terms, “Instead of positing the past as a fixed point toward which the present must somehow return in order to recover or reconstruct it ‘as it really was,’ and conversely, instead of hypostatizing the present as that which has been ineluctably prefigured or predetermined by the past, the historian must make it clear that if there is any knowledge of the past or present to be had, this can only result if there is the dialectical interchange that occurs when the two meet. The place they meet is what Benjamin (following Proust) calls ‘awakening’ or ‘remembering,’ for just as the moment of waking up provides a precarious synthesis whose thesis is the dream from which it is just emerging and whose antithesis is the state of total wakefulness it has yet to achieve, so what once was and what is still to come momentarily collide to create the Now which the historian suddenly remembers.”2 “The Renaissance,” Will-Erich Peuckert informs us, “is a rebirth of the ‘occult sciences’ and not, as taught in the schools, the resurrection of classical philology and a forgotten vocabulary.” While it is true that this provocative assertion could be debated at great length, it is equally true that the Renaissance was the period in which hermetic reason witnesses its greatest theoretical maturation as well as the beginning of its (violent) demise, which resulted in its being relegated to the margins of intellectual history. The fact is, however, that during the Renaissance hermeticism was proposed as a new philosophy that would somehow help resolve the conflicts that afflicted Europe. In 1591 Francesco Patrizi published a work advocating a “new philosophy,” the Nova De Universis Philosophia. In the preface addressed to Pope Gregory XIV (Nicolò Sfrangiati), Patrizi hopes for the restoration of a sapientia that is not mere vacuous speculation but instead informed by the same critical tenets that dominated the day. The new philosophy, which was deeply rooted in the hermetic tradition, was in Patrizi’s mind reconcilable with Catholic theology. But the new philosophy soon became a condemned philosophy, as Patrizi’s book met the same fate as did Bernardo Telesio’s De Rerum Naturam, and the Omnia Opera of both Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, in that it was placed in the Index. A question that the history of ideas has not taken seriously enough: What was and what is the fate of Renaissance hermeticism? Giorgio Agamben has proposed a suggestive response to this question. In his view the entire development of modern philosophy takes place in the semantic

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juxtapositions that link pneuma-spiritus-esprit-Geist. This is so, Agamben continues, since the modern subject of experience and knowledge has its origins in a mystical idea; as a consequence, all explanations of the link between experience and knowledge in contemporary culture inevitably encounter obstacles that are difficult to overcome. But ultimately, the link between hermeticism and modern science appears much stronger than one might at first believe. In Agamben’s own words: Through science, it is in fact Neoplatonic mysticism and astrology that make their entry into modern culture, not Aristotle’s separate mind and incorruptible cosmos. And if astrology was subsequently abandoned (only subsequently: we must not forget that Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Copernicus were also astrologers, as was Roger Bacon, a fervent advocate of astrology who anticipates experimental science in many respects), it is because its fundamental principle—the union of experience and knowledge—had been so much assimilated as a principle of the new science through the constitution of a new subject that its essentially mythic-divine apparatus became superfluous. The rationalism/irrationalism which is so irreducibly a part of our culture has a hidden genesis in this primary kinship between astrology, mysticism and science; the astrological revival among Renaissance intellectuals is the most striking symptom of this. Historically, this genesis is linked to what has now been firmly established thanks to Warburghian philology: that the humanistic restoration of Antiquity was a restoration not of classical Antiquity but of the culture of late Antiquity, in particular of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. Thus a critique of mysticism, astrology and alchemy must necessarily imply a critique of science, and only the recovery of a dimension in which science and experience were each to find their own place of origin could prevail over the rationalism/irrationalism opposition.3

To the surprise of many, the events in Michel Foucault’s life shed an expanse of light on the question of Renaissance hermeticism’s fate. We should recall that in the second chapter of The Order of Things Foucault had made a link between contemporary linguistic theories and Renaissance hermeticism, as well as encouraging the reappearance of the hermetic materiality of the sign.4 According to one of his biographers, Foucault’s most sublime form of philosophical investigation involved seeking a different, occult truth hidden somewhere in the crevices of his soul and body. “But thinking and writing,” James Miller states about Foucault, “ were not the only ways in which he had tried to take care of himself: for at the same time, he

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had pursued a ‘critical ontology,’ trying to transform and transfigure his self, by experimenting, sacrificing himself, putting his body and soul to the test directly, through an occult kind of ascesis, centred on the daimonic ordeals of S/M. His telos and ultimate aim, in entering into this hermetic and highly ambiguous, ‘game’ of truth, was not to become chaste, pure, or immortal—or even to become a master of himself. It was to ‘think differently’: it was to feel bathed in the ‘forgotten sparkle of primitive light’; it was to feel attuned to a mysterious (and perhaps divine) spark within—what Kant called freedom; what Nietzsche called will to power; and what Heidegger called the ‘transcendens pure and simple.’” 5 The simple fact is that we usually associate the work of Foucault with the current debates in cultural materialism, history of sexuality, and so on, but never with the occult sciences of the hermetic tradition. However, it would be erroneous to affirm that Foucault was in a very general sense a “Hermetic” philosopher. It would be equally misleading to ignore the implications of Miller’s assessment of Foucault as well as those of others who perceive a Hermetic strain in the French philosopher’s intellectual practices.6 But Foucault is only one example of a contemporary para-hermeticism. In The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan lists the hermetic elements that psychoanalytic exegesis sets out to resolve: hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, labyrinths of the zwangsneurose, charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition, oracles of anxiety, the talking arms of character, seals of self-punishment, disguises of perversion. The Freudian Lacan has inadvertently offered a Jungian gesture. Lacan has here done, if only for a fleeting moment, what Jung did throughout his entire career: engage psychoanalytical discourse with the hermetic tradition: the tradition of Ficino, Camillo, and Bruno, and others. Lacan has allowed us to see for just a brief moment the hermetic palimpsest that rests, in catacombal fashion, below psychoanalytic thought. Maurizio Ferraris has offered a reading of Heidegger’s thought that underscores a passage from “phenomenology to occultism.” For Heidegger, Ferraris tells us, truth is that which is hidden, occult, “the shadow cone which is projected by the luminousness of the phenomenon.”7 This coupled with the idea that the metaphysical tradition is a history of the forgetting of an originary Being leads Ferraris to conclude that The discourse of being which is not the being of beings, to which Heidegger afforded the most essential aspect of his thought, is qualified above all

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as a transition from phenomenology to occultism—initially thought as a non hiding of the hidden being by beings and then thematized through the notion of Lichtung as lucus a non lucendo, like that light which gives itself only in the sporadic dispersing of the obscurity in the clearing.8

The presence of a link between Heidegger and the hermetic tradition has not escaped the attention of an historian of philosophy such as Paolo Rossi. Rossi establishes a fivefold analogy between the author of Being and Time and hermetic thought. According to Rossi, both hermeticism and Heideggerian thought share 1. the notion of a originary concealed knowledge 2. the fact that history moves from a primordial essence to decay and oblivion 3. a strongly elitist approach to knowledge 4. a powerful emphasis on the charismatic nature of a spiritual leader and a corresponding de-emphasizing of skepsis and intellectual transparency 5. a strong preference for obscurity over clarity9 Rossi is approaching Heidegger in a polemical way as the emphasis is on the German philosopher’s delegitimization of a rigorousness and sound understanding of what defines philosophical discourse. And his attitude to hermetic reason is equally negative. As some would have it, the problem with hermetic semiosis, or what in general we can term esoteric semiotics, is that its validity, as a way to produce meanings and as far as the ethics of interpretation are concerned, is highly suspect if not a hallucinatory aberration of human culture. For example, Umberto Eco characterizes hermetic semiosis as being essentially a weak, defective, impaired mode of linguistic communication. The hermetic sign is an icon of frailty as far as the potential for human signifying practices are concerned. Paradoxically, it is precisely the fragile nature of the hermetic sign that allows it to perform a basic function of the lyric sign—that is, to grasp the ungraspable. But what is it about hermeticism that makes it such a powerful ally of the postmodern experience, as some have argued? In his essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Walter Benjamin offers a way of dealing with this question. In an attempt to explain the dynamics of any interpretative enterprise,

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Benjamin finds himself obliged to take the retro-hermetic path and conjugates the name of the critic with that of the alchemist: Critique seeks the truth of a work of art; commentary, its material content. The relation between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material content. If, therefore, the works that prove enduring are precisely those whose truth is most deeply sunken in their material content, then, in the course of this duration, the concrete realities rise up before the eyes of the beholder all the more distinctly the more they die out in the world. With this, however, to judge by appearances, the material content and the truth content, united at the beginning of a work’s history, set themselves apart from each other in the course of its duration, because the truth content comes to the fore. More and more, therefore, the interpretation of what is striking and curious—that is, the material content—becomes a prerequisite for any later critic. One may compare him to a paleographer in front of a parchment whose faded text is covered by the lineaments of a more powerful script which refers to that text. As the paleographer would have to begin by reading the latter script, the critic would have to begin with commentary. And with one stroke, an invaluable criterion of judgement springs out for him; only now can he raise the basic critical question of whether the semblance/luster of the basic truth content is due to material content, or the life of the material content to the truth content. For as they set themselves apart from each other in the work, they decide on its immortality. In this sense the history of works prepares for their critique, and thus historical distance increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced [italics my own].10

Hannah Arendt was astonished to see Benjamin equate the critic with the alchemist, and writes, “[T]he critic as an alchemist practicing the obscure art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, enduring gold of truth, or rather watching and interpreting the historical process that brings about such magical transfiguration—whatever we may think of this figure, it hardly corresponds to anything we usually have in mind

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when we classify a writer as a literary critic.”11 But then again Benjamin was fond of fusing together materialist ideology with his style of philosophical interpretation, which he had once described as being “innocently archaic.”12 We also need to remember the role that the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition played within his writings up to his death. Benjamin is a sign of the living hermetic idea that has incubated itself in the monumental texts of this century. In his provocative book on Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano offers one of the most incisive readings of Renaissance hermeticism, a reading that overlaps with a meditation on the nature of modern thought. After illustrating the great extent to which the hermetic tradition has been neglected and misunderstood (thanks, in Couliano’s view, to the censoring of the phantasmatic imagination on the part of the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, and in turn by modern science), and how this neglect has brought about “fatal results” for Western civilization, Couliano expresses a hope: “ . . . that a new Renaissance, a rebirth of the world, may overcome all our neuroses, all conflicts, and all divisions existing between us. For such a Renaissance to appear a new Reformation must arise, effecting once again a profound modification of the human imagination in order to impress on it other paths and other goals.”13 It would not be difficult to mistake such a wish for some form of New Age babbling. The fact is, however, that Couliano was a serious scholar of the history of religions and had a strong scholarly interest in Renaissance hermeticism. As vague as his wish might appear, it is nonetheless the sentiment and expression of someone who has crossed the cartography of ideas, including the many sediments, that have shaped the West. II In the late 1970s, when the crisis of reason was on the research agenda of many Italian thinkers, Franco Rella saw it necessary to invent a new form of knowing: “ . . . if it is necessary to destroy a rationality founded on the occulting of unconscious pulsational tensions, it is necessary, however, to construct a new type of rationality, mercilessly secular, that heeds attention also to obscurity, also to the irrational, of that which, repressed and hidden, reveals itself as mystery and enchantment.”14 In Gabriele La Porta’s view, Rella’s project for a new rational metaphysics bears an extraordinary similarity to Giordano Bruno’s lucid investigation into the creative and

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epistemological powers of the imaginative faculty.15 But let us align Rella’s quote with a citation from Walter Benjamin, who affirms that one finds the truth in “ . . . a profane illumination, of materialist and anthropological inspiration. . . .” Benjamin is fusing, as we have already had the occasion to observe, the most materialist of ideologies with what would appear to be a theological aura. But what is it that Benjamin and Rella have in common? To begin with, we need to remember that Rella has written extensively on Benjamin and that he has developed a philosophical world view that is unquestionably in debt to the German philosopher-critic. Ultimately, what the two share is a belief that the material must be conjugated with the unreal. In other words, that the most powerful truth is achieved by expelling the irrational specters from the economy of our material world is only an illusion. The fact is, we are able to seize reality only once we have grasped unreality. Benjamin’s close friend Gershom Scholem understood that for Benjamin, the act of reading and interpreting is “an occult event, although the philosophers do not like to admit this.” The common tendency is to view Benjamin’s ideas from the point of view of cultural materialism. But this is only part of the picture. Benjamin’s world view was a contamination of Marxist material dialectic and the occult. “Like a true gnostic, accustomed to persecutions and disguises,” Roberto Calasso tells us, “Benjamin wanted to hide beneath the cloak of a dialectical materialist and be attacked as such, so that he could survive as a gnostic, unharmed.”16 In making this assessment, Calasso is specifically referring to the philatelic meditations offered in Benjamin’s “One-Way Street.” The collectors solely concerned with canceled stamps are “the only ones who have penetrated the secret” as they truly understand that cancellation constitutes the “occult part of the stamp.” Calasso tells us that this very short essay on postage stamps was to constitute the “tone” of the Passagen-werk. Benjamin’s exegesis of the philatelic practice is in many ways an exercise in the quest for hidden or occult affinities (the stamp collector must possess “like a cabbalist an inventory of dates for an entire century”).17 Call it cultural criticism, but its materialist pretense is a disguise, as Calasso rightly observes, for an interpretative approach that owes more to the gnostic-hermetic than to Marx. Benjamin is as interested in occult links as he is in the material things that hide the links. The Passagen-werk is a seemingly infinite collection of fragments and quotations that contaminates the evident will of cultural materialism with

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the strange voice of a hermetic science concerned with “secrets” and “reawakening.” In the concluding sentences of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, in a discussion in which he compares the allegory to a fragment/ruin, Benjamin writes, “In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in the lesser buildings, however well preserved they are . . .” and the reason for this is that the ruin “ . . . preserves the image of beauty to the very last . . .”18 The Passagen-werk is, among other things, an attempt to “invent” the aura that has become scarce, if not extinct. But this new aura, so speak (“new” in the sense that it assumes a guise that is distinguished by the contingencies of a different historical context) assumes the form of the “secret.” When talking about “One-Way Street,” Rolf Tiedemann refers to Benjamin’s grasping without any mediation the “secret” of what is tangible or concrete. In the earliest notes for the Passagen-werk, Benjamin refers to “a universe of unique affinities and particular secrets. . . .”19 But the idea of secret is not as vague and ephemeral as it might at first appear. What Benjamin has in mind is a certain way of viewing history, and specifically a historical gaze that “liberates the enormous forces of history” that are misplaced or hidden in the “‘once upon a time’ of classical historical narration.” Thus, for Benjamin the hidden secret is what is lodged and unnoticed in the critical language of a form of thinking that is its own limit. The secret, however, is reachable through a reawakening. Both Benjamin and Rella are interested in cultivating what could be called a “new rationality,” a new way of perceiving and understanding the world necessitated by the dissolution of ideologies that were no longer responsive to human cultural practices. A paradigm for a new rationality is the thought of Giordano Bruno, specifically his treatises on memory. In fact, Bruno’s works such as De Umbris Idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas) and others tread interpretative and textological paths that are parallel to the ones traced by Benjamin’s Passagen-werk. While we are in no way claiming a Brunian cause-and-effect genealogy for Benjamin’s work, there is however the suggestion that Bruno’s and Benjamin’s respective signifying eras participate in the same constellation of signs, which allows us to conceive of the present moment of interpretation and message production as the “time of the now,” to use Benjamin’s previously quoted expression, “which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” What connects Bruno’s hermetic art of memory to Benjamin’s para-hermetic envisioning of the new modern is the idea of reawakening and transformation.

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What transformation? To answer this question we need to keep a few things in mind, foremostly the nature of transformations. According to Jean Baudrillard, transformation “knows neither metaphor nor the operation of meaning.” That is to say, meaning does not slide from form to form; instead, in Baudrillard’s view, the forms themselves slide from one to another, “as in dance movements or in oracular prophecies.” Moreover, this form has rather specific characteristics as it is neither a psychological nor a sexual body but “a body freed from all subjectivity, a body recovering the animal felinity of the pure object, of pure movement, of a pure gestural transparition.” Baudrillard qualifies this notion by adding that the movement from one form to another is a means of disappearing and not of dying. Disappearance entails one’s dissemination in appearances: “and dying doesn’t do any good; one must still know how to disappear. Living doesn’t do any good; one must still seduce.”20 Baudrillard builds on his logic of metamorphosis by claiming that transformation lacks a symbolic order; instead, it is equipped with a “vertiginous succession where the subject loses itself in ritual sequences . . . it is only when this transfiguration of forms from one into the other comes to a halt that a symbolic order appears, that meaning is metamorphized according to the law.” In fact, the metaphor, an essential component in the logic of metamorphosis, is a tropological figure for the experience of exile. However, Baudrillard speculates, “in exile one can always maintain a comfortable distance, a pathetic, dramatic, critical, aesthetic distance—the orphan-like serenity of one’s own world, this is the ideal figure of the territory.” But exile is something quite different from deterritorialization, which “is no longer exile at all, and it is no more a metaphoric figure, it is a figure of metastasis; a deprivation of meaning and territory, lobotomy of the body resulting from the turmoil of the circuits.”21 For example, Bruno’s presence as it is projected to the present century assumes a deterritorialized form in that the body of his thought means something quite different from what it might have meant for his own time. However, in observing the role that a purely materialist science has played in defining the operations of the human, thus displacing the religious, metaphysical, and philosophical definitions, Baudrillard observes: “We are in a system where there is no more soul, no more metaphor of the body—the fable of the unconscious itself has lost most of its resonance. No narrative can come to metaphorize our presence; no transcendence can play a role in our definition; our being is exhausting itself in molecular

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linkings and neuronic convolutions.”22 One of the aims of this unit as well as of this book in general is to suggest that not only can a narrative (which I employ here aphoristically as a definition for poetic logic) recite a critical role in defining both the existential and the hyperreal, but transcendence itself (which now constitutes a conceptual and practical element that needs to be rediscovered and then archaeologically unearthed) has the potential to play an important role as far as understanding the real is concerned. So while Baudrillard is essentially correct in his assessment of the hegemony of a materialist scientific mode of cultural exegesis, it is equally true that we need to make the effort to rediscover the use of narrative or poetic reason and transcendence in a new cultural time and place. To this very day Giordano Bruno remains one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures of the history of ideas. Bruno is essentially a twopronged problem: What did he mean for his time, and what does he mean today? While I remain sensitive to the first question, it is the latter issue that most concerns me. Carlo Sini provides an eloquent point of departure for understanding Bruno in respect to contemporary intellectual practices. In a discussion dealing with Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum, Sini comments that “these expressions of calculated prudence will certainly not surprise those who are familiar with Bruno’s Latin and Italian texts, so exuberant, rich with double-meanings and interlaced with allusive and allegorical images, in . . . the style of the times, but also in the style of a thought that found its centre and its essential reason in the images of the art of memory and in the notion of thought as arcane writing and as painting which is in its own way hieroglyphic. This style of thinking, which perished with the imposition of that which we today call modernity, has only recently achieved conceptual clarity . . . The day is still far, but perhaps not very remote, when free theoretical thought will be able to recover this obscure region of its past and will be able to traverse it and adventure in it, in order perhaps to discover that not only behind Leibniz’s reflections on language and writing, and more generally on logic, but also behind Peirce’s research on ‘graphs’ and semiotics, or behind Wittgenstein’s arduous meditation on the logic of representation, there is an unthought and unwitting heritage, issues that reemerge from the most remote antiquity of human thought and its signs, which assume, from time to time, different semblances, incomparable valences, but also exigencies of truth which tenaciously return to provoke thought.”23 Sini is suggesting, among other things, that we need to scrutinize the fundamental contributions of figures such as Leibniz, Peirce, and

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Wittgenstein in order to uncover a palimpsest that belongs to a radically different cultural context, such as Bruno’s. Bruno’s philosophy was heavily indebted to the hermetic tradition: Bruno had absorbed the Corpus Hermeticum and the teachings of important hermetic figures such as Marsilio Ficino. The most important aspect of Bruno’s hermeticism was the art of memory. He transformed (in a way similar to the work of Giulio Camillo) the art of memory from a technique for remembering to a means of knowing and manipulating the secrets of the universe. According to the hermetic mind-set, the truth rests in the extraterrestrial bodies that contain the spirit animating the universe. The Renaissance magus sought to control the spirit or energy through talismans or special images that they would manipulate through their memory. By manipulating mental images we can also control the way we and others perceive reality. Reality is transformed by means of the psyche’s ability to store, recall, and dispose images. That is to say, by means of the art of memory we discover new dimensions of reality and unreality from our subjective point of view, but we also encourage or seduce others to see things in a different way. Hermetic art of memory was evidently also about power. Bruno wrote a series of memory treatises: De Umbris Idearum (1582), Cantus Circaeus (1582), Explicatio Triginta Sigillorum (1582), Lampas Triginta Statuarum (1587), and De imaginum, signorum, et idearum compositione (1591). These works could be described as manuals for the science of the imagination. One could also argue that the hermetic art of memory is a cognitive science, a process for creating and for knowing. The memory manuals are also self-help books, as they offer a wealth of information on the nature of mental images and how to use them for one’s benefit. In the De Umbris Idearum we see that the star-images are what constitute the “shadows of ideas,” shadows of realness that are much closer to reality than are the corporeal shadows in the terrestrial world. The text granted to the philosopher by Hermes, as Bruno writes, is concerned with “the shadows of ideas contracted for inner writing” in that it offers a catalogue of magical images of the stars to be impressed on the memory. The process of impressing the images of “superior agents” on memory is gnoseological in nature since one will know things below from the perspective of above. The De Umbris Idearum begins with an unambiguous warning: the reader will be permitted to participate in the secret knowledge Bruno is about to impart on the condition that the adeptus be willing to enter

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into the labyrinth of the hermetic sciences without the aid of a thread stemming to a previous reality. What is implied in Bruno’s advice is that the construction of memory is very much an anti-teleological activity. The aim of Bruno’s art of memory is to create knowledge, a mnemonic composition of the world within the cartographic space of the memory’s theater. Bruno’s science is non-aprioristic as it moves not under the aegis of pre-established impulses but rather under the influence of the transient shadows’ unpredictable reaction to the fixedness of the eternal. It is only when we begin to perceive Bruno’s mnemonic philosophy in this manner that his closeness to late-twentieth-century thought becomes progressively evident. Bruno’s art of memory is not limited to being a mode of remembering things; moreover, the memory is not the medium but the very “thing” of a hermeneutics that attempts to find paths linking the eternal with the unpredictable. In the De Umbris Idearum Mercury clearly states that the book on the shadows of ideas has been hidden for much time in tenebrosity. Bruno will unconceal the book to the light of day with stipulated conditions. The knowledge contained in the book is secret; it is occult, inaccessible except for a select few. The knowledge is hermetic and antidemocratic and must be protected from those who would never be able to understand it. Bruno is cautious in his usage of the word “shadow.” A shadow is not darkness but images of darkness in light or even images of light in darkness, or possibly participating in both light and darkness, or composed of light and darkness, or a mixture of light and darkness. This is so “not because the truth is not full of light, or because it is false light . . . but because it is an image of that which is true or false. The shadow is then an image of light, participating in light, light which is not full.” The shadow is an image of a murky light, of a lucence that does not blind. A notion central to both Bruno’s philosophy and Benjamin’s poetic logic is the relationship between the eternal and the transience of temporal existence. A major function of hermetic mnemonics is that of inventing or discovering the passage that links the transient to the eternal. The morphology of the passage consists of the images of the many terrestrial forms whose imperfection is redeemed in their “ideal” celestial counterpart. Thus while the teleology of this process consists in knowing the perfect unity of things that exist in the domain of eternity, the means pivots on the mental manipulation of the incomplete images within the geography of the memory. The mind will know eternity only once it has experienced the precariousness of

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earthly figures. Indeed, since the eternal ideas are the principal forms of things, in adherence to which all is given life, we should therefore form in ourselves the shadows of ideas. The shadows become the language and texts we employ to interpret the silence of the eternal. While Bruno is undoubtedly creating a hierarchy that privileges the “Idea” over the terrestrial manifestation or shadow, what must not be underestimated is the centrality of the shadowy figures in the process upon which cognition of the eternal pivots. The transformation of images in the memory system will lead the intellect to an intelligible vision of the world. Moreover, the world of the psyche that houses the image-laden memory is much closer to the truth than is the external world of historical time. The figure transformed by memory speaks with greater proximity to the eternal than does any language that intentionally disrupts the artery, however jagged it may be, connecting shadows to ideas. But any discussion concerning the relationship between the time of decay and the atemporality of the eternal in Bruno must be highly sensitive to what the hermetic philosopher terms the triad of the infigurable. “Ipsa sunt Chaos, Orcus, Nox.”24 Between Chaos, “primum omnium,” and Night, “materia prima,” there hides the liquid maelstrom of Orcus, or infinite desire. A maelstrom of seduction inscribed in Chaos itself: an enchanting vertigo, as Adelia Noferi would phrase it, that constitutes the occult and intoxicating wonder of Chaos.25 There is clearly a logic that governs the symbiotic relationship between desire and Chaos. The former is characterized by absence, which unyieldingly defers the discovery of a final tangible origin of all things. Chaos also is absence and its wonder rests in a desire to locate it cartographically. This is, however, impossible and thus Chaos-desire remains an undividable binomial. Bruno provides a very concise definition of Chaos: “Unfigured, infigurable. And since any figure is necessarily corporeal physical matter it [Chaos] precedes any body or matter and is thus free of them.”26 Moreover, Chaos is free of any predetermined telos that would attenuate the significance of the uncanny, awe-inspiring unpredictability of human experience. This is the root of the conflict that Bruno’s hermetic philosophy would encounter with any form of classical rationalism. While the method of classical rationalism is faithful to fixed rational postulates, Bruno’s science hovers above a rhetorical geography in which any hierarchy that privileges an ordained end is absent.

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Similar to the mind of God, Chaos is a void that could never be filled although it holds everything. It can be perceived solely as a boundary of demarcation that separates the various dimensions. Chaos is the simultaneous presence of absence and emptiness for all that is present and full: “Nothing exists in it, it has nothing. We must not perceive the presence of bodies in it as a sign of its ability to receive a fullness. Rather, the bodies exist since the dimensions of the void exist alongside the dimensions of the bodies . . . thus nothing could escape its presence.”27 Chaos is the obscurity that resides in the tangible and audible but that is nonetheless fleeting and incommunicable. It is the specter that haunts the act of communication. Chaos is indivisible yet it constitutes division and dimension: Chaos is nothing else but the receptacle of dimensioned and divisible bodies in which there occurs division and where everything is indivisible . . . Chaos is one and continued everywhere: it is not distinguishable from diversity, distinction, contiguity and continuity of bodies . . . It does not enter into composition as a part although it is inscribed in any compound.28

Chaos, this atopic obscurity, is the mother of images. To use technical Brunian language, Chaos is the “subjectum,” the place where images are clothed with figures and given traces of intelligible meaning. The faceless obscurity is what grants to things accessible signification. The “subjectum” is the “sinus inexplebilis formarum et specierum,” the locus of metamorphosis, of multiplicity, of the infinite combination of things.29 The shapes that emerge from Chaos are akin to the images that surge forth from the imagination. The shadow of the simulacre is impressed on the universe of both the res and the res significativae. Chaos and the infinite productivity of the imagination is made explicit in Bruno: “Hic adeo amplissimus sinus intitulatus Phantasia.”30 Images and figures are endowed with the lability of erring and aimless simulacre that peregrinate metamorphically from one form to another within the context of their incessant composition and decomposition. This unfigured thing is characterized by thirty conditions, the first being that the vicissitude and order of light to light be understood. The appearance and the return of light indicates darkness and light . . . Just as we do not know the shadow if not for its difference from light [light of course is known for itself ], so we are not able to know Night or matter if not through succession on the same subject of the forms that are the daughters of light.31

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But what is of interest is not just the nature of Bruno’s hermetic science but indeed its fate. If we are to believe what scholarship has to say about Bruno and his kind, the occult sciences (and the art of memory in particular) died with the advent of classical rationalism. But while we are not claiming that the news of its death was an exaggeration, it is true that there are much too many affinities between the thought of some important thinkers of this century and the hermetic past. In the present case, the thought of Walter Benjamin. The Passagen-werk and Bruno’s memory treatises tread parallel paths. Both are an accumulation and assortment of ruins. Benjamin’s work is the outline of an edifice, while Bruno’s works are an outline of a structure. Both are based on the idea of a reawakening. We reawaken to find these ruins, we reawaken again every time we assemble and reassemble them. For Benjamin, David Michael Levin asserts, “modernity under late capitalism is dominated, and haunted, by dream-images and commodified visual fetishes: visual processes re-enchanting the world that the Enlightenment, and then Marxism, had struggled to free from illusion.”32 However, the core of Benjamin’s hermetic mind-set is to be found in what Gershom Scholem calls “Walter Benjamin’s Angel.” This Angel is at once Klee’s Angelus Novus, the description of Klee’s Angel in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” but also the figure Benjamin talks about in the “Agesilaus Santander.” Scholem states that Benjamin’s genius is “concentrated in this angel”; the Angel is for Benjamin “the occult reality of his self.”33 Against the image of a Benjamin imbued in Marxist materialism, Scholem presents a Benjamin who is closely linked to the mystical and the occult. Such an interpretation is encouraged by passages, among others, such as the section entitled “To the Planetarium” from Benjamin’s “OneWay Street,” where we read that “Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods.” But the relationship between humans and the cosmos had been in the past characterized by a form of epistemological narcosis that was to be supplanted by the empirical and ratio-logical mind-sets: “The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch]. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never one without the other . . . It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry

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nights.”34 The cognito-epistemological experience Benjamin describes here is one that restitutes to the empty poetic sign a property essentially unknown to us today: the poetic sign as the messenger of an experience and a body of knowledge that has its own “reason.” Any understanding of Benjamin’s hermetic philosophy is informed by insights offered by a short piece he wrote, “Doctrine of the Similar,” during the spring of 1933 on the island of Ibiza, which expounds a theory of occult phenomena. The element that brings Benjamin in relatively close intellectual contact with other hermetic philosophers is the insistence on the issue of hidden, secret correspondences that exist between entities in the life-world in general. In fact, the opening sentence of “Doctrine of the Similar” reads: “Insight into the areas of the ‘similar’ has a fundamental importance for the illumination of large areas of occult knowledge.”35 Benjamin does suggest that the magical correspondences that humans perceived in the past have been greatly reduced in the present age. Yet, he also admits the possibility of a transformation of the magical correspondences into something else, and cites the example of the horoscope to explain this notion. To be sure, the astrological charts contain information and data whose “rational” significance is barely intelligible to us but fully understood by humans in the past. “The horoscope,” Benjamin writes, “must be understood as an original totality which astrological interpretation merely analyzed . . . we must always take account of the fact that celestial process could be imitated by those who lived earlier, both collectively and individually.”36 The central point that Benjamin is seeking to make is that the faculty of human imitation is at the root of the experiential nature of astrological thinking. The understanding of similarity does not involve the mechanical lucubrations of ratio-logical reflection but rather occurs like an instantaneous flash: “It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars.”37 For this reason the cognition of similarities is encased within the purview of a “time-moment.” The fact remains, however, that we no longer possess the cognitive trait necessary in order to perceive the similarities existing between humans and a constellation of stars. We do have, Benjamin states, at least one instrument that allows us to shed light on the mystery of hidden similarities, namely, language. Benjamin locates the residue of the mimetic faculty in verbal language, the strongest example being the role of onomatopoeia in human speech. In fact, Benjamin quotes Rudolph Leonhard’s idea that “every word—and the whole

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language—is onomatopeic.”38 This notion is verified, in Benjamin’s view, in the concept of similarity: “If, from the different languages, one were to arrange words meaning the same thing around what they mean as their centre, then it would be necessary to examine if these words, which often have not the slightest similarity to each other, are similar to that meaning in their center.”39 Benjamin does recognize here that such an interpretation has much in common with theological and mystical ideas of language, but without necessarily “being alien to empirical philology.” In essence, Benjamin is convinced that language and writing constitute an archive of hidden correspondences; but the human being is himself or herself the carrier of these occult affinities: “What the stars effected millennia ago in the moment of being born into human existence wove itself into human existence on the basis of similarity.”40 The hermetic theories expounded in “Doctrine of the Similar” inform the essence of Benjamin’s short autobiographic writing “Agesilaus Santander,” whose main figure is the Angel and that Scholem terms a “thoroughly hermetic text.”41 There are two versions of this brief piece, a first one dated “Ibiza, August 12, 1933” and a second and longer version dated the following day. Just as in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the main subject of “Agesilaus Santander” is Klee’s Angelus Novus. However, the name “Agesilaus Santander,” Scholem tells us, is an anagram for “Der Angelus Satanas,” “The Angel Satan.”42 This name, according to Scholem, “joins together the angelic and demonic forces of life in the most intimate union . . . Like every truly secret magic name, it may not be entrusted or disclosed to unauthorized ones.”43 The point is that the Angel hides and protects the name of Benjamin’s life and existence, and in approaching his vision of the self in such a way, Benjamin is unquestionably rehearsing some of the main traits of monotheistic angelology. For example, in the second version of “Agesilaus Santander,” Benjamin writes that the Angel “resembles all from which I have had to part: persons and above all things. He makes them transparent, and behind all of them there appears to me the one for whom they are intended.”44 In other words, the name of the Angel is the invisible archive of Benjamin’s spiritual and material existence; in fact, in the first version Benjamin actually makes reference to summoning the Angel.45 But the element that the Angel seeks the most is happiness that is figured in the unrepeatable instant of meaning and of being, which shatters the repetitive logic of history. In Benjamin’s own words, the Angel “wants happiness: the conflict in which lies the ecstasy of the

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unique, [‘once only’] new, as yet unlived with that bliss of the ‘once more,’ the having again, the lived.”46 We conclude this unit on occult correspondences and ascesis by offering an observation about Bruno’s hermetic heresy in relation to Benjamin’s Angel and Foucault’s epistemo-erotic practices. In a document dated Rome, September 9, 1599, and pertinent to Bruno’s trial for heresy, we read that the six members of the tribunal looking into his case all agree on submitting Bruno to corporeal torture as a means to obtaining a more satisfying confession.47 Pope Clement VIII did not however grant the approval necessary for the carrying out of the torture. In other words, while Foucault, we are told, practiced Sado-masochism as a means to experience an occult ascesis, Bruno’s occult ascesis lead to an unwilling and finally aborted torture session. But what does this superimposition of facts and interpretations mean? Is Foucault a victim of the eternal return of the same (is his life a demonic parody of Bruno’s)? Or was his erotico-philosophic gesture an unprecedented and possibly unrepeatable act of human signification? For now let us say that what Bruno, Benjamin, and Foucault share is the notion that something (both non-rational and obscure, yet that gives light) of great import rests occult in the material culture of human experience. It is the occult truth of psychic and corporeal illumination for Bruno; the occult philosophical light of sado-masochist pleasure for Foucault; the occult and intoxicating affinities between material objects protected by the name of the Angel for Benjamin. Finally, in all three cases it is a search for the ancient experience of the infinite joy of cosmic narcosis for which we today have a great nostalgia.

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skar Panizza, a man learned in music, philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry, and whose deranged mind forced him into the Herrogshöhe mental asylum where he died, imagined the scene of the Annunciation in The Inn of the Trinity (1899): “In her sleep, Mary heard what seemed like a storm hit her house. One of the shutters opened and suddenly she saw a huge white shape with luminous hair standing on its feet in front of her. This shape hovered over her and whispered something into her ear.” The Angel who utters the inaudible words into the Virgin’s ear announces itself as a meteorological disturbance. This is so because the Angel is “disturbing” the invisible line that separates the perceivable from the unperceivable. Any transmutation that involves the visible and the invisible necessarily disturbs humans living in a sensorial-centric world. When we say that someone is “disturbed” with reference to their mental health, what we are actually saying is that they receive messages and announcements that pay no heed to the distinction between what is real and what is unreal, what is visible and what is invisible. But although humans have no wings, as Paul Claudel writes in Positions and Propositions, there is enough strength to fall. That is, they have the weight (PENSUM) of thinking (PENSARE). Instead, the Angel possesses only the lightness of unrepeatable and unthought knowledge. The closest that humans come to such a state of being is through the unbearable empty truth of the poetic sign. Alberto Moravia had a similar idea in mind when, in commenting on the violent (indeed sacrificial) death of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, he announced that “il poeta dovrebbe essere sacro” (the poet should be sacred). The “lyric sacredness” conjured up here would ultimately become the new name of signification.

NOTES

A 1. Lorenzo Papi, Marino Marini (Turin: Priuli e Verlucca Editori, 1987). B 1. M. H. Keefer, “The Dreamer’s Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996), 30–76. 2. Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Pearson (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1978), pp. 5–6. 3. Corbin, The Man of Light, pp. 5–6. 4. Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’i, “On the Esoteric Meaning of the Tomb,” in Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, trans. Nancy Pearson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 189. 5. Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 187. 6. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, trans. Ralph Manheim. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 22. 7. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 220. 8. Rafael Alberti, Sobre Los Ángeles (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S. A., 1959), p. 86. 9. Alberti, Sobre Los Ángeles, p. 22. 10. Eugenio Montale, Satura (Milan: Mondadori, 1971), p. 90. 11. John Chrysostomos, Hom. III, 326–329 in Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu, ed. J. Daniélou, A. M. Malingrey, R. Flacelière. Sources Chrétiennes 28 bis (Paris, 1970). 12. John Chrysostomos, Hom., IV, 222–228.230. 13. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 86, 87. 14. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 69. 15. Cited in Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 83.

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16. Rilke, “Orchards” from The Roses in The Complete French Poems of R. M. Rilke, trans. A. Poulin (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1986), p. 138. 17. Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. Felicia McCarren(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 76–77. 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 6.44. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1984). 20. Henri Meschonnic, Le signe et le poème (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 48. C 1. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets for?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 91. 2. Heidegger, “What Are Poets for?,” p. 92. 3. Heidegger, “What Are Poets for?,” p. 94. 4. Heidegger, “What Are Poets for?,” p. 94. 5. Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogo della moda e della morte” in Operette morali, ed. P. Ruffilli (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), p. 35. D 1. Franco Rella, La battaglia della verità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986), p. 41. 2. Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, trans. P. A. Schlipp (La Salle and Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1979), p. 7. 3. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 28. 4. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, p. 29. 5. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, p. 47. 6. “Interview,” Corriere della sera (Terza pagina), Tuesday, May 6, 1997. 7. Wislawa Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanaugh (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 6. 8. Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand, p. 148. 9. J.-F. Lyotard, The Post Modern Explained, trans. and ed. J. Pefanis and M. Thomas (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 15–16. 10. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, in Tutte le opere, ed. F. Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1967) I, 140.

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11. Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 104. 12. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263. 13. Walter Benjamin, “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913 – 1926, p. 213. 14. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 119. E 1. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 42 ff. 2. Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma und Mythos (Hamburg: Reich, 1954), p. 17. 3. Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 193–194. 4. The points summarize the contents of “Necessità dell’angelologia” found in Corbin’s Il paradosso del monoteismo, trans. Gabriele Rebecchi (Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1986). 5. Corbin, Il paradosso del monoteismo, p. 39. 6. Corbin, Il paradosso del monoteismo, pp. 41–42. 7. Summa Theologiae I, q. 54, a. 4. 8. Summa Theologiae I, q. 57, a. 2. 9. Fox and Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels, p. 87. 10. Hildegard of Bingen, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1844–91), 197, 1041C. 11. Hildegard of Bingen, Patrologia Latina, 1045A. 12. Hildegard of Bingen, Patrologia Latina, 1043C. 13. Henry Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, trans. Leonard Fox (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 1995), p. 9. 14. Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, pp. 10–11. 15. Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, pp. 14–15. 16. Cited in Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, p. 31. 17. Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, p. 32. 18. Maurice Merleau–Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 257. 19. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 4–5.

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F 1. Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 41–42. 2. Floyd Merrell, Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Process (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 275. 3. Merrell, Signs Grow, p. x. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Foreword by Paul Bové (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 105. 5. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 104. 6. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 7. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. and foreword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 3. 8. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3. 9. Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 34–38. 10. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 33. 11. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 14. 12. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 3. 13. Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), p. 283. 14. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p. 283. 15. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p. 298. 16. “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, p. 257). 17. Franco Rella, Il silenzio e le parole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), p. 169. 18. Franco Rella, “L’Angelo e la sua ombra,” Rivista di estetica 31 (XXIX) 1989, 118. 19. Rella, “L’Angelo e la sua ombra,” p. 120.

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20. Rella, “L’Angelo e la sua ombra,” p. 121. 21. Rella, “L’Angelo e la sua ombra,” p. 125. 22. St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri 12, in Patrologia latina 34. IV, 23–32. 23. Paolo Valesio, Prose in poesia (Milan: Guanda, 1979), p. 89. G 1. F. W. J. Schelling, Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), p. 222. 2. Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, rev. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1995), p. 9. 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 106. H 1. Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, trans. J. Lacoste (Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 1989), p. 366. 2. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Reflections, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 269. 3. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, pp. 405–406. 4. Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose,p. 133. 5. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), pp. 7–8. 6. Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), XIII, 220–221. 7. P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, rev. trans. E. Kadloubovsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 221. 8. Plotinus, Select Works of Plotinus, trans. Thomas Taylor, ed. G. R. S. Mead (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1929). 9. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, p. 222. 10. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, p. 222. 11. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, pp. 226–227. 12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 7. 13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21. 14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21. 15. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9.

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 67. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 112. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 112. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142. I

1. Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, p. 6. 2. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition XIV, p. 194. 3. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Vol 1, trans. and intro. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 166, 168. 4. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, pp. 173, 181. 5. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 139. 6. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 157. 7. Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 222. J 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1947), p. 275. 2. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. R. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 25. 3. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, pp. 80–81. 4. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 81. 5. Cited in Fox and Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels, p. 91. 6. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 292. 7. Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, p. xiv. 8. Quoted in Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 271. 9. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 4. 10. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 5. 11. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 11. 12. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 11. 13. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 11. 14. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 11. 15. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 13. 16. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 14. 17. Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Reflections, p. 142.

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18. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Reflections, pp. 189–190. 19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 240. 20. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 16. 21. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, p. 126. K 1. Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. Baker (London: SCM, 1967), II, 40. 2. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J.P. Leavey, and I. McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 55. 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 105. L 1. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 178. 2. Paul Valéry, Cahiers (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), vol. I, 313, 175. 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 97. 4. Roberto Calasso, Ka (Milano: Adelphi, 1996). 5. Benjamin, Paris, capital du XIXe siècle, p. 143. 6. Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique (34) Winter 1985: 36. 7. Benjamin, “Central Park,” p. 34. 8. Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 189–190. 9. Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, p. 192. 10. Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, p. 192. 11. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” pp. 257–258. See unit F, note 16 for the full quotation. 12. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” Selected Writings, p. 471. 13. Franco Rella, Il silenzio e le parole, p. 169. 14. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light. Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 71. 15. Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 25. 16. Summa Theologiae I, q. 54, a. 4. 17. Summa Theologiae I, q. 52, a. 3.

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M 1. Plutarch, De “E” in Delphis in Diatriba isiaca e dialoghi delfici, ed. V. Cilento (Florence: Sansoni, 1962). 2. Ernesto Grassi, La potenza della fantasia, trans. C. Gentili and M. Marassi (Naples: Guida editori, 1989), p. 31. 3. Grassi, La potenza della fantasia, p. 32. N 1. Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper, ed. Philippa Hurd (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), p. 293. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 4–5. 3. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seàn Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 101. 4. Paolo Valesio, Ascoltare il silenzio. La retorica come teoria (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986). 5. Cited in Fox and Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels, p. 94. 6. J. Daniélou, Introduction to John Chrysostomos, Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu, p. 47. 7. Basil of Caesarea, De Spirito Sancto, ed. B. Pruche, Sources Chrétiennes 17 bis (Paris, 1968), XVI, 38. 8. Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia. Dal Risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso al fine del XVIII secolo (Florence: Presso Giuseppe Molini, 1834). 9. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans. A. Barrows and J. Macy. (New York: Riverhead, 1996). 10. Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 109. 11. Rella, Il silenzio, p. 16. O 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Agamben, Stanzas, p, xviii. Agamben, Stanzas, p. xix. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 3. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 47. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 17ff. Cited in Agamben, The Idea of Prose, pp. 17–18. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p.123. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 37.

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9. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock (London and Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 63. 10. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 63. 11. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 63. 12. Jacques Lacan, “Marginal Comments” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959 – 1960, trans. D. Porter. (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 135. 13. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 14 14. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, pp. 40–41. 15. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 45. P 1. Federico Borromeo, De Pictura Sacra (Castglioni, 1932), p. 38. 2. Corbin, Il paradosso del monoteismo, pp. 39 ff. 3. Pavel Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza. L’arte dell’icona, trans. P. Giuseppe da Vetralia (Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni San Paolo, 1990), p. 30. 4. Cyril of Alexandria, In Johannis Evangelium 16, 25 in Patrologia Graeca 73, 464B. 5. Quoted in Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, p. 63. 6. Franco Rella, L’enigma della bellezza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), p. 12. 7. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 91. 8. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 90. 9. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 91. 10. Rella, L’enigma della bellezza, p. 96. 11. Rella, L’enigma della bellezza, p. 99. 12. Rella, L’enigma della bellezza, p. 99. 13. Rella, L’enigma della bellezza, p. 151. Q 1. 2. 3. 4.

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 2. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 10. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 61. Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity: Heidegger and the Problem of Love,” trans. P. Colilli, in The Ancients and the Moderns, ed. R. Lilly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 211–229. 5. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 1. 6. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 2.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” p. 211. Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” p. 212. Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” p. 213. Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” p. 213. Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” p. 215. Heidegger, cited in Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity.” Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), p. 144. 14. Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names p. 144. 15. Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names, p. 146. R 1. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. R. and C. Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 328. 2. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 284. 3. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 284–285. 4. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 285. 5. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 286. 6. Attilio Momigliano, “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9, 1946, p. 152. 7. Cf. James Hillman, “Plotino, Ficino and Vico” in Loose Ends (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1975), p. 148. 8. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 286. S 1. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 3. 2. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, p. 156. 3. Agamben, Stanzas, p. 22. 4. Agamben, Stanzas, p. 22. 5. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 140. 6. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), p. 69 7. Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, p. 362. T 1. C. S. Peirce: Collected Papers, ed. A. W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931 – 1958), 7.579–596.

NOTES

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

173

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 109. Italo Calvino, Lezioni americane (Milan: Garzanti, 1988). Rella, L’enigma della bellezza, p. 149. Calvino, Lezioni americane, pp. 7–8. Pavel Florenskij, Le porte regali. Saggio sulli’icona, ed. Elémire Zolla (Milan: Adelphi, 1977), p. 74. Evgenij Trubeckoj, Contemplazione nel colore. Tre studi sull’icona russa, trans. Piero Cazzola (Milan: La Casa di Matriona, 1988), p. 13. John Damascenus, De fide orthodoxa II, 3, in Patrologiae cursus completus, ed. J. Migne, Series Graeca 94, 865 A-B (Paris, 1928 – 1936) Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 1. Franco Rella, “Beauty’s Ulterior Gaze” in The Myth of the Other, trans. N. Moe (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1994), pp. 82- 83. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1931 – 1958), 3.362. Peirce, Collected Papers, 4.447; 4.422. Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), p. 173. Leonide Ouspensky, Théologie de l’icône (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1980), p. 17. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p. 178. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p.185. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza. L’arte dell’icona, pp. 171–172. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, p. 172. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, p. 177. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, pp. 183–184. Florenskij, Le porte regali, p. 56. Florenskij, Le porte regali, p. 58. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p. 193. Elémire Zolla, Uscite dal mondo (Milan: Adelphi, 1992), pp. 246–247. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII-2, ed. Colli and Montanari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967 – 1978), p. 388; trans. D. Scott Korn in “Zarathustra Returns: A Study in Nietzschean Spirituality,” The Quest 9. 3 (Autumn 1996), p. 44. As Janco Lavrin has observed, these notes are a verbatim version of a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (Lavrin, Dostoevski: A Study [New York: Macmillan, 1947] p. 12). F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 103. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p.14. Rella, La cognizione del male: Montale e Saba (Rome: Riuniti, 1985), p. 11. Rella, La cognizione del male, p. 11. Rella, La cognizione del male, p. 12.

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31. Rella, La cognizione del male, pp. 13–14 32. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. D. Mashenberg (New York: Semiotexte, 1991), p. 116.

U 1. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, p. 9. 2. Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 9. 3. Maximus the Confessor, Various Chapters on Theology and Economy, on Virtue and Vice, Centuria Secunda 89, Patrologia Graeca 90, 1253C. 4. Christos Yannaras, “L’icona come ‘semantica’ del logos non convenzionale,” in In un’altra forma. Percorsi di iniziazione all’icona (Sotto il Monte: Servitium-Interlogos, 1996), p. 73. 5. Augusto Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” trans. P. Colilli, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. P. Virno and M. Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 169. 6. Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” p. 172. 7. Cited in Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” p. 174. 8. Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” p. 175. 9. Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” p. 183. 10. Michel Serres, Angels, p. 20. 11. Serres, Angels, p. 17.

V 1. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 2. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 171. 3. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 255. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 255. W 1. Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e. Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy. Or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). 2. Theodor Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism,” Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Social Theory 19 (Spring 1974), pp. 7–11. Adorno’s “The Stars

NOTES

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

175

Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column” is published in the same issue, in pp. 13–89. Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism,” p. 9. See, for example, Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, pp. 12–15. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 234. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 24. Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.644. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, pp. vii-viii. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 256. Linda Hutcheon, “Eco’s Echoes: Ironizing the (Post)Modern,” Diacritics 22.1 (Spring 1992), p. 5. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 22. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 22. E. Corsini, Il trattato ‘De divinis’ dello Pseudo-Dionigi e i commenti neoplatonici al Parmenide (Turin: Giappichelli, 1962), p. 63. Corsini, Il trattato ‘De divinis’ dello Pseudo-Dionigi, p. 65. See, Ireneus, Adversus Haeresias in Contro le eresie e gli altri scritti, ed. E. Bellini (Milan: Jaca Book, 1981). Quoted from Slavoj Zizek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” in Slavoj Zizek /F. W. J. Von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 8. Zizek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” p. 9. Zizek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” pp. 10–11. Antonio Corsano, “Vico e la tradizione ermetica,” Omaggio a Vico (Naples: Morano, 1968), pp. 23–24. M. Papini, Il geroglifico della storia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984), pp. 71–72. Papini, Il geroglifico della storia p. 353. For the discussion on Peirce’s semiotic thought and particularly for the interpretation of the categories of qualisignification, sinisignification, and legisignification I am greatly in debt to Floyd Merrell, Peirce’s Semiotics Now (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 1995), p. 151 ff. Merrell, Peirce’s Semiotics Now, p. 151. Merrell, Peirce’s Semiotics Now, p. 153. Carl G. Jung, Preface to Ian MacPhail, Alchemy and the Occult: A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts from the Collections of Paul and Mary Mellon (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1968), p. vii. Merrell, Peirce’s Semiotics Now, p. 156.

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27. Robert D. Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 111–112. Y 1. Erik Davis, “Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly 92.4 (Fall 1993), 585–616. 2. Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 18–19. 3. Giorgio Agamben, History and Infancy. Essays on the Destruction of Experience, p. 21. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973). 5. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 348. 6. See, for example, Kent Biel, “Critical Reflection and the Hermetic Tradition: A Study of Michel Foucault’s Politics of the Imagination and Subjectivity in Relation to the Western Counter-Tradition of Gnosis,” Ph.D. Diss. McGill University, 1984. 7. Maurizio Ferraris, La filosofia e lo spirito vivente (Bari: Laterza, 1991), p. 204. 8. Ferraris, La filosofia e lo spirito vivente, p. 202–203. 9. Paolo Rossi, Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), p. 20. 10. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Selected Writings, pp. 297–298. 11. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Illuminations, p. 5. 12. Cited in “Introduction,” Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, p. 20. 13. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 223. 14. Rella, in Anna Cavallaro, Pittura visionaria e metafisica (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1978), p. 43. 15. Gabriele La Porta, “Introduzione,” in Giordano Bruno, Il canto di Circe. (Rome: Editrice Atanor, 1978), p. xxx. 16. Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, p. 320. 17. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, p. 478. 18. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 235. 19. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, p. 825. 20. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, tran. B. and C. Schutze (New York: Semiotexte, 1988), p. 46, 47. 21. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. 47, 50. 22. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. 50.

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23. Carlo Sini, “Presentazione,” in Giordano Bruno Le ombre delle idee (Milan: Spirali edizioni, 1988), p. 11. 24. Giordano Bruno, Lampas Triginta Statuarum in Opera Latine Conscripta, ed. Felice Tocco (Florence: Le Monnier, 1879 – 1891), III, 9. 25. Adelia Noferi, Il gioco delle tracce (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979). 26. Bruno, Lampas, p. 10. 27. Bruno, Lampas, pp. 10–11. 28. Bruno, Lampas, pp. 13–14. 29. Giordano Bruno, De Compositione Imaginum, in Opera Latine Conscripta, II, III, 119–120. 30. Giordano Bruno, Triginta Sigillorum in Opera Latine Conscripta II, II, 121. 31. Bruno, Lampas, p. 15. 32. David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 23. 33. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. G. Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 51–89. 34. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, p. 486. 35. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” trans. K. Tarnowski, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), 65. 36. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 66. 37. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 66. 38. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 67. 39. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 67. 40. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 69 41. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 59. 42. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 68. 43. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 69. 44. Cited in Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 59. 45. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 57. 46. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 59. 47. Luigi Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, ed. D. Quaglioni (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1993), pp. 327–329.

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INDEX OF NAMES

Abraham, N., 53–55 Adorno, T., 126–127, 129 Agamben, G., 19, 42, 44–45, 57–58, 63, 82–85, 86–87, 92, 96–99, 106–108, 120, 144–145 Alberti, R., 5 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 7, 25–26, 27, 30, 58, 72–73, 78, 100 Arendt, H., 83, 98, 148 Aristotle, 12, 13, 14, 47, 59 Augustine, St., 39, 98, 99 Bacon, F., 47 Basil of Caesarea, 79 Basilides, 132 Bataille, G., 106, 111, 121 Baudelaire, C., 68, 125 Baudrillard, J., 152–153 Benjamin, W., 3, 18, 19, 20, 30, 37, 43–44, 46, 62–63, 65, 67, 68, 70–72, 83, 84–85, 86, 108–109, 124, 127, 128, 130, 143, 147–149, 150–151, 155, 158–161 Blanchot, M., 85 Blondel, E., 77 Bloom, H., 21 Bocchi, A., 79 Borromeo, F., 90 Bruno, G., 66, 67, 129, 135, 144, 146, 149, 151, 152, 153–158, 161 Bultmann, R., 2 Burger, P., 109 Butler, J., 33

Cacciari, M., 22, 30, 35–37, 72, 76, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116–117 Cadava, E., 72 Calasso, R., 4–5, 67, 69–70, 150 Calvino, I., 68, 110–111 Camillo, G., 129, 146, 154 Campanella, T., 144 Carrey, J., 69 Célan, P., 84 Certeau, M. de, 65 Chrysostomos, J., 6, 78 Claudel, P. 162 Clement VIII (Pope), 161 Corbin, H., 3–4, 5, 23–24, 28–29, 30, 38, 52, 58–61, 71, 81, 82, 90–91, 106, 128 Couliano, I., 149 Creuzer, F., 104–105 Cvetaeva, M., 43 Cyril of Alexandria, 91 Damascenus, J., 111 Dante, 14, 67, 82, 124 Davis, E., 143 Deleuze, G., 31, 32–35, 49–51, 77 Derrida, J., 29, 64, 108 Descartes, R., 2, 26, 139 Dostoevsky, F., 91, 93 Dürrenmatt, F., 1 Düttman, A. G., 83–84 Eco. U., 48, 126, 127–128, 129, 130, 147

188

THE ANGEL’S CORPSE

Eichrodt, W., 64 Einstein, A., 16 Evagrius, 91 Evdokimov, P. N., 91, 113–114 Fabbri, P. 18 Fechner, G.T., 59, 61 Ferraris, M., 146 Ficino, M., 95–96, 100, 108, 129, 146, 154 Florenskij, P., 111, 114–115 Foster, J., 15 Foucault, M., 20, 32, 145–146, 161 Fox, M. 22, 26 Francis of Assisi, St., 67 Frege, F. L. G., 75 Freud, S., 45–46, 54, 55–56 Gadda, C.E., 68 Giotto di Bondone, 139–140 Goethe, J. W., 21 Grassi, E., 74–75, 95 Guattari, F., 31, 49–51, 77 Hawking, S., 85 Hegel, G.W.F., 24, 132–133, 135 Heidegger, M., 11–1, 17, 62–63, 81, 82, 84, 95–96, 97–100, 119, 124–125, 146–147 Herbert, Z., 58 Hildegard of Bingen, 26–27 Hobbes, T., 27 Hölderlin, F., 15, 89, 92 Hulewicz, W. von., 57 Husserl, E., 99 Hutcheon, L., 129 Ibn ‘Arabi, 58 Illuminati, A., 121–122 Jaffé, A., 105

Jung, C.G., 103–105, 137–138 Keefer, M.H., 2 Keynes, J.M., 2 Klee, P. 35, 37, 70–71, 158, 160 Kristeva, J., 106, 108 Kristellar, P.O., 95 Lacan, J., 146 Lanzi, L., 79 La Porta, G., 149 Leonardo da Vinci, 45 Leonhard, R., 159 Leopardi, G., 12, 19, 93 Levi, P., 68 Levin, D. M., 158 Lyotard, J.F., 18 Maimonides, 36 Marini, M., 1 Marx, K., 150 Maximus the Confessor, 91, 120 McDowell, A., 69 Merleau-Ponty, M., 29 Merrell, F., 31, 135–138 Meschonnic, H., 10 Michelangelo, 46, 67, 89–90 Miller, J., 145–146 Milosz, O., 1 Momigliano, A., 104–105 Montale, E., 5, 10, 110–111, 117–118 Moravia, A., 119, 162 Morozov, N.A., 115 Murray, B., 69 Nerval, G. de, 38 Newton, I., 2 Nietzsche, F., 9, 35, 77, 78, 81, 87, 92, 95, 116 Novalis, 92, 93

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ouspensky, L., 112–113 Ouspensky, P.D., 47–49, 50–51, 115 Panizza, O., 162 Papini, M., 134–135 Pasolini, P.P., 68, 162 Patrizi, F., 144 Peirce, C.S., 110, 112, 127, 135, 153 Pessoa, F., 4 Petrarch, F., 14, 68 Peuckert, W.E., 144 Plato, 13 Plotinus, 47, 50, 113 Plutarch, 74–75 Poliziano, A., 120 Proculus, 131 Proust, M., 38, 39, 67 Pseudo-Dionysius, 91, 100, 131–132 Rand, N., 54 Rella, F., 13, 37–39, 76, 80, 91–94, 111, 117–118, 149–150, 151 Rilke, R.M., 7, 8, 24, 57, 79, 89, 90, 91, 96, 111 Romanyshyn, R., 139 Rosenzweig, F., 116–117 Rossi, P., 147 Saba, U., 117 Sachs, N., 7 Sartre, J.P., 99 Scheler, M., 98 Schelling, F.W.J., 41, 133 Scholem, G., 150, 158 Serres, M., 8, 76, 77, 123 Sextus Empiricus, 142

189

Sfrangiati, N. (Pope Gregory XIV), 144 Shaikh Ahmad Ahs_’_, 4 Shakespeare, W., 118 Sheldrake, R., 22, 26 Shestov, L., 6 Sieburth, R., 144 Sini, C., 153–154 Solovyov, V., 41, 101 Steiner, G., 83, 86 Suhrawardi, 5, 38, 90 Szymborska, W., 18 Telesio, B., 144 Tiedemann, R., 151 Tillich, P., 22 Torok, M., 53–55 Trubeckoj, E., 111 Trubeckoj, S., 115 Valéry, P., 65 Valesio, P., 39–40, 77–78 Vattimo, G., 16–17, 135 Vico, G.B., 26, 86, 134–135 Virilio, P., 7, 118–119 Waite, G., 126, 129 Weinenger, O., 80–81 Weil, S., 111 Wenders, W., 35 Whales, J., 7 Wittgenstein, L., 9, 41–42, 75, 80–81 Yannaras, C., 120 Zizek, S., 6, 133 Zolla, E., 115