Octavio Paz: Humanism and Critique [1. Aufl.] 9783839413043

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Oliver Kozlarek (ed.) Octavio Paz

Volume 5

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Editorial Globalization demands for setting up new cultural orientations. Different traditions and forms of life struggle for recognition throughout the world and have to meet the necessity of values and norms with universal validity. Similarities and differences in understanding the world have to be analyzed and recognized which requires a new reflection on what it means to be a human being concerning its anthropological universality, but also its diverseness and changeability. The books of the series Being Human: Caught in the Web of Cultures – Humanism in the Age of Globalization are committed to a new Humanism, which not only highlights humaneness in its cultural and historical varieties but also presents it as a transculturally valid principle of human interaction in all cultural life-forms. The series is edited by Jörn Rüsen (Essen), Chun-chieh Huang (Taipei), Oliver Kozlarek (Mexico City) and Jürgen Straub (Bochum), Assistant Editor: Henner Laass (Essen). Advisory board: Peter Burke (Cambridge), Chen Qineng (Beijing), Georg Essen (Nijmegen), Ming-huei Lee (Taipei), Surendra Munshi (Calcutta), Erhard Reckwitz (Essen), Masayuki Sato (Yamanashi), Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer (Wolfenbüttel), Zhang Longxi (Hong Kong)

Oliver Kozlarek (Dr. phil, Dr. en Humanidades) teaches political and social philosophy and social theory at the Institute for Philosophical Research at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Mexico. Currently he is a visiting professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico City. He held visiting appointments at the New School for Social Research, the Universidad de Buenos Aires, the Technical University Chemnitz, Stanford University and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen.

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Oliver Kozlarek (ed.)

Octavio Paz Humanism and Critique

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In Cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University, the Faculty of Humanities of the University Duisburg/Essen

Humanism in the Era of Globalization – An Intercultural Dialogue on Humanity, Culture, and Values sponsored by Stiftung Mercator

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2009 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Proofread by: Shari Gilbertsen Typeset by: Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1304-9 Distributed in North America by

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Content

Oliver Kozlarek Foreword ........................................................................................................

7

Oliver Kozlarek Introduction: Crossing Borders, Reaching Humanity .....................................................

9

Part I: The Critical Theory of Octavio Paz Alfons Söllner Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz – A Comparison of their Early Cultural-Philosophical Writings Published after the Second World War .......................................................

19

Oliver Kozlarek Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Critiques of the Same Modernity ........................................................

31

Yvon Grenier Socialism in One Person: Specter of Marx in Octavio Paz’s Political Thought .................................. 47 Rubén Gallo Octavio Paz reads Moses and Monotheism ................................................... 65

Part II: Paz and the ‘Privileges of Sight’ Bolívar Echeverría Octavio Paz, Mexican Muralist ................................................................... 89

Rolando Vázquez On Visual Modernity and Poetic Critique, between Octavio Paz and Walter Benjamin ............................................... 99 Juan Álvarez-Cienfuegos Fidalgo Duchamp According to Octavio Paz ...........................................................

111

Part III: Octavio Paz and Social Sciences Oliver Kozlarek The Sociology of Octavio Paz ...................................................................... 137 Jorge Capetillo-Ponce The Walls of the Labyrinth: Mapping Octavio Paz’s Sociology through Georg Simmel’s Method ...... 155 Liliana Weinberg Luz inteligente: The Anthropological Dimension in Octavio Paz’s First Essays ............... 179

Part IV: Octavio Paz and Philosophy Hugo Moreno Octavio Paz’s Poetic Reply to Hegel’s Philosophical Legacy ..................... 217 Xavier Rodríguez Ledesma To Hear the Inaudible, To See the Imperceptible: Modernity and Otherness in Octavio Paz .................................................. 231 Juliana González Valenzuela The Blue Fire of the Double Flame ............................................................. 249

Notes on Contributors .................................................................................. 259 Index of Names ............................................................................................. 263

Foreword Oliver Kozlarek

Edward Said once wrote: Humanism, I strongly believe, must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind of testimony that doesn't make it into reports but which is increasingly about whether an overexploited environment, sustainable small economies and small nations, and marginalized peoples outside as well as inside the maw of the metropolitan center can survive the grinding down and flattening out and displacement that are such prominent features of globalization (Said 2004: 81-82).1

It is precisely through its willingness to “excavate” the legacies of forgotten or even vanished cultures and civilizations that humanism becomes practical. This book is about the Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998). Although Paz was one of the most prominent and internationally recognized Latin American authors of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, and saw his work translated into many languages, neither he himself nor his works have yet received the attention they so richly deserve. By showing that Paz’s work combines a strong commitment to modernity and critique with a similarly strongly felt commitment to humanism, it will become evident that he could well be considered an important spiritus rector of our era of globalization. This book is the result of my collaboration in the project “Humanism in the Era of Globalization, an Intercultural Dialogue on Culture, Humanity, and Values,” in which I participated as a Visiting Fellow in 2007 and 2008. The project is organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut – KWI) in Essen (Germany), in close cooperation with the neighboring universities of Bochum, Dortmund, and Duisburg-Essen, and is sponsored by the Stiftung Mercator in Essen. I owe 1 | Edward W. Said (2004): Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press.

8 | Oliver Kozlarek a debt of gratitude to all those institutions and especially to the people who represent them. Special thanks go to Angelika Wulff who worked tirelessly on bringing the different chapters into the homogenous form of a manuscript, to Shari Gilbertsen in Germany for the revisions of the English versions, and to Paul Kersey in Mexico whose skills as a translator and copy editor are invaluable. I would also like to thank Birgit Klöpfer from transcript for her patience and professional support. I am also grateful to Henner Laass for his help with the manuscript. I wish I could express in words how grateful I am to Jörn Rüsen. He is not only the Director of the project, but also a grand human being who taught me what humanism is really all about: seeing and bringing out the best in every human being. Morelia, August 2009

Oliver Kozlarek

Introduction: Crossing Borders, Reaching Humanity Oliver Kozlarek

In the preface of the first volume of his Complete Works (Obras Completas),1 Octavio Paz (1914-1998) wrote: [I] do not feel able to choose among my writings. Their diversity intimidates me: poems, art criticism and literature, a biography which is, at the same time, a study of literature and a picture of history, essays about topics of morals and politics, notes and articles on issues and concerns of our time, digressions, glosses (Paz 1994a: 15).2

Indeed, Paz’s work is intimidating! Its scope, in terms of both topics and forms, is difficult for the conventional academic disciplines to deal with. Literary scholars may be intrigued by the fact that Paz preferred essays over novels, while those interested in his poetry may be irritated by his essays which take up questions that are deemed the reserve of the social sciences or philosophy. Finally, social scientists and philosophers who may be interested in his essays could feel discouraged by the fact that Paz was not an academic peer. This, of course, does not mean that nobody has actually written about his extensive and, as Paz himself thought, “intimidating” oeuvre. Just a short time ago, an anthology with some of the texts that can be considered milestones in the history of the critique of Paz’s work was published. The editor, Enrico Mario Santí, writes: “It is difficult to find another author to whom so much attention has been paid” (Santí 2009: 11). This may well be true. The book itself, with its 700 pages, is an impressive piece of evidence of the many reactions that the Mexican Nobel Prize winner from 1990 has provoked. However, it also evidences something else: a sort of perplexity. 1 | The Obras Completas are published in 15 volumes and include Paz’s poems, essays and interviews. 2 | Translations by Oliver Kozlarek.

10 | Oliver Kozlarek It is not that the many words about Paz that Santí’s book recapitulates are not eloquent but, rather, that many of them seem like so many echoes of isolated ideas that this celebrated Mexican man of letters expounded during his prolific life. Was Paz then an opportunist, someone who discussed whatever seemed to be fashionable at a given point in time? Was he an eclectic who cared little for coherence? Without wishing to suggest that Paz left his readers a hermetically-sealed “system” of any kind, I do think that there are two especially strong and omnipresent guiding principles that oriented his thought in all the different manners in which he chose to express it: humanism and critique. Thus, one of the objectives of this book is to show that it is, above all, the unity of this double principle that may be understood as a key to Paz’s thought, and that it is this quality that makes it so relevant to many of our contemporary concerns. As I said above, much has been written about Paz and his work, but it is also true that outside of the Spanish speaking/reading world the situation is quite different. Certainly, Paz belongs to the elite of the international republic of letters. Much of his work has been translated into many languages (including English and German), but the potential significance of his contributions for many of the contemporary debates that dominate the social sciences and the humanities has not yet truly been appreciated. A prime example is Jürgen Habermas’ commentary on Paz: In his “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,”3 Habermas manifests that he felt that they were kindred spirits in the defense of modernity at a time when many were ready to abandon the “project” that he himself had so energetically stood for. He calls Paz a “Parteigänger der Moderne” (party follower of modernity) (Habermas 1990: 37). This gesture from such an internationally influential author has raised hopes and has even been taken as proof that, “by the middle of the last century, Hispano-American thought reached a phase in which it changed from being a mere consumer and importer of original ideas into a producer and exporter [of them]” (Gomes 2004: 167; see also Pozas 2009). Indeed just as it is beyond doubt that Paz’s ideas were always committed to many aspects of what is commonly understood as modernity in Europe or the United States, there is also no question that his experience in, and with, modernity and, consequently, his ideas on this topic are in many ways different from – and perhaps even contradictory to – the meaning of this term in those countries. Instead of seeing in Paz only a confirmation of what had already been said in Europe or the United States, it is possible to discover in his writings the expression of a different modernity or, better, of different modernities that intermingle and overlap but without ever losing their particularities. The second objective of this book is thus to present to the reader a selection of texts that strive to translate some of Paz’s ideas. “Translation” can be understood here in a double sense: on the one hand, 3 | I quote here from the German edition.

Introduction | 11

some of the essays in this book were previously published in Spanish, and translating them into English responds to our desire that readers who are not specialists in Latin American literature may develop an interest in Paz’s work. But at the same time, the book also intends to achieve a different kind of “translation”: it intends to show how Paz’s thought can be translated into the languages of many different intellectual and academic fields where his works have not yet been discovered and where he is not yet recognized as a serious interlocutor. The focus in this book is placed on critical theory, aesthetics, anthropology and sociology, as well as philosophy. The affirmation that Paz combines critique and humanism needs to be explained, as for many the claim of this partnership can no longer go uncontested. A particularly influential voice in this respect is still that of Michel Foucault. For Foucault, humanism undermines modernity’s inclination towards a “permanent critique of ourselves” (Foucault 1984: 43), since “what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science and politics” (ibid.: 44). Foucault continues: “Humanism serves to color and justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse” (ibid.). He concludes: “[...] I am inclined to see Enlightenment [modernity] and humanism in a state of tension rather than identity” (ibid.). Foucault is correct: humanism has indeed served on more than one occasion as a convenient discourse that helped to justify hegemonic power relations. This is true, for instance, in the case of colonialism, where everything that did not attain the ideal of European man was excluded from the category of humankind. However, the humanism that Octavio Paz strives to achieve does not start out from such a closed understanding of humankind. Instead of an idée fixe of this or that image of “the human”, Paz’s humanism is the result of experiences with other human beings and their cultures around the world; experiences that simultaneously shaped his understanding of modernity. One key to Paz’s idea of modernity is what Hannah Arendt observed so keenly some 50 years ago. For this German philosopher, modernity comprised basically the following: The decline of the European nation-state system; the economic and geographic shrinkage of the earth, so that prosperity and depression tend to become worldwide phenomena; the transformation of mankind which until our own time was an abstract notion or a guiding principle for humanists only, into a really existing entity whose members at the most distant points of the globe need less time to meet as the members of a nation needed a generation ago - these mark the beginnings of the last stage in this development. [M]ankind now begins to replace nationally bound societies and the earth replaces the limited state territory (Arendt 1958: 257).

12 | Oliver Kozlarek Accordingly, “modernity” is above all the name of this ‘growing together’ of the inhabitants of the most distanced places on earth. Modernity is the name for the process that converts humankind into a concrete reality. Paz shared this idea; however, he also knew that this process is far from finished. For someone like Paz, who oriented his ideas in experiences and not abstract ideas, this means that modernity should not be normatively overrated. Although he defended certain basic principles of modernity – such as autonomy, democracy, the independence of the sciences and arts, and so on – he knew that there are many aspects of the human condition that all modern cultures tend to overlook. Paz opted for a more cautious approach: instead of depositing certain normative contents in “modernity” – and at the same time excluding many others – he preferred to see it as an “empty name”, or a cipher, for “that which does not yet have a name” (Paz 1994b: 19). But, we could ask, does that not sound like this “worldless mentality” that Hannah Arendt also noticed as a consequence of the world growing together? For Arendt there was no doubt that “[since] men cannot become citizens of the world as they are citizens of their countries [...] the formation of a lonely mass man” and “the formation of the worldless mentality” (Arendt 1958: 257) would be consequential. Here, Arendt touches on issues that Octavio Paz was indeed very much aware of. Loneliness – or as he prefers to say, solitude – is one of the central issues in his writings. But for Paz it is not only modernity that produces solitude. Or rather, he suspects that an anthropological particularity provokes the feeling of being lonely. “Man is the only being who knows he is alone”, he wrote. But just as it is certain that human beings feel lonely, it is also true that they seek out one another. In Paz’s words: “[…] Man is nostalgia and the search for communion” (Paz 1994c: 195), a concept that one could take even further: “solitude” and the constant search for “the other” are the two opposite sides that produce the typically human energy, that when all is said and done, is responsible for human culture in its totality. Time and again, Paz’s work explores the different forms in which distinct cultures deal with solitude and look for “communion” with “the other”. Paz’s critique of modernity draws on these cultural comparisons. The Labyrinth of Solitude, first published in 1950, stands out especially in this respect. It is not only a reflection on Mexican identity, but also a comparison of two modern cultures: the Mexican and the North American. At the same time, it is an exercise in the attempt to determine anthropological universals that shine through the fabric of cultures which can only be grasped through comparison. As the title reveals, the most important anthropological universal that the book is interested in is that of solitude. Another universal that is very important for Paz manifests itself in the fact that all cultures seem to have an innate knowledge of poetry. For Paz, the “poetic experience” provides the certainty that everything in the universe is in reality connected to everything else. It is as if poetry reminded us of this universal connectivity that the “worldless mentality” of modernity seems to forget. In other words: poetic experience helps us to realize that it is indeed possible to connect to “the other” and to the world. Moreover, it makes us

Introduction | 13

aware of our incompleteness when we fail to do so. In his Nobel Prize speech from 1990, Paz recalled that even in his childhood he felt drawn to the “world out there”: “The experience repeated itself over and over. Any news, an anodyne phrase, the headline in a newspaper, a popular song: all proofs of the existence of a world out there and a revelation of my unreality” (Paz 1994d: 35). This too is a modern experience, and it was probably as a result of it that Paz devoted so much of his lifetime to traveling. Instead of seeing in Paz – as Habermas did – a Parteigänger (party follower) of modernity, I would prefer to call him a Grenzgänger; that is, someone who crosses borders. Indeed, Paz crossed all kinds of borders: the borders between politics and arts, and the borders that in the academically institutionalized sciences separate different realms of the production of knowledge, but especially the borders of the countries through which he traveled and the cultures that he studied and compared. Crossing borders, meeting people and learning from them and their cultures are activities that in the end help to strengthen an awareness of our own incompleteness. It is in this sense that they represent an important source for any kind of self-critique. But it also helps to understand that our modern world is far from being complete. We have created a world in which the most important sources of fear among human beings are not natural disasters or divine punishments but other human beings. We are living in a world that is still dominated by violence. For Paz this suspends the completion of the “project of modernity”. When he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1984, he pronounced these words: “Violence exacerbates differences and impedes people from talking and listening; monologue eliminates the other [while] dialogue maintains the differences but creates a space in which othernesses coexist and intermingle” (Paz 1995: 466). He concluded with what can only be viewed as a grand humanist gesture: “Dialogue does not allow us to negate either ourselves or the humanity of our adversaries” (ibid.). The “unfinished project of modernity” is for Paz the unfinished project of humanity. Modernity is not an end in itself, but a step – albeit a supremely important one – in this process that eventually will make us more human. This book is divided into four sections: The first part is dedicated to a review of what may be called the “critical theory of Octavio Paz”. It begins with two chapters (by Alfons Söllner and Oliver Kozlarek) that examine Paz’s relationship to the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, followed by Yvon Grenier’s chapter on the important influence that Marx exercised on Paz. Rubén Gallo then discusses Paz’s interpretation of Freud, emphasizing that his concept of solitude can actually be traced back to Freud’s ideas about melancholia in particular, and his theory of cultural malaise in general. At least two of the chapters of the second section might also have been placed in the first one, since they continue the discussion of Paz’s work through the lens of critical theory. The essay by Bolívar Echeverría compares Paz’s cultural critique, as expressed in his The Labyrinth of Solitude, to the

14 | Oliver Kozlarek famous Mexican muralists whose footsteps he seems to have followed. He sees in The Labyrinth a picture painted in words. Rolando Vázquez makes a similar point. Not only does he explore the relationship between the visual and language, he also proposes a form of “poetic critique” that draws on Octavio Paz and Walter Benjamin. Juan Álvarez closes this section with a detailed reconstruction of Paz’s interpretation of the work of Marcel Duchamp that offers an insight into how Paz combined his poetic understanding of language and his visual intelligence in order to interpret the work of a figure whom he saw as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. The third section centers on a discussion of the work of Paz in relation to the social sciences. The first two chapters, by Oliver Kozlarek and Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, attempt to show that although Paz was not a sociologist, there is a sociological aspect to some of his essays. In her contribution, Liliana Weinberg sheds light on Paz’s affinities with anthropology. The fourth and final section is dedicated to the philosophy of Octavio Paz. Hugo Moreno begins by comparing Paz to Hegel, while Xavier Rodriguez follows with an essay that explores the philosophical depth of Paz’s ideas about otherness. Last, but not least, Juliana González discusses Paz’s ideas about sexuality, eroticism and love.

Bibliography: Hannah Arendt (1958): The Human Condition, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Michel Foucault (1984): “What is Enlightenment.” In: Paul Rabinow (ed.) (1984), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32-50. Miguel Gomes (2004): “Modernidad, presencia de estilo y capital simbólico en Convergencias de Octavio Paz.” In: Héctor Jaimes (ed.) (2004), Octavio Paz: La dimensión estética del ensayo, Mexico City: Siglo XXI, pp. 167-186. Jürgen Habermas (1990): “Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt.” In: Habermas (1990), Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt: Philosophischpolitische Aufsätze 1977-1990, Leipzig: Reclam, pp. 32-54. Octavio Paz (1994a): “La casa de la presencia.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), Obras Completas 1, La casa de la presencia, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 15-27. Octavio Paz (1994b): “Unidad, modernidad, tradición.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), Obras Completas 3, Fundación y disidencia. Dominio hispánico, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 15-27. Octavio Paz (1994c): “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), The Labyrinth of Solitude: the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre, New York: Grove Press, pp. 7-212. Octavio Paz (1994d): “La búsqueda del presente”, in: Octavio Paz (1994), Obras Completas 3, Fundación y disidencia. Dominio hispánico, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 31-41.

Introduction | 15

Octavio Paz (1995), “El diálogo y el ruido”, in: Obras Completas 9, Ideas y costumbres I. La letra y el cetro, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 458-466. Ricardo Pozas Horcasitas (2009), “Modernidad de los modernizadores”, in: Anthony Stanton (ed.) (2009), Octavio Paz entre poética y política, Mexico: El Colegio de México, pp. 235-293. Enrico Mario Santí (2009), “Prólogo”, in: Enrico Mario Santí (ed.) (2009), Luz espejante: Octavio Paz ante la crítica, Mexico: UNAM/Era, pp. 11-13.

Par t I: The Critical Theor y of Octavio Paz

Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz – A Comparison of their Early Cultural-Philosophical Writings Published after the Second World War 1 Alfons Söllner

The aim of this essay is a rather modest one: a comparative look at two great intellectuals of whom one can say that they have had a decisive, formative impact on the 20th century. But the first question has to be whether such an aim as taken by this essay makes sense at all: are Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz not rather two unique figures and thus incomparable? Would it not be better to let them stand by themselves? On the one hand, the German musicologist, critical sociologist and university professor, who after unwillingly spending a decade of his life in the United States, returned to Germany as soon as possible, going on to become the intellectual foster father of the student revolt as well as eventually, its adversary? And on the other hand, the Spanish-speaking lyric poet and essayist who, early on, made contact with European modernism, and, while serving in his nation’s diplomatic corps, matured into a literary cosmopolitan and by the 1990s, was honored with the Nobel Prize after having resigned as a public servant in protest to Mexico’s “68”? Two very impressive, but also widely divergent intellectual careers! And perhaps, in the end, they are only comparable from the perspective of the factual, namely the fact that their reputation grew with historical distance, and that, as is so often the case, their international recognition promoted their national rehabilitation. What this, however, often entails is a ritualized adoration of the “really important” that appears either as academic hagiography or as imitation of the specialized jargon, both of which are forms of intellectual opportunism which do not absorb any of the spirit of criticism which each of the two embodied in their individual ways. In the 1 | First published in Spanish in Gustavo Leyva (ed.) (2005), La Teoria Critica y las tareas actuales de la critica, Barcelona/Mexico City: Anthropos/UAM-Iztapalapa, pp. 272-286. Translation into English by Annettte Roeder-Klimek.

20 | Alfons Söllner

case of Adorno, this is what we saw happening in the year 2003, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, when this intellectual “bone of contention” was in retrospect converted into a rounded-off cornerstone of German postwar history. And in the case of Octavio Paz, I imagine a similar process of national glorification, which was suddenly triggered off when, in 1990, this highly vocal critic of the Mexican government was honored with the most sought after international literary award, – a process which has steadily continued ever since. If one takes, however, the form of their works as a starting point, then hardly any approaches to a comparison between the two present themselves: the twenty volumes of Adorno’s collected works seem far too massive or even canonical today, and this impression of a hermetically sealed-off oeuvre is multiplied by at least a factor of 2 by the just as numerous posthumously published writings. And although, in Germany, Octavio Paz’s writings are all available in translation, their presence seems rather an echo of the sensation caused by the fact that half a decade after he had received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade of 1984, Paz was awarded the Nobel prize. At any rate, the language-intensive poet has always had a hard time retaining a foreign audience, despite his international orientation, whereas the essayist, because of the multi-cultural variety of his topics, which can only be dealt with in anthologies, causes problems of orientation. Still, here in the twilight between reflexive prose and literary production, a first clue as to a possible comparative approach emerges, not least because, from a sociological point of view, they both speak to a common audience: the educated classes open to cultural criticism. It holds true for both Adorno and Paz, no matter how differently they have to be read, that everything they did or strove for – their poetry and thought, to use more emotive terms – circled around a single focal point: the investigation and interpretation of culture and its status in human society. No matter how difficult it may be to define the term “culture” and thus to circumscribe what specialists who deal with culture have in common – in the case of Adorno and Paz it shouldn’t take long to agree that they obviously belong to that species of intellectual who deserve to be labeled with the somewhat ambiguous title of “culturalist”, at least they have perfected the trade of intellectual culturalism in a way that has set discipline-wide standards. But even in this context one could well start with the differences: did not Adorno play the role of cultural pontiff of the post-war period, whose relentless pen did not leave any trend in either art or science uncritiqued, who advocated a negative universalism because he regarded every movement in the field of culture as being subject to “excommunication” by a totalitarian power-logic? Octavio Paz, on the other hand, seemed to represent the exact opposite: did he not stand for a cheerful universalism which discovered the idiosyncratic in the diverse cultures of the world, the sum of which seemed to produce a collective human nature? Positive multi-culturalism versus universal negativism – would that make for a possible comparative link between Paz and Adorno?

Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz – A Comparison | 21

But, we must be careful! Even if such an evaluation would lead to this dichotomy, it would be grounded on a positive precondition common to both writers that could be identified as their mode of production. What I refer to is a certain type of writing – of great importance to the vocation of an intellectual – namely, the form of the cultural-critical essay, to which both Adorno and Paz were committed. It was Adorno who published the famous “Essay as Form”, which he again used as a programmatic introduction to his three-volume work “Notes on Literature” and which can be considered the most problematic example of this genre because he tries to turn a flash of inspiration into a procedure, into a method (Adorno 1974: 9-33). Apart from that, it was this small format of philosophical cultural criticism with which Adorno, during the 1950s, conquered the editorial feature pages of German newspapers and, thus, the hearts of the cultured bourgeoisie; and wisely doing so before confronting society with the truly painful, burdensome topics, namely the lack of a critical reappraisal of the past and the deficits in democratic culture. Decisive for this strategy – a kind of culturalist masking of political critique – was, in fact, the concise diction and flexible form which allowed for an articulate and extremely broad spectrum of topics – from the subtleties of “New Music” or specific literary and philosophical questions up to the psychological taboos of the post-Hitler era, most of all the issue of the Holocaust – in such a way that the political defects of the Adenauer era were exposed (cf. my essay: Söllner 2004: 490-511). This constructive interplay of an essayist writing style combined with political critique needs to be specifically examined because, during the 1960s, Adorno was considered primarily a sociologist and academic philosopher by both friend and foe. For Octavio Paz, there exists an assessment in inverse proportion which, however, still leads to the same result – as if a talented linguistic artist, as eminently versed in multiple languages as he was, thus facilitating a quick access into the cultural metropoles of the Western world, as a young and unknown talent from the periphery, he could at best fall back on the form of the essay if he wanted to transcend his Mexican biotope. What this statement reveals is a principal underestimation of the form of the essay as such. And yet, with his very first publication of 1950, the The Labyrinth of Solitude2, Octavio Paz not only consciously placed himself in the long and great tradition of South American essay-writing, he also politicized its content and at the same time perfected its form. Indeed, this collection of essays, which probably was and still is his best, initially stands out because of its large scope, especially when compared to works from the same period by Adorno, but then – and that could well have been a calculated overextension of the form – the rather discursive and argumentative style does attract attention, a style which only made possible this historical and ideological expansion. Later on, then, Paz too, usually sticks to the “shorter form” and with it, he will conquer the universe of the cultural history of man; he does not accept any boundaries between art, religion and politics; indeed, he makes explicit 2 | I quote from the English translation Paz 1994: 7-212.

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this comparison between cultures the main connecting theme of his essaywriting, even though he keeps referring back to the one major issue by which he is particularly moved: the tragicomedy of the conditio humana. These reflections are, of course, not meant to suggest that the formal problems inherent in the essay form provide the basic key to the work of two writers who were quite brilliant at mastering this genre – this is simply not possible because they both were agreed on, in the end, that the essay could not be defined, that it constituted a “formless form”. Still, it would be interesting to examine what corresponds to the obviously possible – and by Paz actually realized – overextension of the form at the other end of the spectrum, i.e. what constitutes the elementary particles of the essay formula. In this respect, Adorno might well be more informative than Paz, for it was he who, in that book which was to become his first successful post war publication, namely the Minima Moralia, published in 19513, used mainly building blocks which were by far, less complex than those of his later essays of literary and cultural criticism. Here, Adorno made notable use of the aphorism, the diary entry and the short reflection, i.e. the “even shorter” form, and thus revealed how closely he followed the tradition of fragmentary thinking and writing, i.e. how strongly he emulated Nietzsche, Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin. As is well known, this quite paradoxical program reached far into Adorno’s maturing phase, even into the Negative Dialectics and in the posthumous Aesthetic Theory, the fragmentary style of thinking and writing still dominates. Regardless of how one assesses the value of these major philosophical works – obviously it is their intention to compare, in both content and form, the “non-identical” with the principle of identity, i.e. with the obligation to conform to the system of thought. But, for a moment, let us become absorbed in the period when the works we have mentioned emerged, where both Adorno and Paz first became “recognizable” as authors: of The Labyrinth of Solitude, on the one hand, and the Minima Moralia, on the other. Not only were the two books published at the same time, the one five, the other six years after the end of the Second World War, albeit under different circumstances, also, the extent of the possible accord – and also of the complexio oppositorium, as will be shown – between the two writers becomes apparent once one visualizes that both projects from which the two books emerged were tackled not only in the same part of the world, but actually in the very same place: as is well known, the notes that formed the basis for the Minima Moralia, were written between 1944 and 1947, during the time Adorno spent in Los Angeles, partly in the company of Max Horkheimer. Octavio Paz, too, could be found in Los Angeles while on a scholarship in 1943 (later, he went on to New York), where he gained his first impressions of North America. Despite the fact that the final formulation of his Confessio Mexicana was carried out in Paris, the introductory chapter of the text clearly shows that, for Octavio Paz, there exist “two Americas” and, in 3 | I quote from the separate edition by the Bibliothek Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/ Main 1969.

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the course of the work, he proves this duality to be embedded in a plurality of further historical contexts, although they have all had their share in opening up the “wound” at the heart of the Mexican identity. This was certainly a biographical twist of fate and should not be overrated in the case of two authors with such a highly coincidental orbit; still, it offers an interesting starting point for a comparative evaluation. An approach is provided by focusing on the culture factor in general, and by the assessment of the culture of the United States, in particular. While the first aspect stands for an unproblematic affinity between Adorno and Paz, the second, although it reveals similarities, markedly points to the differences. And these are clearly linked to the authors’ origins and to the determination of the horizon to which each felt bound by and how they normatively measured North American culture: whereas Octavio Paz, whose social-revolutionary zeal was gradually relativized by the Parisian left-wing intellectual milieu, had to carefully distance himself from North America in order to be able to partly imagine and partly critique his own myth of Mexican/South American folk culture; Adorno, on the other hand, directly and exclusively starts out from the vantage point of 20th century European civilization, and, on this basis, arrives at his own devastating appraisal of American society. According to Paz, there seems to exist two, if not more similar instances, of at least equally valuable manifestations of American culture, whereas Adorno’s descriptions of North American middle-class society, which is quite simply equated with American society at large, are pursued by an aesthetic fury which virtually compels him to intellectually distance himself. With his account of the “culture industry” he thus goes all out, as did Marx, with his concept of the commodity in the deductive logic of Das Kapital. This has to be stated quite clearly in order to be able to get from a seemingly superficial side issue in order to quickly access the central theme of the two books and thus to recognize what might make a comparison between these two authors both enticing and stimulating; while at the same time indicating significant alternative readings. What I am referring to here is the pose of the “outcry”, typical of both writers, which became even more intense by placing a thoroughly subjective feeling of life into a rather expansive perspective, i.e. one that at least claims objectivity. To call this position “existentialist” would be a misleading allusion, unless one adds that both authors dissociated themselves from the then currently fashionable philosophy of Sartre and his circle in Paris. Still, it seems remarkable that it is a thoroughly negative sensibility toward life that is placed at the center of all intellectual feeling and aspiration at two completely opposite sides of the world, by authors using different languages and line of reasoning. Whereas Sartre, in postwar Paris, confronts “Being and Nothingness”, Hannah Arendt, meanwhile, in New York, mourns the “loneliness” of man – both in an emulation and modification of Heidegger’s existential concept of “fear” – Adorno and Paz, on the other hand, have added the special element of historio-philosophical speculation to the genre, thus identifying its temporal-diagnostic potential with all its negative as well as positive aspects.

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In the following, I would like to elaborate on this thesis. To do this, however, requires that another text from the Californian period of the Frankfurt School has to be included in my comparison, namely the Dialectic of Enlightenment4, a joint work by Adorno and Horkheimer. What obviously provided the formative background to Adorno’s “Reflections from a damaged life”, but was still, for a long time, considered a kind of hidden code because the book was almost disowned by Horkheimer, has by now been identified by historiography as the key text for the entire development of the Frankfurt School.5 The Dialectic of Enlightenment seems to “fit” our context ideally insofar as its authors combine the fragmentary form with a quite radical historical-philosophical claim, and it is not least this contradictory, maybe even deliberate constellation which made the book the blackest and at the same time, the most provocative text of international philosophy scene after 1945. Thus, even the formal approach to the essay by Octavio Paz is quite instructive: whereas Adorno and his co-author Horkheimer self-confidently place themselves in the tradition of European historical philosophy – from Condorcet via Hegel up to Marx and Nietzsche – in order to, as it were, “think it through to the end”, that is, to radically transform it into a history of pure decay, Paz, on the other hand, somewhat naïvely uses the historicophilosophical pattern of thought for the reconstruction of the “Mexican identity”, which, however, has to carry a heavy burden. Naïve, in this case, does not mean either simple or positive, quite the contrary: Paz stages a real cavalcade of mythological, religious, and political ideas, at the same time setting this sequence of pictures to a discursive narrative which both recounts and ambitiously interprets the major stages in Mexican development since the Spanish conquest until finally, at the end of his purposeful and arduous research into the source of mexicanidad, he reaches some tentative conclusions. It is now that a perspective emerges, albeit more imagined than actual because, although the pathos of the Mexican Revolution shines through, the politics of the ruling “party of the institutionalized revolution” (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) quickly turns out to be unsupportable. Rather than lying along a linear trajectory, the future must be located somewhere along a circular route, in the search for and eventual return to an original starting point: “The radicalism of the Mexican Revolution consisted in its originality, that is, in its return to our roots, the only proper basis for our institutions” (Paz 1994: 144). So, it is a cyclical conception of the world that Octavio Paz outlines in his first and overlong essay: he tries to capture the “essence” of the Mexican nation in a grand reflective sweep, yet it is primarily a thoroughly negative feeling of life that unfolds in the history of this nation in seemingly endless and always painful convulsions. At the core, there is a feeling of intense loneliness, more hopeless 4 | I quote from the paperback edition published by the Fischer publishing company, Frankfurt/Main 1971. 5 | Most recently and in great detail by Müller-Dohm 2003.

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than the feeling of inferiority that is the result of comparisons with the technologically and economically powerful neighbors in the north, a feeling that is also not individually or socially limited but, rather, constitutes a collective state of pain, a true and depthless traumatization which is as old as the history of the Mexican people themselves. Paz exposes the transformations and masquerades through which the Mexicans have tried to flee the primal “tristesse”; and that their continuing efforts to do so are in vain is proven by the conspicuous traditionalism of Mexican life, the eternal recurrence of the fiestas, the religious rites and the political ceremonies and also by periodic outbreaks of decolonialization; the excesses of the revolts, revolutions and authoritarian relapses. Furthermore, within the national character there is harbored a strange and ineradicable preference for death, especially for ritualized death, a fascination which goes far beyond the rites of the Roman Catholic liturgical year, such as Good Friday or All Saints Day/ All Souls Day. Paz searches for the key to this collective negativity in the nation’s historical psyche and he locates it in the foundation of neo-Hispanic Catholic Mexico itself, in the violence of the Conquista, which had involved far more than the conquest by the Christian Spaniards and the eradication of the indigenous ruling caste of the New World’s advanced civilizations. Its concrete embodiment is to be found in the figure of La Malinche; the Aztec interpreter cum concubine, eventually forsaken by her lover, Cortes, is the ultimate symbol of the “carnal violation of the Indian woman”, a symbol transformed into the mythologically generalized symbolic figure of the Chingada, the “violated mother” who gave birth to the Mestizo Race, the hybrid population of modern Mexico. Paz concludes this etymology of stomach-churning violence with a reference to Mexico’s independence from Spain, annually celebrated, every September 15th, which also constitutes an unsuccessful attempt at fleeing the traumatic history: “When we shout: ‘Viva Mexico, hijos de la chingada!’ we express our desire to live closed off from the outside world and, above all, from the past” (Paz 1994: 86). However, this masochistic cycle is not the end of it, rather, there exists another Mexican cult of the Mother which can be traced back to the same historical context of catastrophes and thus serves as a counter-image: the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe became the true and still very much alive center of the popular Catholic faith of the Indian and Mestizo populations. However, Paz does not stop here; he makes the leap into the 20th century, into his own present, – and thus the essay leads to an interpretation of the Mexican revolution, rightful heir to the independence movement of the early 19th century, and therefore for Paz, has not yet come full circle – the historic migration route has not been completed – from which alone, a positive conception and truer image of mexicanidad could emerge: Thus, the revolution becomes “a search for our own selves, and a return to the mother. Therefore it is also a fiesta: ‘the fiesta of the bullets’ […] And with whom, does Mexico commune in this bloody fiesta? With herself, with her own being. Mexico dares to be, to exist” (ibid.: 148). Of course, such a recapitulation of The Labyrinth of Solitude is rather

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forced; but perhaps by so doing it becomes clearer where to find both the positive and negative reference points with which to compare with those formative texts published by Adorno after World War II. I assume they lie within the historico-philosophical structure itself, in its rigorous structure, but also in its scope. And perhaps this construct is best revealed by enquiring into the role of the intellectual on the one hand, and by focusing on the status of culture on the other. Or, to put the question differently: if this role is primarily of a cultural-political nature and thus has to imply an interested interpretation of the changed world situation, what is then to be understood by culture and how should the intellectual deal with it if he wants to be up-to-date? Octavio Paz gives an extensive answer to this question, which is all the more surprising because it combines a concrete definition of the Mexican intellectual’s position with a much broader international outlook. In two long chapters, he deals with the present position of the Latin American intelligentsia, which reveals a progressive politicization, which from a differential analysis, it is located equidistantly between Europe, the United States and the “prodigious and terrifying visage of the Soviet Union” (Paz 1994: 190), from which Paz resolutely turns away in order to finally sketch the apartness of the Third World in all its ambivalence – as an abyss of nothingness and as a possible opening up of a new historical sphere: The background – and indeed, the very substance – of contemporary history is the revolutionary wave that is surging in the peripheral countries. We will be living in nakedness and abandonment. But there is that “open” loneliness; transcendence is also waiting: the outstretched hands of other solitary beings. For the first time in our history we are contemporaries of all mankind (Paz 1994: 193-194).

If this astonishing about-turn in the “dialectics of loneliness” actually exists, then this could also constitute the decisive point at which to confront Octavio Paz’s diagnosis of his times with that of Adorno. Perhaps one could overstate the comparison and attempt to characterize their different starting positions as follows: the Dialectics of Enlightenment is, as we all know, a historiophilosophical construct of the most abstract kind, set out in both ingenious and fragmentary sketches. Its theoretical core consists in a prehistory of power, in which reason and nature, man and society, enlightenment and myth are entwined in a fatal and insoluble manner. Aphorisms such as: “Even myth is enlightenment, and: enlightenment will turn back into mythology”, or “The curse of unstoppable progress is unstoppable regression” (Adorno/ Horkheimer 1971: 35) are not intended as statements about limitable factual contexts or periods of time, but rather as an expression of a single universal principle that has asserted itself with iron logic throughout the history of mankind. The style of the text is quite severe and its rhetoric highly outraged, – but still, it culminates yet again in an apocalyptic interpretation of the present which manifests itself most graphically in a straightforward identification of the American cultural industry, on the one hand, with European fascism, on the other. Here, the methodological union of culture, politics, and economics

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in a consummated system of hopeless domination is perfected, as it were: the over-determination of the present through a culturalist historical philosophy. Just two eloquent quotations, instead of many, may serve to verify this: A philosophical construct of world history would have to show how, despite all detours and obstructions, the consequent rule of nature asserts itself ever more decisively and integrates all that is inner-human. From this aspect the different forms of economy, power, and culture ought to be deduced (ibid.: 191).

And: Existence in late capitalism is essentially a single rite of initiation. Everybody has to show that he identifies himself entirely with the power by which he is beaten. That is what defines the principle of syncopation in Jazz, which simultaneously derides the stumble and declares it the norm […] The miracle of integration, however, the permanent act of mercy by the one giving the orders to take in the one without resistance who chokes back his renitence, refers to fascism (ibid.: 138).

What follows from this identification of historical philosophy with a culturalist diagnosis of the present in regard to the status and the task of the intellectual? Which conclusions did Adorno draw for himself? It is quite clear that – unless one wants to bind Adorno to an abstract logic of deduction, which was never his thing – no simple answer can be given, if one wants to acknowledge the entire scope of his work, which already revealed itself unmistakably in the Minima Moralia and was to pour fourth a brilliant series of philosophical, sociological, and cultural-critical writings produced during the two decades of his work in the Federal Republic of Germany. The feeling of loneliness, by all means comparable to the demeanor of Octavio Paz, dominates and is – in Adorno’s writings – primarily manifest in the isolation of the intellectual-as-emigrant: Every intellectual in emigration, without any exception, is damaged and does well to realize that himself, unless he wants to cruelly learn just that behind the tightly closed doors of his self-esteem. He lives in surroundings that must remain incomprehensible to him even if he is well informed about the union organizations or the traffic; he’ll always be on unknown terrain. Between the reproduction of his own life under the monopoly of mass culture and the factualresponsible work there exists an irreconcilable breach. He is dispossessed of his language and the historical dimension, from which his cognition had drawn its strength, has been cut off (Adorno 1969: 32).

Yet, how great the difference between the chasms of melancholy from which despondent reflection rises, how big the difference between the vanishing points at which it is aimed: while Paz turns towards the historical origins of a political collective in order to promote his national identity – not without looking down into mythological depths – Adorno remains fi xated on another,

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no less dichotomist constellation, the poles of which are represented by the faraway advanced civilization of Europe and the unbearable present of American mass culture, spreading like a desert around the disappointed member of the educated class. The culture industry, described by the emigrant with a mixture of disbelieving curiosity and aesthetic repulsion, is confronted with the intricate world of art and culture of the old culture of Europe, which in turn contains the tension between bourgeois traditionalism and aesthetic avant-gardism, – the first is remembered somewhat nostalgically, the second is referred to with a whiff of arrogance. Yet, always the esoteric self-reflection of the isolated intellectual is retained, which – in an exquisite and ambitious manner – touches different fields such as literary criticism, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and which covers writers from Goethe and Balzac to Proust, Kafka and Walter Benjamin. Adorno’s “Reflections from a Damaged Life” are more or less unisonous intonated cultural-critical miniatures, but even when they surpass the horizon of the bourgeois tradition of art and culture and orient themselves by aesthetic modernism, “new music” or experimental literature, they remain in confrontation with the historico-philosophical context of blindness as it had previously been outlined by the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno’s conception of the world – as the representative texts from the late 1940s seem to suggest – remains, as it were, tied into a more or less closely fitted framework formed by the negative contemplation of the culture industry, on the one hand, and the half critical, half nostalgic reconstructed horizon of the European educated world, on the other. Both approaches however, are yet again enclosed by the theoretical frame of a negative historical philosophy in which the catastrophic consequences of European fascism and the U.S. entertainment industry are reduced to a single common denominator – that of a completely administered and thoroughly controlled present – in which there remains only a tiny gap for a hopeful outlook. This is the point at which aesthetic modernism gains its historical right, which is at least strengthened by Adorno. Yet its utopian dream can only be of a negative kind, its protest against an environment of universal blindness must remain impotent, never to achieve a position of historically authoritative negation. In the end, this is also the point at which the turn towards a negative theology ensues, as suggested in the final note of the Minima Moralia: “Philosophy, the only form justifiable in the face of desperation, would be the attempt to look at all things as they would present themselves from the point of view of salvation. Knowledge has no light other than that which shines on the world from salvation” (Adorno 1969: 333). Is it really possible and does it make sense to take formulations such as these as concrete judgments which can be translated into a tangible conception of the world, from which, in turn, could be deduced something like a political role of the intellectual? The answer has to remain as ambivalent as the theoretical premises on the basis of which Adorno did research and wrote at the time. These premises led simultaneously to a historio-philosophical over-determination and to a culturalist limitation – the result being that his

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cultural-critical assessments, which were undoubtedly immanently elaborate, turned out extremely judgmental. Thus, it was symptomatic that, for instance, the American film and entertainment industry was not compared to its European counterpart, i.e. to the mass culture that had already developed there, too, but rather to European advanced civilization – and its esoteric variant, on top of that. This comparison, if actually intended, had to go wrong. In fact, with his purely pejorative evaluation of US-American mass culture, Adorno blocked his perception of the corresponding advanced civilization in its no less typical difference compared to European conditions. The problem of the normative evaluation was thus also increased through a highly selective lens. But in the end, both – normativity and selectivity – refer to a bias typical of Adorno, a bias which seems inherent in a culturalist view of society taken as a whole: it is prone to totalizing judgments and threatens to lose itself in problematic generalizations. Shackles of historical philosophy = snares of culturalism? It would certainly be one-sided and unfair to say that Adorno fell prey to this equation while Octavio Paz escaped it! After all, there were differences in their historical starting positions that suggested alternative approaches – to the world of (the one) advanced civilization and to the (many) cultures of the world! But perhaps this differentiation contains a principal choice, namely that between an open and a closed cultural horizon, on each of which the intellectual moves differently. Adorno starts out from a negative historical philosophy, to the totalizing attitude of which cultural life, not least advanced civilization itself, remains normatively bound. He is in danger of succumbing to this unilinear and monocausal construction, even though he tries to achieve the opposite. The imagination of the “other”, the concept of an “outside” remains caught in the “spell of the existing”; the utopia of plurality must fail. “The whole is the untruthful” – this program, intended as a critique of false totality, reverts to just that! Not so Octavio Paz: he, too, knows about the figures of thought of the mythical spell and of the failure of enlightenment – what else would the “labyrinth of solitude” be but the description of just that circle? Yet, because, even in his reconstruction of Mexican national culture, Paz presupposes a plurality of cultures, he creates an open horizon, regardless of how winding the path towards liberation might be. Starting with a reflection on a traumatic collective identity, the author then walks out into the distance; he becomes a cultural internationalist who makes the comparison of the cultures the focal point of his work. But still, this comparison is only half the truth – it does not achieve the true depth that determined the starting positions of those two prominent intellectuals. I refer to the original level of their traumatization, which even had a differentiating impact on their relation to myth, on the possibilities of its “elucidation”, in particular. When reading the significant texts by Adorno written during the 1940s with a focus on this deep structure, then a second semantic dimension reveals itself under the ever brilliant culturalist surface, – a dimension which leads a peculiar shadowy existence and which is hardly ever tangible, probably because it was not only psychologically too painful

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but also “inexpressible” in a sense still to be explained. This, of course, refers to what we today describe with the word “Auschwitz”, a cipher that stems, not accidentally, from the vocabulary of Adorno himself. That the extermination of the European Jews was not merely a project of National Socialist politics, but that the so-called “Final Solution” proceeded for the most part successfully – this terrifying certainty reached, during the 1940s, also those Hitler refugees who had attained the greatest distance from Europe. A note in the Minima Moralia, which is both direct and unique, reads as follows: The notion that, after this war, life could go on as “normal” or that culture could even be “rebuilt” – as if the rebuilding of culture alone was not its negation – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered – and that is to be considered an interlude and not the catastrophe itself? What is this culture waiting for? (Adorno 1969: 65).

With the greatest possible sharpness, this formulation reveals two aspects at the same time: the abyss of fear confronting a German Jew in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust – and the compulsion to flee it; as it were: the deductive, rationalizing character not only of cultural theory, but possibly also of the encompassing historio-philosophical frame. To reduce it to a simple – and surely much too simple – common denominator: while Octavio Paz was confronted with a more remote human sacrifice which had taken on mythic status and was thus available to the historical imagination, Adorno had barely escaped an incomparably greater collective crime that had just occurred in the immediate present.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor (1969): Minima Moralia, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1974): “Der Essay als Form.” In: Noten zur Literatur: Gesammelte Schriften 11, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 9-33. Adorno, Theodor/Horkheimer, Max (1971): Dialektik der Auf klärung, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. (Engl. Transl.: Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso, 1972). Müller-Dohm, Stefan (2003): Adorno: Eine Biographie, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Paz, Octavio (1994): “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” In: Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre, New York: Grove Press, pp. 7-212. Söllner, Alfons (2004): “Adornos ‘Einsatzstelle’ im kulturellen Konzert der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte.” In: Wolfram Ette et al. (eds.), Adorno im Widerstreit: Zur Präsenz seines Denkens, Freiburg/Munich: Albers, pp. 490-511.

Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Critiques of the Same Modernity 1 Oliver Kozlarek

The year 2003 the hundredth anniversary of Adorno’s birth, was celebrated in Germany, and to a certain extent in other parts of the world, evidencing the will to ensure that critical theory remains alive. But is this ambition, expressed by a flood of publications, proof enough of the “actuality” of Adorno’s thinking? Reading some of the many articles and books which were published in the “Year of Adorno”, it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that what really motivated the euphoria surrounding the centenary of this highly uncommon thinker was not so much the assurance that Adorno’s ideas are still valid, but was evidence, rather, of a certain nostalgia for a time which has passed and can never be recaptured. Over and over again Adorno was described as an icon of an era that was long over: as “a last genius” (Claussen) for example. And for Lorenz Jäger it seems to be beyond any doubt that Adorno’s biography is woven into a modernity which began with the year of his birth in 1903, and had come to a definite closure by 1969, the year of his death (Jäger 2003). This nostalgia for a period in which it might have been easier to be a negativist, non-conformist, confrontational intellectual is probably a legitimate motivation to return to the age of Adorno, as it allows us a glimpse into a time in which the life and work of an intellectual was in many ways definitely unique. But it doesn’t inform us “whether” or “if” Adorno’s work still has any social, political, cultural or academic relevance today. Therefore it would be important to revisit Adorno’s writings using a more analytical approach. This is what Martin Seel proposes: “It would be time to free Adorno’s philosophy from the dogma and trauma of negativity, from the sometimes unhappy fi xation on Hegel and from the supposed focus on artistic problems” (Seel 2004: 29). 1 | First published as: “Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Visions of Modernity.” In: Critique, Theory and Culture 47/1 (2006), pp. 39-52 (http://www. informaworld.com).

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Seel discovers in Adorno a “philosophy of contemplation”. Under this title he subsumes in Adorno’s work the announcement of a kind of thought in which the “respect between human beings” is of prime importance, and which emphasizes first of all “a singular form of opening to the world” (Seel 2004: 33). A few lines later Seel writes: Contemplation is Adorno’s name for a praxis in which one engages with another and in which, at the same time, one can let the other be the other. In these kinds of relationships to the other which are not guided by utilitarianism, Adorno sees the “core of the experience” that motivates and sustains his critique of the condition of modern societies (Seel 2004: 34).

In what follows I would like to show that Seel is announcing here two different attitudes which are not balanced in Adorno’s work: on the one hand, there can be no doubt that Adorno avows the right of the other to be different. This he expresses in the negative sense by being permanently critical toward the provincial tendency of his own, German, “culture” (Kultur) to lock itself away against the other. In this sense it can be said that one of Adorno’s achievements is to have helped to break the chains of this self-confinement. But this is not the same as “engaging” with or connecting to the concrete other. In order to take this second step Adorno’s “critique” (Kritik) would need a complementary effort like the one Octavio Paz is performing in his engaging comparison to other cultures. Comparison is not only a technique or a method different from other techniques and methods, it is first of all a different attitude: it is already an opening to, and at the same time an embracing of the concrete other. My comparison of Adorno to Paz is not only interested in the differences between them. Before I begin to highlight these, particularly with respect to their understandings of critique (4, 5), I will show that they share a commitment to a role fundamental to modern societies (2, 3), namely the role of the intellectual, a term I would first like to define (1).

1. Intellectuals in Post-Traditional Societies According to Anthony Giddens, modern societies are post-traditional societies (Giddens 1995). Giddens explains that the shift from traditional to posttraditional societies must have disturbing psychological consequences since traditions guarantee “ontological security”. As a controlled form of repetition, traditions assure us of being in the “world we know” and they help to avoid having to be exposed to “alien values” and “forms of life”. Consequently, modernity must represent a severely destructive impact on any tradition. This occurs not so much because of the widely celebrated unleashing of rationality, but according to Giddens’s understanding, because modernity is a globalizing process, that is, the constitution of a global network of communication and

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interaction, in which any society is constantly confronted with “alien values”, meanings and “forms of life”. Giddens recognizes that modernity does not categorically eliminate traditions, although his argument still resembles in many aspects the conventional logic of “modernization theory” according to which modernity and tradition are seen as fatal opponents (see Knöbl 2001: 17). He reminds us: traditions did not even exist for so called “traditional societies” since they had no notion of it. Octavio Paz shares this idea: “more than having an awareness of their traditions, they live with and in them” (Paz 1985: 26). Modernity is not “the other of tradition” since it can even be considered a process of “inventing” tradition (Hobsbawm/Ranger 1992), which does not lead to posttraditional forms of human life, but to an unprecedented worldwide effort to challenge the institutional, symbolic and imaginary ways in which traditions do inform human action and thought. Giddens’s intuition can be quoted once more: it is not the unleashing of reason, but globalization, which triggered this program. And with Paz we could add: “while reason can only explain negation, globalization explains the recognition of difference, of different cultures, civilizations, traditions, and so on” (Paz 1985: 21). Now we can also try to define a more homogenized concept of the modern intellectual: Whatever local and universal, political or a-political, engaged or ironic, opportunist or non-conformist intellectuals share, it is the awareness of the challenge to “work on traditions”, that is, to deconstruct, reconstruct and even outright invent them. This understanding of what an intellectual is can be found in Adorno and Paz. For both, modernity means fi rst of all this “work on traditions” without relapsing into some kind of fundamentalism.

2. Adorno’s Negative Re-Appropriation of His Own Tradition In Germany the situation of those intellectuals who dominated the cultural debates at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century when the “crisis” of tradition became an issue in this country, are those who were coined by Fritz Ringer as the “German mandarins”. Hauke Brunkhorst gives a very concise definition of this term: In Germany the mandarins take over a role similar to the spirit of pragmatism in the United States, or, at least since the Dreyfus-Affair, the “universal intellectual” in France. Excluded from political as well as economic power much more effectively than comparable sections in other Western countries, the German mandarins took over the power of symbols. It was their task to substitute the virtues, values and traditions of the old religion of the aristocratically organized worldly order, which was devastated by the storm of modernization, with new values. It is this function of substitution that for a long time guaranteed their cultural hegemony. Aristocracy of the spirit (Geistesaristokratie) and the cult of education (Bildungsreligion); social pessimism, nationalism and a neo-pagan

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metaphysic are doomed to compensate for the binding forces of the old church. And they do so without democracy, without a political ideal of liberty and after Enlightenment (Brunkhorst 1990: 45).

“German mandarins” have thus been a very important momentum in the German process of modernization, and they have played a firmly institutionalized key role in an academically successful education and university system. However, at the same time they varnished the German bridge into modernity with conservative and even reactionary colors. Critical intellectuals like Adorno were relegated to the fringes of educational and cultural institutions with very little chances to participate in the public sphere. Adorno reflects on this situation many times. Especially in his Minima Moralia, he articulates his experiences as a marginalized intellectual, an “intellectual in suspension”, a situation which became even more accentuated from the moment Adorno had to leave his country, becoming detached from his own culture, from his own traditions, from his own language. He resumes: “Every intellectual who lives in exile is, without any exception, damaged […]. He lives in a world which he won’t understand […]” (Adorno 1997, vol. 4: 35). Another powerful and oft-quoted metaphor emerged in this context which explains how Adorno evaluated the impact of his work; without any expectation that it would find an immediate public, Adorno refers to this work as a “message in a bottle”. Eventually this “bottle” was picked up after Adorno returned to Germany and the message embraced and appropriated by a generation of young Germans who defined themselves by their fierce opposition to their parent’s generation. It was in this new constellation that a historical consciousness and a political culture developed in Germany which was expressed in negativistic terms: a political culture in which “non-conformism” became the leading slogan of the student movement and its latent mistrust of all institutions, and a historical consciousness in which the memory of atrocities committed by the previous generation – which found their strongest symbol in Auschwitz – became the most important building-block for a new identity which would guarantee a democratic and peaceful future. To put it bluntly: Western Germany after World War II became a country the cultural and political “project” of which was defined partly by a critique of it’s own tradition, and Adorno’s cultivated negativity seemed, all of the sudden, to be exactly the program that fitted its needs.2 Adorno’s critique of his own tradition was not a radical negation of it. 2 | Adorno was aware of the fact that he, the former “non-conformist” intellectual, became a protagonist in the “intellectual founding of the Federal Republic” of Germany (see: Albrecht et al. 1999). Horkheimer reflects about this in a letter he wrote to Adorno: “It would create a unique situation in which two persons, who act with so much resistance to reality, and who precisely for this reason seem to be determined to powerlessness, are offered a possibility of influence which can hardly be calculated” (Kraushaar 1998: 54).

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He realized that any intention to leave one’s own tradition has to be an illusion, especially as the writer is forever tied to his tradition through language (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.1: 314). In this sense, Adorno’s critique of tradition attempts to “renounce tradition and still follow her” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.1: 319) or in more general terms, to establish a “relationship to the past which is not conservative” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.1: 315). This does not mean that Adorno’s critique of his own tradition was not radical enough, but the problem I see is that he focused to a considerable extend on his own – European, even in a more limited sense – German3 tradition. And although he understood that European culture had become long since globalized, he rejected the idea that a different experience with modernity might help in the endeavor of critique. Allow me to give you an example: In his Minima Moralia Adorno recognizes that some might think that “the integration of the non-occidental peoples in the struggles of the industrial societies was long overdue” (Adorno 1997, vol. 4: 59). But at the same time he tries to convince his readers that this would not only be wrong, but even dangerous, since there cannot be any critical thinking outside of Europe: It would be bad psychology to assume that what one has been excluded from, awakens hatred and resentment; it awakens also an obsessive, inpatient kind of love, and those who had never come close to the repressive culture turn easily into its most stubborn guardians (Adorno 1997, vol. 4: 58).

That this observation is not only arrogant, but also wrong might provoke a comparison from Octavio Paz.

3. Octavio Paz and the ‘Fabrication’ of a Universal Tradition In order to call Paz a non-conformist intellectual, one would probably have to confront many objections. For the last two decades of his long and productive life, Octavio Paz (1914 to 1998) seemed to have dedicated himself to storming the Olympus of an international elite of writers, a dedication which was to be eventually rewarded by nothing less than the Nobel-Price in 1990. In Mexico, however, Paz will also be remembered for his polemical relationship to the political establishment (see González Torres 2002). One of the most controversial decisions Paz ever made, was his support of the former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gotari who came to power by what many consider a fraudulent election in 1988, and who propagated his neo-liberal policy as 3 | I appreciate a commentary by Stefan Müller-Doohm that Adorno’s thinking is situated in a European context. I will not discuss this observation as it is incontrovertibly true. However, here I am trying to make the point that his idea of “critique” is probably the result of a particularly German cultural situation. I will develop this argument in section 4.

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the only way which would lead Mexico into modernity (see González Torres 2002: 114). However, it would be unfair to sustain that Paz made his decisions because of some kind of opportunism. It has to be remembered that in the 1980’s he was already one of the most internationally recognized Mexican writers who didn’t need to bow before the political powers-that-be in order to help his career. Additionally, it can hardly be doubted that even earlier in his life Paz made many uncomfortable decisions out of protest against the political system. 4 And it would also be too simple to see in neo-liberalism the culmination of Paz’s commitment to liberalism.5 This does not mean that Paz wasn’t interested in maintaining a healthy relationship with the political system, but, just as I tried to show that Adorno’s intellectual non-conformism, maybe even his philosophical negativism, cannot be understood without any reference to the historical and biographical context; it would also be incorrect to see in Paz’s interest to connecting with the political system as only some kind of personal weakness. Instead I would like to suggest that the Mexican political system, especially during and after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), established a very astute way of dealing with even the most critical intellectuals.6 Though the preparatory phase of the Revolution itself did not count on much important support by the intellectuals – “it was essentially the work of the common people […] no great intellectuals prescribed to its program, formulated its doctrine, outlined its objectives” (Knight 1991: 144). However, once the revolution was successful, the process of the administrative and cultural construction of a new nation did require the help of the intellectuals.7 The meaning of which is: In Mexico there was almost always a possibility for intellectuals to identify with and to participate in a state-orchestrated political project. However, the price to pay was considerably high, as the Mexican sociologist Fernando Castañeda explains: “the protagonists in the cultural organization of post-revolutionary Mexico are neither the intellectuals nor a group of ‘illustrious citizens’, but the state itself. The Mexican culture emancipated itself from the church, but not from the king”, writes Castañeda (idem 2004: 112). One of the consequences was an all-pervading nationalism, from which no cultural or academic activity could easily escape. It is no secret that Paz “did his duty” for his country. For many years (from 1944 until 1968) he belonged to the diplomatic corps of the Mexican foreign 4 | The most spectacular was probably when he resigned from his post as Mexican ambassador to India in protest against the slain of students in Mexico City in 1968. 5 | For a more sophisticated view on Paz's liberalism see Grenier 2001. 6 | One of the most severe crisis in the relationship between intellectuals and government had been triggered by the crackdown on the Mexican students movement in 1968 (see Volpi 1998). 7 | Some of which even sacrified their lives, working as government officials instead of producing an intellectual oeuvre. This can be said for the ‘generación de 1915’ (see Krauze 2000).

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ministry. The last position he held was that of ambassador to India. However, this does not mean that he had sacrificed his critical attitude and succumbed to crude nationalism. On the contrary: The diplomatic service allowed Paz to get to know many different countries – above all the United States, France, Switzerland, Japan and India – thus helping him to understand the richness of the world and consequently the mistake of any kind of self-contented nationalism (see Sheridan 2004: 433-495). Of course, Paz participated in the mission of defining the character of “the Mexican”. Enrique Krauze writes: “[…] the permanent subject and object of his passion and his critique was Mexico, his country [...]” (Krauze 2003: 141). But Krauze also recognizes a “permanent fascination with duality” (Krauze 2003: 142). This means that for Paz it was always imperative to understand Mexico as both: as a culture which has developed its own ways of coping with the most import aspects of the human self-understanding – solitude, communion and death – and, at the same time, as a culture which despite of all singularities participates with its own voice in the “polyphonic” concert of human cultures. The task of a modern Mexican intellectual as Paz understood it, was, consequently, the “fabrication” of a new tradition (Zermeño 2003: 7) that was able to recognize these dialectics of being oneself without being detached from the rest of the world. Paz found his major source of inspiration in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the nun and poet of 17 th century New Spain. At a time when the power of Spain in the American colonies started to fade, and in which a new Creole society started to take over, Sor Juana became the “mother” of modern Mexican intellectuals. She “transformed natural maternity into a symbolic or spiritual” one (Paz 1994: 112). The stress on maternity is crucial. For Paz Mexico is a maternalist culture. Already in his The Labyrinth of Solitude he wrote about two other important female characters. But while Doña Marina/La Malinche, born into the Aztec aristocratic class, and who eventually became the interpreter and concubine of Hernán Cortés, is still today the symbol of treason, but also of Mexico’s cultural and ethnic hybridity, and the Virgen de Guadalupe is the representation of Mexican unity under the roof of the Catholic Church, it is Sor Juana who is presented by Paz as the Mexican key to the modern world. In Sor Juana’s poetry Paz senses an important step towards a “universal” tradition he himself was longing for. “Universal”, however, does not refer to all-inclusive and abstract principles, but first and foremost to a universal language; in this case Spanish. The language in which Sor Juana wrote was for Paz just such a universal language. But it became universal in the poetry of Sor Juana, where it ceased to be only an imposed, alien language, the “language of the conquistador”. In nuce: a language or tradition becomes “universal” when it is appropriated. Appropriation does not mean to copy that which is borrowed, rather it always contains a process of transformation and consequently of creating something different. A universal tradition is thus for Paz something “which does not annul diversity, but which makes it possible, which sustains it” (Paz 1993: 18).

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As we have seen, Adorno and Paz saw the challenges for a modern intellectual basically in working on tradition. But while Adorno sticks to what he considers to be his own, European (and as we will further see: more specifically German) tradition, Octavio Paz looks for inspiration in many different cultures with which he tries to establish contact. In the following section I would like to show that these differences determine their respective understandings of “critique”.

4. Why Adorno’s ‘Kritik’ is so Dif ficult to Translate In an etymological sense “critique” does always contain the meaning of “marking differences”. Critique requires a constant work on the language in which it expresses itself. It is impossible to mark differences in “stale language” (abgestandene Sprache) which is rather condemned to indifference and only reaffirms the conventional understanding about reality. In stale language the “whole” speaks for every individual. What Adorno was looking for, however, is the transition to Mündigkeit, a condition in which everybody has his/her own voice and where the polyphony of discourses opposes radically any kind of monologism (see Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 785-793). Modernity is thus a permanent critique of language. Adorno found inspiration for his understanding of critique not in philosophy but in aesthetic modernism. Modernity’s critique of language mimics modern art, more so: “[modernity] is art through mimesis of the petrified and the alienated; it is by this, not by neglecting the mute, that it becomes eloquent …” (Adorno 1997, vol. 8: 39). And Hauke Brunkhorst resumes Adorno’s idea as follows: “It is decisive that critique follows art and not theory” (Brunkhorst 1995: 127). Brunkhorst explains: [Critique] accepts the experience of contradictions and antinomies, of complex and uncontrollable situations and impulses and it renders to them, it looses itself in the things, mingles with them [verfranst sich selbst in ihnen], and rejects the prefabricated solutions of theory, which she finally reveals as appearance [Schein] and false absolutizing (Brunkhorst 1995: 127).

The motor of critique is not the effort to produce novelty in a positive sense. Adorno is very clear about this in his Aesthetic Theory: The authority of the new is that which is historically unavoidable. In this sense it implies an objective critique of the individual, its vehicle: aesthetically the new ties the knot of the individual and society. The experience of modernity says more; although its concept, despite of all qualitative meaning, always works on abstraction. It is from the beginning more a negation of what should not be anymore, than a positive phrase (Adorno 1997, vol. 7: 38).

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This “negation of what should not be anymore” is only possible through the recognition of the “non-identical” which Martin Seel defines as the heterogeneous, the strange, the different, the unique or the special (Seel 2004: 23), and in which he suspects the “individual presence of things and persons” (Seel 2004: 24), that is, something definitely positive and existing. Seel thinks that Adorno’s diagnosis may be negative, but that the procedure – which orients itself in real-existing things and persons and which “recognizes” them in their resistance to the facticity of the totalizing discourses and institutions – is positive. Seel refers in this context to Adorno’s text “Scientific Experiences in America”, suggesting that a “positive” source of inspiration for Adorno’s critique was the scientific and political culture he encountered in the United States, where he lived for more than a decade of his life. In order to make his point, Seel quotes a very important passage of this text: “We will not become free human beings by realizing ourselves after a terrible phase as individuals, but only by going beyond ourselves, getting into a relationship with others and, in a sense, by rendering ourselves to them” (quoted in Seel 2004: 27; Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 735-736). But is this quotation really a proof of Adorno’s decision to look to other cultures for positive inspiration, as Seel seems to suggest? I have my doubts and would like to propose a different reading: I think that Adorno’s phrase is not an indicator of how he is on the lookout for inspiration from a different culture or a different modernity8, but rather a summary of a critique of his own German, culture. In order to bring out this point, it might be helpful to focus on another text, namely, “About the question: what is German?” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 691-701). Right at the beginning Adorno denies the possibility of giving a positive answer to this question. Instead he underscores that what he is really interested in, is the question itself, and that thinking about this question helps to understand that a possible answer is always burdened by a normative ideal of what “German” shall be. In other words: the question “What is German?”, usually steers toward idealizations and stereotypes, that is, to positive images – which because of their abstract character – can only be “wrong”. Therefore: “[True] and better is […] that which does not fit into the collective subject, which, where ever possible, resists to it” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 691). This “critical self-understanding” (kritische Selbsbestimmung) (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 692) does not need the positive imagery that a comparison with other cultures might provide. On the contrary, it nurtures itself in an alternative German tradition of which Adorno sees in Kant the most prominent expression. “His [Kant’s] thinking has its center in the concept of autonomy, the self-responsibility of the reasonable individual and not in the blind dependencies, of which one is the unreflected predominance of the national” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 692). It seems quite obvious that Adorno situates Kant’s as well as his own ideas 8 | Just as if he would announce an awareness of the plurality of modernities – which marks the debate about “multiple modernities” in contemporary sociological theory – ahead of time.

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in an outspokenly German situation, in that of a “culture war”, as it were, which is marked by a dialectical tension: on one side, “a radicalization of the spirit” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 695), on the other – just as radical a tendency toward collective delusions, by which individuality and subjectivity – that is, both the recipients and shaper of spirit and reason – are constantly crushed. In still another text (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 786-793), Adorno even explains “Kritik” as a direct outcome of this ambivalence; it is the radical reaction against the just as radical and “essentially German” tendency to “call for the positive” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 792). To put it differently: despite of all the years Adorno spent outside of Germany it is quite possible that his thinking did never leave this German cultural and political battlefield which shaped his ideas so effectively. That is not to say that Adorno does not recognize anything positive in the countries he lived in during his years of exile. Especially, as Seel has pointed out, the United States actually left some important impressions on Adorno’s thought, and one might also add, so did England and France, as Adorno himself admits (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 791). However, these influences, so I would dare to say, are not decisive for his understanding of “critique”, and they don’t provide indispensable criteria for his critique of his own German culture. At this point an aspect of critique should be remembered, as I mentioned earlier; that is, its dependency on language. One of the most important reasons for Adorno’s decision to return to Germany (see Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 699) was that he felt the need to express himself in his mother tongue in order to be a fully functioning intellectual. And Adorno is not referring to the common problems of acquiring a new language either. He explains the need for the German language rather by underlining its intrinsic connection with critique: If critique is the undermining of the positive, the essential, the facticity, and so on, then it is the German language and especially its “speculative moments” – which philosophy appreciates above all – that explain the “elective affinity” to critique: it enables the expression of something of the phenomenon which does not fit into its “pure positivity and giveness” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.2: 700). In the final analysis Adorno’s relationship to his own culture may be ambivalent; but this ambivalence is still the ambivalence unique to the German culture, which Adorno was reflecting upon.9 For Adorno there is probably no reason to doubt that there is a typically German form of critique which can only work in the German language and which is impossible to translate into another. And, despite his constant ambition to fight the “narrowness” (Enge) and the “mustiness” (Muff ) of the German culture10, which certainly helps to break through the armor of the particular, allowing 9 | “Critique is an indispensable element of the culture which is contradictory in itself […]” (Adorno 1997, vol. 10.1: 15). 10 | “Narrowness” (Enge) and “mustiness” (Muff ) are words which accompany Adorno’s thought at least from very early 1930s to the last decade of his life. They always seem to refer to a typical German attitude for which Adorno finds the most striking

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for reflection on the “non-identical” (the other, the strange), Adorno’s Kritik does not make contact with the other. In order to be able to do so, it needs to be complemented by a more outreaching form of critique, like the one we can find in Octavio Paz’s writings.

5. Comparison of Cultures: Octavio Paz’s Cosmopolitan Modernit y At first sight Adorno and Paz couldn’t be more different. In his own intent to compare the German with the Mexican thinker, Alfons Söllner describes the work of Paz as an expression of “a joyful universalism which discovers in the singularities of the most different cultures of the world, [what] makes the human essence in general” (see Söllner in this book p. 17). It is this “comparison of cultures” that Paz declares “explicitly as the guiding principle of his essays” (Söllner in this book: 17). But the essay is as the “formless form“ (Adorno) also a privileged instrument for critique. In his “Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad” (Paz 1994b: 241-260), Paz explains: “Critique is for me a free form of commitment. The writer has to be a sniper, he has to stand the solitude and he has to know that he is marginalized. That we writers are marginalized is a condition which is a blessing. To be marginal means to give a value to our writing” (Paz 1994b: 258). This does not sound too different from Adorno: the relationship between critique and the form of the essay as well as the solitude of the critical intellectual is what Adorno underscores time and again. And still, there is also a very important difference between both thinkers. For Paz there is always a way out of solitude, while for Adorno this seems to be endlessly difficult. For Paz there is no doubt that solitude is part of the human condition. He writes in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “the feeling and consciousness of being alone, of being alienated from oneself and from the world, even of being separated from oneself is not an exclusively Mexican condition of the soul. All human beings feel sometimes alone”. And: “Life means to separate ourselves from what we once were, in order to become what we will be at one point in the unknown future, and solitude is the most stable foundation of the conditio humana” (Paz 1994b: 189). But solitude and the awareness of it is only one part of a much more complex condition. Complementary to it is what Paz understands as the constant search for new ways of “communion” with the other. In this sense Paz writes: “The human being is the only creature which knows that it is lonely, the only one that searches the ‘other’” (Paz 1994b: 189). This sentence couldn’t express more clearly what Paz means when he speaks about the “dialectics of solitude”. The sensation of solitude

evidence in the “jargon of authenticity”, that is, a language which he encounters above all in Heidegger’s philosophy (see Adorno 1997: vol. 6).

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is part of the human condition, however, to it belongs a complementary moment, the “desire and search for communion” with the other. This dialectical pair builds a “force field” which Paz recognizes especially in modernity. Modernity is in this context an awareness or a problematization of the relationship to the other. Paz explains this with reference to the relationship between Mexico and the rest of the modern world. He understood that, from a Mexican point of view, modernity is not some kind of “alien” exteriority and that, in this sense, Mexico cannot be relegated to a position at the supposed “exteriority” of modernity. Rather, there is a typical Mexican modernity which, though obviously unique in some respects, also shares many pivotal experiences with other modernities. Consequently one might say that Paz did anticipate an intuition which is being exploited only in recent years and which has paved the way for a whole research-program like that which in current sociology goes under the name of “multiple modernities”. Although he dedicates much of his writing to describing and interpreting the Mexican culture, Paz also demonstrates that modern Mexican culture can only be understood if it is compared to many other cultures on the planet, to which it belongs as being part of the human experience with and in the modern world. This awareness is no accident, nor is it the result of the sort of Mexican inferiority complex famously postulated by the Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos. It is, rather, the consequence of a deeply felt normative commitment, intrinsic to Paz’s concept of modernity. In modernity Paz sees not only a planetary phenomenon, but he also recognizes that it is precisely the intercultural aspect of a global modernity which calls for an ethics that emphasizes the imperatives of comparison and mutual learning from each other. Modernity is thus seen as a global but not homogeneously shared definition of social and cultural realities. It does create differences and finds one of its most important normative orientations in comparison, that is, in an activity that celebrates differences without ignoring important affinities. This might have motivated Paz to see in modernity an “empty name” (Paz 1993: 19). In Habermas’s words, one could say modernity is and will be an unfinished project. However, to be able to capture the complete sense of what Paz might have had in mind, one has to go beyond Habermas, since for Paz it would be a mistake to presume that the empty word “modernity” can be resumed in one single project or one grand narrative. But just as wrong as seeing in “[m]odernity […] an arrogant affi rmation of the future and the now”, would it be to understand it as the coming of a catastrophic, barbarous and totalizing cataclysm on a planetary scale, which Adorno’s negative philosophy of history has predicted. Both ways fail to understand what modernity really means: it is an “empty surface of questions” (Paz 1993, vol. 3: 20) i.e., a name for a permanent challenge, which accepts the vanishing of unquestionable certainties and at the same time, the certainty of the continuity of uncertainty. Critique is thus the permanent questioning of any given self-content of manifestation. But while for Adorno the critique

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roots into a German context, for Paz it is the result of comparing oneself to what is actually other. Yvon Grenier has noticed that Paz can be seen as one of the precursors of postmodernism (Grenier 2001: 98). And indeed, despite of his defense of modernity, one can sense in his writing some kind of horizon beyond modernity. “[…] it is good to repeat that modernity, like anything else which is history, is a vanishing reality: nothing will stay of it, but if something will stay, it will be some lively instants, a few words before and after the dates” (Paz 1993: 22). The last part of this phrase is certainly obscure and therefore very untypical for Paz, who in his essays was always concerned with clarity. What is meant by those “lively moments” and the words that seem to have a certain temporal independence? Certainly, what is independent of time is the present. It is not only different from past and future it is separated from time; the present is experienced as the suspension of time, and it is this suspension which creates the instant of transcendence that shines through the fabric of history (Paz 1993: 40). But for Paz that which shines through history is not postmodern. It refers rather to an experience for which an anthropologic condition is responsible and which cannot be simulated in any other language than poetry. “The poem” – says Paz in his El Arco y la lira – “draws a line which separates the privileged instant from the temporal flow: in this here and now begins something: love, a heroic act, a vision of divinity, a momentous amazement about this tree or about Diana […]” (Paz 2003: 186-187). The poem brings us back to Paz’s anthropology of the dialectics of solitude and communion: it marks the instant as the “space” between human beings (Paz 2003: 187). In 1990 Paz said in his Nobel-Prize-speech: “What do we know about the present? Nothing – or almost nothing. But Poets know something: The present is the fountain of presences (presencias)” (Paz 1993: 41). Paz refers to the Spanish poet Antonio Machado when he narrates the virtues of the poetic language in the following words: “The other presents itself and speaks through the [mouth of the poet]” (Paz 1996: 35). All this doesn’t mean that poetry serves or should serve as some kind of definite exit from history. Paz recognizes that history is another condition of the human being and he was very clear about that in the 1950s: “In order to be in the present the poem has to become present between human beings, incarnate in history” (Paz 2003: 187). But the message of poetry, which stems from the deepest source of our human desires is what should inform history, or more precisely: Histories. Again, Paz is not arguing for a definite suspension of history, but rather for the conflation of distinct times, of different histories. And according to him it is modernity which allows this “multaneousness of times” in one globally shared moment. Of course, under the conditions I just outlined, it becomes difficult to talk about modernity in the singular. Paz knows that, and he sounds definitely like an early herald of the awareness that informs the current debate about “multiple modernities:” “What is Modernity? First of all it is an incorrect term: there are so many modernities as there are societies” (Paz 2003: 35).

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Critique is for Paz first of all self-critique. This he shares with Adorno. However, while Adorno’s critique somehow reduces itself to the critique of the “own” (das Eigene) Paz goes a step further: he reaches out to the other by learning his language and comparing it with his own. In so doing, he follows a very important instinct: the desire to know the world and the human cultures that articulate/narrate it, which he remembers having experienced since his childhood: “The experience repeated itself over and over. Any news, an anodyne phrase, the headline in a newspaper, a popular song; all proofs of the existence of a world out there and a revelation of my unreality” (Paz 2003: 35).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1997): Gesammelte Schriften, 20 volumes, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Albrecht, Clemens, (1999): “‘Das Allerwichtigste ist, daß man die Jugend für sich gewinnt:’ Die kultur- und bildungspolitischen Pläne des Horkheimer-Kreises bei der Remigration.” In: Clemens Albrecht/Günter C. Behrmann/Michael Bock/Harald Homann/Friedrich H. Tenbruck, Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, pp. 97-131. Auer, Dirk/Rensmann, Lars/Wessel, Julia Schulze (eds.) (2003): Arendt und Adorno, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Brunkhorst, Hauke (1990): Der Entzauberte Intellektuelle: Über die neue Beliebigkeit des Denkens, Hamburg: Junius. Brunkhorst, Hauke (1995): “Kritik statt Theorie. Adornos experimentelles Freiheitsverständnis.” In: Gerhard Schweppenhäuser/Mirko Wischke (eds), Impuls und Negativität: Ethik und Ästhetik bei Adorno, Hamburg and Berlin: Argument-Verlag, pp. 117-135. Castañeda Sabido, Fernando (2004): La crisis de la sociología académica en México, Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa UNAM. Giddens, Anthony (1995): “Living in a Post-Traditional Society”. In: Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens/Scott Lash, Refl exive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Gonzáles Torres, Armando (2002): Las guerras culturales de Octavio Paz, Puebla: Colibrí. Grenier, Yvon (2001): From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom, Lanham and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.) (1992): The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. Jäger, Lorenz (2003): Adorno eine politische Biographie, Munich/Darmstadt: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Kamphausen, Georg (2002): Die Erfindung Amerikas in der Kulturkritik der Generation von 1890, Weilerswist: Velbrück.

Theodor W. Adorno and Octavio Paz: Two Critiques | 45

Knight, Alan (1991): “Intellectuals in the Mexican Revolution.” In: Roderic A. Camp/Charles Hale/Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (eds.), Los intelectuales y el poder en México, Mexico City and Los Angeles: El Colegio de México/ UCLA Latin American Center Publications, pp. 141-171. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2001): Spielräume der Modernisierung: Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit, Weilerswist: Velbrück. Kraushaar, Wolfgang (1998): Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, vol. 1, Hamburg: Rogner and Bernhard by Zweitausendeins. Krauze, Enrique (2000): Los caudillos culturales en la Revolución mexicana, Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Krauze, Enrique (2003): Travesía liberal, Mexico City: Tusquets. Offe, Claus (2004): Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne: Tocqueville, Weber und Adorno in den Vereinigten Staaten, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Paz, Octavio (1985): Los hijos del limo, Mexico City: Planeta-Agostini. Paz, Octavio (1993-2003): Obras Completas. 15 volumes, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1993): Fundación y disidencia: dominio hispánco. Obras Completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura. Paz, Octavio (1994): Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Obras Completas, vol. 5, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura. Paz, Octavio (1994a): Los privilegios de la vista II: arte de México. Obras Completas, vol. 7, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura. Paz, Octavio (1994b): El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de Mexico. Obras Completas, vol. 8, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura. Paz, Octavio (1996): Ideas y costumbres II: Usos y símbolos. Obras Completas, vol. 10, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura. Paz, Octavio (2003): El arco y la lira, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Seel, Martín (2004): Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Sheridan, Guillermo (2004): Poeta con paisaje: Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Era. Tenbruck, Friedrich H. (1999): “Von der verordneten Vergangenheitsbewältigung zur intellektuellen Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Die politischen Rahmenbedingungen.” In: Albrecht/Behrmann/Bock/ Homann/Tenbruck 1999, pp. 78-96. Volpi, Jorge (1998): La imaginación del poder: Una historia intelectual de 1968, Mexico City: Era. Zermeño, Guillermo (2003): “El concepto intelectual en Hispanoamérica: Génesis y evolución” (manuscript).

Socialism in One Person: Specter of Marx in Octavio Paz’s Political Thought 1 Yvon Grenier

If influence is omnipresent in literature, it is also, one should emphasize, always secondary in any work of quality. Salman Rushdie2

When reminiscing on his intellectual and political itinerary, Octavio Paz (1914-98) never failed to recognize his debt to Karl Marx. He routinely presents the German philosopher (he would say: historian) as one of the two or three thinkers who influenced him the most (see for instance Paz 1994d: 258). In the fifteen tomes of his Obras completas, Marx is quoted and referred to more often than anyone else.3 The pattern is quite consistent from his earlier essays and interviews to the last ones. Furthermore, most references to Marx seem to express espousal of the German philosopher’s views, or at least signal a genuine intellectual complicity. There’s much to be liked about Marx, from a Pazian perspective. Marx was a distinguished intellectual whose work belongs to the canon of Western thought. He denounced injustices and challenged the dominant class with courage and abnegation. An avid reader of Greek tragedies, Cervantes (see his German Ideology) and Shakespeare, Marx was also a genuine writer, capable to pen (in Paz words) “alexandrine[s] perfecto[s]” [perfect alexandrine(s)] (Michael 2001: 82-84). 4 No resemblance here, in Paz’s mind, to culturally1 | First published as: “El socialismo en una sola persona: el espectro de Marx en la obra de Octavio Paz.” In: Anthony Stanton (ed.) (2009), Octavio Paz: de la poética a la política, Mexico City: El Colegio de México, pp. 211-233. 2 | Rushdie 2002: 65. 3 | I use the version published in Mexico City by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz’s complete works is also published in Barcelona, by the Circulo de lectores. 4 | In his review of Francis Wheen’s biography of Marx, Mexican critic and Paz’s close collaborator Christopher Domínguez Michael, following a typically Pazian

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challenged “professors” who call themselves Marxists. Paz liked to compare Marx favorably to his followers, especially the Mexican and Latin American ones, with whom he crossed swords for decades.5 A distant loyalty to Marx opened a breach in their territory and afforded Paz some potent rhetorical ammunition to fight his comrades, seemingly on their own turf. Not a few observers think that the specter of Marx survived Paz’s reconciliation with political (if not economic) liberalism during the 1970s. At the very least, there is ground to conclude that for all his scathing criticism of communist regimes and socialismo realmente existente [really existing socialism], in the last two or three decades of his life, Paz remained, as he never ceased to repeat, a man of the Left, an intellectual who remained thoroughly indebted to Marx’s thought. As he said in an interview with Braulio Peralta: I was born with the Left. I educated myself in the cult of the French Revolution and Mexican liberalism. During my youth, I assimilated the grand and Promethean Communist effort to change the world. The revolutionary idea was and still is a very generous project. My intellectual and moral affinities, my life itself and even my critiques are part of a tradition of the Left. […] Even though my dialogue with the Left has often turned into a dispute, it was never interrupted. At least not from my end. In my own conscience, I argue and discuss silently with my adversaries. They are my interlocutors (Paz 1996a: 164).6

If not a Marxist stricto sensu, Paz vehemently refused to be called an “antiMarxist”, preferring to be considered as an independent and at times

way of thinking, deplores Wheen’s insufficient attention to Marx’s authoritarian propensities but let himself being seduced by the portrait of a Marx gentleman and rebel, an “eminent Victorian” who, in typical romantic fashion, affects a superb disinterest for material comfort. Last but not least, Marx had a “decisive influence on history” and was a “formidable prose writer”. In: Letras Libres 33 (September 2001): 82-84. 5 | For instance: “Reducir al marxismo al dualismo en blanco y negro de nuestros muralistas (también de muchos poetas, como Neruda) no sólo es empobrecerlo sino desfigurarlo” [To reduce Marxism to the dualism in black and white of our Muralists (and also of many of ours poets, like Neruda) is not merely to impoverish it, but to disfigure it] (Paz 1994b: 223). 6 | [...] nací con la izquierda. Me eduqué en el culto a la Revolución francesa y al liberalismo mexicano. En mi juventud hice mía la gran y prometeica tentativa comunista por cambiar al mundo. La idea revolucionaria fue y es un proyecto muy generoso. Mis afi nidades intelectuales y morales, mi vida misma e incluso mis críticas, son parte de la tradición de la izquierda. [...] A pesar de que mi diálogo con la izquierda se ha transformado con frecuencia en disputa, nunca se ha interrumpido. Al menos por mi parte. En mi fuero interno converso y discuto silenciosamente con mis adversarios. Son mis interlocutores.

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turbulent follower of Marx (and others). This is what Paz’s closest collaborators remember. The case can be made that the magnitude of Paz’s purported “turn” from the “Left” to the “Right” is often exaggerated, probably for two reasons (see for instance Rodríguez Ledesma 1996). First, there is a tendency to exaggerate Marx’s influence on Paz’s thought, especially on the young Paz. Secondly, the exceptional consistency of Paz’s political views over these turbulent decades is not fully appreciated. Paz was not a philosopher, a political theorist or a political activist. He was a poet and a public intellectual, who tended to poach ideas and inspiration in an incredibly wide range of sources and disciplines. Paz’s perspective was fundamentally poetic; it wasn’t systematic or rooted on an academic discipline. A voracious reader, Paz took special interest in the authors who shared his main preoccupation (beside poetry): modernity and its discontent.7 He was a passionate reader of all radical critics of modernity, in particular Marx and Nietzsche. Time and again he commented and used the ideas of other giants, such as Heidegger, Husserl, Ortega y Gasset, Tocqueville and Kant. It is nothing short of overwhelming to do the inventory of the thinkers and intellectuals with whom Paz engaged over the years. And yet, he never undertook a systematic and thorough study of any of these great thinkers.8 Nor did he ever become anybody’s “disciple”. I concur with Willard Gingerich when he writes: He accepts no system but his own experience and sees all languages of analysis as so many metaphors of reality, like all metaphors limited and partial in their comprehension. From Freud, Breton, Hegel, Nietzsche, Jung, Marx, Blake, Kant, Keynes, Reyes, Prebisch, Lévi-Strauss or Heidegger he takes whatever suits his purpose and recognizes no obligation to account for the rest, remaining committed at every point only to the integrity of his own disciplined intuition (Gingerich 1984: 22).

The author he praised the most and to whom he felt most indebted was probably André Breton (1896-1966). Breton was a friend and almost a role model. And yet, it is quite remarkable to see how Paz was inspired by Breton without being convinced by most of his ideas: I felt attracted by Breton’s magnetic personality and his ideas seduced me, although they did not manage to convince me altogether. They exalted my idea of freedom and my idea of the one and unique love – my debt to romanticism – but I considered with scepticism his naive faith in automatic writing. I did not understand either his hostility toward Christianity or his fascination for the occult 7 | On Paz and modernity see Maarten van Delden’s chapter in Van Delden/ Grenier 2009. 8 | His only lengthy text on a contemporary thinker who is not primarily a poet is his essay on French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: Paz 1967, transl. 1970.

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sciences. I felt the same way about his indifference, sometimes a truly intense dislike, for traditions, ideas and beliefs that I saw (and I still see) as constitutive parts not only of our civilization but of our selves as human beings. How to separate love from the ideas of Plato and the Roman poets, of the Sufi mystics and of the Italian poets which represent a tradition that he rejects: Cavalcanti, Petrarch? And don’t we owe to Christianity our ideas of freedom and fraternity, the censure of wealth and the exaltation of the poor? How can we condemn civilizations and entire periods of history: The painting of the Renaissance, Greek sculpture, the novella of the nineteenth century, Arab or Chinese poetry, Calderón’s drama? And in a more limited domain, although for me essential: If one loves poetry, can one despise prosody and the music in verses? Nothing of this tarnished my affection and my admiration. My affinities were ethical and spiritual rather than aesthetic (Paz 1994: 24f.).9

When tracing Marx’s influence in Paz’s thought, one is soon confronted with another difficulty: disentangling the co-author of the Communist Manifesto from other thinkers – and not only socialists. There is a tendency to declare Marx owner of virtually all radical socialist ideas, and then some. Think for instance about the concept of class struggle (Guizot), or the idea of the working class conceived as an universal emancipatory force (Flora Tristan), to say nothing of dialectic, materialism, or revolution, all borrowed from other philosophers. Building on the assumption that Paz read Marx and cites him often, it is tempting to see proofs of Marxist influence each time Paz slams capitalism. What is specific to Marxism is an assemblage of the following tenets: a materialistic and dialectic conception of history; a critique of the state, understood as the instrument of the propertied class; the division of all known societies in antagonistic classes, with no prospect for reconciliation; the promotion of class violence, or revolution, as the midwife of history; and 9 | “La personalidad magnética de Breton me atraía y sus ideas me seducían, aunque no lograban convencerme del todo. Me exaltaban la idea de libertad y la del amor único del romanticismo – pero veía con escepticismo su creencia ingenua en la escritura automática. Tampoco comprendía su hostilidad frente al cristianismo y su fascinación por las ciencias ocultas. Sentía lo mismo ante su indiferencia, a veces verdadera antipatía, ante tradiciones, ideas y creencias que yo veía (y yo veo) como constitutivas no solo de nuestra civilización sino de nuestro ser mismo. ¿Como divorciar al amor del pensamiento de Platón y de los poetas romanos, de los místicos sufies y de los poetas italianos que representan una tradición que el rechazaba: Cavalcanti, Petrarca? ¿Y no le debemos al cristianismo nuestras ideas de libertad y fraternidad, la condenación de la riqueza y la exaltación de los pobres? ¿Como condenar civilizaciones y épocas enteras: la pintura del Renacimiento, la escultura griega, la novela del siglo XIX, la poesía árabe o china, el teatro de Calderón? ¿Y en un dominio mas limitado, aunque para mi esencial: si se ama a la poesía, se puede despreciar a la prosodia y a la música de verso? Nada de esto enturbiaba mi afecto y mi admiración. Mis afinidades eran más de orden ético y espiritual que estético y fi losófico.”

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last but no least, the necessity or the inevitability (it is an aporia in Marx theory) of the demise of capitalism, thus leading to a classless society. It is reasonable for someone to call himself or herself Marxist while expressing doubt about some of Marx’s most dated views, such as the inevitability of socialism/communism, the withering away of the state, the absolute pauperization of the working class, the inconsequentiality of the middle class, and the derivative quality of cultural representations. What is more, the actual intensity of one’s Marxist fervor can vary significantly. Our Marxist colleagues remind us on a daily basis, by their praxis, that revolutionary socialism can be embraced with Zen-like patience and without compromising the comfort of bourgeois life. In other words, there is flexibility. Even so, it does not seem appropriate to call Marxist a corpus of political ideas that contradict Marx’s fundamental ideas on private property, class struggle, the role of the state in a capitalist society or the need for a violent revolution. Social-democrats reject those ideas: they remain socialist, but they are not Marxists. Finally, one needs to remember that Marxism is not the only radical or revolutionary socialist option (remember that Paz read the Anarchists extensively). In sum, not all ideas articulated by Marx are typically Marxists, and to be a Marxist one needs to have more than a few ideas in common with the author of Misery of Philosophy.

What is Lef t? For Paz politicization started early, in his family: he was the son of a Zapatista activist and grand-son of a liberal intellectual. He was born and grew up during the Mexican revolution, the Russian revolution of 1917, the irruption of fascism in Europe, the crash of 1929. As a young man he witnessed the Spanish Civil War and the onset of the Cold War. He worked in various capacities for Mexico’s Foreign Service from 1946 to 1968, living abroad (in Europe and Asia) for many years. The first three decades of his life corresponded to the adolescence of the century: turbulent, at once optimistic and disenchanted, and immensely creative. Many intellectuals and writers of the time found in Moscow (or Rome) desirable alternatives to capitalism and electoral (or “bourgeois”) democracies.10 “For my generation,” Paz commented 10 | In a comment on his activities in the Unión Estudiantil Pro-Obrero y Campesino (UEPOC), founded in 1926, Paz says: “Fue el semillero de varios y encontrados destinos políticos: unos cuantos fueron a parar al partido oficial y desempeñaron altos puestos en la administración pública; otros pocos, casi todos católico, influidos unos por Maurras, otros por Mussolini y otros más por Primo de Rivera, intentaron sin gran éxito crear partidos y falanges fascistas; la mayoría se inclinó hacia la izquierda y los más arrojados se afi liaron a la Juventud Comunista” [It was the seedbed of various existing politic destinations: A few joined the party in power worked in the public administration; a few others, most of them Catholic, some influenced by Maurras, others by Mussolini and still others by Primo of Rivera,

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in a reflection on that period, “los términos democracia parlamentaria, injusticia social, imperialismo, capitalismo, crisis económica, desempleo y guerra se convirtieron en sinónimos” [the terms parliamentary democracy, social injustice, imperialism, capitalism, economic crisis, unemployment and war became synonymous] (see Paz 1995a [1991]: 230). All of his friends and associates called themselves “revolutionaries,” with the superb liberty, naïveté and irresponsibility (Mannheim would say: sans attache) that is the privilege of artists and intellectuals of all time.11 The material available for the study of Paz’s early intellectual development is scarce. The main sources are Paz’s own autobiographical writing, especially Itinerario (1999).12 This is not the place to examine in details what Guillermo Sheridan called Paz’s “adolescencia filocomunista” [philocommunist adolescence] (Sheridan 2004: 13), his experiences to help set up a school for rural children in Yucatan peninsula, the extraordinary journey to Spain and France in 1937, and the first encounters with great minds such as Louis Aragon, Jorge Cuesta, André Breton, Pablo Neruda, Victor Serge, or Albert Camus. Suffice to reiterate that both his own revolutionary dispositions and the dominant passions of the time led him to mingle with leftist artists and intellectuals, and even to echo some of what Guillermo Sheridan calls the “sitios comunes del comunismo” [communist clichés] (Sheridan 2004: 222).13 If Paz went as far as saying that he was “del lado de los comunistas” [on the Communist side] (Paz 1996b: 142), he never joined the communist party (or any political organization of that tendency), either as a member or, a trendy alternative at the time, as a compagnon de route. He remained independent when it would have been easier to clearly take side. Paz’s leftist dispositions were more intense “as a young man” than later on. This pattern is not exceptional, to be sure, especially for a man born in 1914. The 20th century was tilting more to the extremes (Left and attempted to create Fascistic political parties and phalange; most were on the Left and the bravest joined the Communist Youth organization] (Paz 1999: 48). 11 | According to Guillermo Sheridan, Jorge Cuesta was “el único escritor serio en México que, en ese momento, está nadando con inteligencia a contracorriente de la izquierda” [the only serious writer in Mexico who, at that time, was swimming intelligently against the Leftist tide] (Sheridan 2004: 138). 12 | In Poeta con paisaje (Sheridan 2004), Guillermo Sheridan expresses doubts about some of the affi rmations that Paz made with respect to his youth, especially about his trip to the U.S. See also the important texts by Enrico Mario Santi, especially his El acto de las palabras, estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz (FCE, 1997). 13 | For example, “Todas las fuerzas creadoras de la cultura y la técnica, mediante la democracia burguesa, acuden ahora, en la época en que hacen crisis todas las concepciones y formas tradicionales, al fachismo, que es la tiranía brutal del capital monopolista” [By means of the bourgeois democracy, the creative forces of culture and technique are currently, in the midst of a crisis of all traditional forms and conceptions, joining Fascism, which is to say the brutal tyranny of capital in its monopolistic stage]. Quoted in Sheridan 2004: 223.

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Right) during the belle époque than after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Nevertheless, if Paz’s thought doubtlessly evolved from the thirties to the nineties, one looks in vain for some fundamental variation among the core principles of his political thought: a defense of absolute freedom in art and criticism, a critique of modernity in both its socialist and liberal forms, a critique of nationalism and political revolution, and a call for democratization in Mexico. I share the view of the great Mexican artist (and old friend of Paz) Juan Soriano when he contends: I don’t know why people think that Paz has changed; I’ve known him for ever and he has always thought the same. In 1987 and in 1937. […] For me, nobody in Mexico has been so consistent with himself over the years (quoted in Poniatowska 1990: 9).14

Paz was a republican and a democrat who became increasingly comfortable with liberal ideas and institutions. He was never an “orthodox” liberal or a liberal ideologue. In other publications of mine, I tried to demonstrate that in his essays, most of which produced after his late 1930s, Paz comes across as a skeptical and eclectic liberal democrat, who likes to find redeeming features in other ideational families as well. Paz was simultaneously a romantic who spurned materialism, a liberal who championed democracy, a conservative who respected tradition, and a socialist who lamented the withering of fraternity and equality. An advocate of fundamental transformation in the way we see ourselves and modern society, Paz was also a promoter of incremental change, not revolution. He liked to think à la carte, selecting the ideas that work for him within a broad but thin liberal framework. Was Paz’s awakening to the tragic dimension of communism precocious? Paz himself recalls that an important turn took place when, at age twentythree, he was personally invited by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to serve as a member of the Latin American delegation of intellectuals and artists to the Second International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, held in Valencia, Spain, in July 1937. Paz was one of the only two delegates (the other being Carlos Pellicer) who abstained from a landslide vote condemning French writer André Gide for having publicized his disillusion with the Soviet experience in a book entitled Retour de l’URSS, published in Paris in 1936. Paz was one of the youngest participants in the group, in a situation in which the pressure to tag along with the Communist line was undoubtedly overwhelming, and not only because he had been invited by the Communist Neruda. Nick Caistor contends that “experiences in Spain were to shape his political belief in a rational, critical liberalism that was to remain with him for the rest of his life.” (Caistor 2007: 32).

14 | “Yo no sé porqué piensan que Paz ha cambiado; lo conozco desde siempre y siempre ha pensado lo mismo. El de 87 es el mismo que el de 37. […] Para mi, nadie en México [ha sido] tan consecuente consigo mismo.”

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Another Paz scholar, Enrico Mario Santí, considers that Paz’s flirtation with the Left […] dissolved as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (1939), Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico the following year, and his personal breakup with Neruda, who was then Chilean Consul General in Mexico City (Santí 1995: 267).

This coincides with what Paz writes in Itinerario: Had I written The Labyrinth of Solitude in 1937 I would doubtlessly have affirmed that the meaning off the Mexican Revolutionary explosion – what I have called its quest – would have ended by adopting communism. The communist society was going to solve the dual Mexican confl ict, the inner and the outer: communion with ourselves and with the world. But the period that runs from 1930 to 1945 was not solely one of faith and noisy support but one of criticism, revelations, and disappointments. My doubts began in 1939: in 1949 I discovered the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union and from then on it did not seem so clear that communism was the remedy for suffering in the world and in Mexico. My doubts turned into criticisms, as can be seen in the second edition of my book (1959) and in other writings (Paz 1999: 25).

And yet, talking about the year 1943, Mexican author (and Paz’s collaborator) Guillermo Sheridan contends that Paz took six more years to publicly recognize the existence of the concentration camps in Siberia, after he read David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire in 1949. For Sheridan: “it would seem overdue and yet, it was early when compared to so many others and, certainly, it was premature compared to the laid-back Latin American intelligentsia”15 (Sheridan 2004: 407). In 1946, in París, Sheridan goes on, “Paz continues to be convinced that once the war was over, workers uprisings would trigger a new period of proletarian revolution in Europe”16 (Sheridan 2004: 409). Paz himself is not an adept of clear-cut chronology: he was still refusing to be called “anti-communist” in 1977, long after he made known his hostility to all actually existing communist regimes.17 What can be said with some confidence is that Paz views on communist regimes turned from deep misgivings in the 1930s and 1940s to open hostility from the 1950s on. He remained an admirer of intellectuals such as André Breton and Victor Serge, whom he met during the 1940s. Both were vehemently opposed to Stalin, but as Trotskyites, they were still communists (if very unorthodox ones). During the same period he met and admired Albert Camus, who at the time could be considered a radical 15 | “Parecería tarde y, sin embargo, temprano en relación con tantos otros y, desde luego, prematuro en relación con la pausada intelligentsia latinoamericana.” 16 | “Paz sigue convencido de que, terminada la guerra, los levantamientos obreros iniciarán una nueva etapa de la revolución proletaria en Europa. [...].” 17 | See his interview with Julio Scherer in Paz 1994c: 371.

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critic of communism and revolution. The men he met and whose political views he admired the most were men of the left who were highly original libre penseurs (free thinkers), intellectuals such as (in addition to the ones just mentioned) Benjamin Péret, Roger Caillois, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Kostas Papaoianou. And of course he continued to salute Marx. If he admired Kant and Tocqueville, he paid little attention to Anglo-Saxon liberalism and unlike many Latin American liberals (who tend to be fairly conservative); he expressed no interest in philosophers and economists such as Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) or Milton Friedman (1912-2006). The 1960s started with the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the onset of what Jorge Castañeda called the “thirty years war” in Latin America: that is, the wars opposing armed disciples of Fidel and Che to Latin American regimes, either dictatorial or democratic. During that period, according to Castañeda, “every Latin American intellectual worth his pen, canvas, or songbook made the journey to Havana at one point or another” (Castañeda 1994: 177, 184). Paz kept his distance. In Itinerario, Paz makes the following comments on the Cuban revolution: It began as an uprising against a dictatorship as much as a reaction to the clumsy politics of the United States. It stirred up enormous sympathies all round the world, above all in Latin America. It also awoke mine although, once bitten twice shy, I tried to keep my distance. As early as 1967, in a letter sent to Roberto Fernández Retamar, prominent personality at the Casa de las Américas, I said: “I am a friend of the Cuban revolution for what it owes to Martí not to Lenin” (Paz 1999: 74-75).

In his writings of the 1960s, Paz remains almost silent on the adventures of Fidel and Che, certainly compared to the shock it caused on writers of his (and the following) generation (Gilman 2003). In a letter to Tomas Segovia, who at the time was Managing Editor of Paz’s important “little magazine” Plural (1971-76), Paz writes “We have to gain the right to criticize Cuba (the parts that should be criticized), by first criticizing other Latin American regimes, beginning with Mexico.”18 Since criticizing other Latin American regimes was never difficult for Paz, spelling out his views on the authoritarian and caudillistic nature of the Castro regime wasn’t a problem 18 | Quoted in John King: The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture, From Tlatelolco to the Philantropic (King 2007: 69): Plural was a monthly cultural magazine created by Octavio Paz in 1971, in the wake of his resignation as Ambassador to India (in protest against his government’s responsibility in the 1968 massacre of Tlatelolco). He directed and edited what King calls this “little magazine” until the summer of 1976, when he and his collaborators resigned en masse in protest against the Echeverría government’s “coup” against Excélsior (especially its feisty director, Julio Scherer García), the independent daily that funded Plural. See also van Delden 1996: 133–56.

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either. His magazines Plural (1971-76) and Vuelta (1976-1998) were open to Cuban authors proscribed on the island (Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy), while it ignored the regime’s official writers such as Nicolas Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, Roberto Fernández Retamar, or Lisandro Otero. In his pondering on the misadventures of communism during the 20th century, Paz preferred to focus on the big picture: the Soviet Union. If for many intellectuals of his generation Cuba was a sort of political lighthouse, a model, for Paz it was another Latin American country, saddled with problems of underdevelopment and caudillism. The cultural and ideological “state apparatus” in Cuba (Casa de las Americas and the various periodicals of the party or the ministry of culture) ignored him back (the Latin American art of the ninguneamiento!). He was not a friend (or a former friend) of the regime and his sources of inspiration (Surrealism, Oriental thought, postwar French thought) had little resonance in the island. During the 1960s, Paz’s criticism of communist regimes was framed in Rizzi- Trotskyite terms:19 i.e. the USSR is “bureaucratic” rather than socialist; it deviated from its original template; it was a totalitarian ideocracy that shed all revolutionary pretenses. Subsequently his condemnation became more direct and final. And yet, in Itinerario (1993) he still contended that “The true intellectual cadaver of our time is not Marxism, but the idea of history as the depository of a mythical transcendence.”20 How can a theory survive the “death” of one of its main tenets? What is left of Marxism, beyond a respect for what it has represented, for many, for a century: a quest for a more just society?

Socialism in one Person As I have said earlier, references to Marx are abundant in Paz’s essays. Many, perhaps most, are not very consequential; quotes such as: “Marx criticized capitalism because it reduced the worker to hours of labor. He was right”21 19 | I am refering here to an influential book at the time, by Rizzi 1976; originally published as the first part of La bureaucratisation du monde, Paris 1936. 20 | “El verdadero cadáver intelectual de nuestro tiempo no es el del marxismo sino el de la idea de la historia como depositaria de una mítica trascendencia” (Paz 1993: 162). When called an “anti-communist” in the mid-1970s, Paz responded this: “Octavio Paz no ha sido nunca anticomunista pero es, desde hace mucho, un enemigo de la burocracia que ha convertido a la URSS y a otros paises “socialistas” en ideocracias totalitarias. Pensar asi no me convierte en un anticomunista: el que asesino a los comunistas fue Stalin, no sus criticos” [Octavio Paz was never an anticommunist but he has been for a long time an enemy of the bureaucracy that converted the USSR and to other socialist countries into totalitarian ideocracies. To think this way does not convert me into an anticommunist: Stalin was the assassin of Communism, not his critics] (Paz 1994e: 371). 21 | “Marx criticaba al capitalismo porque reducía al obrero a horas de trabajo. Tenía razón.”

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(Paz 1995a: 149). Some of Marx’s ideas he highlights are not particularly “Marxist”. In Corriente Alterna (1967) one finds a few references such as this one: “Marx never believed in a peasants-led communist revolution”22 (Paz 1996c: 598). In El arco y la lira (1956) he claims that Marx assigns to the human species “la autonomía de la conciencia” (autonomy of conscience) and talks about its capacity “casi demiúrgica de crear la existencia y modificarla” (almost demiurge-like capacity to create existence and modify it) (Paz 1994: 217). Here the idea is not Marx’s any more than almost any progressive thinkers of his time. In other words, he quotes Marx to highlight what the German philosopher owes to the dominant ideas of the 19th century. In “Revisión y profanación,” published in Corriente alterna in 1967, Paz seems to adopt a typically Marxist view, one that is incidentally rejected by Latin American Marxists in the wake of the Cuban revolution. He says: “At least on this point Marx was right: The equalitarian society is made possible by development and a poor economy only generates oppression and regimentation”23 (Paz 1996: 612 – my emphasis). Similarly, in Vuelta al El laberinto de la soledad, published for the first time in 1975, Paz reiterates that “Revolutions are the consequence of development, as Marx and Engels tirelessly said”24 (Paz 1994f: 249). However, while this is indeed a Marxist position, it is one that is now fairly common in the literature on political and economic development. I am thinking in particular about a theory that is usually associated with liberal or even conservative perspectives: the so-called Modernization theory.25 For Paz, developing countries are not ready for full-fledged revolution. They can only afford revolts (revueltas) rebellions (rebeliones) and popular uprisings against a reputedly unjust system (“levantamientos populares contra un sistema reputado injusto”). In this scenario, actors are typically individuals and groups who are marginals (“grupos e individuos marginales”), not social classes (Paz 1994d: 249). This seems to contradict his writings on the Mexican revolution, but then again, for Paz it was not so much a revolution, similar to the great French or American revolutions, but a revelation, a preamble to the first act as a true nation. Leaving aside for a moment the veracity of his theory of revolution, it appears that Paz adopts Marx’s conclusion but not the reasoning that led to it. For Marx, the development of productive forces establishes the objective conditions for the occurrence of a revolution. For this reason he considered colonialism as a boost to hasten developing countries’ passage to capitalism and therefore to socialism. For Paz, however, there is a correlation between 22 | “Marx nunca creyó en una revolución comunista de los campesinos.” 23 | “Por lo menos en este punto Marx tenía razón: la sociedad igualitaria se funda en el desarrollo y toda economía de escasez engendra opresión y regimentación”. 24 | “Las revoluciones son la consecuencia del desarrollo, como no se cansaron de decirlo Marx y Engels”. 25 | See for instance Huntington 2006, foreword by Francis Fukuyama. This book was first published in 1968.

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development and revolution, not because the first necessarily caused the second, but because the second is impossible without the first. Paz knew very well that revolutions of the twentieth century triumphed not in the most developed nations, but in the middle-income developing nations, with a middle class and the presence of resources for political mobilization. Furthermore, Paz always rejected the linear conception of history and development, epitomized in Marxism. Paz embraced Marx’s theory of revolution as an epochal phenomenon, a romantic and utopian vision that resonated with the ideals of the Enlightenment: liberty, equality, fraternity (or death…). But his overall position on revolution, for all its superficial similarity with Marx’s view, is not Marxist stricto sensu. As a good Romantic, Paz has nothing but disinterest for all economic matters. The issue of private property, evidently central in Marx, shines by its absence in Paz’s essays. Paz occasionally refers to problems of poverty and social inequality, without insisting. He never came close to espousing the idea that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle. He never described the Mexican state as a mere instrument in the hands of the capitalist class. In El ogro filantrópico (1979) and other texts, he insists on the relative autonomy of the Mexican state, its pre-revolutionary and even premodern roots. His interpretation of the Mexican revolution is romantic and populist (“el encuentro de México consigo mismo” [the encounter of Mexico with itself]), not Marxist. When criticizing Marxism, as he does occasionally, he resorts to his poetic perspective rather than challenging Marx on his own turf (political economy, philosophy of history). For instance, in Corriente alterna, Paz contends that “Marx was oblivious of what would be one of Nietzsche’s discoveries: The physiognomy of cultures, its particular shape and its singular vocation”26 (Paz 1996: 627). Marx’s failures to recognize the importance of culture and poetry in particular is signaled in a few of Paz’s writings. In an essay on poet Luis Cernuda published in 1943, Paz uses the example of Marx to explain that many great authors have published only one great book. For Paz, Marx’s great opus is The Capital, which was never finished. “What would have happened if Marx had finished off his book, accomplishing a little more than a criticism of the capitalist economy?”27, asked Paz. “The Marxists think that tomorow the future socialist world will write all that Marx could not write. This man not only left us a testament, with clauses we must execute, but a thought we should develop and complete”28 (Paz 1998: 305). He then contends that in his 26 | “Marx fue insensible a lo que sería uno de los descubrimientos de Nietzsche: la fisionomía de las culturas, su forma particular y su vocación singular”. 27 | “¿Qué hubiera ocurrido si Marx termina su libro, que es algo más que una crítica de la economía capitalista?” 28 | “Los marxistas piensan que será el futuro mundo socialista quien mañana escriba todo lo que Marx no pudo escribir. Este hombre no sólo nos dejó un testamento, cuyas cláusulas debemos cumplir, sino un pensamiento que debemos desarrollar y completar”.

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view, “this seems particularly true in poetry”,29 and uses as an example the book La realidad y el deseo, by Cernuda, to make his point. How much his “poetic of history” contradicts, rather than complements, Marx’s philosophy of history, he doesn’t always seem aware of. And yet, if, as he claims, a possible new revolutionary way of thinking “would have to absorb two traditions disdained by Marx and his heirs: the libertarian and the poetic traditions…”,30 one can imagine how these two traditions could clash with Marxism and not merely supplement it (Paz 1994e: 371). In another text, on Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, published in 1964, Paz criticizes the tendency to “consider civilizations as masks that conceal the true social reality – that is to say: as ideologies, in the sense that Marx gave to this word – we ended up attributing an absolute value to the social and economic systems”31 (Paz 1994a: 161). And why not considering those as “infrastructure”? Because as he explains in “Polvos de aquellos lodos,” fi rst published in Plural in 1974, Marx and Engels were wrong to conceive ideologies as “superstructure” and to ignore the fact that Those “superstructures” often outlive the “structures”. Christianity outlived Constantin’s bureaucratic and imperial regime, medieval feudalism, the monarchical absolutism of the 17th century and 19th century democratic bourgeois nationalism. Buddhism has shown even stronger vitality (Paz 1995: 191)32.

In other words, ideas, imagination and cultural forms in general were conceived by Paz (even the “young Paz”) as fundamentally impervious to any determinism. This is Marx walking on his head. What is more, one does not need to dig very deep into Marxism to see how a libertarian and cultural perspective cannot easily be conjugated with dialectic materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In “Los signos en rotación” (1965) we find perhaps the most praiseworthy comment on Marx and Marxism. Paz even quotes Marx extensively (which is unusual) from his Introducción general a la crítica de la economía política. In the version reproduced in his Obras completas (1994), Paz adds this note: “These lines were written in 1964. Today, twenty years after, the enormous historic failure of Marxism-Leninism is an incontrovertible fact. But a new 29 | “[…] parece que todo esto resulta particularmente verdadero en poesía.” 30 | “[…] tendrá que absorber dos tradiciones desdeñadas por Marx y sus herederos: la libertaria y la poética ...” 31 | “[…] considerar a las civilizaciones como máscaras que encubren la verdadera realidad social – o sea como ‘ideologías’, en el sentido que daba Marx a esta palabra – habíamos terminado por atribuir un valor absoluto a los sistemas sociales y económicos.” 32 | “[…] esas ’superestructuras’ sobreviven muchas veces a las ‘estructuras’. El cristianismo sobrevivió al régimen burocrático e imperial de Constantino, al feudalismo medieval, al absolutismo monárquico el siglo XVII y al nacionalismo democrático burgués del XIX. El budismo ha mostrado aún mayor vitalidad.”

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critical and creative thought has not emerged.”33 Apparently, we have here a blatant case of ideological turn, admitted by Paz himself. But what did he say in his 1964 text? Essentially, this: that Marxism features both an instrument (criticism) and a utopia (communism); both of which are historical parts of Western political thought and as such, they cannot be thoughtlessly discarded. He insists on the need to embrace the instrument of criticism, including in our interpretation of Marxism, but he cannot renounce to the utopia of communism. In his own words: The idea of an universal community in which, following the abolition of the classes and of the State, the domination of man by man would end and the moral of authority and punishment would be replaced by a moral of freedom and the personal responsibility – a society in which, as private property is abolished, each man becomes his own owner while this “individual property” is literally still owned in common, shared by all thanks to the collective production; the idea of a society in which the distinction between work and art has faded – this idea cannot be forsaken. It does not merely constitute the inheritance of the moral and political thought of the West since the time of Greek philosophy; it also shapes our historic nature. Giving it up is renouncing to what the modern man has wanted to be, it is like renouncing to be (Paz 1994: 252).34

It is worth recalling that Marx never said much about the actual configuration of the communist society of the future. Like many thinkers of his time, Marx had a hard time thinking about politics as a relatively autonomous sphere of human activity, not as a mirror of external forces: society, the division of labor, history, the “modes of production,” and the likes. Communism, for Marx, is what is left once all the problems and “contradictions” have been solved. Hence, Paz cannot “renounce” to the most elusive and utopian part of Marxism, the part that links it most intimately not to the socialist family but to a broader category: Western utopia. All the same, from “not renouncing” to fully embracing, there is quite a step. From the 1960s on, Paz attacked with gusto the pillars upon which many modern Western philosophies (including 33 | “Estas líneas fueron escritas en 1964. Hoy, veintiséis años después, el enorme fracaso histórico del marxismo-leninismo es un hecho incontrovertible. Pero no ha surgido un nuevo pensamiento crítico y creador” (Paz 1994, fn. 57). 34 | “[…] la idea de una comunidad universal en la que, por obra de la abolición de las clases y del Estado, cese la dominación de los unos sobre los otros y la moral de la autoridad y del castigo sea reemplazada por la de la libertad y la responsabilidad personal – una sociedad en la que, al desaparecer la propiedad privada, cada hombre sea propietario de sí mismo y esa ‘propiedad individual’ sea literalmente común, compartida por todos gracias a la producción colectiva; la idea de una sociedad en la que se borre la distinción entre del trabajo y el arte - esa idea es irrenunciable. No sólo constituye la herencia del pensamiento moral y político de Occidente desde la época de la fi losofía griega, sino que forma parte de nuestra naturaleza histórica. Renunciar a ella es renunciar a ser lo que ha querido ser el hombre moderno, renunciar a ser”.

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Marxism) rest: the ideology of progress, the conception of history as linear evolution, historical determinism and the promise of a definitive solution to human problems.35 In this quotation from “Los signos en rotación”, Paz does seem to accept the idea that to create this “universal community”, private property has to be abolished. But he does not insist on this point, either in this text or in any other. What he calls “irrenunciable” is not this or that idea, but the utopia as a whole, and by extension, the tradition it is embedded in. The specific ideas of Marx – which is to say, not the ones that can also be loosely found in Christianity, in various philosophers of Les Lumières, in other socialist or social-democratic camps – are in fact rejected in the same paragraph in which he praises the imperishable heir of Western philosophy: The notion of the proletariat understood as a universal agent of history, the idea of the state as the simple expression of the class in power, the idea of culture as mere “reflection” of the social reality, all this, and many more, will pass away. Not the vision of a communist society (Paz 1994: 251).36

In sum, his debt to Marx is very tenuous.

Conclusion Nothing is more difficult to measure than influence, especially in a case such as this one: the influence of a philosopher on the coherent but unsystematic thought of a very eclectic poet and public intellectual. With no particular “Marxist” text to focus on, one has to collect references and quotes from a variety of texts that don’t even concern Marx or Marxism directly. Still, the exercise is interesting because it affords drawing lessons on Paz’s thought but also on Marxism. We saw that what captivated Paz was not so much Marx the critic of the capitalistic political economy, the philosopher of history and believer in the lendemains qui chantent, but the Romantic Marx, who laments the withering away of humanity, almost the soul, under modern capitalism.37 Paz rejected what the Marxist conception of alienation owes 35 | This pluralist critique is not without resemblance to what can be found in the work of Isaiah Berlin, a thinker Paz surprisingly disregarded (see Grenier 2001: 37-43). 36 | “La notion del proletariado como agente universal de la historia, la del Estado como simple expresión de la clase en el poder, la de la cultura como ‘reflejo’ de la realidad social, todo esto, y muchas otras cosas más, desaparecerá. No la visión de una sociedad comunista”. 37 | In his book on Karl Marx, Isaiah Berlin writes that Marx “reached maturity at a very early age,” and “became a devoted reader of the new romantic literature: the taste he acquired during these impressionable years remained unaltered until his death” (Berlin 1963: 27).

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to historical determinism. Nevertheless, Marx was right, according to Paz, when he condemned (and not in particularly “Marxist” terms) the fetishism of commodity and the ensuing erosion of human nature. Paz seemed particularly seduced by Marx’s (but also Nietzsche’s and Freud’s) analysis of the malaise of our (capitalist) civilization for what it does to the human being, and not so much for its implications for social classes, modes of production, “superstructure”, the state and other markers in Marxist analysis. In other words, socialism, inasmuch as it has something to offer, is the remedy to what capitalism (and modernity more generally) does to the individual – hence the title of this chapter, “socialism in one person”. Paz calls for a revolution that is pre-political; that is to say, an aesthetic and moral revolution, rather than one geared toward political mobilization and state building. What’s the use of Marx and Marxism in this endeavor? We touch here what is arguably the most potent ingredient in Marxism: the argument (the prejudice?) against the dominant, instrumental, technological, possessive, optimistic colonization of the future called modernity. Marx is present here but as much as – in fact interchangeably with – authors such as Nietzsche, Freud, Eliot, or Breton. We are not in the realm of positions and political thoughts but rather in the domain of dispositions or attitudes. The importance of this dimension is central to understand why each generation seems tempted to reinvent its own Marx, seemingly regardless of the accuracy of his analysis and predictions – in fact, without much regard for what Marx actually said – as long as the struggle and the tone continue to be right. Take the example of the cultural studies. In spite of its openly antiMarxist tenets (the fi xation on “discourses”, the contemptuous rejection of positivism, the dismissal of “grand narratives”, the indifference toward class analysis and the working class in particular), it remains vaguely inhabited by a sort of Marxist ambiance. Political scientist Mark Lilla has shown that the work of Jacques Derrida, for instance, is filled with what he calls Marx’s “messianism”, beyond the many contradictions between deconstruction and dialectic materialism (Lilla 2001: 184). In other words, it is not so much Marx’s specific views but his cause, his élan, his superb indignation that never dies; and many (including Paz) have, and apparently still want a piece of the action.

Bibliography Berlin, Isaiah (1963): Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, New York: TIME Reading Program Special Edition, reprinted with special arrangement from Oxford University Press. Caistor, Nick (2007): Octavio Paz, London: Reaktion Books. Castañeda, Jorge G. (1994): Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, New York: Vintage Books. Gilman, Claudia (2003): Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor en América Latina, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

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Gingerich, Willard (1984): “The Poetics of History: A Defense of the Washington Address of Octavio Paz.” In: New Scholar 9, 13-37. Grenier, Yvon (2001): “Paz y Berlin: dos conceptos de la libertad.” In: La Gaceta del Fondo de Cultura Económica 361 January, pp. 37-43. Huntington, Samuel P. (2006 [1968]): Political order in changing societies, foreword by Francis Fukuyama, Yale University Press. King, John (2007): The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture: From Tlatelolco to the ‘Philantropic Ogre’. Studies of the Americas Series. Edited by James Dunkerley, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Ledesma, Xavier Rodríguez (1996): El pensamiento político de Octavio Paz, Las trampas de la ideología, México City: UNAM, Colección Posgrado. Lilla, Mark (2001): Reckless Minds, New York: New York Review of Books. Michael, Christopher Domínguez (2001): “Review of ‘Karl Marx’ by Francis Wheen (1999).” In: Letras Libres 33, pp. 82-84. Paz, Octavio (1967): Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo, Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz. English translation: J. S. Bernstein and Maxine Bernstein, transl. (1970): Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Paz, Octavio (1991): “Un escritor mexicano ante la Unión Soviética.” In: La Jornada October 9, 10, 11 and 12. Reproduced in idem (1995): Ideas y costumbres I: La letra y el cetro Obras completas, vol. 9, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1994): La Casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia. Obras completas, vol. 1, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1994a): “El caracol y la sirena: Rubén Darío.” In: Fundación y disidencia: Dominio hispánico. Obras completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 137-171. Paz, Octavio (1994b [1978]): “Re/visiones: la pintura mural.” In: idem, Los privilegios de la vista II: Arte de México. Obras completas, vol. 7, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 188-227. Paz, Octavio (1994c): El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de México. Obras completas, vol. 8, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1994d [1975]): “Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad.” In: El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de México. Obras completas, vol. 8, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, First published in: Plural 50, pp. 239-260. Paz, Octavio (1994e [1977]): “Suma y sigue.” In: El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de México. Obras completas, vol. 8, pp. 366-382. First published in: Proceso 57 and 58, Mexico City (5 and 12 of December 1977). Paz, Octavio (1994f): “Vuelta al Laberinto de la soledad.” In: El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de México. Obras completas, vol. 8, pp. 239-260. Paz, Octavio (1995): Ideas y costumbres I: La letra y el cetro. Obras completas, vol. 9, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

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Paz, Octavio (1995a [1991]): “América en plural y en singular.” In: Ideas y costumbres I: La letra y el cetro. Obras completas, vol. 9, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 137-163. Paz, Octavio (1996): Ideas y costumbres II: Usos y símbolos. Obras Completas, vol. 10, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1996a): El poeta en su tierra, Diálogo con Octavio Paz: Interviews with Braulio Peralta, Mexico City: Grijalbo. Paz, Octavio (1996b): “Octavio Paz, itinéraire d’une vie, propos recueillis par Frédéric de Towarnicki.” In: Magazine littéraire 342 April, pp. 140-147. Paz, Octavio (1996c): “Corriente alterna.” In: Paz 1996, pp. 567-681. Paz, Octavio (1998): “Luis Cernuda, Ocnos.” In: Miscelánea I: Primeros escritos. Obras completas, vol. 13, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 305-307. Paz, Octavio (1999): Itinerary. Translation by Jason Wilson, New York: Harcourt. Poniatowska, Elena (1990): “Una sillita al sol.” In: La Jornada October 12, p. 9. Rizzi, Bruno (1976): L'U.R.S.S., collectivisme bureaucratique: la propriété de classe, vol. 1, Paris: Éditions Champ libre. Originally published as the first part of La bureaucratisation du monde, Paris 1936. Rushdie, Salman (2002): Step across This Line, Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002, Toronto: Alfred Knopf Canada. Santí, Enrico Mario (1995): “Octavio Paz: Otherness and the Search for the Present.” In: The Georgia Review 49/1, p. 267. Santi, Enrico Mario (1997): El acto de las palabras, estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Sheridan, Guillermo (2004): Poeta con paisaje: Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Ediciones Era. Stanton, Anthony, ed. (2009): Octavio Paz: de la poética a la polític, Mexico City: El Colegio de México. van Delden, Maarten (1996): “The War on the Left in Octavio Paz’s Plural (1971–1976).” In: Annals of Scholarship 11/1–2, pp. 133–56. van Delden, Maarten (2009): “The Incomplete End of Modernity of Octavio Paz” In: Maarten van Delden/Yvon Grenier, Gunshots at the Fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 115-136.

Octavio Paz reads Moses and Monotheism1 Rubén Gallo

Out of all the books published by Freud, the one that had the most influence in Mexico was Moses and Monotheism: an essay that was read by writers and artists as a model for theorizing Mexican identity. If Novo and Ramos were primarily interested in Freud’s theories of sexuality and Neuroses, readers of Moses expanded their inquiry into more sophisticated territory: they were inspired by Freud’s understanding of religion, national identity, and intellectual work. Yet Moses seems like an odd choice: what could a book about Moses and the Egyptian origins of Judaism teach Mexican intellectuals about their country? Why would writers and artists be inspired by a study that stands out as Freud’s most difficult – and controversial – work? As we will see in this chapter, the fate of Moses in Mexico is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of the international reception of psychoanalysis. Moses and Monotheism was the last book Freud published before his death in 1939. The German title is Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, “Moses the Man and the Monotheistic Religion,” and it tackles a thorny question: what is it that makes Judaism such a distinct culture, and why has their history been so full of accidents and catastrophes? The book was a radical departure for Freud, a proud atheist who rejected religion as illusion, and once described himself as a “godless Jew.” Critics from Peter Gay to Jacques Derrida to Edward Said have read Moses and Monotheism as Freud’s belated attempt to write about his own identity, and his place in the world as a Jew. In order to analyze the particularity of the Jews, Freud, like any good analyst, makes an enquiry into the beginning, into the origin of the culture. He focuses his study on the figure of Moses and proposes a hypothesis that might sound rather extravagant to anyone acquainted with the Hebrew Scriptures. Moses, Freud tells us, was not a Jew but an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaton, the pharaoh who had shaken his country by abandoning the long established polytheist beliefs in favor of a monotheistic religion 1 | The author will publish an extended version of this chapter in Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2010).

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that was infinitely more sophisticated. But this new religion was too strict, too demanding of its followers, and one day the Egyptians rose against Akhenaton, murdered him, and reinstituted the old polytheistic cult. In the wake of this bloody coup, Moses managed to escape from Egypt and to bring the monotheistic religion to the Jews, who adopted it as their own and made Moses their leader. At this point Freud adds another twist to the plot: like the Egyptians before them, the Jews rose against Moses and murdered him, but unlike the murderers of Akhenaton they kept alive the monotheistic cult. The memory of Moses’s killing was repressed, but its phantasmatic presence has haunted the Jews ever since: like infantile traumas, also based on repressed memories, it is destined to return and to repeat itself. Freud identifies a historical repetition of the murder of the prophet in the advent of Christianity, founded on the story of another sacrifice, another killing of a father figure. Freud argues that the murder of Moses led to several crucial developments in the history of civilization. First of all, the figure of Moses was internalized as a strict superego that led the Jews to reach “ethical heights which had remained inaccessible to the other peoples of antiquity” (Freud 1964: 134). Second, Freud argues that the rise of monotheism was one of the most important developments in the history of civilization, one that led to what he calls an “advance in intellectuality” (“der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit”), a refinement of abstract thinking that culminated in the invention of literature, philosophy, and the highest forms of reasoning. Freud links this “advance” to the Mosaic prohibition against graven images, an interdiction that resulted in the fact “that a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea – a triumph over intellectuality over sensuality, or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its necessary psychological consequences” (Freud 1964: 113). Moses and Monotheism is an unusual book for Freud, not only in its subject matter, but also in its form. In contrast to previous works, like The Interpretation of Dreams or The Psychology of Everyday Life, which have a clear and elegant narrative structure, Moses is chaotic, disjointed, and plagued by interruptions and digressions. The book consists of three essays – “Moses an Egyptian,” “If Moses Was an Egyptian,” and “Moses, his People and Monotheist Religion” – and two prefaces, placed not at the beginning but before the opening of the final essay. The third essay is longer than the first two combined, and it is divided into two parts consisting of several sections. Throughout the book Freud expresses his dissatisfaction with its form, at one point comparing it to “a bronze statue with feet of clay” – a precarious metaphor that betrays his anxieties that the edifice of Moses might come tumbling down (Freud 1964: 14). The book’s disjointed structure is due, in part, to the numerous interruptions that Freud endured during the writing process: several operations of his malignant tumor, the Nazi seizure of power and the Anschluß of Austria, his last-minute move to London and the buildup to the Second World War. All of these traumatic events left their mark on the text in various forms.

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Recently Moses and Monotheism has attracted the attention of many scholars. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said have all published books examining Moses as Freud’s enigmatic expression of his views on Judaism, Jewish history, and his place in the world as a Jew. Curiously, this obscure treatise on Egyptian monotheism has been read as a work that has much relevance to current debates about cultural identity, alterity, and even – in the case of Said – the Palestinian conflict (Yerushalmi 1991; Derrida 1995; Said 2004). Despite this recent surge of scholarly interest in Moses, the reader is probably wondering how Freud’s wild, disjointed, and speculative hypothesis about the repressed murder of Moses might have found an audience in Mexico. Moses as an Egyptian, the tension between polytheism and monotheism in ancient Egypt, the origins of Judaism… all of these questions would appear to be entirely unrelated to the concerns faced by Mexican intellectuals in the 1940s. But contrary to what we might expect, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism had circulated widely in the Spanish-speaking world. Though Moses was not included in the Obras completas published in Spain by Luis López Ballesteros, Freud’s longtime translator – the last volume, Historiales clínicos, had been published in 1932, and the project, if it was to continue, was probably interrupted by the Spanish Civil War – it was released by Editorial Mundo Nuevo in Chile in 1939, only a few months after the English and German versions. The book was called Moisés y la religión monoteísta, and the title page announced it had been “translated from the French by Luis Rodríguez M.” In the same year, the Argentinean publisher Losada issued another version and a reprint in 1944. As early as June 1939, a brief note in Sur, the influential journal edited by Victoria Ocampo that was the literary home of Borges, commented enthusiastically on the publication of Moses, and in the 1940s the book became extremely popular throughout Latin America, despite its esoteric subject matter (Ocampo 1939).

Moses in the Labyrinth (Octavio Paz) Freud wrote that Moses and Monotheism “tormented [him] like an unlaid ghost,” and in Mexico his book continued to mesmerize intellectuals. After Kahlo completed her painting Moses (1945), a very young Octavio Paz – who would later rise to become the most important Mexican writer of the 20th century – chanced upon Freud’s Moses and, like Kahlo, he set out create a new work inspired by his reading. Paz was a poet, and his response to Freud took the form of an essay: The Labyrinth of Solitude, first published in 1950. In an interview with Claude Fell, his French translator, about the origins of The Labyrinth, Paz recalled the strong impression Moses and Monotheism made upon him. “Freud’s study of Judaic monotheism,” he told Fell, made such an impression on him that he began to write an account “of the world of repressions, inhibitions, memories, drives, and dreams that Mexico has been and still is” (Paz 2001: 421). Surprisingly, Paz’s revelation – an invitation

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to read The Labyrinth of Solitude as a Mexican version of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism – has never been studied in detail, and despite the voluminous bibliography on The Labyrinth, no critics have made an enquiry into Paz’s use of Freud’s Moses.2 The Labyrinth is an essay about Mexican identity, one of the many books published in the first half of the twentieth century that attempted a definition of the national character. Many of Mexico’s best-known intellectuals – including Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso, and Samuel Ramos – had participated in the debate that eventually became know as “the philosophy of Mexicanness.” Paz, however, was the first to use Freudian ideas to explain what might make Mexico such a peculiar nation. In eight chapters, The Labyrinth analyzes various Mexican “myths,” – from the popularity of masks to the dead – and presents a critical overview of the country’s history from the Conquest to the 1940s.3 But how does Paz’s essay about Mexicanness relate to Moses and Monotheism? Although the subject matter of the two books could not be more different – one is a book about Mexican identity; the other an analysis of the rise of monotheism – there are a number of striking similarities between Moses and The Labyrinth. Freud worked on Moses during the 1930s; Paz wrote The Labyrinth in the 1940s. Both books were written in exile: Freud completed his book in London; Paz wrote most of his essay in Paris, where he worked at the Mexican Embassy in the late 1940s. Both Moses and The Labyrinth are veiled autobiographies; both authors write about cultural identity from a position of marginality: Freud lived in a German-speaking country but was not ethnically German, and he wrote about Judaism from the perspective of a “godless Jew”; Octavio Paz was born in Mexico, but he spent part of his childhood and a significant period of his adult life living abroad – an experience that, as he recalls in Itinerario, earned him the repeated accusation of being a foreigner in his own country (Paz 1995: 1572). Both Moses and El laberinto are explorations of a complex subjectivity, one that does not fit into the orthodox paradigms of national, cultural, or religious identity. There is also one crucial difference between the two books: The Labyrinth was Paz’s first major book, while Moses was Freud’s last. One was a work of youthful exuberance – Paz was 36 years old when he published The Labyrinth –; the other, a last will and testament, a farewell to the world written by an eighty-three-year old man who was dying of cancer and would not live to 2 | Enrico Mario Santí, in his erudite introduction to the Cátedra edition of The Labyrinth mentions Moses and Monotheism as a source for Paz’s essay (Santí 2001: 72). Thomas Mermall has written an essay exploring “the psychoanalysis of history” in The Labyrinth in which he examines Paz’s use of certain psychoanalytic concepts, but he does not mention Moses and Monotheism (Mermall 1958: 97-114. Reprinted in Santí 2000: 18-35). 3 | Paz revised the titles and content of the chapters in the second edition, but the structure of the book remained the same (see Santí 2001: 65-66).

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write anything else. The differences in style and tone between Moses and The Labyrinth constitute a good example of what Edward Said has defined as “late style.” Said uses the term spätstil or late style – a concept he borrowed from Theodor Adorno – to describe works produced late in an author or composer’s life, creations that tend to be difficult, fragmentary, unresolved, and often produce an alienating effect on the reader. This seems like a good description for Moses, with its three parts, two prefaces, and endless expressions of doubts and insecurities on Freud’s part (“my structure has its weak spots,” [Freud 1964: 41] he concedes at one point, and later laments that the entire book is “inexperienced and inartistic”) (Freud 1964: 103). Said actually presented Moses and Monotheism as one of his examples of spätstil, since it is a book that “seems to be composed by Freud for himself, with scant attention to frequent and often ungainly repetition, or regard for the elegant economy of prose and exposition. […] late style’s effect on the reader or listener is alienating” (Said 2004: 27, 30). Books conceived early in an author’s career, on the other hand, are usually simpler, clearer, and more self-assured. 4 The Labyrinth is a case in point: in contrast to the numerous doubts that interrupt the narrative flow in Moses, the author of The Labyrinth presents his views with extreme self-confidence; Paz writes with authority, clarity, and a remarkable lack of anxiety at treating such an overwhelming subject – national identity and the history of Mexico over 500 years. The tremendous ambition behind The Labyrinth is perhaps a result of youthful naïveté. Leaving aside these numerous structural similarities and divergences, we should now turn our attention to Paz’s reading of Moses and Monotheism, and to the question of how Freud’s discussion of Judaism’s Egyptian roots might possibly relate to an elucidation of Mexican history. In contrast to Kahlo, who focused on the characters appearing in Moses and Monotheism, Paz directed his attention to the ideas presented in Freud’s work. He was fascinated by Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the history of civilization as a process punctuated by traumas, repressions, and unconscious anxieties – exactly like the development of individuals. In The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz uses this model to analyze the history of Mexico. Paz borrows from Freud the notion of phylogenetic transmission: the possibility that memories and traumas can be passed down unconsciously from one generation to the next. In Moses, Freud argues that every individual possesses an “archaic heritage […] that comprises […] memory traces of the experience of earlier generations” (Freud 1964: 97), and that this heritage is “an inherited property” that calls “not for acquisition but only for awakening” (Freud 1964: 132). In The Labyrinth Paz applies this idea to Mexican history as he analyzes the persistence of unconscious traces – most notably solitude, the central theme of his essay – from the Conquest to the twentieth century. Like 4 | Early in his career Said published (1975) Beginnings: Intention and Method, New York: Basic Books. My discussion of “beginnings” differs from his.

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Freud’s memory traces, solitude appears as an inherited condition, one that eludes conscious understanding and produces powerful psychic effects. In order to adapt Freud’s model to the Mexican context, Paz altered many of the strategies deployed in Moses and Monotheism. Freud wrote a psychoanalytic history of Judaism, Paz turned his attention to the Mexican nation. The starting point for Freud’s enquiry is the pre-history of Judaism in Egypt. The Labyrinth begins not with Aztec or Maya civilizations, but with the Conquest – an important difference, since Paz was much closer in time to the events he analyzed than Freud was to ancient Egypt. Freud focused his study on Moses, the founder of the religion, but surprisingly, The Labyrinth lacks a protagonist; there is no founding father of the Mexican nation to take center stage. Paz could have focused on Hernán Cortés, or on any of the figures of Mexican independence, but instead, he writes a book without a hero.”5 Despite these differences, The Labyrinth follows the argument of Moses and Monotheism quite closely. There are three key concepts in Freud’s essay that Paz borrows for his analysis of Mexican history: the Oedipus complex, the notion of an advancement in intellectuality, and the concept of solitude.

Oedipus complex Moses and Monotheism proposes one of the most original – and most controversial – applications of the Oedipus complex, a theory Freud had first developed in his correspondence with Fliess in the 1890s and later elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams and other works. In Totem and Taboo, a work that revolves around the story of a primal horde of brothers that killed their father, Freud extended the Oedipus complex, and the murderous impulses it awakens against the father, from the individual to civilization. Moses and Monotheism adapts the Oedipal tale recounted in Totem and Taboo to the history of the Jews. This new version has Akhenaton, the founding father of Egyptian monotheism, murdered by his subjects – avatars of the primal horde – after they found the new religion too harsh and demanding. This killing was to be repeated in the history of civilization against other father figures: Moses and Jesus. Freud interprets the aftermath of these patricides as a crucial development: just like the primitive brothers had introjected paternal authority after the parricide, the Jews internalized the figure of Moses, a harsh and demanding superego that would lead them to live under a strict moral code, accomplish endless intellectual developments, and reach “ethical heights.” The Jews, writes Freud, “imposed more and more new instinctual renunciations on themselves and in that was reached – in doctrine and precept, at least – ethical heights which had remained inaccessible to the other peoples of antiquity” (Paz 2001: 134). 5 | Paz explains how the paucity of paternal figures is one of the explanations for the perennial Mexican as solitude (Paz 2001: 220).

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In this Oedipal account of Jewish history, Freud associates the figure of the mother with the female deities prevalent in Egyptian polytheism, and with the magic, superstition, and sensuality that had to be renounced as part of the advancement in intellectuality. For Freud the development of civilization implied a rejection of femininity in favor of a strong identification with paternal authority. Freud saw polytheistic Egypt – as Carl Schoske has argued – as the epitome of sensuality, femininity, and the maternal (Schorske 1993: 35-40). This is, in a nutshell, application of the Oedipal metaphor to the history of civilization that Freud presents in Moses and Monotheism, and the conceptual framework that Octavio Paz borrowed for his analysis of Mexican history in The Labyrinth. But how could Freud’s controversial speculations about the murders of Akhenaton and Moses aid Paz in thinking about Mexico? In “The Sons of la Malinche,” the fourth section of The Labyrinth, Paz undertakes a transformation of the family romance found in Moses and Monotheism. This chapter opens by enquiring about the possible meaning of the most violent insults in Mexican slang: “Viva México, hijos de la Chingada,” a profanity that could be translated as “Long live Mexico, sons of a Chingada.” Delving into linguistic and lexicographic sources, Paz shows that “chingar” refers to rape, and “la chingada” is thus a violated woman. The rest of the chapter focuses on elucidating the identity of this debased female figure, repeatedly invoked in everyday speech. To solve this riddle, Paz turns his attentions to the origins of the Mexican nation, a period he analyzes – following the example of Freud’s Moses – in terms of a family romance. The Mexican nation, Paz tells his readers, was born from the clash between pre-Columbian and Spanish civilizations, an event he interprets as the rape of an Indian mother by a Spanish father. Paz associates the father with Cortés, the conquistador, and the mother with Doña Marina, Cortés’s Indian translator, popularly known as La Malinche. Freud located a murder at the origin of civilization; Paz, instead, posits a rape as the constitutive act of Mexican identity. After proposing this revised version of the Oedipus complex, Paz argues that the “Chingada” invoked in the profanity is none other than La Malinche, and that whenever Mexicans insult someone as “hijo de la Chingada,” they are effectively calling their opponent an offspring of rape. But the problem, Paz argues, is that the person uttering the curse issues from the same muddled origins, since all modern Mexicans are descendants of the clash between Indians and Spaniards: all Mexicans are “sons of La Malinche,” as the title of his chapter indicates. Paz concludes that the “hijos de la Chingada” is not merely a curse, but a form of disavowal, a negation of the speaker’s origins, and a symptom of intense Oedipal anxieties at the core of Mexican identity. The insult is ultimately an expression of ambivalent feelings towards the mother: “In the same way,” Paz writes, “that the child does not forgive his mother for abandoning him to go in search of his father, the Mexican people cannot forgive la Malinche’s betrayal” (Paz 2001: 224). Like the psychic pathologies

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discussed by Freud in his case histories, the Mexican Oedipal anxiety produces a repetition compulsion, and the curse has to be uttered endlessly. Like Freudian traumas, its effects are felt with a particular intensity: “The curious persistence of Cortés and Malinche in the imagination and sensibility of Mexicans today reveals that these are not merely historical figures: they are symbols of a secret conflict, one that we have not yet resolved” (Paz 2001: 225). In Paz’s analysis, the disavowal of Cortés and La Malinche are the precipitating cause of the national neurosis that affects modern-day Mexicans. We can now see how Octavio Paz has transformed Freud’s family romance into an altogether theory of origins. Paz keeps the Oedipal triad in his analysis of Mexican history, but he gives its three elements – father, mother, and son – an altogether different meaning from that found in Moses and Monotheism. In his account, Freud emphasized identification with the paternal figure as a crucial development in the history of civilization, one that led to an “advancement in intellectuality” which culminated with the establishment of social and religious institutions. Paz, in contrast, introduces a father figure embodying aggressive impulses. In the Mexican context, identification with the father leads not to civilization but to barbarism, to sadistic excesses and outbursts of violence. Moses features a series of founding fathers, of ethical patriarchs representing the values of the superego. In contrast, Paz’s father is a “macho,” a threatening figure who “is not the founder of a people; he is not the patriarch who exercises the paternal function; he is neither king nor chief of a clan […]. He is a complete stranger.”6 The only father figures in Mexico are murderous machos, a fact that explains the paucity of heroes in Mexican history: even Miguel Hidalgo, one of Mexico’s most revered independence fighters, is not a towering figure but merely an “anciano inerme”, “a puny old man”. In contrast to Freud’s view of the maternal as representing the easy sensuality that must be overcome in favor of a strict rationality, Paz calls for a separation from the father – the macho – and for a stronger identification with the Indian mother. If The Labyrinth associates the father with violence and aggression, it links the mother with the richly sensual pre-Columbian heritage that often goes unacknowledged by contemporary Mexicans. And not only unacknowledged: it is rejected and disavowed with every utterance of the curse against “la Chingada.” Every person who utters the insult renounces his own fi liation by pretending that only others are “sons of la Malinche”, offspring of the violence of the Conquest. Paz keeps many of the ideas presented in Moses, but he shifts the emphasis from the father to the mother: Freud argues that the murder of the father was forgotten, eliminated from written history but preserved, though in distorted from, in the tradition; Paz believes that it is the rape of the mother that is disavowed by the individual as it pertains to his own history, but that 6 | “El macho – no es el fundador de un pueblo; no es el patriarca que ejerce la patria potestad; no es rey, jefe de clan […] es el extraño” (Paz 2001: 220).

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a veiled memory of the crime lives on in the profanities directed against the other. Freud argued that the historical repression of the crime against Moses explains the Jewish sense of guilt; Paz proposes that the disavowal of the violence against the mother gives rise to solitude – the peculiar form of anxiety tormenting modern Mexicans. The refusal to acknowledge the mother is one of the main problems Paz identifies in Mexican society, one of the most severe neuroses that affl ict the national psyche. Paz borrowed the concept of a collective Oedipus complex from Moses and Monotheism, but then transformed Freud’s patriarchal model into a matriarchal one. Freud praised the virtues of paternal authority – the source of reason, ethics, and conscience – but Paz emphasizes the importance of the maternal – a rich realm of myths, sensuality, and pre-Columbian traditions. Moses is descriptive, but The Labyrinth is prescriptive: it urges readers to identify with the feminine by reevaluating historical maternal fi gures, from La Malinche to Sor Juana. If Kahlo’s Moses presented a postcolonial reading of Moses and Monotheism, then The Labyrinth orchestrates a feminist revision of Freud’s model, shifting the emphasis from male to female, from fathers to mothers. As a feminist, Paz is more radical than Kahlo. Her painting placed Moses, the paternal figure, at the center of the composition; Paz, in contrast, gives center stage to the mother – his chapter is not called “the sons of Cortés” or “the sons of Spain”, but “the sons of La Malinche”.7

Geistigkeit In addition to rewriting the Oedipus complex with an emphasis on the mother, Octavio Paz responded to another important idea developed by Freud in Moses and Monotheism: the concept of Geistigkeit, a particular form of intellectual activity that is at the center of the book’s argument. Freud devoted an entire section of the third essay in Moses and Monotheism to the question of intellectuality. He called it “Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit” and in it he argues that the advancement in intellectuality – the development of abstract thinking – was one of the most important Jewish contributions to civilization, second only to the introduction of monotheism. Freud sees this development as a direct consequence of the Mosaic prohibition against graven images, which resulted in “the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” and produced a shift from the visible to the invisible, 7 | The Labyrinth, and especially the chapter on “The sons of La Malinche”, has been the subject of numerous feminist critiques denouncing Paz as a patriarchal author who debases the historical figure of Malinche. In my view, these critiques are based on a misreading of Paz’s text that ignores his efforts to engage with Moses and Monotheism. Once we take this crucial fact into account, we can see that The Labyrinth is in agreement with recent feminist and Chicana efforts – especially in the work of Cherrie Moraga and Alicia Gaspar de Alba – to reclaim La Malinche as a positive historical figure. See Gaspar de Alba 1994: 261-66; and Moraga 1983: 90-144.

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from sense perception to abstract reasoning (Freud 1964: 112f) “a sensory perception was given a second place to what may be called an abstract idea”, a shift Freud considers “a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its necessary psychological consequences” (Freud 1964: 113). Freud considered Geistigkeit as an advance over Sinnlichkeit, intellectuality as an overcoming of sensuality. Thinking requires a “renunciation” of the senses, and thus Freud believes the highest form of intellectual activity is one that cannot be verified by the senses. The passage from matriarchal to patriarchal social organization, for instance, was another great advance, since “maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premise”. (Freud 1964: 114). Furthermore, sense perceptions stem from “a lower psychical activity” (Freud 1964: 113) and were ultimately relegated to a secondary place – along with sexuality – in the development of Judaism.8 Carl Schorske judges Freud’s account of Geistigkeit as a purely intellectual activity uncontaminated by sense perceptions almost “puritan” in its strictness, but Freud argues this severity is one of the characteristics of Judaism (Schorske 1993: 35-40). “The religion which began with the prohibition against making an image of God,” he writes, “develops more and more in the course of the centuries into a religion of instinctual renunciation” (Freud 1964: 118). In this respect the Jews differ sharply from the Ancient Greeks, who managed to harmonize intellectuality and sensuality, but at least, Freud tells us, Judaism opted “in favor of the worthier alternative” (Freud 1964: 115). Despite its strictness, the renunciation of sensuality in favor of intellectuality yielded invaluable benefits for the Jews: not only did it spark their development of a literature and a complex system of intellectual inquiry, but it also increased their self esteem – each individual was able to share in the greatness of the invisible god, much like individual Britons feel proud because they have a small, individual share in the power of their country9 – 8 | Freud stresses that the development of Judaism required not only a rejection of Sinnlichkeit, but also of sexuality: “It is not that [Judaism] would demand sexual abstinence; it is content with a marked restriction of sexual freedom. God, however, becomes entirely removed from sexuality and elevated into the ideal of ethical perfection.” And “ethics,” he writes, “is a limitation of instinct” (Freud 1964: 118). 9 | Freud used the analogy of a patriotic Briton to explain how the belief in a powerful god leads to an increase in self-esteem: “we may perhaps make it easier to understand if we point to the sense of superiority felt by a Briton in a foreign country which has been made insecure owing to an insurrection – a feeling that is completely absent in a citizen of a small continental state. For the Briton counts on the fact that his Government will send along a warship if a hair of his head is hurt, and that the rebels understand that very well – whereas the small state possesses no warship at all. Thus, pride in the greatness of the British Empire has a root as well in the consciousness of greater security – the protection – enjoyed by the individual Briton. This may resemble the conception of a grand God” (Freud 1964: 112).

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and this pride ultimately played an important part in helping them to survive the endless trials and tribulations that marked their dramatic history. “The pre-eminence given to intellectual labors throughout some two thousand years in the life of the Jewish people has […] helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal” (Freud 1964: 115). Freud’s pages on the advancement of intellectuality must have made a deep impression on Octavio Paz, a writer who placed a great value in the life of the mind and spent much of his life defending an ideal of intellectual work. The Labyrinth itself is a tribute to reason, a book that repeatedly stresses the virtues of intellectual enquiry and its liberating potential. After painstakingly detailing the various historical errors, simulations and deceptions that have trapped Mexicans inside a “labyrinth of solitude,” Paz points to crítica – the exercise of critical thought – as the thread that can lead out of the maze.10 Paz devotes an entire chapter of The Labyrinth – “La ‘inteligencia’ mexicana,” to the analysis of crítica, a concept that is closely related to Freud’s theory of intellectuality. Like Freud’s Geistigkeit, Paz’s crítica is a form of abstract intellectual activity. Like Freud, Paz takes the development of intellectuality as a prism to analyze the development of civilization: The Labyrinth is extremely attentive to the role played by writers and thinkers in the various periods of Mexican history. Freud associated Geistigkeit with the invention of literature, and Paz relates crítica to the development of a Mexican philosophy (Paz 2001: 315). Freud attributes enormous powers to intellectuality – Geistigkeit allowed the Jews to survive two thousand years of expulsions and dislocations – and Paz ascribes similar virtues to criticism, which he presents as a cure for the perennial Mexican solitude. “Philosophical reflection,” he writes “becomes an urgent task that leads to salvation […] it will offer us a concrete solution, one that will give meaning to our presence on earth” (ibid.). Though Paz presents a secular analysis of Mexican history, his discussion of the redemptory powers of crítica is as charged with religious overtones as Freud’s account of Judaic intellectuality. Paz once wrote that for Alfonso Reyes, the most important Mexican writer in the first half of the twentieth century, “literature was a form of religion,” (Paz 2001: 308) and the same could be said about the practice of crítica for Paz. Both Freud and Paz use the life of the mind as a measure to gauge the state of affairs in the world they lived in. Freud, writing on the eve of World War II, is understandably the more pessimistic of the two. In his account, the great advancement in intellectuality that the Jews had given to civilization was in the process of being undone. Freud believed that the world had suffered an initial regression from Geistigkeit after the introduction of Christianity, a 10 | The concept of “simulation” is a crucial one throughout The Labyrinth. Paz defines it as “an activity not unlike acting […] the actor has developed a complicity with his character that nothing can break except for death or sacrifice. A lie takes root in his self and this becomes the only background for his personality” (Paz 2001: 178).

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religion that did away with the prohibition against graven images, brought back a disguised form of polytheism – in the worship of saints –, and even returned to a form of matriarchy – in the cult of the virgin. This regression became more acute in Nazi Germany, a culture that privileged a retrograde form of instinctual satisfaction: “We find to our astonishment,” he wrote in one of the prefatory notes to Moses, that “in the case of the German people, [there has occurred] a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism” (Freud 1964: 54). Paz was living in less barbarous times when he wrote The Labyrinth: the war had been over for several years, and Paris, his new home, had become an effervescent center for literary and philosophical activity. Mexico, too, was in the midst of an intellectual boom, and the government had appointed many writers and artists – including Paz himself – to important diplomatic and cabinet positions. But despite the widespread optimism, Paz worried that intellectual life had suffered a setback, and that the increasing dependence of writers on government jobs and grants had compromised the independence of their intellectual inquiry. Thinkers working for the government “have lost their independence and their critical activity has been diluted as a result of their cautious or Machiavellian behavior” (Paz 2001: 303). In the book’s most pessimistic moment, Paz asks: “Has the Mexican intelligentsia ceased being intelligent? Has it given up its role as the country’s critical conscience?” (Ibid.) Unlike Freud, Paz ends on a hopeful note: the first edition of The Labyrinth closes with a call to arms, with an invitation to his readers to use the weapons of the intellect to fight their way out of the labyrinth of inauthenticity. “We must learn to face reality,” Paz writes. “Thinking is the foremost obligation of our ‘intelligentsia’ – often it is the only obligation” (ibid.: 338). Intellectuality has suffered a step backward, but Paz believes it is possible to recover lost ground and charge forward – a possibility that never appears in Moses and Monotheism. But there is one important difference between Paz’s crítica and Freud’s Geistigkeit. Paz argues that intellectual, abstract ideas have not always produced beneficial results in Mexican history. In his discussion of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance, he criticizes the presidencies of Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz – the historical periods known as La Reforma and El Porfiriato – as epochs marked by a proliferation of complex political ideas that ultimately had deleterious effects on the country and its citizens. The problem, Paz claims, was that the ideas behind the 1857 constitution, the 19th century Reform laws, and the positivist doctrines of the Díaz regime were so far removed from the Mexican reality that they became meaningless, empty signs. “Ideas,” he writes, “served to cover up reality, instead of revealing it or expressing it” (Paz 2001: 263). Paz takes issue with these nineteenth century ideas because they were too abstract and too intellectual, to the point that they became entirely disconnected from the country’s everyday reality. Whereas Freud invariably saw abstraction as a positive development, Paz believes intellectual constructs

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can be treacherous; they can become a trap for well-meaning figures, like the intellectuals of the Reforma and the Porfiriato. In contrast to Freud’s full-fledged belief in intellectual abstractions, Paz argues that ideas must not only be grounded in reality, but they must also be authentic. Throughout The Labyrinth, he stresses the importance of authenticity – a concept he likely borrowed from Jean Paul Sartre – and its rarity in Mexican history. In his analysis, the periods of the Reforma and the Porfiriato were doomed by the inauthenticity of their intellectual constructs, whereas the culture that emerged after the Mexican Revolution was characterized by truly authentic ideas and endeavors. In addition to their inauthenticity, Paz highlights another shortcoming of the Reforma and the Porfiriato: their ideas were too cerebral, too far removed from the sensuous vitality of Mexican life. The ideology of the Reforma, for instance, “ignore[d] one half of man: the half that is expressed in myths, communion, festival, dreams, and eroticism” (ibid.: 271). If Freud argued that Geistigkeit requires an instinctual renunciation and an overcoming of Sinnlichkeit, Paz believes that ideas are worthless unless they are animated by the senses. Paz’s ideal is not pure abstraction, as it was for Freud, but rather an intellectual life that is energized by the eroticism. Eros and logos are entirely compatible in Paz’s system, and in the end he prescribes an intellectual life tinged by the mysteries of sensuality as the most appropriate remedy for Mexican solitude. Paz conceives criticism – and the poetry, festivals, and myths he analyzes in The Labyrinth – as an activity that brings together mind and body, ideas and perceptions, thinking and desiring. And this is perhaps the one most significant difference between The Labyrinth of Solitude and Moses and Monotheism: whereas Freud believed that intellectuality demands a rejection of sensuality, Paz calls for a synthesis between the life of the mind and the life of the senses, for a Geistigkeit that is also animated by Sinnlichkeit, as it was for the ancient Greeks. Like other readers of Freud, Paz must have been surprised by Freud’s puritanical account of Geistigkeit as pure reason stripped of all sensual elements. After all, hadn’t psychoanalysis shown that literature, art, and all great cultural achievements resulted from a sublimation of sexuality and thus had a sinnlich foundation? André Breton and the surrealists embraced Freud’s writings precisely because they uncovered the Dionysiac powers of sexuality that bourgeois society was so intent on repressing. So why did Freud, the archeologist of sexual desire, turn his last book into a celebration of a form of abstract thinking entirely divorced from the realm of the senses? In his essay “Freud’s Egyptian Dig,” Carl Schorske points out that in developing the concept of Geistigkeit, Freud was not only turning his back on many of the beliefs he held earlier in his career, but he was also going against the most provocative findings reached by his sources. Freud writes about Akhenaton as the original developer of Geistigkeit, and he presents him as a strict, purely rational ruler who invented laws and an abstract concept of god. Schorske shows that one of Freud’s main sources, James Henry Breasted,

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had written extensively on the sensual character of Akhenaton’s rule. “None of the sensual side of the Akhenaton culture described by Breasted appears in Freud’s account,” Schorske tells us. Freud selected from Breasted’s History only what connects the Egyptian enlightenment to the Geistigkeit he sees in the Jews. In his own copy of Breasted’s history, Freud marked only the passages that sustained this theme. The rest – and the richer information on the sensuous culture of Akhenaton in The Dawn of Conscience – he ignored (Schorske 1993: 35-40).

The reasons behind Freud’s turn away from Sinnlichkeit in his last work remain a mystery, although it is not hard to understand why an old man, driven to exile and dying of cancer, might want to escape the senses, which at that late age brought only pain, in order to take refuge in the life of the mind, which had always been Freud’s lifeline. As he struggled to think and to finish writing his last book, Freud had to forget his own body, a constant source of discomfort – a form of “instinctual renunciation” he then projected into his theorization of Geistigkeit. Paz, in contrast, was in the prime of life when he set out to write The Labyrinth. Unlike Freud’s fragile organism, his own body was strong and healthy, and a source of more pleasure than pain. It is not surprising, then, that Paz would want to incorporate the senses, the body, and eroticism into his view of intellectual life. As a young man, he had no need to forget his own body; on the contrary, the body – and the mystery of erotic love – was one of the sparks that animated Paz’s work, from his first publications in the 1940s to his last books in the 1990s. In The Labyrinth the body appears as a source of joy, as one of the antidotes to solitude: “we are neither afraid nor ashamed of our body,” Paz writes, “we experience it with a degree of plenitude” (Paz 2001: 170). Crítica, Paz’s synthesis of Geistigkeit and Sinnlichkeit, is a version of the Greek ideal of a harmony between mind and body, the happy synthesis that Freud believed had been denied to the Jews. In Paz’s account, Mexicans were as lucky as Ancient Greeks and were not forced to choose between Logos and Eros. But surprisingly, The Labyrinth affirms Freud’s belief that the development of intellectuality requires a rejection of visual images in favor of intellectual abstractions. In “Critique of the Pyramid,” an essay written in 1969 and incorporated into subsequent editions of The Labyrinth, Paz criticizes the exhibition design at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology. In his view, its display of pre-Columbian sculptures and other archaeological artifacts suggest a false and tendentious narrative in which the Aztecs appear as the culmination of pre-Hispanic civilizations. Paz argues that this is a ruse by the governing party, the PRI, to create a myth of origin by identifying itself with the Aztecs and touting post-Revolutionary Mexico as a revival of the Aztec past after centuries of rupture. To propagate this false view of history, the Museum relies on a canny use of images: “The glorification of Mexico-Tenochtitlán [the Aztec capital] in the Museum of Anthropology is

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an exaltation of the image of the Aztec pyramid,” Paz writes. His discussion associates images with deception, entropy, and death: “all images suffer a fatal tendency towards petrification” (Paz 2001: 415). Like Freud, Paz suggests that images foster a form of intellectual laziness: since they offer a wealth of visual information to the senses, there is no need to exercise the imagination. And like Freud, Paz believes that intellectuality is fundamentally incompatible with images. At times, Paz’s critique appears stronger that Freud’s: Paz writes that crítica – his version of Geistigkeit – “is the acid that dissolves images” (ibid.: 415). Critical thinking is the antidote to the manipulative images found in the Museum of Anthropology – and writing books like The Labyrinth becomes a remedy for the petrification of history orchestrated by the PRI.

Solitude, Melancholia, Malaise In addition to the Oedipus complex and Geistigkeit, there is a third element Paz borrowed from Moses and Monotheism: the concept of solitude. Freud never wrote about solitude, but he did elaborate a number of concepts that have much in common with Paz’s discussion: of these, melancholia seems to have the most affinities to solitude. In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud defined melancholia as a condition characterized by “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self regard.” Like mourning, melancholia stems from the loss of an object – a loved person, an ideal, or even an illusion. Unlike mourners, however, melancholics lack a conscious understanding of what has been lost, and they tend to direct negative affects towards themselves: they experience an “impoverishment of [the] ego,” which sometimes leads to “delusional expectations of punishment” (Freud 1953: 244). Paz’s discussion of solitude bears some striking resemblances to Freud’s account of melancholia. Like Freud, Paz identifies loss as the precipitating cause for the experience of solitude: “Any rupture (with ourselves, with our surroundings, with the past or the present) produces a feeling of solitude. In extreme cases – separation from the parents, the womb, or the native country, death of the gods […] – solitude becomes indistinguishable from orphanhood” (Paz 2001: 200). And in all of these cases solitude becomes indistinguishable from Freud’s melancholia and the painful dejection it precipitates. To analyze solitude, Paz invokes a number of well-known Freudian tropes. The first experience of being alone in the world, he tells us, begins with the traumatic separation from the mother at birth: “Solitude […] began the day we were separated from the maternal realm and fell into a strange and hostile world” (Paz 2001: 217). Like Freud’s melancholia, solitude generates a relentless longing for the lost object, a “nostalgia for the body from which we were torn” (ibid.: 356). Paz never uses the word “unconscious,” but his discussion makes it clear that Mexicans are unaware of the underlying causes

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for their feelings of loneliness – causes so complex, remote, and obscure that they certainly remind us of Freud’s definition of unconscious phenomena. Following the strategies Freud deployed in Moses and Monotheism and other essays on applied psychoanalysis, Paz extends his analysis of solitude from the individual to the group, from infantile to national history. In the chapter “From the Conquest to Independence,” Paz discusses Mexican history using the metaphors of individual development – birth, infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. In this schema, the Conquest represents the birth of Mexico as a nation, a traumatic event that destroyed Aztec culture and threw Mexicans into a strange new reality. Like the separation from the maternal body, the collapse of pre-Columbian religions left the Indians “alone, abandoned by friends, subjects and gods,” and the young nation plunged into “a solitude caused by the death and destruction of [its] gods” (ibid.: 236). Eventually this experience of solitude became a permanent condition, and a defining trait of the national character, whose precipitating causes receded into the unconscious. Despite these similarities, Paz’s solitude is a more complicated affair than Freud’s melancholia. Freud considered melancholia a dangerous pathology that threatens the ego with destruction. He insists upon the violent, sadistic, and murderous impulses propelling melancholic dejection. Melancholia can kill – in extreme cases it leads to suicide –, and this is a crucial point in Freud’s discussion that has often been overlooked in recent scholarly discussions of what has become a fashionable academic theory. The Labyrinth, on the other hand, presents a more benign account of solitude. Solitude can be painful, even overwhelming, but it is never deadly, and in certain cases it can even be a life-affirming experience.11 And though for most of The Labyrinth Paz associates solitude with inauthenticity, simulation, entrapment, and even “asphyxia,” (Paz 2001: 146) he also portrays his most admired historical figures as solitary beings, as if there were a direct link between solitude and creativity. The seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for instance, appears as “a melancholic and solitary poet who smiles and remains silent”; (Paz 2001: 258) and the 20th-century historian Daniel Cosío Villegas is “another solitary” intellectual (ibid.: 307). In these figures, solitude is very far from being a dangerous and deathly impulse: it is a necessary experience for intellectual reflection, for the exercise of crítica. For intellectuals, solitude is a gift from the muses. This positive conception of solitude is closer to the Romantic myths of the solitary genius and the saturnine poet than to Freud’s discussion of melancholia as a devastating pathology. Paz’s conception of a creative solitude has more in common with the Greek – especially the Aristotelian – conception of melancholia as an ailment of creative types than with the Freudian account. In his “Problem XXX,” Aristotle discussed melancholia as a special sensibility, a gift from the gods to the most remarkable of men, 11 | Paz, in fact, differentiates between two experiences of solitude: one constructive, or “open,” as he calls it; the other detrimental or “closed.”

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from Homer to Plato. “Why is it,” asks Aristotle, “that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?” (Aristotle 1957: 155). And why is it, we may ask, that in The Labyrinth notable intellectuals are invariably presented as solitary beings?12 But not all experiences of solitude are the same, and not all solitary individuals mentioned in The Labyrinth are poets or intellectuals. In addition to the creative solitude of writers, Paz examines a second, more pernicious type of solitude that is especially prevalent in the modern world. Writing about post-war society, Paz laments “the endless, infinite labor” and “the solitude it produces; the promiscuous solitude of hotels, offices, workshops and cinemas.” Paz considers this experience of solitude as the most pernicious form of alienation, “a total confi nement, the reflection of a world with no exit” (Paz 2001: 352). In contrast to the fertile experience of poets, the solitude of modern societies traps individuals in the dark, soulless labyrinth that gives the title to Paz’s book. This conception of solitude as one of the debilitating effects of the modern world on the individual has more in common with Marx’s concept of alienation than with Freud’s melancholia (in his youth, Paz read Marx as avidly as he read Freud).13 Paz’s solitude begins to look less and less like Freud’s melancholia. Melancholia kills, but solitude is, at its worst, a variant of social alienation and, at its best, a gift from the muses. Perhaps more significantly, Freud considers melancholia an exceptional state, a pathological condition affecting only those prone to neurotic symptoms, whereas Paz sees solitude as a universal condition: in Freud’s account, melancholics are the exception to the rule, but Paz insists that “all men are alone.”14 In the end, solitude has little to do with melancholia – but it has much in common with another concept introduced by Freud in Moses and Monotheism: cultural malaise, one of the most mysterious and least studied of Freudian constructs. In the final pages of Moses and Monotheism, Freud muses on the prevalence of a certain malaise in European culture, a “depressed mood of the peoples” for which there is no rational explanation. Some historians have taken this malaise as a symptom of the “ageing of ancient civilization,” but Freud interprets it as a variant of the Jewish sense of guilt. Early in the history of Judaism its people developed an intense sense of guilt, a feeling which Freud interprets as a reaction to the disavowal of the murder of Moses – and the 12 | Another similarity between Aristotelian melancholia and Paz’s solitue can be found in the connection of mysticism. Aristotle links melancholia to furor – divine rapture –, and Paz relates solitude to mysticism: “our solitude,” he writes, “has the same roots as religious experience” (Paz 2001: 155). 13 | See, for instance, the references to Marx in Paz 1994. 14 | “All men are alone” but not everyone experiences solitude in the same way. Paz is interested in detailing the differences about Mexico and the United States deal with the solitude that permeates their cultures. “Man is alone everywhere, but the solitude of Mexicans differs from that of Americans” (Paz 2001: 155).

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concomitant repression of “the murderous hatred of the father” (Freud 1964: 134). Eventually this feeling spread to gentile cultures as well, and it became a permanent trait of European civilization: “The sense of guilt caught hold of all the Mediterranean peoples as a dull malaise, a premonition of calamity for which no one could suggest a reason” (ibid.: 135). As in melancholia, the originating cause for the cultural malaise of European culture has receded into the unconscious. “The sense of guilt produced by civilization,” writes Freud in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), the only other text in which he mentions the concept,15 “remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations” (Freud 1961/63: 135-6). In other respects, however, cultural malaise is quite different from melancholia: melancholia is an individual pathology, malaise a group affliction. Melancholia poses a deadly threat to the ego, but malaise merely casts a harmless gloom over the Mediterranean world. Melancholia is pathological, but cultural malaise is “the price we pay for our advancement in civilization […] a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (ibid.: 134). Freud muses over the possible treatment of melancholics, but he never considers curing civilization of its malaise. Like Freud’s malaise, Paz’s solitude is a universal condition inflected by cultural specificities. Freud argues that civilization invariably produces a generalized sense of guilt, but not all cultures exhibit the same response to this experience: Christianity and Judaism, for example, reacted in markedly different ways (one introduced the concept of salvation from “original sin,” whereas the other offered no palliatives to its people) (Freud 1964: 135). Similarly, Paz’s solitude oscillates between universality and particularity: “Man is alone everywhere,” he writes, “but the solitude of Mexicans differs from that of Americans” (Paz 2001: 155). In The Labyrinth Paz is as fascinated by the contrast between Mexican and American experiences of solitude as Freud was in Moses by the differences between Jewish and Christian cultures. Like malaise, solitude is a necessary discontent: Freud saw malaise as the price we have to pay for civilization, and Paz sees solitude as a prerequisite to all intellectual work of great value. Without solitude, Mexico would have no Sor Juanas, no Cosío Villegas … and no Octavio Paz! And the originating causes of cultural malaise, like those of solitude, are ultimately unconscious: Jews needed Freud to uncover the roots of their sense of guilt, and Mexicans needed Paz to crack the enigma of their eternal solitude. Paz’s solitude is thus less a melancholic state than a variant of cultural malaise, and one can see why The Labyrinth takes Moses and Monotheism instead of “Mourning and Melancholia” as its source. Melancholia is an individual affliction, but malaise is a state that emerges from the development 15 | The German word Strachey translated as “malaise” is Unbehagen, which can also mean “discontent,” as in Civilization and its discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur).

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of civilization, a construct that traverses and is traversed by history. And just as Freud relied on cultural malaise to analyze the evolution of Judaism from the repressed memory of the murder of Moses to the explosion of antiSemitism in the 1930s, Paz invoked solitude to understand Mexican history, from the conquest to the modern state of the 1940s. Out of all the points mentioned by Freud in his analysis of Jewish history, there was one that must have made a deep impression on Paz: the belief that an advancement in civilization does not bring happiness, but, on the contrary, produces endless discontents, burdens the people with a sense of guilt, and shrouds them in a dull malaise. In The Labyrinth, he was to present a remarkably similar account of history as a process that has led Mexicans to an ever deepening sense of solitude. But solitude, like malaise, can be productive: in the end, The Labyrinth springs from Paz’s experience of solitude in the same way that Moses and Monotheism was born out of Freud’s intense physical and spiritual malaise in the last years of his life. Cultural malaise can never be cured but Paz believed there was a cure for solitude: “mythical time,” he wrote, “the time of poetry, love, and myths liberates us from solitude and returns us to a state of communion” (ibid.: 360). Freud ends his Moses on a characteristically pessimistic note, lamenting the limitations of Geistigkeit and of his ability to know; Paz, on the other hand, ends his book by assuring his readers that “plenitude awaits us at the end of the labyrinth of solitude” (ibid.: 342). The three concepts Paz borrowed from Moses and Monotheism – Oedipus, Geistigkeit, and Malaise – have an important element in common: they are abstract ideas that could never be expressed as visual images, complex notions that resist translation into pictorial form.

Conclusion The Labyrinth of Solitude is an original adaptation of Moses and Monotheism to the Mexican context – an effort to use psychoanalytic concepts to theorize cultural identity. What Freud did with Judaism, Paz repeated with Mexicanism. But why would Paz choose a work famous for its esoteric speculation as the basis for his book? Couldn’t he have chosen another, simpler Freudian text dealing with the same themes? Why not take Totem and Taboo or Civilization and its Discontents as a point of departure? Wouldn’t these texts make things considerably easier for him? But there is compelling reason behind Paz’s choice of Moses over other Freudian texts. In Freud and the non-European, a short but brilliant work, Edward Said praises Moses and Monotheism as a model for thinking about national and ethnic identity. Said notes that Freud’s inquiry into the origins of Judaism opens with a shocking hypothesis: Moses was an Egyptian, and thus the founder of the Jewish religion was a non-Jew. Or formulated in slightly different terms, Freud’s inquiry into the identity of his people places the Other at its center. And if the founding father of Judaism is an other, then

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Jewish identity is predicated on alterity. “In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity,” Said writes, “Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself, but rather with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian)” (Said 2004: 44). This analysis “mobilized the non-European past in order to undermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular” (ibid.: 45). This radical move of constructing a national or cultural identity that has the other at its center is what led Octavio Paz to choose Moses and Monotheism as his model. In The Labyrinth, he too sets out to construct a theory of Mexican cultural identity that originates in an experience of alterity. In a gesture that has not been properly analyzed, Paz begins his book not with Mexico but with California, and his first chapter is a meditation on the Pachuco, the Mexican-American who does not fit comfortably into either of the two national identities. To think about Mexico, Paz takes California as his Egypt and the Pachuco becomes his Moses – a Mexican-American Moses. Our analysis of Paz’s debt to Moses and Monotheism also sheds light on why so many Latin American intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century gravitated to psychoanalysis as a model for theorizing national identity. Figures from the Mexican Samuel Ramos to the Peruvians Honorio Delgado and Jose Carlos Mariátegui and the Argentinean Ezequiel Martínez Estrada turned to Freud’s writings in search for the conceptual tools to examine their nation’s history and culture. In those years, psychoanalysis emerged as the preferred model for examining collective identity, for diagnosing its pathologies and offering therapeutic solutions. Psychoanalysis was, in other words, part and parcel of the neuroses of modernity.

Bibliography Aristotle (1957): “Problem XXX.” In: Problems, Books XXII-XXXVIII. Translation by H. Rackham, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1995): Mal d’Archive: Une impression freudienne, Paris: Galilée. Freud, Sigmund (1961/1963): Civilization and Its Discontents, SE, XXI, (German original: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), New York: W.W. Norton/ London: The Hogart Press. Freud, Sigmund (1964 [1939]): Moses and Monotheism, SE XXIII, London: The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Freud, Sigmund (1953 [1925]): “Mourning and Melancholia.” In: J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, pp. 239-260. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia (1994): “Malinche’s Rights.” In: Ray González, Currents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, pp. 261-66.

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Mermall, Thomas (1958): “‘El laberinto de la soledad’ y el psicoanálisis de la historia.” In: Cuadernos americanos 27/156, pp. 97-114. Reprinted in Santí 2000, pp. 18-35. Moraga, Cherrie (1983): “A Long Line of Vendidas.” In: idem, Loving in the War Years, Boston: South End Press, pp. 90-144. Ocampo, Victoria (ed.) (1939): “Moisés y la religión monoteísta.” In: Sur (June). Paz, Octavio (1994): Generaciones y semblanzas. Obras completas, vol. 4, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1995): “Itinerario”. In: Ideas y Costumbres I: La letra y el cetro. Obras Completas, vol. 9, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 15-72. Paz, Octavio (2001): “Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad (Coversación con Claude Fell).” In: Enrico Mario Santí (ed.), El laberinto de la soledad, Madrid: Cátedra. Santí, Enrico Mario (ed.) (2000): El laberinto de la soledad: Edición conmemorativa. 50 aniversario, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 18-35. Santí, Enrico Mario, “Introducción.” In: Paz 2001. Said, Edward W. (2004): Freud and the Non-European, New York: Verso. Schorske, Carl E. (1993): “Freud’s Egyptian Dig.” In: The New York Review of Books 40/10, pp. 35-40. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim (1991): Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Par t II: Paz and the ‘Privileges of Sight’

Octavio Paz, Mexican Muralist 1 Bolívar Echeverría

The unreality of that observed gives reality to the gaze

It has been said that the publication of The Labyrinth of Solitude in 1950 not only surpassed the results of philosophical research on “the ontological particularity of Mexicanness,” a topic that many of Mexico’s most talented philosophers were striving to elucidate but, in fact and in a certain sense, made them superfluous. Stating such an affirmation entails an assumption: that the goal pursued by modern philosophy, as represented by those philosophers, and the goal that Paz’s Labyrinth reached were one and the same – that is, to elucidate the “essence (self) of the Mexican” – and that, to put it simply, Paz discovered how to achieve that objective first. Such an affirmation, however, would be unjustified. At first glance, without doubt, the “Mexican” that should have been the topic of philosophical treatises and the “Mexican” that is the theme of The Labyrinth appear to be quite similar, but in reality they are two different issues. What happened was that this similar, but in the end distinct, object discussed in Octavio Paz’s essay came to occupy the place of that other object upon which philosophers had promised the intellectual public opinion a treatise. It might be said that, with The Labyrinth, the literary-essayist genre of reflexive discourse emerged from the shadows to seize the responsibility for defining the nature of the topic of Mexicanness that the scientific-philosophical discourse was threatening to take under its wing and present to that public opinion. It could even be argued that the 1 | Paper given at the International Colloquium “Por el Laberinto de la soledad,” Mexico, August 20-27, 2000, First published (2001) in: Anuario de la Fundación Octavio Paz 3. Memoria del Coloquio Internacional "Por el Laberinto de la soledad" a 50 años de su publicación, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Translation: Paul Kersey. The translation was made possible thanks to the fi nancial support of the Facultad de Filosofía, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, Mexico.

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“Latin American” or, perhaps better, “Mexican,” way of reflecting – a rather more literary form – proved to be more agile and accurate for speaking of Mexicanness than the scientific-philosophical approach, which came almost directly from Germany.2 But the fact that the literary Mexican differs from the philosophical Mexican is revealed even more clearly if yet another Mexican is brought into the picture: the one that plastic artists of the generation immediately prior to Octavio Paz had been painting and sculpting since the time of Vasconcelos. Beyond its dialogue with philosophers, The Labyrinth seems also to carry on an implicit discussion with this other type of “intellectual”; i.e., the Mexican muralists, especially Orozco, Rivera and Siquieros who, together with the fi lmmakers of that period – given their fully justified and overwhelming fame – were the most important and effective shapers of popular opinion in Mexican society. Mexico’s muralists attempted to give coherence, at least iconically, to the confused ideological representations of the postrevolutionary political class. Thought out in visual images, or translated into them, their formulation of the questions of national identity, national history and the project of the new state was, during Paz’s youth, the most vivid and widely shared quasi-discursive attempt to achieve what was intended to be a historical coming-into-consciousness. I do not think it is risky to posit that Paz’s The Labyrinth lays out before the reader, as in a Mexican mural, though with a plasticity not visual but linguistic, a “triptych” composed of different scenes whose conceptual images are interconnected and invade one another so as to produce an apparent synthesis. The “panel” that we might call the central or principle one of this triptych would include the first four chapters of The Labyrinth, where Paz describes the uniqueness of the Mexican. There we see a most impressive figure (taken, it seems, from a scene of a Siqueiros mural) that, beneath the “grand night of rock on the High Plain,” there where the “insatiable gods still reign,” “is suspended in the gravitational field of contradictory forces.” This figure emerges from the land or sinks dramatically back into it, because this is “mother and tomb.” This is without question the most brilliant and complex part of the work, where the reader encounters the now classic sketches of the pachuco3 in search of identity, and of the hermetical man who, 2 | The reader should recall here that the reflexive use of modern discourse is not always or in all cases of a philosophical-scientific order, nor has it always interiorized the “cultural revolution” of the Protestant Reformation. Though the methodical resource of reducing theology to a parenthesis, and the meaning of “God” to an intensity as close to “degree zero” as possible, has certainly been an extremely effective one in the advance of the modern rationalization of life, it was not used universally in that rationalization. At times, as in the case of the baroque modality of this reflexive use of discourse, recourse was had to an internal transformation of theology, a re-definition of the idea of God. 3 | “The pachucos are youths, for the most part of Mexican origin, who form gangs in southern cities; they can be identified by their language and behavior as well

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using simulation and masks, guards the suspicion of his own emptiness from the eyes of others. This part of the essay presents the Mexican who carries with him the stigma of being the son of the… Malinche, 4 the man for whom the fiesta is a challenge to death. The left-hand side of the triptych (chapters 5 and 6) brings together the historical scenes in a somber ambience similar to some of Orozco’s spaces. From the period of the Viceroyalty to the present, represented mainly by the Mexican Revolution – a movement at once “desperate and redeeming,” a portentous fiesta in which the Mexican, drunk with himself, finally meets, in a mortal embrace, the other Mexican” – the history of Mexico, with its “atrocious reality of a nightmare,” appears as a tragic series of repeated but failed attempts to “overcome the state of solitude.” In the third panel, the one on the right (chapters 7 and 8), Paz offers the reader a portrait gallery, using the resource of Rivera’s village irony, a panoramic appreciation of – for him – the important figures of Mexico’s “intelligentsia,” including Vasconcelos, Ramos, Cuesta, Reyes and O’Gorman. This panel, and the triptych itself, ends with an attempt to situate the political possibilities of the Mexican state in the context of the Cold War. Upon folding the triptych, the inverse side of the two joined wing panels shows another of Paz’s vignettes – one which could just as well be a conclusion as an introduction – entitled “The Dialectics of Solitude.” Here, this experience, which would be the “ultimate basis of the human condition,” is shown being vanquished by love. Fascinated, the reader must be – and, indeed, is – left speechless before this enigmatic “figure amidst the landscape” that Paz has placed before him; the conceptual image of the Mexican: a presence that, though frightening, also elicits empathy.5 Because of its dazzling perfection, the text of The Labyrinth is impossible to criticize without such criticism betraying a flawed understanding of the work as a whole. The seduction that emanates from it is above and beyond any discrepancy of its contents that readers might perceive as they read through it. What makes this so? I believe it is due to the fact that Paz’s book is a baroque text and that baroque writings close in upon themselves like a as by the clothing they wear. They are instinctive rebels…” (Octavio Paz (1985): The Labyrinth of Solitude, New York: Grove Press, pp. 13-14). 4 | It was considered quite “scandalous” when, in 1949, Paz brought the term chingada (English, “fucked”) from the smoky ambience of the bar to the rarefied atmosphere of the Colegio de México; somewhat akin to that daring invitation of surrealist dreams in which the Cossacks made their horses drink beer from the fountains of Paris. 5 | The untouchable perfection of Labyrinth has had devastating consequences for many Latin American intellectuals who analyze the cultural history of Mexico, for whom Labyrinth has been a lens without which Mexico would be condemned to invisibility.

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monad; they are there to persuade, to be admired, but not to be justified or refuted. Though profoundly skeptical of the possibility of a text being true in itself as a collection of propositions suitable for the object they intend to describe, and convinced that without some superhuman, reticent and mysterious intervention by God, or luck, this adapting of the intellect to the thing would be impossible, baroque discourse does not discard the idea of “truth” or resign itself to its inexistence. Rather, reflexive baroque discourse attempts to uncover truth within its unsalvageable hiddenness, which it respects without reserve. Thus, the method is not a direct or aggressive one, or one that in the final analysis is ingenuous of logic but, rather, that subtle and hard-tofind way that is logic’s double, and is known as rhetoric. The path that Paz chooses is the pathway of art, which discovers truth in its metamorphosis as beauty. If, as Sarduy argues, it is possible for “the echo to precede the voice,” that the given may be a “retroactive effect of that which is to come,” then it is no less possible that certainty, which should be the effect of the truth in the redoubts of the mind, may be the cause, if not of truth, then of that which is humanly possible: realizing truth. That which should be the corollary of discourse – i.e., certainty, convincing, persuasion in the mind of the reader – is reached first through simulation via the route of beauty. And truth, which should be the essential part of reflexive discourse, and which certainty should only accompany, comes, paradoxically, later. A truth suggested as a probable cause of certainty: more probable the more beautiful it is, polished and “ingenious” is the rhetorical effect that provoked it, as Gracián might say. Thus it could be said that the central goal of cognitive discourse, the truth, the adapting of the intellect to the object, is relativized ironically. At stake here is not the pragmatism of discourse but its dramatism, not the appropriation of the object but its theatricalization. It is there that truth, in a simple twinkle, at times lets itself be espied. The text is present, above all, as an object addressed to aesthetic experience, as a series of images perceived immediately; it is only within this presence, and confounded with it, that the text can become the vehicle of a suprasensorial “mental vision”: access to a theoretical or reflexive understanding. The baroque resources put to work in Paz’s text are many and highly varied, as he constructs his image of the Mexican that is meant to persuade and convince. Others will be able to examine them better and with more time; I mention only one, and perhaps only in passing. This recourse consists in alternating phrases written in third person singular and in first person plural; sentences in “he” and sentences in “we.” “The Mexican” – the text says in third person singular – is a being that encloses and preserves itself: “its face a mask, its smile a mask.” “Hermeticism – Paz then adds in first person plural – is a recourse of our suspicion and mistrust.”

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And this alternation continues: He: “The Mexican (contrary to what is supposed), aspires to create an ordered world in accordance with clear principles.” We: “At times the forms choke us.” He: “The Mexican exceeds in dissimulating his passions and himself.” We: “We dissimulate with such zeal that we almost do not exist… we also dissimulate the existence of those like us… We negate them.” He: “The solitary Mexican loves fiestas and public gatherings.” We: “We are a ritual people.” He: “The Mexican’s indifference before death is fed by his indifference to life.” We: “We are alone.” He: “The Mexican condemns all of his tradition…” We: “Our history, in certain moments has been a bloody will of uprooting.” He: “The Mexican and Mexicanness are defined as… the living awareness of solitude, historical and personal.”

As we see here, the most convincing part of Labyrinth is dominated by a text in which the voice that expounds divides itself in two. The first voice, the one that speaks in first person plural, is that of a spokesperson for something that seems to be a collective, self-critical, reflexive confession, somewhere between prideful and contrite; a voice like that of an ecclesiastical confession, of someone worried about their salvation. The other voice, in contrast, speaks in third person singular, and is that of the anthropologist, sociologist, or historian: it is an objective, unconditional and implacable voice: a voice concerned with truth. It must be added that this involves not only an alternation of voices, but also a rhythmic arrangement of this alternation, which is unquestionably masterful. The rhythmic alternating of these two voices gives the essay a musicality that makes it exceptional and is, in my opinion, the first and amplest instrument of its persuasive effect, of its capacity to produce certainties. The baroque “swinging” that emerges in the text of The Labyrinth provokes in the reader a kind of vertigo as s/he perceives such a fleetingly protean object; one that oscillates, time and again, between confession and critique, between the search for salvation and the search for truth, between the universalization of the Mexican to the Mexicanization of human beings in general. It could also be said that this interplay of alternation is overdetermined due to the need to appeal to a readership that is also dual, on the one hand Mexican or Latin American and, on the other, European. The Labyrinth appears not to be addressed only to the public in general or, more specifically, to an exclusively Mexican and Latin American audience; rather, and more intimately, it is addressed also to the concrete circle of the author’s friends and companions in the Paris of his time, the Paris of existentialism. Paz seems to be reacting against the spontaneous attitude of the European milieu that judges non-European human beings to be undoubtedly subhuman, an attitude that exists even among the most

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audacious spirits of the surrealist circle. Taken as an object of dialogue, but not as an interlocutor of it; as part of the world, but not as the conscience of it, the Latin American writer never felt quite at home in Europe. Even among the intellectuals of Europe who personify self-criticism – believing that they have made a quantum leap beyond their own cultural shadow – Paz observes the lack of an approach to “the other” that respects it in its difference and does not see in it just a non-European way of being. Adopting a tactic that is traditional among American creoles, Paz rotates 180 degrees the pretension of European humanism, which takes its own mode of humanity to be the exclusive, proper or central way of being human in general. From Heidegger – through the Parisian fi lter dominated by Sartre’s celebrated book, Being and Nothingness – he takes the determination of the essence of that which is human to be the capacity for freedom that emerges from the state of derelictio, from being helpless amidst the self, to creating for himself a world endowed with necessity and meaning. This conception of European philosophy is the weapon that Paz turns against the Europeans. It is, he says, a fundamental determination of that which is human, that which in Europe one finds only in a betrayed state but that, in contrast, can be found in a pure state in the immediacy of Mexican existence. The solitude of the Mexican has not been erased, as it has in Europe, thanks to the anti-solitude device instituted in the world by technique; a deceptive device because it is in fact the human presence that is reflected in it in narcissistic fashion. “Our feeling of solitude is justified,” Paz writes, not only because “we are in effect alone, because we are in effect different,” but because we truly lack a refuge, as we have no God or substitute for God, such as the techniques that would be capable of protecting us. The human figure that Paz’s essay presents under the name of “the Mexican” is placed polemically in that admirable series of proposals for constructing an ideal type called the American Man – think of the most brilliant one of these, that of José Enrique Rodó – that have been competing among themselves since the Latin American creoles were obliged to redefine their identity outside the Spanish empire, in that more liberal context of a score of republics, and under the ineluctable inspiration of a romanticism that blew strongly from the “Old World.” Paz’s figure of the Mexican is a proposal to define this ideal type that does not succumb before the kind of sociologized or historicized psychologism that is usual in the confection of many typical Latin American personages. It is a proposal firmly based on the author’s commitment to the nationalism of the post-revolutionary Mexican state. As is well known, the modern nation is an imaginary entity whose function consists in alleviating the need for a concrete identity, which is present in the real group of private property owners that surrounds a joint enterprise of capital accumulation bent on establishing itself in world markets. As such an imaginary entity, the modern nation comes together with a pretension of synthesis, and proposes itself as the ideal to be pursued, a more-or-less welldefined series of positive human traits; but traits that emerge by deforming

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the qualitative characteristics of real communities – be they traditional ones or ones that point to the future – that must be sacrificed in the march of the historical capitalist enterprise. Indeed, the typical member of the community called “nation” exists only on the plane of the imaginary: the many types of Germans, Italians or French are forced to become unreal before they can be transformed into the German, the Italian or the Frenchman. This is also the case of the veracruzano and the michoacano, of the sonorense and the yucateco, of the oaxaqueño and the jalisciense, and of the guerrerense and the regiomontano.6 How much of themselves would they have to sacrifice; that is, to what degree would they also have to become unreal in order for all of them to exist in accordance with the imaginary type of the unique national subject? Undoubtedly, the highly improbable synthesis of the series of characteristics that Paz attributes to his figure of the Mexican, and which produce an invented, “arbitrary,” subject – as Paz himself affirms – is a provocative, challenging and perhaps even irritating construction for those who would confront it with the unity of the national subject, established through the official use of empirical sociology or historical archives. The Mexican of The Labyrinth does not coincide with the consecrated image of the Mexican. Seen from the corresponding disciplines, Paz’s Mexican would be a literary hero of sociology-fiction and history-fiction. And, in effect, he is, but not a hero of novels, or of free or unbridled fiction, but one that pertains to a different kind of poetic discourse, the literary-essayist type in which the fictitious comes not to the thing from without, from the mind of the creator, but is within the thing itself, which is a moment constitutive of reality. The figure of the Mexican in Paz is not arbitrary in the sense that “he” scorns or ignores the laws of reflection, but in the sense of – baroquely skeptical – playing with the deep arbitrariness that exists within them. It is evident from a necessity located on a different level, that it is precisely the arbitrariness of this illustrative figure that appears in The Labyrinth that gives coherence to an order that could be called “iconic-conceptual,” one that for fifty years has represented an ongoing challenge to critical reflections on Mexican culture, history and politics. It must be said, however, that the basis of this critical presence of the figure of Paz’s proposed Mexican is also, tragically, the foundation of its ideological function. If Paz’s essay has any limitation, it is found in his obedience to the illusion of modern nationalism. It is this that above, and contrary to, the real concretization of the populations disciplined by the modern state, calls into discussion the contents of an empty entelechy: the identity of the nation. It is this illusion that proposes to give form to, or invent some traits for, the subject that would be the typical member of the Nation. And Paz who, like so many others, followed that call instead of mistrusting it or doubting that it was the adequate via of reflection, proceeds to fill it with the fascinating 6 | Spanish terms for people from the states of Veracruz, Michoacán, Sonora, Yucatán, Oaxaca, Jalisco, Guerrero and the city of Monterrey, respectively.

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characteristics of the creation he calls the Mexican. Of all the roads open to reflexive discourse in its approach to “the meaning of the singularities of the country,” the peculiar modern ethos that in the history of modernity has governed the creation of the forms of Mexican life, he chooses to examine this meaning and ethos by means of the construction of a personage. This “personification” of an issue that, upon being substantialized as a collective personal masculine subject essentially withdraws itself, is the basic proposal of the nationalist illusion, and, by accepting this illusion, by presupposing that the national subject does indeed exist in reality, Paz collaborates in this disfiguration. This same nationalist illusion that provides Paz with the opportunity to construct his fascinating image of the Mexican turns this opportunity into a poisoned gift; the price he pays is that he must attach his reflection to a political and historical horizon that is severely restricted. Though he does adduce, in effect and eventually, that “Mexicanness will be a mask that, when it falls, will finally reveal the man”; and although his is a paradoxically universalistic nationalism – located at the antipodes of the racism towards which the nationalist exaltations of identity tend to reach – it does not cease to be a modern nationalism, as it conceives of the concretization of social life in the form of the imaginary concretization attributed to the subject of this historical enterprise that is the capitalist state. “The human being in his fundamental condition of being delivered to his condition of freedom with no protection whatsoever” – the Dasein in his Verlassenheit – would be the nucleus of the experience of the world in contemporary life. This is a philosophical theme posited radically by Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology, and dramatized, incipiently, by Heidegger himself in his Being and Time. In the essayist figure of “the Mexican and his orphanhood,” Paz subjects this topic to a poetical reconstruction that fully dramatizes it and presents it as a figure vitalized not only by its contradiction but also by the consistency of its contradiction; a consistency that comes from the uneasy imprint of concrete life in Mexico. Thus, as a personage in essayist fiction, this figure that Paz calls “the Mexican”, this personage that is the protagonist of The Labyrinth of Solitude, has assured himself of a prominent place not only in Spanish-American but also in universal literature. Ut pictura poiesis. When the aperture that the baroque style provides in its essayist-literary definition of the Mexican passes into the discursive political order, where the modern national subject is no innocent illusion but quite the opposite, it becomes a limitation. The material with which the fascination of the fi gure of the Mexican is made is, however, and tragically, the same stuff that constitutes the cause of its limitations as an image of the social, historical and political reality of the peoples of Mexico. Returning to the Creole tradition – the Euro-Mexican, who considered the

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downtrodden and silenced culture of the new continent a living mirror of his own utopian self-projections – Paz avails himself of a series of characteristics – impressive but at times incompatible among themselves – of Mexico’s everyday culture that he uses once again to construct a polemic argument within European debates. To combat the “cultural fatigue of Europe,” a theme he covers almost obsessively in the rive gauche of postwar Paris, Paz recommends a cure of authenticity, a reconsideration of a reflection incarnated in the practice of the fundamental condition of human existence. The Mexican, as the type of human being capable of having the immediate experience of this condition would be called, on the one hand, to show the European the way out of that state of fatigue and, on the other, to find in it an authentic companion that would save him from his exemplary but unbearable solitude.

On Visual Modernity and Poetic Critique, between Octavio Paz and Walter Benjamin Rolando Vázquez

[V]ale más condescender ante la imposibilidad, que andar errante, perdido, en los infiernos de la luz. María Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía

With modernity our experiences of time and the visual have undergone enormous transformations. This paper addresses these changes by offering a critique of modern visibility and modern temporality in the hope that by gaining a better understanding of these transformations we can reveal the experiences that are being lost.1 To walk along the path of this questioning, we open a dialogue between the thoughts of Octavio Paz and Walter Benjamin. These two thinkers have rarely been put together despite their strong affinities, especially regarding the critique of modernity’s notion of time and history and their common praise of poetry and the image. The text starts by briefly addressing the intimate relation between language and visibility, so as to lay the groundwork of Paz’s affirmation that in modernity there is a break between prose and poetry. To speak of the division between prose and poetry is to differentiate the instrumental from the poetic uses of language. These uses of language hold divergent relations both to the world and to time. Modern prose represents the world; it turns language into a tool fabricated for the appropriation of reality. Whereas poetry relates to language in the manner of receiving, of listening; its images are not produced but evoked. With this distinction in mind, we proceed to see how the temporality and logic of representation that we observe in modern prose reaches a concrete affirmation in the technological transformation and production of reality. 1 | I want to thank the Hasselblad Foundation for allowing me to do part of this research in their library, I want to specially thank the Librarian Elsa Modin for her kind support.

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According to Octavio Paz, the advent of modern technology2 means the loss of the image of the world and its replacement by the visibility of rational representation. Benjamin teaches us that the constructions and objects that we owe to modern technology since the 19th century are nothing other than the phantasmagoria of modernity, “set in stone”. With the technological construction of reality, modern temporality and its visual order attain its concrete realization and enters the immediacy of perceptible experience. Technology and the technological conquest and appropriation of space, become a clear example of how modernity transforms everyday life by asserting presence and the present as the foremost and privileged site of experience. Empty time becomes the sole site and horizon of visibility. Putting in contrast the visibility of technology and the poetic image we are able to see how modernity’s hegemony has meant the erasure of other experiences of time and the visual. The poem, the poetic image, is used as a critical visuality and a critique of time. We argue that the poetic image holds a different experience to time. It owns its very visibility to its open relation to what has been, to memory. It brings to experience a time that overflows modern empty time; a time that challenges the modern affi rmation of the present as the only site of the real. Finally, we bring to the fore photography as an arena where the tensions between the temporality of technology and the poetic experience are played out in a unique way. More generally, the text puts forward the works of Octavio Paz and Walter Benjamin as contributions toward a poetic critique of modernity. The poetic speaks of an experience that escapes the logic of representation and comes in the vicinity of the illogical, the irrational; of difference and plurality; of the other. In a poetic critique reality comes to sight as multiple and irreducible to the modern production of certainty.

Language and the visual –¿Y a qué jugaba de niña? –Jugábamos a moler el lodo, lo molemos, lo torteamos […] también hacemos muñeca de palo, envolvemos con ropitas y ya es nuestro hijo. Testimony of Susana, Zapatista woman

Let us begin by exploring the question of the relation between language and image. In childhood we are surprised by the visible, we ask, we learn to name it. Through the asking and the naming we learn words. Soon, the visible 2 | In this essay we use the terms prose and technology following Octavio Paz’s usage, but it is important to say that they could be replaced by a variety of terms that could be more precise but that also hold their own limitations. We could use for example Michel de Certeau’s scriptural machine to speak of prose, and the Frankfurt School notion of instrumental rationality to speak of technology.

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takes shape in language and in turn language appears as visibility. Naming is a way of delineating and inhabiting the world. Language in its speaking, is not an object, we cannot posses it. Language is not ours; it always already precedes us. It is a place of encounter among ourselves, among times and knowledges. I don’t see with the eyes: words are my eyes. We live among names; what is without name is still non existent: Adam of mud, not a doll of clay, a metaphor (Paz 1978: 15).3

This language, that names and renders visible the world, has come under the sway of instrumental reason. Words are increasingly used as objects, as instruments. The hegemonic use of language assimilates it to the object, bounds it to the present. Language is made an instrument for the appropriation of the world, not for naming it, but rather for consuming and manipulating it. This use of language corresponds to the modern order of certainty, of truth in which the object is the concrete expression of the real. In this context, the poetic word that gives visibility to absence, to the nonobjectifiable, the non-measurable, to what cannot be harnessed by reason, is perceived as fiction, as illegitimate and useless to understand the world. In modernity, says Octavio Paz, language suffers a caesura; the instrumental use of language, prose in Paz’s terms, is radically separated from poetics. Poetry becomes marginalized as irrational, useless. Poetry is likened to madness. What we call imagination, poetry, sacred word, voice from another world was expelled, casted out. These words have a reverse: incoherence, alienation, madness. Poetry was sentenced to exile; madness to confinement. As the borders between the one and the other became blurred, sometimes poets were confined and sometimes they were treated as inoffensive fools (Paz 1973: 24).

The critical potential of poetry comes from its exile. It has the ability to show us modernity from its margins and reveal what is being excluded. Poetry gives us a view of the limits of the modern production of certainty. The distinction that Octavio Paz makes between prose and poetry enables us to see the changes in our relation to language brought about by modernity. In its use of prose modernity has made of language a key instrument for the appropriation of the world. “It is thus not without reason that for the past

3 | “No veo con los ojos: las palabras/son mis ojos. Vivimos entre nombres;/lo que no tiene nombre todavía/no existe: Adán de lodo,/no un muñeco de barro, una metáfora.” All translations of works quoted in Spanish are my own.

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three centuries learning to write has been the very defi nition of entering into a capitalist and conquering society” (de Certeau 1988: 136). In modernity language is brought under the logic of fabrication, it is made; whereas in poetry or in oral traditions language is heard. The scriptural conquest and its relation to language as an object is marked by a loss of a different experience of language. “[T]he ‘scriptural’ is that which separates itself from the magical world of voices and tradition. A frontier (and a front) of Western culture is established by that separation” (de Certeau 1988: 134). Paz’s separation between prose and poetry corresponds intimately to Michel de Certeau’s (1988) perception of modernity as a scriptural enterprise. With the loss of the mnemonic dimension of language, also comes the devaluation of oral tradition and the visual presence of poetry. For Octavio Paz, it is precisely in poetry where we find preserved this relation to language in which language is not an object of the present but living memory, a memory that calls to be heard and told anew. This becomes evident when we see that poetry is not representation, description, appropriation but image. In poetry language opens itself to visual experience, the poetic image is a presence that is always plural and ambivalent. The poetic breaks the order of rational representation. Sentences and phrases are means. The image is not a means to an end; being grounded on itself, it is its own meaning. It is its beginning and its end. The meaning of the poem is the poem itself. Images are irreducible to any explanation and any interpretation (Paz 1994b: 124).

The poetic image is a fracture a critical questioning of the tenets of “certainty” the truth values of modern prose. In poetic imagery language is not representation but presence. Poetry is open to uncertainty, plurality, the workings of memory, temporality. We can then speak of the mnemonic poetics of time versus the spatial chronology of “modern prose”. “Every image – or every poem made of images – contains many contradictory meanings that it embraces and reconciles without suppressing them” (Paz 1994b: 114). The same can be found in Walter Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image, the image is only visible because it is a site of tensions, of irreducible contradictions. “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again” (Benjamin 2003: 390). This is the basis of Benjamin’s method to develop a critique of homogeneous empty time, of the modern utopia of progress. “The image is scandalous because it defies the principle of non-contradiction” (Paz 1994b: 115). In Paz’s thoughts, the poetic image not only debases the logic of instrumental reason, the processes of chronology; but it also over-flows the logic of dialectical thinking. Images do not hold contradictions in the sense of dialectical negations, their contradiction derives not from duality or negation but from plurality. “[T]he image is a phrase in which the plurality of meanings doesn’t disappear” (Paz 1994b: 121). The plurality of the image

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corresponds to the poetic use of language; where language is not put at the service of description, explanation, nor representation. In the poetic image language merely shows. The processes of description, Paz explains (1994b), give away with the totality of the object, whereas in the poem the image reaches the plurality of the visible. The poetic image does not represent, it presents. Just as in the moment of perception the image is full with tensions and contradictions. The emerging image brings back in a flash of memory the experiences encountered in the past. Here we see how the visibility of the poetic image, is entwined with the visibility of memory. The poetic practices are mnemonic practices that is, practices that summon the past and rapture the semblance of continuity of the modern present. We begin to point here towards the intimate connection between the poetic use of language and the critique of history and the modern notion of time.

Technolog y and Visual Modernit y Octavio Paz speaks of the transformations that technology brought to our image of the world. His analysis enables us to see how technology imposes itself as an economy of the visual that affi rms the modern notion of time. It is a parallel effort to that of Walter Benjamin who saw in the constructions of the nineteenth century, like the Arcades, the very materialization of modernity, of both its visuality and its temporality. Octavio Paz sees poetry as the refuge of those qualities that are excluded from the modern notion of the real; whereas Walter Benjamin fi nds in the poetry of Baudelaire the revelation of modernity as phantasmagoria. In their affirmation of modernity, technological constructions enter the realm of phantasmagoria, they are the phantasmagoria “rendered in stone” (Benjamin 1999: 24). In the face of the visual panorama of technology and progress, poetry appears as a critical force. In his book of essays El signo y el garabato, Octavio Paz asserts that every society has a “world image” and that this world image is deeply connected to a particular notion of time (Paz 1973: 11). In modernity he sees that “[t]he destruction of the image of the world is the first consequence of technology” (Paz 1973: 13). Technology brings about a visual economy that replaces what Octavio Paz calls the “image of the world”. Here modernity comes to view not as affirmation but as erasure. The earth and sky that philosophy had vacated from the gods are gradually being covered with the amazing constructions of technology. However those works represent nothing, and strictly speaking, they say nothing. [...] What do our hangars, railway stations, office buildings, industries and public monuments say? They do not say: they are functions, not significations. They are energy centres, monuments of will, signs that irradiate power, not meaning (Paz 1973).

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Technology, the power of modernity, the movement of appropriation of its rationality colonizes space with its fictions and in the same way it vacates other significations. Space becomes the property of modernity, the place of realization of its power. Quoting Michel de Certeau we could say that hegemonic modernity expresses itself in […] the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own [...] [I]t is an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other. It is also a typical attitude of modern science politics, and military strategy (de Certeau 1988: 35-36).

What is important for us of Michel de Certeau insight is the realization that the exercise of power in modernity comes through the control of space. Space is delimited as a property of knowledge, of control. This shows that space is the realm, the proper place of modern certainties and their power. This understanding of modernity’s need for a proper place, can help us understand the movement of colonization of all aspects of life as much as of the realms of experience and geographical places. The understanding of the proper place as the exercise of modernity’s power, hegemony over the world and its visibility underlies the importance of a critique of time. The critique of time enables us to see how the enterprise of modernity is bound within the realm of space and renders invisible all that which does not belong to space. In other words, modernity is the affirmation of presence and the present as the only site of the real. The critique of time, by bringing to view the practices of memory, and the visuality of poetry divest modernity from its universality and renders it with its limits, as a machinery of visibility and of erasure. We can thus see the workings of the violence that comes with modernity, its coloniality.

Time and the Phantasmagoria of Modernit y The sun of History is the future, and Progress is the name of this movement toward the future. Octavio Paz, In Search of the Present

When seen from the critique of time, modernity is divested from its mask of future, of progress, its evolutionist attire. It reveals its dark side, its violence, the coloniality of its movement. The chronological time that we assume and exercise is not “universal”, it is a product of history and of the injustice of our social relations. It is a notion of time that has framed and thus limited our realm of experience, our idea of truth, the diversity of our world. Chronological time, clock time that is commonly assumed as an innocuous mechanism, as an objective measure and coordinating axis of our activities, of social life, as

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the certainty that years go-by, is a time that emerges with modernity, it is a historically created time. It is an artifice that corresponds and reproduces the interests of power and domination. It is a time whose imposition signifies an enormous violence and a loss of experience. “For us Spanish Americans this [real] present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others – by the English, the French, the Germans” (Paz 1991: 17). Modernity brought a notion of time loaded with ideals and fictions. The very understanding of the word modernity that we now see as a historical epoch started as an ideal, as a horizon to be reached. It is the epoch that took the name of its obsession. The attainment of modernity was the engine of commerce, of the sciences and the arts. Modernity is a word that bifurcates; it presents itself at once as horizon and goal as much as an epoch. Octavio Paz tells us that the poets, just as their societies, entered that frenetic and futile race to reach the horizon. “All modern poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure. Baudelaire was the first. He was also the first to touch her [modernity] and discover that she is nothing but time that crumbles [dissolves] in one’s hands” (Paz 1991: 18). We could say that Baudelaire was not only the first modern poet but also the last. By showing that modernity is “time that crumbles in one’s hands,” Baudelaire revealed the fiction of modern time. He opens the path for a critique of modern time. Walter Benjamin’s notion of modern “empty time” is grounded in Baudelaire’s poetic experience. In his encounter with the poetry of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin pictures modernity as a breading ground of fictions, as the epoch of phantasmagoria. “The world dominated by its phantasmagorias – this, to make use of Baudelaire’s term, is ‘modernity’” (Benjamin 1999: 26). Let us come back to our question of visibility, of the image. As previously argued, the phantasmagoria of modernity, is not just an abstract idea, it takes concrete historical forms and visibility. The phantasmagoria of modernity expresses itself in a visual discourse through which she reproduces itself and enters the certainty of experience. Its discourse, its truth-value are not limited to the realm of ideas or ideologies; they are manifest in the geometry of the objects, in the geography of the cities, in the representation of the maps as well as in the realm of the visual. In the very reproduction of the advertising images we see the concrete appearance of the phantasmagoria of modernity. The symbolic dimension of the commodity, its fetishism, becomes tangibly visible in the advertising images; images that are themselves commodities, the product of utilitarian reason. The visibility of these images is dependent on the vision of the future that they carry, of the cult of fashion, the cult of novelty. Their visibility depends on their fiction on their very emptiness. “Fashion is the eternal recurrence of the new” (Benjamin 2003). In the realm of the visual the images that appear in packaging, posters, magazines, the TV, the news, the internet, etcetera are at one and the same time products and reproduce the fiction of modernity, of modern time: of chronology that exalts the new and that runs frenetically towards the void of the future, towards the void of their own illusion. Octavio Paz warns us that

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not even art images are saved from the logic of the commodity. “Our society only praises the painter and his work under the condition of transforming them into objects of exchange” (Paz 1994: 9). The two ends of the modern conception of time are complementary: on the one hand the cult of the new presents itself as the everyday practice of the emptiness of the future, on the other hand the past remains bound to a notion of history that ties it to the linear narrative of modern time. “The idea of modernity is a by-product of the conception of history as a non-repeatable and linear process of succession”4 (Paz 1991: 22). In the modern ideology of the future, of phantasmagoria, the past is deprived of its content. The past is subject to the hegemony of the idea of the future, to the cult of novelty. The past ceases to be a realm of experience and enters the progressive and linear narrative of history. Benjamin tells us that the claims of the past with their calling for justice remain silenced in face of the rational narrative of history. Under the hegemony of the narrative of history, the past ceases to be memory and becomes series of facts. The past is appropriated as an object of the present. “The false aliveness of the past-made-present, the elimination of every echo of a ‘lament’ from history, marks history’s final subjection to the modern concept of science” (Benjamin 2003a: 401). The negation of the past, its reification is concomitant to the cult of the present, to the cult of novelty of the modern conception of time. “Modernity is the spearhead of historical movement” (Paz 1991: 24). In the hierarchy established by modernity, modernity presents itself as the present, as the time to which belongs the real. Present, reality and modernity becomes synonyms. Change is the permanent condition of the ephemeral present, always in a state of becoming towards the future. This is the temporal logic that underpins the ideology of progress. “[W]e adore Change, the motor of progress and the model for our societies” (Paz 1991: 24). The ideology of progress has been instrumental for the expansion of the “European” modernity, for the subjugation of other cultures and civilizations as they become identified with the past, as being backwards vis-à-vis the race to the future. Progress, the bearer of the modern idea of time, is a large source of discrimination against the other: the backward, the barbarian, the primitive. Baudelaire’s poetry and Benjamin’s thought performed the critical task of revealing from the entrails of the European modernity the falsity of the idea of progress; they opened the path towards a critique of time. “In Baudelaire, it is very important that the ‘new’ in no way contributes to progress [...]. His hatred was directed above all at ‘faith in progress’ as at a heresy, a false teaching, not a common-place error” (Benjamin 2003a: 188). The ideas of progress, of change, of the future that reign in modernity cannot be sundered from the colonizing violence that modern thought has exercised. The modern notion of time, or rather, what we could call the modern politics of time have meant a continuous loss of experience and an

4 | Modified translation.

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ongoing source of violence. “Historical determinism has been shown to be a costly and bloodstained fantasy” (Paz 1991: 28). This hegemonic way of thinking, is not just present as an abstract civilization model but it has also meant marginalization, exclusion, oblivion as forms of domination vis-à-vis all the other knowledge, the other visions of the world. It has meant the rejection of the past as an open memory, as experience, as imaginary. Behind the backdrop of media and utilitarian images, the images of memory face oblivion, they are abandoned to invisibility; this is what we can see with the poetic critique of Paz’s and Benjamin’s thought. We think that many movements of resistance against the colonialism of hegemonic modernity contain poetic practices. Poetic practices reinforce their effort to fight modernity’s control over the visual, by bringing to visibility what has been marginalized into oblivion.

Photography as Critique It is not easy to speak of photography as a critical voice akin to poetry. Photography is an offspring of modernity, of its technology and its desire of appropriation through representation. As any other modern technology, photography has been thought in relation to presence. It is a technology to appropriate presence as an image, as a visual object. It is a technology of the instant, of the ephemeral present celebrated by modernity. It is normally used as a further affirmation of presence as the site of reality. Furthermore, photography has been instrumental for the dissemination of the hegemony of progress, for the constitution of the image of development, for the constitution of a visual discourse of the other. Product of the encounter between photography and anthropology, that started in the mid XIX century, thousands of images of the Other rest in between the pages of field work notebooks in photographic archives around the world [...] We know how photography directed its arrogant gaze towards the Other (Gili 2003: 7).

How can we think of photography as a critical voice, a species of photography that moves away from the idea of the present as totality, from the modern politics of time? In the text that Octavio Paz wrote for his book with Manuel Alvaréz Bravo we find two contending visions of the task of photography: photography as a technique of modernity and photography as poetry. Paz tells us that photography is the achievement of the modern tradition coming from the renaissance, because it brings to the point of perfection the representation of perspective, of reality (Paz/Álvarez Bravo 1982). It is thus, the achievement of the rational control of the subject over the object in the realm of the visual. It is also the affi rmation of presence, of the present as the only site of reality. Nonetheless, Paz opens another possibility by bringing together poetry and photography. “Every verbal or visual image contains another implicit, latent image; the perception of that other image

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is instantaneous like poetic illumination and like the flash of the camera” (Paz/Álvarez Bravo 1982: viii). Paz speaks here of the possibility of using photography as a poetic practice. Photography, that is the product of modernity and technology, product of modern rationality and temporality can become, ironically, a privileged site of contestation. “The realm of photography, as an art, is not different from that of poetry: the intangible and the imaginary. But revealed 5 and, to say it somehow, filtrated by what has been seen” (Paz/Álvarez Bravo 1982: viii). Photography becomes poetic when it questions the totality of presence and opens a connection with what has been, with memory, breaking the linearity of time. The thought of Octavio Paz helps us to see how much visual and verbal images coincide with each other. They have the ability of bringing to view other images that exceed the realm of presence. Through poetics the realm of the visible extends itself towards the invisible, it becomes a joint between presence and absence. It is in this movement that we see the possibility of a poetic critique of modernity. Visual critique turns the gaze the photographic gaze towards the limit of the visible, towards the limits of the realm of presence. It confronts photography with its impossibility. The task of critique affi rms itself as the humbling, the containment of technology. In a critical photography technology is put at the service not of reason but of criticism. Return to the visual image that is not simple affirmation of presence, reproduction, appropriation but the image that becomes limit, horizon, floating veil; the image that, at one and same the time, keeps us apart and puts us in “communion” with absence.

Concluding remarks By reading Octavio Paz and Walter Benjamin together we have been able to trace a poetic critique of modernity. Both, Benjamin and Paz strove to understand the transformations brought about by modernity in our visual experience of the world, as well as, in our conception of time. The critique of visual modernity cannot be separated from the critique of modern temporality. We have seen how the visibility of modernity and its sense of the real, brought poetry to the margins. Both Paz and Benjamin found in poetry the clear vision of modernity that can only be reached from afar. In the poetic outlook modernity is divested of its universalism, of its claims to own the totality of the real. Modernity appears as an enterprise of conquest of time and visibility, of experience. “Today poetry faces the loss of the image of the world. That is why it appears as a configuration of dispersed signs: image of a world without image” (Paz 1973: 12). 5 | Here Paz uses the word “revelado” that means revealed but at the same time refers to the “development of the fi lm into image”.

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Poetic critique is not limited to denounce the mechanisms of illusion of the phantasmagoria of modernity; it seeks to reveal what is being lost. “The poem makes us remember what we had forgotten, what we really are” (Paz 1994b: 123). For poetic critique, modernity’s hegemony has meant the loss of experience, the loss of the poetic image and its open relation to memory, to the unexpected. In other words we see how a world dominated by the mechanism of modernity has meant the marginalization, the making invisible of other imaginaries. In the tension between visual modernity and the poetic image we find the possibility of extending the critique of modernity towards time and visibility. Such a critique is as necessary as the critique of the material processes of exploitation. It reveals the loss of experience that results from the invisibility, the oblivion that is produced by the mechanisms of modernity. Poetry appears as an undercurrent that flows against the phantasmagoria of modernity and brings to light an image endowed with the power of what has been erased. It may be that in their unfolding, poetics can wrest away from the oblivion of modernity the flow between presence and absence.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter (1999): “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé of 1939.” In: W. Benjamin/R. Tiedemann (ed.), The Arcades Project. Translation by H. a. Eiland, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 14-26. Benjamin, Walter (2003): “Central Park.” In: W. Benjamin/H. Eiland/M. W. Jennings (eds.), Water Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 4 19381940, Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 161-199. Benjamin, Walter (2003a): “Paralipomena to On the Concept of History.” In: W. Benjamin/H. Eiland/M. W. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 4 1938-1940, Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 401-411. de Certeau, M. (1988): The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gili, M. (2003): “¿Quién mira a Quién?” In: Graciela Iturbide, Graciela Iturbide, Madrid: Fundación Arte y Tecnología (Telefónica), Tf. Editores, pp. 7-11. Mujica, H. (2007): Lo Naciente: Pensando el acto creador, Valencia: Editorial Pretextos. Paz, Octavio (1973): “La nueva analogía: poesía y tecnología.” In: Octavio Paz, El Signo y el Garabato, Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, pp. 11-30. Paz, Octavio (1978): Pasado en claro, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Paz, Octavio (1991): In Search of the Present: Nobel Lecture 1990, San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company.

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Paz, Octavio. (1994): “Rupturas y restauraciones.” In: Vuelta 217, pp. 6-10. Paz, Octavio (1994a): “La casa de la presencia.” In: idem, La casa de la presencia, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 15-27. Paz, Octavio (1994b): “El arco y la lira.” In: idem, La casa de la presencia. Poesía e historia, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 33-289. Paz, Octavio/Álvarez Bravo, M. (1982): Instante y Revelación, Mexico: Fondo Nacional para la Actividades Sociales.

Duchamp According to Octavio Paz1 Juan Álvarez-Cienfuegos Fidalgo

[…] an afternoon in Marcel Duchamp’s apartment in New York: Teeny Duchamp in a corner of the sunlit room, a quiet nook of white light; John Cage’s laugh as he discusses a chess move with Merce Cunningham; Marcel with his elegant manner, reminiscent of old France, helping Marie José with her coat or his love for a (not impossible) asymmetric geometry and a logic of exceptions; conversation […] but, what did we speak of that afternoon: the disappointing Dalí exposition or the Magritte retrospective, X’s ideas or Z’s manias? [...] no, I don’t recall what we said, I remember what we didn’t say, what went unsaid and, nevertheless, was said […] not an exchange of ideas, news, likes, dislikes, but the flow of that which is tacit, the silence that covers each word with sand. Marcel Duchamp: master of the art, not of thinking, but of seeing, not of seeing, but of breathing. Octavio Paz

If one were to judge the importance that Octavio Paz attributed to Marcel Duchamp’s place in 20th-century art solely on the basis of the number of pages he devoted to him in his writings in the field of art criticism, there would be no doubt as to the preeminent place he reserved for the creator of the work entitled The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre). In the two volumes of his complete works, The Privileges of Sight (Los privilegios de la vista), where he presents his acute critical analysis of Mexican, pre-Columbian and modern art, as well as oriental, Arab and contemporary expressions, especially vanguard works, the lines dedicated to Duchamp reach out and capture the reader’s attention. At the beginning of his study, Paz is clear about the reasons for this delay: 1 | Translation: Paul Kersey.

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upon comparing Picasso’s prolific and intense artistic production with the deliberate, restrained content of Duchamp’s work, Paz states: Perhaps the two painters who have exercised the greatest influence in our century are Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The former for his paintings, the latter for one piece that embodies the very negation of the modern notion of art […]. These two painters, as is the case of all true artists, even minor ones, are incomparable. I have associated their names because it seems to me that, each in his own way, they define our time: the first through his affirmations and discoveries; the second for his denials and explorations. I know not whether they are the best painters of the last half century, nor do I know what the word “best” would mean when applied to a painter. The case of Duchamp – like those of Max Ernst, Klee, Chirico, Kandinsky and some others – fascinates me not because he was the “best”, but because he was unique; this is the most suitable term, the one that defines him (Paz 1994: 131).

In this article, I first present a schematic summary of the pages that Paz devoted to Duchamp, found in two texts: “The Castle of Purity” and “Water writes always in Plural.” The second section contains a brief note on Paz’s own work, while the third and final part contains a commentary on his interpretation of Duchamp’s work. I base this analysis on Paz’s 1976 text, in which he brought together, and updated, his earlier writings on Duchamp: The Privileges of Sight (Paz 1994). As he notes in “The Castle of Purity,” Paz’s intention was to contrast Duchamp and Picasso. In his introductory comments on Duchamp he stresses, first, the artist’s belief that paintings are a sustained chord and, second, his defense of the picture-idea; that is, the negation of sensorial painting, the denial of olfactory art, characterized by the smell of turpentine, and of retinal painting which stresses the visual character implicit in this conception of art. Having established these preliminary considerations, Paz goes on to comment the artist’s early works. In his view, those pieces already manifested Duchamp’s mastery and maturity, as appears clearly in his early flirtations with fauvism and cubism, and in his daring to go beyond the “school” of Picasso and Braque in his Dulcinea, a painting that highlights the decomposition of movement through five silhouettes of the same female figure, thus foreshadowing his Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descendant un escalier). This ironically-titled piece from 1912 marks the end of his cubist period with its echoes – more than influence – of futurism. While, on the one hand, futurism suggests movement, Duchamp, as he would later say, reflects a sustained chord; that is, a decomposition of movement. On the other hand, in contrast to the importance that the futurists attributed to the sensation provoked by the painting and to the machine as a symbol of the new epoch, Duchamp tended to paint the “idea” and proffer anti-mechanisms, devices that function unpredictably and have no utility. The counterpart in language would be plays on words.

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Later, Duchamp produced The King and the Queen (Le Roi et la Reine) and The King and the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (Le Roi et la Reine entourés de nus vites), works that accentuated his differences with futurism and clearly reveal that if Chirico’s figures “are inspired in the human body,” those of Duchamp “are mechanisms with a humanity that is not corporal. They are machines with no human vestiges though, despite this, their functioning is more sexual than mechanic, more symbolic than sexual” (Paz 1994: 137). This is painting conceived as a philosophy of destroyed plastic signs, as philosophy through humor. Paz points out the debt that Duchamp owed to the word in those early years; indeed, the delirious mechanisms that R. Roussel unchained in his Impressions of Africa (Impressions d’Afrique), a stage play that Duchamp attended with Picabia and Apollinaire, and his word games, “opposing two words of similar sound but different meaning to discover a verbal bridge between them,” reflect his preference for the influence of writers over that of painters. During his stay in Munich in the summer of 1912, he painted Virgin and The Passing from Virgin to Bride, and also conceived the idea for his The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, without the final adverb “even” (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, [meme]). His ambiguous attitude towards his work from those years found a solution that embraced all of his attitudes: “to contradict.” This is how we must understand his ready-mades, his pseudonym, Rrose Sélavy, the optical machines and his relationship with Dalí, which foreshadows his definitive break with the traditional concept of art. It was a time of disorientation in which the laws that interested him were those of exception, those valid for only one case, ideas he sought to apply to the alphabet. From 1913 to 1919, Duchamp “transformed” a series of objects: a bicycle wheel, a comb, a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a urinal, air from Paris trapped in a chemist’s vial, a perch fastened to the ground and the Mona Lisa with a mustache, are just some of his so-called “ready-mades”: objects transformed into pieces of art through random choice; that is, free of the mediation of any special preference for the object. This is in an ironic gesture on the part of the artist, “a gesture that dissolves the notion of the object of art. Contradiction is the essence of the act; the plastic equivalent of a play on words” (Paz 1994: 141). They are neither art nor anti-art, their nature is to criticize taste, “retinal” art, and art itself, because […] the only thing that counts in art is form. Or, to be more exact, forms are the emitters of meaning. Form projects meaning, it is a device of meaning. Now then, the meanings of “retinal” painting are insignificant: [mere] impressions, sensations, secretion, ejaculations. The ready-made opposes to this insignificance its neutrality, its non-meaning. For this reason it must not be a lovely, pleasant, repulsive or even interesting object (Paz 1994: 143).

It is a gesture, not a piece of art, one that even negates art and thus

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denies the manufactured object itself, which is rendered useless after this “transformation.” Hence, the ready-made marks the separation from the process of modern production, because […] though Duchamp has not the least bit of nostalgia for natural paradises or infernos, neither is he an adorer of technics. The injection of irony negates technics because the manufactured object is transformed into a ready-made: a useless thing. It is a double-bladed sword: if it is transformed into a work of art, it spoils the gesture of profanation; if it preserves its neutrality, it transforms the gesture itself into a work of art (Paz 1994: 147).

It is this irony, distancing and disinterest with which Duchamp views those objects and their value – be it economic or aesthetic – that allowed him to avoid falling into the trap that caught some of his followers. In any case, the ready-made is a rendezvous with no one whose finality is the noncontemplation. A nihilism that spins on its own axis and refutes itself: enthroning a mere trifle, and once it is upon the throne, denying it as it denies itself. Not an act of art: the invention of an art of internal liberation. In the Great Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom it is written that each one of us must strive to conquer the state of bliss of Bodisatva, though aware that Bodisatva is a non-entity, an empty name. This is what Duchamp calls the “beauty of indifference”; that is, freedom (Paz 1994: 147).

While involved in choosing and then transforming such objects, Duchamp also worked on the piece he had gestated on his trip to Munich, titling it, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even…, which he abandoned, unfinished, in 1923; “one of the most hermetic works of our century” (Paz 1994: 148). The simultaneity of his ready-mades and this piece reveals the thematic relation and aesthetic proposal between the one and the other. The title is enigmatic, as the Bride is not actually disrobed but, rather, mise en nu: shown naked in public. The Bachelors, who are neither fiancés nor suitors, are plural, “more than polyandry they bring to mind a flock” (Paz 1994: 149); they shall never wed the Bride. And, finally, the disconcerting adverb that has no meaning but that, for this very reason, introduces an element of irony and indifference. This is not a painting, properly speaking, but “a double glass, two meters seventy high by one meter seventy wide, painted in oil and divided horizontally in two equal parts by a double row of lead” (Paz 1994: 150). It was shown for the first time in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum’s International Exposition of Modern Art, but upon its return to the home of its owner part of the glass was broken. Duchamp repaired the fissures in 1936, delighting in their “symmetrical architecture,” though he was not responsible for them. The upper half is the domain of the Bride, who is called by different names: Motor-wish, Hornet and Hanged Female. According to some critics, she is a combination of a dragonfly and a praying mantis, while others associate mariée with the common name of a species of moth. The Bachelors are in the lower half, also called by different

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names: Apparatus-single, Nine male molds and Cemetery of uniforms and livery. Significantly, there are nine of them, and nine is a number replete with mythical resonances. They are molds, empty suits, their tomb is the place of their resurrection as, once again, “ambiguity appears, now between platonic archetypes and mechanical molds” (Paz 1994: 150). Paz then presents a detailed description of this work that occupies several pages and includes some of Duchamp’s own references to it from his Green Box (Boîte verte) a text that complements The Large Glass and provides clues to some parts of the piece that are alluded to in the box but not represented in it. The Bride’s domain contains several forms: in the upper left is the complex mechanism of the Bride, a device whose humanity is not reflected in human form. The functioning of the Bride is, at one and the same time, physiological, mechanical, ironic, symbolic and imaginary: the substance that nourishes her is a spray called the essence of love (automovilina). Her ecstasies are electrical and the physical force that sets her gears in motion is desire (Paz 1994: 151).

What follows is a detailed analysis of the elements that make up this section: the Bride hanging from a hook, the metal-stemmed mortise connected to the magnet-desire, where the material of the filament (invisible in the piece) must be located, as it is the source of the mast called “tree-type” connected to a “wasp” that secretes the “gasoline of love.” In the lower section is the “pulse-needle,” in the form of a pendulum that is the dress-horizon of the Bride. This quotation from Duchamp: “the Hanged female is the form in ordinary perspective of a Hanged female for whom one might try to find the true form” (Paz 1994: 154), together with his observation that this part is the projection of a three-dimensional object that is, in turn, the projection of a four-dimensional one, lends support to Paz’s interpretation of the Bride as a copy of a copy of an Idea. It is a mix of speculations on non-Euclidean geometry, which were popular during Duchamp’s youth, with that current of neo-Platonism that since the late 15th century has irrigated the soil and subsoil of our civilization. I do not speak of a conscious influence: the ideas that emerge from neo-Platonic hermeticism circulate invisibly among us, as if they were our spiritual blood, dissolved in our ways of thinking and feeling (Paz 1994: 154).

To this Platonized version of the Bride one could juxtapose Lebel’s view: the fourth dimension is the instant of the carnal embrace, the erotic dimension. In the center of the upper section is the Milky Way, which seems to emerge from the “head” of the Bride. This might represent the moment of her “cinematic florescence,” the dilation of pleasure before orgasm. Within that sort of cloud there are three “pistons,” three panels, called Nets or upper Register, “their function consists in conveying to the Bachelors and the Minstrel the severity of the Bride’s discharges: her sensations, her

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commandments. According to Roché, they are ‘original Mystery, the Cause of all Causes, a Trinity of empty boxes.’” Beneath the Milky Way there are some points, the Bachelors’ Nine shots. Other areas are not painted; for instance, the Shadows projected below the Nine shots and, beneath them, the Image of the splatter; on the horizon line the Bride’s fallen dress; the Minstrel of gravity would have been a spiral-shaped spring ending in a tray upon which there rolled a black ball to be offered to the Bride’s tongue and, to the left, along the horizon line, is found the Wilson-Lincoln system, “an optical puzzle made of prisms in which one sees in the same piece, Wilson’s face on the one side and, on the other, Lincoln’s” (Paz 1994: 156). From the Bride’s domain in the upper panel of the work, we pass to the lower half. The differences between the two parts are sharp: the forms in the upper segment are not to scale, while those in the lower part are measured, though only imperfectly; the former is governed by free geometry, while in that of the Bachelors a classic perspective dominates. The first is the kingdom of indetermination, the second that of measure and causality, […] another example of the manner in which Duchamp places certain popular notions of modern physics – the fourth dimension, non-Euclidian geometries – at the service of a metaphysics of neo-Platonic origin. As for Plotino and his followers in the 15th and 16th centuries, the One and its emanations, Ideas, were free forms that eluded perception by the senses. Geometry is the shadow of Ideas. And, moreover: the crack that allows us to see true forms. We see them, but are unable to ever see totality, as it were (Paz 1994: 158).

The Bride has a life-center, the Bachelors do not; they are animated by coal, she is self-sustaining, they are subject to geometry and perspective, hollow molds fi lled with illuminating gas. As Duchamp himself put it, […] once the castings of gas were obtained, they listened to the litanies recited by the small carriage, the chorus of the entire Bachelor-machine, though they can never overtake its Mask […] as if wrapped within a mirror that reflects their own complexity until hallucinating them in a clearly onanist fashion (Paz 1994: 159).

On the left is the group of Nine male molds, the Cemetery of liveries and uniforms, or Eros’ Matrix; empty suits without personality, of whom Duchamp wrote: “the Bachelors are the architectural base of the Bride, who thereby becomes an apotheosis of virginity […]. One bachelor-Machine is a steam engine with a foundation of masonry upon a base of bricks” (Paz 1994: 157). A Machine that creates its “desire-part” and thus converts itself into a blast furnace, separated from the Bride by a cooler that might be joined to the Bride’s dress, but is not visible. To the right of the molds is the Runner, a small Carriage or Sled that conceals the Waterwheel driven by a Waterfall that is not shown; its movement is back-and-forth thanks to the drippings from a bottle of Benedictine that recites litanies:

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Slow life, vicious Circle, Onanism […]; these are the Bachelors’ themes. All Nine hear them and wish to emerge from themselves, pass through their masks: their liveries and uniforms, but they cannot […]. Another strange feature: the weight of the bottle of Benedictine “is denser, due to condescension, while falling than while rising” [Duchamp]. Its density “is in perpetual movement and not fi xed as is that of the metals” [Duchamp]. We have no other choice than to call this property of the bottle of Benedictine philosophic: its density oscillates and thus “expresses the freedom of indifference” [Duchamp], the only freedom to which we can aspire in this world of horizontal relations (Paz 1994: 159).

Capillary tubes join the molds to the Sieves, seven parasols arranged in a semicircle; tinted by the dust that has settled upon them over the months and equipped with a vacuum pump, they are a kind of Metamorphosis Chamber. The chocolate Grinder, in ceaseless movement, occupies the center of the Bachelors’ section, “the bachelor grinds the chocolate himself,” a chocolate that “comes from who knows where and that, once ground, is deposited in the form of chocolat au lait” [Duchamp] (Paz 1994: 160). To the right of the Grinder are the Eyewitnesses, three circles similar to those used by opticians, and above them another, smaller one that must be a magnifying glass. Below the Eyewitnesses we find the Hill, or run-off Plane, the area of the Splattering that ends in a mobile Weight with nine holes; while above the Eyewitnesses would be the boxing Match, the assaults of a combat ball “upon three targets placed upon three cusps. The force of the ball each time it reaches one of the cusps triggers a system of clockworks that releases two battering rams” (Paz 1994: 164). After this description of the elements that make up The Large Glass, Paz goes on to elucidate its functioning. In the upper section, the work revolves around the spectacle of the disrobing of the Bride, perhaps a figuration, but one that is invisible, and a static representation of movement: “what we see is a moment in a process, when the Bride reaches her ‘blossoming’, as a consequence of being disrobed and a prelude to her orgasm” (Paz 1994: 165). The ceremony is initiated by the Bride, based on her timid potency that she conveys from within herself to the entire complex mechanism [already] described, the essence of which is her desire to be. At the same time, there is a ventilation system, a vital draft, her spirit, that traverses the different parts of the machine and sets them in motion, a metaphor of the desiring soul and sexuality, accompanied by sighs; the air current reaches the Three Pistons whence it contacts Eros’ Matrix in the form of electrical discharges and awakens the Bachelors. In a second version of this process, or perhaps in a later moment of it, the drafts that traverse the Three Pistons are transformed into alphabetic units, not phonetic in nature but ideographical, and untranslatable into other languages, giving rise to a peculiar rendering of the desire for universal reading. In the lower part, the monotonous world of the Bachelors follows its course, the illuminating gas inflates them and the pressure pushes them towards the capillary tubes where, finally, it freezes and is transformed

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into “spangles of frosty gas” (Paz 1994: 166), each one of which, like male sequins, tends to rise but is absorbed by the first parasol in which the frosty gas enters the three-directional labyrinth where all sense of direction and individuality is lost, leaving only “the instinct of cohesion.” At the end of their sojourn they encounter the fan in butterfly form that converts them into a kind of glycerin and pushes them down the Hill where they crash three times. Along its journey, the liquid reaches as far as the milieu of the Oculists and “the Sculpture of drops is transformed from something that is seen into something that sees. Like all gazes, it trips over the horizon: that transparency which is the Bride’s dress, where it feels the effects of the Wilson-Lincoln system” (Paz 1994: 167-168). While traversing this system the drops become others but without ceasing to be themselves; “this is one of the themes or axes of The Large Glass: forms change, but essences do not. Universal anamorphosis: each form we see is the projection, the deformed image, of some other one” (Paz 1994: 168). Following their course, the drops rise until they brush against the area of the Nine Shots. There is an unquestioned correspondence between the image of the Sculpture of the drops and the Nine Shots. The first is the projection of the illuminating gas after its metamorphoses and final transfiguration through the speculations of the Eyewitnesses and the Wilson-Lincoln prism; the second – the Nine Shots of the Bachelors – is the projection of the principle points of a body in three dimensions (Paz 1994: 168).

What the drops and shots have in common is desire, “a desire that never hits the target,” and the greater or lesser proximity to the target that is given by memory. A strange, hermetic affi rmation that, nevertheless, is not impossible to decipher: what we see is nothing other than the memory (vague, imprecise, unfaithful) of what it really is. Knowing is memory. An amorous, desirous memory. A new appearance of neo-Platonism, willful or reflexive, in The Large Glass. Real reality is elusive, not because it is changing but because it resides in a different sphere, in another dimension (Paz 1994: 168).

Finally, the lower panel represents the world of appearances, that which we can touch and see, while the upper one is the world of apparitions, of essences, a projection “of the true forms that inhabit the fourth dimension” (Paz 1994: 169). Having described the anatomy and physiology of the work, Paz adds a few more pages of commentaries. First, he refers to the psychoanalytical interpretation that is, in his opinion, the most attractive and accessible one. Its diagnosis – autism and schizophrenia – though clear, is erroneous. At the beginning of his interpretation, Paz considers “The Large Glass to be a scene from a myth or, to be more exact, from a family of myths concerning the Virgin and the closed society of men” (Paz 1994: 172), as suggested by the

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separation of the Men from the Bride and their dependence on her, reflected in the division between the lower section, the world of passivity, the illusion of movement and self-deception, and the upper one, the world of energy and decision. But they are two separate worlds with no communication between them; all the attempts by the Bachelors to make contact with the Bride are in vain, indeed, deceiving, as they believe they have reached her, but do not succeed. In truth, the only thing that the Bride is aware of is her own reality reflected in the activity of her motor-desire; that is, “the Motor-desire drives the Bride to leave her own body and that desire encloses her more completely in her own self. The world is a representation of her” (Paz 1994: 173). Paz then introduces a myth from the Tantric tradition in which Kali, the wife of Shiva, dances upon two ascetics, one of whom, eyes closed, is absolute unconsciousness, while the other, eyes semi-closed, is the absolute in a state of alertness; she is a manifestation of Shiva, while the three figures represent the process of manifestation: the unconscious passivity of the absolute, the still passive phase of consciousness and the apparition of activity or energy. Kali is the phenomenal world, incessant energy, and thus emerges as destruction – sword and scissors – as alimentation – the cup fi lled with blood – and as contemplation: the lotus of inner life. Kali is butchery, sexuality, propagation and spiritual contemplation (Paz 1994: 174).

He relates this myth to The Large Glass because “in both cases we witness the representation of a circular operation that reveals the phenomenal reality of the world while simultaneously negating all reality of truth.” In Paz’s view, this is no external or casual coincidence, but the very essence of the two representations, though this does not mean there is a direct relationship between them, they are two distinct and independent versions of one and the same idea, perhaps of a myth that refers to the cyclical nature of time. Of course, neither the Hindu tradition nor Duchamp was necessarily aware of that myth; rather, their versions are responses to the traditional images that some civilization or other has made of the phenomena of creation and destruction, of woman and of reality (Paz 1994: 174).

In another representation of Kali, she nourishes herself with her own blood, just as the Bride sets the Bachelors in motion in order to satisfy herself; moreover, both are divided, one decapitated, the other separated from her Motor. Kali and the Bride are one representation and the real world is a second representation, the shadow of a shadow. The circular movement is the reintegration of the dispersed energy through dance [Kali] or desire [the Bride],

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and no extraneous element enriches or changes it. Everything is imaginary (Paz 1994: 175).

So, who do these two figurations represent? Kali, formed from the wrath of the gods bestirred by the power of the devil who intends to destroy the world, is the female deity who will finish him off; energy and the phenomenal world are representations or manifestations of the absolute (unconscious and conscious, asleep and semi-awake). There are two reasons why energy is female: woman is creation and destruction; the phenomenal world is Maya, illusion (Paz 1994: 175).

What the Bride represents is the fourth dimension, though here Duchamp turns silent, as this is an unknown dimension. But according to his own explicit declarations, his silence means neither theism nor atheism, “for me there is something else [with regards the topic of God], something distinct from yes, from no and from indifferent; perhaps, the absence of research in this sphere” [Duchamp] (Paz 1994: 176). It is there that one finds the difference between the traditional explanation that reaffi rms the myth and Duchamp’s approach, which “places it in parenthesis.” Neither affirming, nor denying, nor showing indifference, his attitude is ironic, critical. On the one hand, it is a mockery of the traditional myth, reducing the cult to the goddess, whether in her religious or modern form, devotion to the Virgin or romantic love, to a grotesque mechanism in which desire is confounded with the combustion of a motor, love with gasoline, and semen with the gunpowder of the device. On the other, criticism is also a mockery of the positivist conception of love and, in general, of everything we call “modernity” in the usual meaning of that word: “scientism”, positivism, technology and everything else (Paz 1994: 176).

The piece is an infernal, mocking painting of modern love or, to be more exact, of what modern man has made of love. Turning the human body into a machine, though even a symbol-making one, is worse than degradation. Eroticism lives on the frontier between the sacred and the accursed. The body is erotic because it is sacred. The two categories are inseparable: if the body is just sex and animal instinct, then eroticism is transformed into the functional monotony of reproduction; if religion is separated from eroticism, it risks becoming an arid moral precept. This is what has happened in Christianity, especially in its modern version, Protestantism (Paz 1994: 177).

In contrast to the body, which reproduces itself and in that sense is immortal, machines are perishable. Thus,

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the humorous element of The Bride resides not in the fact that Duchamp, instead of painting radiant, perishable bodies, painted creaky, opaque machines. The humor of the skeleton is pathetic; that of the machine, icy. The first may make us laugh or cry; the second provokes in us what I would call, parodying Duchamp, the horror of indifference […]. In summary, Duchamp’s critique is a dual one: a criticism of myth and a criticism of the critique. With The Large Glass, Duchamp culminates the movement of the irony of affirmation that animates the ready-mades. It is a critical myth and a criticism of the critique that adopts the form of a comical myth. At the beginning, he translates the mythical elements into mechanical terms and thus denies them; then, in a second moment, he transports the mechanical elements to a mythical context and denies them once again. He negates the myth through criticism and the critique through the myth. This double denial produces a never-definitive affirmation, one that is in perpetual equilibrium above the void. Or, as he has said, Et-qui-libre? Équilibre (Paz 1994: 177).

Paz then alludes to certain critics who see in this piece a montage of the underworld and the supraworld, of matter and the aerial region, or an antiworld, a manifestation of that which the artist fears and loathes. In Paz’s view, these are incomplete explanations because the Christian pictorial tradition is Trinitarian, not dual or Manichaean, and because both parts of the work – upper and lower – are infernal. The division would thus be ontological: Males with no existence of their own/Bride with autonomy, which is illusory, “it is no accident that these are images on glass: everything has been but a performance and the personages and their circular acts a projection, the dream of a dream” (Paz 1994: 178). According to Paz, where those critics do not err is in placing the piece in the context of the western pictorial tradition, not because it is a pure painting meant to make an impression on the retina, nor one that shares in the ideals of tradition but, rather, because its objective goes beyond the aesthetic sensation: it has a goal, because it expresses an idea, “the divinity in whose honor Duchamp has raised this ambiguous monument is neither the Bride nor the Virgin nor the Christian God, but an invisible and perhaps inexistent being: the Idea” (Paz 1994: 179). The contradiction of Duchamp’s endeavor – “how to go about painting a picture of ideas in a world bereft of them?” (Paz 1994: 179) – is dissolved through irony. In a world, the modern one, in which ideas yield to criticism, our only idea would be criticism. The Large Glass is a painting of ideas because it is a critical myth, it is the Myth of Criticism: the painting of the only modern idea. Critical myth: critique of the religious and erotic myth of the Virgin/Bride in terms of modern machinery and, at the same time, a burlesque myth of our idea of science and technics. Myth of criticism: a painting-monument that narrates a moment in the vicissitudes of criticism in the world of objects and erotic relations. […]. As the Myth of Criticism, The Large Glass is a painting of Criticism and a Critique of Painting. A piece turned in upon itself, set upon destroying that which it has created. The function of irony now emerges more clearly: when negative, it is the

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critical stuff that impregnates the piece; when positive, it criticizes the critique, denies it and thus inclines the scale toward the side of myth; irony is the element that transforms criticism into myth (Paz 1994: 179-180).

In this perspective, the work would enter quite justifiably in the ambiguous current of a modern world stalked by irony, from Quijote to Joyce, and would be placed, moreover, on the hinge between the agonizing modern world and another one that is to come; a paradoxical situation that makes it both a continuation of, and rupture with, tradition, as “Duchamp applies criticism not only to the Idea but also to the act of painting itself” (Paz 1994: 180). Other artists – surrealists like Mondrian and Kandinsky – were also painters of ideas, but theirs were subjective, private worlds, in contrast to Duchamp’s character as a public painter, as Apollinaire pointed out. His closest predecessor would be Mallarmé, he of Un coup de dés; where we see, once again, the linkage that the artist always maintained with poetry and the word. Thus, the role that randomness plays in Mallarmé’s universes is taken on by humor, Duchamp’s meta-irony. The theme of the painting and the poem is criticism, the Idea that ceaselessly destroys itself and is ceaselessly renewed (Paz 1994: 181).

Both works are of an unfinished character, which reveals the void over which they were erected. The poem and the painting simultaneously reaffi rm the absence of meaning and the need to signify; it is here that the meaning of both works resides. If the universe is a language, then Mallarmé and Duchamp show us the inverse of language: the other side, the empty face of the universe. They are works that seek meaning (Paz 1994: 182).

After a cursory mention of the influence that Duchamp’s work exercised on Dada, surrealism and Anglo-American painting, Paz alludes to the idea of the artist expressed in his “spectator before the painting”; an expression in which Duchamp sees not the denial of the work but, rather, the conception of the work of art as the difference between what the artist sought to express and what the spectator interprets. Finally, he points out their special condition: “like the cynical philosopher and those few men who have dared to be free, Duchamp is a clown. Freedom is not knowledge but that which comes after knowledge. It is a state of animation that not only allows contradiction, but seeks within it nourishment and foundation” (Paz 1994: 188). Humor and irony rescue Duchamp from the temptation to take his works too seriously and, thus, present ongoing possibilities for freedom; a freedom that culminates in purity, “that which remains after all the additions and subtractions” (Paz 1994: 188). In his other writing devoted to Duchamp, “Water writes always in Plural”, Paz elaborates on the themes he explored in the earlier essay and introduces

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new keys to interpretation through a dialogue between the The Large Glass and Duchamp’s final piece, Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The illuminating Gas (Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau / 2. Le gaz d’eclairage), which he began in 1943, 23 years after he left the first piece intentionally unfinished, and deemed complete in 1966, two years before his death. A piece he worked on in secret. The visitor enters through a small door [in the Philadelphia Museum] and finds himself in a rather small room, one completely empty. No paintings on its bare walls. No windows. On the back wall, embedded in a portal made of brick and finished with an arch, there is an old door of worm-eaten wood, patched and locked with a rustic hasp, also of wood and fastened with thick nails. To the extreme upper left there is a small window, also closed and latched. Thus, the door presents to the visitor its very nature as a door but with a certain aplomb: there’s no way through. It is the opposite of the hinges and their paradoxes, a truly damned door. But as the visitor comes nearer, he perceives two small holes right at eye-level. If he comes closer still and dares to peek in, he sees a scene that he will not soon forget: first, a brick wall with a split in it and through that gap a large luminous, almost bewitched, space. Quite close to the spectator – but also far away, on the “other side” – is a naked girl, laid upon a kind of cot or pyre with branches and leaves, her face almost completely covered by a mass of blond hair, her legs spread and slightly flexed, her pubis strangely free of hair in contrast to the abundant splendor of her blond tresses, her right arm out of view, the left one raised slightly, its hand firmly gripping a small gas lantern made of metal and glass. Its weak light blinks in this brilliantly illuminated and motionless late summer day. Enchanted by this challenge to common sense – what could be less clear than light? – one’s vision takes in the entire scene: at the bottom, wooded hills, green and reddish, below them, a small lake and above the lake a tenuous fog. Inevitably, a blue sky. Two or three small clouds, white, also inevitably. On the extreme right, among some rocks, shines a waterfall. Tranquility: a piece of time suspended. The immobility of the naked woman and the scene contrasts with the movement of the waterfall and the flickering light of the lantern. The silence is absolute. Everything is real and borders on verism; everything is unreal and borders on… what? (Paz 1994: 192)

At first glance, Assemblage could hardly be a stranger piece, or one more distant from The Large Glass, given its theme, its composition and the aesthetic proposal it suggests; but in his commentary Paz brings these two pieces together and points out their unity. Here, the references are others and the tradition in which he discovers what they have in common widens one’s gaze and extends it towards new myths. The hinge is the first element of the explanation, the one that creates the link between them and that elucidates Duchamp’s entire opus; hinges allow one to open and close not only doors, but also ideas and montages, “perhaps to make a hinge painting,” wrote Duchamp in the The Green Box, an expression that, though referring to that piece, guides us to another, also contained in The Green Box, “sustained

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chord (retardo) in glass”; in addition to its common meaning [of delay or backwardness], the Spanish word retardo also has an application in music, where it refers to a chord that is sustained (or prolonged) until the next one begins, when the first one ends. As Paz elucidates: by spinning the “sustained chord in Glass” [Duchamp] – that is The Bride – on her hinge […] leads us to another composition that in its musical sense, and all others, represents his resolution. That composition, the final chord, as it were, is Duchamp’s Assemblage (Ensamblage) at the Philadelphia Museum. To see it is to hear a chord deferred from The Large Glass. Resolution or solution? (Paz 1994: 191)

In addition to the “verbal bridge” established in the notes in The Green Box and The White Box, these two pieces also share a visual element, that of “looking through”: in the latter, one looks through a door, in the former, one looks through glass, the very transparency of which becomes an obstacle. This is, [r]eversibility: to see through opacity, and not see through transparency. A wooden door, a glass door: two contrasting faces of the same idea. An opposition resolved in a single identity: in both cases we look upon ourselves looking. Operation-hinge. The question, “what is it that we see?” brings us face-to-face with ourselves (Paz 1994: 193).

For this reason, just as the Bride is enclosed, so too is the spectator in The Large Glass, and also the visitor who is incorporated into Assemblage: that is to say, the spectator himself comes to form part of the piece. Through this operation Duchamp takes the criticism of modernity to the extreme, using the irony of the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, as stated above. This speculative relationship between these two pieces and, indeed, among all of Duchamp’s works, is further suggested by the presence of certain common elements, such as gas and water – beyond such mechanical attributions as gas being male and water female – which are visible in the illuminating gas of Assemblage, but invisible, though evoked, in the Bride, just as in The Large Glass the Waterfall is invisible, a force we do not see but that produces the movement of the Waterwheel; in Assemblage it is the Waterwheel that has vanished while the Waterfall is visibly present. And who is it that sees these appearances and disappearances? The Eyewitnesses, who are inside the The Large Glass and ourselves who, by peeking through the holes in the Spanish door embody the Eyewitnesses, just as the nude woman embodies the Bride. Thus, they (us) are the only ones who can tell us (themselves) something of the syntax of the Waterfall and the illuminating gas, and of the text they trace out through their conjunctions and metamorphoses (Paz 1994: 201).

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In both cases, the spectator is a voyeur; even “the placement of the Eyewitnesses corresponds more or less to that of the holes in the door of Assemblage” (Paz 1994: 201). This reflective latticework of gazes stretches out to the Bride herself; if what is seen there is the image of desire, the gaze itself is also incorporated into the painting, I look upon the painting but I look at it looking upon what I look at – looking at myself. But the voyeur is, at the same time, a medium for the Bride; the Eyewitnesses and anyone who gazes upon the Assemblage do not really see; she who looks upon herself is the Bride. The vision of herself excites her: she sees herself and undresses herself under the gaze that looks upon her. Reversibility: we look at ourselves looking at her and she sees herself in our gaze that sees her naked. It is the moment of the discharge – we disappear from her view (Paz 1994: 203).

This undefined interplay of gazes leads Paz to recall the myth of Actaeon, who inadvertently sees the goddess Diana naked. His error, more than offence, she punishes by turning him into a deer that will be devoured by her dogs. Just as anyone who looks upon the two aforementioned works of art is also observed, so too Actaeon goes from hunter to hunted, from watcher to being watched. Paz then identifies other elements that are shared by Assemblage and that myth narrated by Ovid; for example, the landscape in the painting is quite similar to that of the Metamorphosis; there is affinity between the Bride and the goddess, virgins both with their “bit of malice”; “Actaeon depends on Diana, he is the instrument of her desire to see herself, and something similar occurs with the Eyewitnesses who, by looking at themselves looking at her reflect her image back to the Bride.” Also, the axis of the Bride is called by the name “tree-type,” and Diana, of course, is an arboreal divinity. Furthermore, The Large Glass remits to Assemblage “all the elements of The Green Box and The Large Glass – the illuminating gas, the tree-type, the cloud or Milky Way, the Waterfall – appear in the Assemblage but transformed into visual images,” thus the continuum of Diana-Bride-Young nude is not forced but, rather, enhanced by another association between these two milieus, much like the relationship fire/firewood that remits to the tree-type/girl’s lantern/myths of the birth of fire. Paz further relates Diana with Janus, the god of doors and hinges, an additional feature that leads us back to The Large Glass and Assemblage. Paz then makes a 180 degree turn to underline Duchamp’s relation to the theories of his youth concerning the fourth dimension, scientific conceptions of the early 20th century and certain precursors of scientific literature, especially Gaston de Pawlowski’s Journey to the Fourth Dimension. Here again, Paz recalls Duchamp’s debt to Jarry and Roussel. A new element of comparison, or inspiration appears: anamorphosis, the perspective that distorts images until rendering them unrecognizable proper to the 17 thcentury esoterics as personified by Niceron, Huret or Kircher. Paz also detects traces of The Large Glass in this tradition, because of its conception

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of perspective as a suprapersonal rationality and invention of machines endowed with free will and movement, whose functioning is rational though not dependent upon any psychology. Another reference found in Duchamp’s work involves optical, photographic and stereoscopic phenomena and their physical and philosophical implications; concretely, the stereoscope of a special object that he calls a sign of concordance, the convergence of Duchamp’s foundations: eroticism, metairony and metaphysics, as well as ourselves, […] it is the glass that separates us from the desired object at the same time as it allows it to be seen. The glass of otherness and identity, we can neither break it nor elude it because the image it reveals to us is that of ourselves in the moment we perceive it through looking. In a certain sense, the Possibilities and Appearance depend upon us, as we do upon them. It is amidst the “various facts” that, “under certain laws” condition “the instantaneous State of Repose or Allegorical Appearance” that we peek through the glass or through the holes in the door (Paz 1994: 231).

Paz then returns to an aspect he had mentioned in the earlier essay – neoPlatonism – as a complement to the medieval theory of courtly love; with the two traditions in which love and knowledge come together – one erotic, the other philosophical – still present in the real world. There is a relation to Duchamp’s opus, but no suggestion that he had read the works of such authors. Here, the division of The Large Glass, with the Bride in the upper section and the Bachelors below, is related to the homage and service that the tradition of courtly love required the gentleman render to the lady, who takes the initiative and puts her lover to the test, while his sexual sublimation is consumed in the vision of the naked woman, a vision that transports [us] to another reality, […] it is not difficult to perceive in this idea certain echoes of Plato, those found also in Duchamp, though in a meta-ironic manner: love not as a possession but as the contemplation of an object that transports us to a superior sphere. […] The lover had to espy the lady much as the spectator glimpses the Assemblage. Just as the Bachelors never remove their uniforms, the lover in courtly love contemplates fully-dressed the rite of disrobing (Paz 1994: 234-235).

Paz further relates Duchamp to treatises on neo-Platonic love from the Renaissance, from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno; the latter of whom discourses on intellectual love, a heroic passion that raises the soul towards the contemplation of spiritual beauty that leads to union with the uncreated; above, luminosity, a world of unity; below gloom, a world of plurality, “the Bride and her Bachelors”; kingdom of apparition, kingdom of appearance, whose imitation in terms of color is that of native colors versus apparent colors, those that “are not colors in the sense of reflections in blue, red, etc., of an illumination ‘X’ that proceeds from outside [but] luminous bulbs that

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produce active colors […]. Color-sources, not colors subjected to a colored bulb outside the object” [Duchamp] (Paz 1994: 239). This is an idea of color that he owed to the physics of his youth and to the symbolism of neo-Platonic Renaissance hermeticism, with its various classes of light, from the supracelestial to the sub-lunar. Finally, in this game of relating Duchamp to Bruno, Paz concludes: Like the illuminating gas, the heroic lover ascends and, as he ascends, the object of his desire retreats into the horizon until it disappears. The One retreats into his folds, the three-dimensional figure vanishes in the fourth dimension’s mirror-mold. The One is neither visible nor speakable nor thinkable. […] Not even because being necessarily entails non-being. The One is before being. Eyes fi xed on the horizon, the waterline frozen in glass, we pass from desire to contemplation, of what, of whom? The answer is in Actaeon’s sacrifice and in the fate of the illuminating gas: subject transformed in object (Paz 1994: 244).

Now it is time to conclude, to make a balance, to return to the outset. The meta-irony of Duchamp and the nihilism of Picasso: face-to-face, the skeptic and the doubter, who is thus superstitious, free and Stalinist. What is art for Duchamp? A means, transmission of ideas and movements. Art in itself does not exist. The work of the artist revolves around the most classic theme of art and thought: love and knowledge, whose object is the nature of reality. Love that leads to knowledge, but knowledge as reflection, as shadow. The Bride is a landscape of which we form part, a shadow, “the outline of an invisible being on a mirror, a speculation” (Paz 1994: 246), it is a point of escape; that is to say, “real reality, that of the fourth dimension, is a virtuality.” The Bride and the young nude form the apparition that appears fleetingly as appearance only to disappear and fade away. The logic of the hinge, that opens by closing and vice versa. The denial of the piece as the motor of the piece. Reconciliation of the artist with the world and with himself: The Assemblage. The gas lantern with its flickering flame alive in the full light of day evokes irony, provokes obscurity and introduces in the piece the enigma that allows us to espy the “other side,” the void and momentary plenitude, death and vivacity in repose. The zero is full: plenitude is open, empty. Feminine presence: a real waterfall in which the hidden is manifested, that which is within the folds of the world. The enigma is the glass which is separation/union: the sign of concordance. We go from voyeurism to clairvoyance: the damnation of seeing becomes the freedom of contemplation (Paz 1994: 247).

Octavio Paz’s gaze is that of a poet, in which the world, and everything that takes place in it, acquires form and color through poetical reason; life and death, history and identity, art and politics, all crisscross in his writings as a result of the intense spirit of one who lives and interprets all existence from the depths of the written word. During his years of study he dialogued

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poetically with Pellicer, Tablada and Villaurrutia, then with Neruda and Cernuda, passed through the sifted baroque of the Spanish poets of the generation of ’27 in search of a pure poetry; the Spanish Civil War awakened him to the creation of social commitment, “they shall not pass,” and his time in Yucatán revealed to him the peasant world of tyrannized labor in the henequen fields, “immobile and rabid.” Nor does he neglect the romantic wave though he is fascinated by surrealism. The journey to his creative maturity begun in the early 1940s took him, first, to San Francisco and New York, where his word echoed the reflections on tradition that T.S. Eliot had elaborated from a critical posture, as well as his criticism of the dehumanized and anonymous life of the modern metropolis, the foundations of which had been laid by Whitman. Also following that North American poet he introduced into his poetry the colloquial language that led him to the origins of Mexico’s national being trapped in its labyrinth. Clearly, the ponderings of another U.S. poet on North American identity, Williams, were not unknown to him either. In the mid-1940s in Paris, he formed a friendship with André Breton that pushed him strongly towards surrealism, with which he had become acquainted in Mexico through Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Wolfgang Pallen. Inspired by the flame of that movement, freedom, love and poetry – topics broached in the works of his youth – are all found along the firm path of Paz’s poetics. Through the interplay of discovered pairs, freedom is linked to fatality, love becomes the junction of the physical with the metaphysical and poetry, by means of the image, is transformed into the privileged expressive flow of language. This tension of opposites, a constant in Paz’s opus, had been expressed clearly by Breton in the Diccionario abreviado del surrealism: […] everything leads one to think that there is a certain point of the spirit where life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the uncommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. In vain would we search in surrealist activity for any other motive than the hope of establishing this point (Breton/Eluard 2003: 96).

Later, Paz had an encounter with the East and became fascinated with its poetics. Upon his return to Mexico he would see with new eyes, thanks to his familiarity with the aesthetics of “primitive” cultures, modern art, and the artistic expressions of pre-Colombian civilizations. Now, to the reconciliation of the above mentioned opposites he added that of modern art/pre-Colombian art, the dual conception of the world characteristic of Mesoamerican thinking retreats into another syncretistic duality, one that emerges from the art of the vanguards and of the ancestral American universe. Also while in India he discovered new paths for his poetics that he would bind to surrealism and thus introduce a new pair of reconciled concepts: poetry and meditation on poetry, creation and reflection. El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre) is a response to this concern, conciliation manifested in the title itself, in

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the development of the piece, in the meditation on poetry and the poem; in summary, poetry as a “hinge” between the immortality promised by religion and the precarious finiteness administered by philosophy. Upon his return to Paris and India, the decade of the 60s saw Paz more firmly or deeply ensconced on the path that stretched out before him, one now enriched with new references and associations that strain towards a latitudinous, ubiquitous horizon. Once again, Breton; a re-encounter with surrealism and its compasses: magic, esoterics and occultism, carnal love and spiritual sex and freedom. In India once again; polymorphous universe in which Islam and Hinduism attain a reconciliation by mixing the atavistic tradition of Indostan with the Sufism of the Prophet, whose final inspiration Paz places in neo-Platonism; thus opening a door, or laying a bridge, between East and West. Recondite conjunctions created by, and creators of, his poetic soliloquy; from discursive poem to the poem of signs, the symbol yields its place to the sign, for Symbols have lost their meaning because they are many and contradictory. Signs, in contrast, are less ambitious and more flexible; not the emblems of a “conception of the world,” but the movable pieces of a syntax. Signs change their meaning and gender in relation to their position in context. Alone, they have no meaning: they are elements of a relation (Paz 1994: 194-195).

A soliloquy in multiple voices, from East to West, marked by the intersection of Tantric corporality, the universe conceived as a double of the human body in a complete movement that includes the mystical, the erotic and the poetic, with the corporal sublimation of the Orphic Mallarmé into the white of nothingness, there where his poem-painting-symphony reconciles the masculine/feminine opposition and establishes a nexus between the universe and writing. Nor do the assays of Brazilian concrete poetry escape his view, open works that invite the reader to actively conclude or recreate them. In a final twist, Paz also reconciles the literary genres crystallized in this conciliation of poem in prose where, at the same time, he places in his crucible the Japanese Genji tradition, the Indian tradition from Ramayana and also the romantic western one. Finally, this is a soliloquy consumed by poetry as a luminary of life. The nourishing humus of its polyphonic making, then, cannot be in this time, nor in the other, but in myth re-thought, re-made, re-animated. Triumph of analogy, not of identity. In this sense, that of his conception of time, his commentary on the work of Quevedo makes this clear: modern art is modern because it is critical. Its critique unfolds in two opposed directions: it was a negation of the linear time of modernity and a negation of itself. In the first case, it denied modernity; in the second, it affi rmed it. Facing history and its changes, it postulated a time of origin, an instant or a cycle; facing its own tradition, it posited change and critique (Paz 1994: 201).

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Marcel Duchamp (Blainville, 1887-1968) was both a witness to, and protagonist of, the revolution that affected art in the last decade of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th, a revolution riddled with “-isms.” After finishing primary school in his hometown, he went to Ruán at the age of 10 to study high school. He was not an outstanding student, except in mathematics and drawing. In those years his painting was influenced by impressionism, but towards the end of the period he began to react against it. At 17, he went to live in Paris, preceded by his two brothers who were 12 and 11 years older than him, respectively: Jacques Villon and Raymond DuchampVillon, the first a cartoonist and painter, the second a sculptor. There, he entered the fevered world of early 20th century art and adopted its bohemian lifestyle. When his application for admission to the School of Fine Arts (École des Beaux-Arts) was rejected, he spent more time in pool halls than at the Julian Academy where he registered, but soon had to leave the capital city to do his military service, returning to Paris in 1906, where he devoted himself to humorous drawings, painting a la Cézanne and fauvism. “It was approximately 1911. Around that time I abandoned my fauvist tendencies to approach something I had encountered and that had drawn my attention: cubism, which I took up most seriously” (Cabanne 1972: 34). But he did not follow that “-ism” to the letter because he was also intrigued by the problem of the representation of movement. Thus began a phase of his work that produced, first, Dulcinea and Sad Young Man in a Train, and culminated with his Nude Descending a Staircase (1912): [in Nude] my desire was to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without one actually having to know whether or not a real personage descends an equally real staircase. In truth, the movement is that of the spectator’s gaze that is incorporated into the painting (Cabanne 1972: 43).

Duchamp presented the piece for an exposition in the Salón des Independants in March 1912 that was designed to present a “reasonable cubism.” The piece caused such an enormous scandal that his brothers went to his home to ask if he couldn’t change the title, but Duchamp went to the Salón and removed the painting. “This helped me free myself from the past completely in the personal sense of the word. I said to myself, well, if this is the way it is, I must not join the group, I shall have to depend upon myself, then, and go it alone” (Cabanne 1972: 45). He traveled to Munich, to Jura with Picabia, read a great deal of literature, and traveled to New York in 1915; he flirted with Dalí and surrealism but always maintained his independent stance. Duchamp died in Neuilly in the early morning of October 2 1968 after spending a lovely day in which he found a book of anaglyphs and used the bi-colored lenses of his glasses to peruse it, and another by Allais with puns and humorous pieces. He was buried in Ruán where one can still read the epitaph that he himself composed: “D’ailleur, cést toujours les autres qui meurent” (“Elsewhere, it is always the others that die”).

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Duchamp’s work has been interpreted from a variety of angles, and will continue to be so because he himself recognized the significant role of the observer of artworks: “Let us first consider two important factors, the two poles of all creations of an artistic nature; on the one hand, the artist, on the other, the observer who, with the passage of time, becomes posterity” (Cabanne 1972: 110). In this sense, works of art will always be unfinished, as they await present and future judgments. One of those interpretative angles is of a psychological nature. Here, I present Paz’s assessment of such approaches: Of all the interpretations, the psychoanalytical one is the most attractive and easiest: onanism, destruction (or glorification) of the Mother-Virgin, castration (the Scissors), narcissism, retention (anal symptom), aggression, self-destruction. A well-known psychiatrist concludes his study – one not lacking in brilliance – with the expected diagnosis: autism and schizophrenia. The problem with these hypotheses resides in the fact that their authors consider the pieces only as symptoms or expressions of certain psychic tendencies; the psychological explanation transforms reality (the painting) into shadow and shadow (illness) into reality (Paz 1994: 171).

In another critique, Arturo Schwarz combines the psychological and esoteric exegeses, seeing in Duchamp’s early piece, Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), a painting that foreshadows his later work and provides certain keys for interpreting his philosophy. Schwarz argues that the piece contains esoteric messages from Egyptian hieroglyphics and Gnosticism, from the Cabbala and Tantric yoga, from Greek mythology and Platonic philosophy, from the Upanishads and Buddhism, and argues that all of these elements, plus several others, reflect Duchamp’s unconscious incestuous desires towards his sister Suzanne, which he interwove with the alchemist’s symbolism of the brother/sister fusion as the fusion of opposites. An insistence upon the alchemical hermeticism of Duchamp’s work also characterizes Ulf Linde’s and Maurizio Calvesi’s commentaries, though the latter adds a Mariological interpretation of The Large Glass (see Schwarz 1969). Linda Dalrymple Henderson, in contrast, underlines in her observations on The Large Glass the implicit presence of scientific theories and the new technological artifacts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; arguing that the piece hints at X-rays, electrons and radioactivity, electromagnetism and electricity, meteorology and the telegraph, the theories of the fourth dimension and aeronautical constructions (see Henderson 1998). Finally, she holds that Duchamp’s work evokes the philosophy of Bergson and science fiction literature. Thus, there can be no doubt: there is no artwork, only interpretations. Returning to Octavio Paz, we find an interpretation that is discursive, significant and poetic. Just when we think we have reached a key point in his interpretation of Duchamp, he pushes us towards another space where, once again, we find that his game of twists and turns leads us to yet another

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myth, yet another reference. The painting understood as idea, more than as feeling, its intimate coupling with poetry and the word, the contradiction of the very piece that by creating itself and making itself public contradicts itself, the irony and distancing it entails, references to the Tantric tradition, the work conceived as a critique of modernity that makes it modern, the presence in his commentary of the myth of Actaeon, of anamorphosis and of courtly love, its recalling of the erotic sense of Duchamp’s work and its anti-machinism; finally, and above all, the many references to neo-Platonism by the creator of The Bride; these are the keystones that characterize Paz’s evocation of Duchamp. This final aspect of Paz’s critique is the one most characteristically his and the most well-loved. It is precisely here that we find the reconciliation of the exuberance of the poet and the limits of the critic. Exuberance is displayed in Paz’s astounding ability to find innumerable parallels to Duchamp’s work in different cultures and diverse epochs. The limits are seen in Paz’s desire to make Duchamp’s work jell with his own conception of art, of language and, indeed, of poetry no matter what the cost, as if he were working on a kind of Procrustean bed. Octavio Paz’s reflections on the work of Marcel Duchamp and its meaning are clearly those of a poet and not those of an art critic in the strict sense of the term, but this does not make them trivial or irrelevant, quite the contrary, though one must keep this perspective in mind in order to understand the affirmations of the author of The Privileges of Sight. In any case, his acute sense of poetics expresses most eloquently that poetry is the clearest manifestation of the homage that the poet renders to the artist, and that this could be no other way. Mar Celo Marcelo mar de cielo cielo de campo maricel y campocel invisible mente de vidrio vidrio demente Aparece desaparece tejida de miradas destejida en deseos desvestida desvanecida La Novia Dulcinea inoxidable Cascada polifásica Molino de refranes Aspa de reflejos La Novia tu creatura y tu creadora tú la miras del otro lado del vidrio

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del otro lado del tiempo Marcelo eras la mirada eros tu mirada lámpara encendida en pleno día México, a 28 de julio de 1987

Bibliography Bozal, Valeriano (1999): Historia de las ideas estéticas y de las teorías artísticas contemporáneas, vol. II, Madrid: Visor. Breton, André and Paul Eluard (2003): Diccionario abreviado del surrealismo, Madrid: Siruela. Cabanne, Pierre (1972): Conversaciones con Marcel Duchamp, Barcelona: Anagrama. Duchamp, Marcel (1978): Escritos: Du Signe, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Duchamp, Marcel (1987): Lettres á Marcel Jean de Marcel Duchamp, Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber. Duchamp, Marcel (1989): Notas, “Introduction” by Gloria Moure, Madrid: Tecnos. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (1998): Duchamp, Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Linde, Ulf (1963): Marcel Duchamp, Stockholm: Galerie Burén. Paz, Octavio (1994): “Apariencia desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp”. In: Los privilegios de la vista I. Obras Completas, vol. 6, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 129-247. Ramírez, Juan Antonio (1993): Duchamp el amor y la muerte, incluso, Madrid: Siruela. Schwarz, Arturo (1969): The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thanes, Hudson. Tomkins, Calvin (1999): Duchamp, Barcelona, Anagrama. Ulacia, Manuel (1999): El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz, Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores.

Par t III: Octavio Paz and Social Sciences

The Sociology of Octavio Paz Oliver Kozlarek 1

Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude also ripens the perverse, the asymmetrical, the absurd, the forbidden. Thomas Mann2

Octavio Paz was not a sociologist, and it would be quite inaccurate to adduce that he was, because his attitude towards sociology or, at least, to a certain kind of sociology, was always both critical and distanced. However, one may well ask: what is sociology after all? Are the boundaries it shares with other intellectual and academic fields really as clearly defined as many professional sociologists claim? Or, to put it in a different way: what are the more or less hidden relations between sociology and other fields of political and social thought? In order to answer these kinds of questions it might be helpful to recall the history of sociology’s emergence in Europe and the United States in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. When we adopt this perspective we recall immediately that in its institutional and academic forms sociology developed simultaneously with hybrid forms of thinking and writing that were nourished by a wide range of intellectual fields such as philosophy, history, economics and, last but not least, literature. Taking all this into account, one could ask: does Sociology or, perhaps better, “sociological thought,” really require the institutional framework of a university or of sociology departments? Is it not possible that sociological thought was also cultivated in extra-academic realms such as that of essay-writing, especially in societies in which the institutional framework was somewhat inadequate? These are the kinds of questions that led me to my argument. In this essay my intention is to establish that some of Octavio Paz’s essays, especially The 1 | I am grateful to Jorge Galindo and Paul Kersey for their comments on earlier versions of this text. 2 | Mann 1999: 311.

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Labyrinth of Solitude, express a genuine sociological purpose. In other words, though Octavio Paz may not have been a sociologist in the academic sense of the term, some of his works do indeed contain a form of sociology. There are at least two aspects of The Labyrinth that can be interpreted as genuine sociological topics: first, his diagnosis of modernity; and, second, what can best be termed an anthropological theory of human sociability. Now, if what I have just stated is correct, it would be more than sufficient to justify a reading of Paz from a sociological perspective, but additional reasons can also be adduced; for instance, the relationship between sociology and literature. The publication of Wolf Lepenies’ fascinating book, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (1988 [1985]), erased all doubt that the relationship among the “three cultures” – science, literature and sociology – has been a rather complex one. More than mutual exclusion, it is a relationship that has been marked by both complementarity and competition. What Lepenies’ study, which appeared some 20 years ago, also revealed was the fact that no way of defining this relationship fits into a neat, general formula. Quite to the contrary: detailed historical analyses are the only means of explaining the complex and pluralizing processes that have unfolded in different intellectual communities to define the way in which science, literature and sociology have reached some kind of mutual accommodation. To put it bluntly: what is needed is comparative research. Lepenies has made an outstanding effort in this respect by comparing France, England and Germany. But if differences can be found among those countries, then it should come as no surprise to find that other nations, such as Mexico, were to evidence a very different way in which academic sociology became institutionalized and sociological thought was expressed in, and through, literature. As far as I know, little work has been done on these questions with respect to Latin America in general and Mexico in particular. In fact, it has been argued repeatedly in the Mexican example that the importance of the country’s literary and essayistic tradition has in fact hindered the professional institutionalization of sociology. An interesting book that holds this thesis was published a few years ago by the Mexican sociologist Fernando Castañeda (Castañeda 2004). In his book, Castañeda conceives of the difference among the ways in which sociological thought is articulated in Mexico, Europe and the U.S. as the result of an unequal relationship that places Mexico in a position of inferiority in comparison to those other traditions. Though it may well be true that Mexican “academic” sociology had a rough start, I am not prepared to see that necessarily as a disadvantage in comparison to other countries. Rather, I am interested in discerning the kinds of alternatives that emerged and have been cultivated in Mexico. Castañeda mentions the tradition of essay-writing as one of the reasons for the delay in the formalization of academic sociology; however, a different take on this topic might suggest that the essayist tradition and academic sociology are in fact complementary; and I believe that one can come to understand their complementarity quite well by examining Octavio Paz’s essays.

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Finally, there is a third reason why Paz’s works may be relevant to sociology departments and curricula: the fact is that his writings are replete with references to, and comments on, sociology. While it is certainly true that most of his commentaries are of a critical nature, it is precisely his critique of sociology that provides – at least ad negativum – some very interesting ideas as to how Paz would have liked sociology to be. I begin my argument with this second point, and later in this article go on to explain in more positive terms the kind of sociology that Paz was attempting to espouse in The Labyrinth of Solitude. As I will show, this requires a thorough evaluation of the influence of the Collège de Sociologie on Paz and his thought. Finally, I discuss some of the sociological topics broached in The Labyrinth, especially the critique of modernity and what can be understood as an anthropological theory of human sociability. My main purpose is to show that there is a fundamentally humanistic thrust in Paz’s arguments that could, or should, be an important guiding principle for sociological thought and theory today.

2. A Critique of Sociolog y or Critical Sociolog y? In his aforementioned book on the relationship between sociology and literature, Wolf Lepenies discusses the case of the circle of intellectuals that coalesced around the figure of the charismatic poet Stefan George (Lepenies 2006: 335). One feature of the orientation within this circle was the way it distanced itself from and critiqued modern science. Though its critique was directed mainly at the natural sciences in general, the social sciences, especially sociology, also became targets as the methods of the former gradually came to play a more prominent role in the latter. Lepenies explains, however, that despite its explicit critique the perspective of George’s Circle towards scientific sociology was not a simple rejection (kompromisslose Ablehnung) but a view best understood and characterized as “ambivalent” (see ibid.: 335). Something similar can be said of Octavio Paz’s feelings towards sociology as, upon reading through his prolific works, the reader finds, time and again, evidence of an intriguing critique of sociology. I do not mean to suggest that Paz openly rejected this discipline. On the contrary, I intend to show that his comments on sociology constitute a critique of certain trends within that discipline and can thus be understood as an intervention in the heated debate that surrounded sociology at that time. In his well-known essay, Postdata, Paz wrote: “Economists and sociologists generally view the differences between traditional and modern society as an opposition between development and underdevelopment” (Paz 1994a: 284). This line of argument leads Paz to criticize the exaggerated use of statistics: Now, although it is normal for statistics to omit a qualitative description of phenomena, it is hardly normal for sociologists not to perceive that behind those

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figures there are psychic, historical and cultural realities which cannot be reflected in the measurements the census necessarily has to take (Paz 1994a: 284-285).

Paz is not opposed to sociology per se, or even to statistics and empirical research; rather, what he is saying is that our understanding of sociocultural realities cannot be reduced to quantitative research alone. Another problem that Paz denounced in this text was expressed in the following terms: “Furthermore, those statistical schemes have not been designed for Mexico, but are crude adaptations of foreign models” (ibid.). Paz was anything but a narrow-minded anti-imperialist who thought that anything that came from abroad had to be rejected. In fact, one of his prime concerns was precisely the integration of Mexico into the broader world society. Paz was a cosmopolitan and his cosmopolitanism opposed any kind of shortsighted provincialism. But he was also keenly aware of the fact that integration could not and should not mean a blind assimilation of anything and everything that came from abroad. If one of the main ideas of the current postcolonial discourse is that, as Sergio Costa has put it, “every enunciation has its place of origin from where it emerges” (Costa 2007: 92),3 then it is also clear that the vast majority of ideas in the social sciences stem from very few places, and that most of those are located in the so-called North. For this reason, those ideas may well work in, and for, the societies for which they were created, but could produce “epistemological distortions” when applied to others. Gurminder Bhambra has recently related this idea to sociology: Modernity was framed as “the one great transformation in history”, and sociology was seen as the attempt to understand how this transformation had begun and the means of intervening in how it would be completed. Sociology, thus, became ineluctably tied to the categories of modernity in its self-understanding (Bhambra 2007: 871-872).

However, this author goes on to say that “[t]hese developments [that led to modernity], were usually considered from a narrow, Eurocentric point of view in which colonial and postcolonial encounters were written out of hegemonic accounts” (ibid.: 872). At a very early stage of his writings, Paz advanced ideas that prefigure these very complex cultural relationships between those areas of the world that played the role of colonizers and those that were the colonized, ideas that are currently being discussed in debates concerning postcolonialism. In the late 1960s, Paz was already aware that the theories and models upon which sociological research depended made no acknowledgment of cultural and/ or geographical differences. 4 However, rather than discussing this problem through a simple and unreflective repetition of anti-imperialist stereotypes, 3 | All translations in this text are by the author. 4 | This argument has been made more recently by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Waquant (1999).

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Paz chose to demonstrate what he meant by examining concrete cases. For instance, one important indicator used to distinguish between the levels of developed and underdeveloped countries had to do with the kind of food that a given society produced and consumed. In this respect, the consumption of substantial quantities of wheat was deemed a feature of development, while consuming other cereals was judged as a sign of underdevelopment. This idea was supported by the conviction that wheat had a much higher nutritive value than other cereals. Paz went on to express – not without his characteristic sense of humor – where this logic would lead, as he wrote: “This criterion condemns Japan to eternal underdevelopment, as rice is less nutritive than wheat” (Paz 1994a: 285). He went on to conclude: “Indeed, development has been a straitjacket. It is a false liberation: though it may have abolished many ancient, senseless prohibitions, it has also oppressed us […]” (286). In other words: sociological analysis and the political strategies that are drawn from it must become more sophisticated. Here, it is clear that Paz was reacting to modernization theory, a current of thought that was very prominent at the time when he wrote the lines quoted above. His arguments, however, were not inspired by ideological differences. Rather, he simply recognized that sociological theories of modernization were far too simplistic and, therefore, incapable of coping with the extremely complex sociocultural processes characteristic of modernization. But what, then, did he propose? In another of his essays Paz wrote: There are gaps and clashes, changes and restorations that are being resolved in the one thing that really counts: works. Everything else belongs to the realm of history and sociology; the former a kingdom of the particular, the latter an ideological fog (Paz 1994b: 19).

Here again we encounter a severe judgment of sociology, but it is clear once more that Paz was referring specifically to the sociology of his time, a field dominated by the master narrative of modernization that he criticizes. Paz’s strategy of attack is most interesting: he demands that greater attention be paid to the cultural testimonies (works) that different societies produce. In this sense, Paz could well be seen as an advocate of a kind of “cultural sociology”; that is, a sociology committed to the symbolic dimensions of social processes, the processes through which social imaginaries are built up and experiences come to be rooted in cultural legacies. Of course, this kind of appreciation of culture was not very popular in sociology in the 1950s and 1960s when modernization theory was the dominant paradigm. However, all that changed in the 1980s when the German sociologist Friedrich H. Tenbruck, among others, advanced a brand of cultural sociology inspired in the following idea: “[I]f culture is based on the social, then society is based on culture” (Tenbruck 1990: 8). Tenbruck explained what this statement meant for the orientation of sociological thought and research:

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[…] sociology that acknowledges culture as a social fact [realizes] the indetermination of structures and, because of that, will not become a technical discipline for decision-makers but, rather, will emphasize the task of achieving a self-awareness of cultural meanings. That is precisely why culture remains the central question that is decisive for the self-understanding of sociology and, consequently, for its social impact (Tenbruck 1990: 51).

This approach implies a fundamental critique of modernization theory, which reduced social processes to the transformation of institutions and economic change, but paid little if any attention to culture, with the result that its explanations tended to become more and more abstract. As another German sociologist, Rainer Lepsius, had observed in the 1970s: “Modernization [is a] neutral concept for processes that lack more concrete definitions; in addition, it distinguishes itself from tradition, that is, the empirical starting point for developing processes” (Lepsius 1977: 11). And, almost as if Paz was anticipating a reaction to this, he wrote: “Is modernity an empty name? I am afraid this is so. Modernity is a fi le, a way to name that which does not yet have a name” (Paz 1994b: 19). Finally, in a prescient statement of a theme that would become popular in sociological theory in the 1990s under the name “Multiple modernities”, Paz continued to ask: “Is [modernity] one or various?” (ibid.). It is evident that in his critique of sociology Paz proposed ideas that have become popular in contemporary sociological discourse. The terms “cultural sociology,” “multiple modernities” and “postcolonialism” currently express notions that achieved a certain degree of sophistication by protesting – with Paz – against modernization theory. There is, however, an aspect of Paz’s work that at first glance seems to be very different from sociology: the kind of writing. Paz criticized not only the ideas intrinsic to sociology but also the way in which those ideas were expressed. The parts of his opus that are most clearly relevant to his commentaries on sociology are his essays, the most important and well-known of which is still The Labyrinth of Solitude; though it must be emphasized that Paz did not consider himself an essayist, but always a poet. Given that for Paz writing poetry was far more important then writing essays, it is fair to ask if his critique of sociology emerged from the fact that he was a poet and that, as such, a player in a very different intellectual game, a participant from a different “culture,” as it were and one that was not remotely related to sociology? I do not believe that this is the case, and would suggest that a more feasible argument is one that holds that poetry and essays, art and social analysis, and critique are in fact inseparable. In the case of Paz, at least, this would seem to be the case. In this view, one of the problems of professional or academic sociology was that it had lost sight of the poetic aspect of writing and, consequently, also of thinking. But what could this poetic aspect of sociological writing and thinking be? To answer this question we can turn to an orientation offered by Zygmunt

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Bauman in an article he published almost ten years ago (see Bauman 2000), entitled On Sociological Writing. There, Bauman begins with a comparison of history and poetry, two intellectual domains that he understands as parallel movements characterized by one of the kernel principles of the human condition, namely, autopoiesis, a term borrowed from Niklas Luhmann. Autopoiesis and, consequently, history and poetry, reveal that human action always has a quality of “creation and discovery.” In Bauman’s words: Niklas Luhmann’s seminal and precious legacy to fellow sociologists has been the notion of autopoiesis – self-creation […] – that meant to grasp and encapsulate the very pith of the human condition. The choice of this term was itself an act of the creation/discovery of the link (inherited kinship rather than close affinity) between history and poetry (Bauman 2000: 80).

By emphasizing that Luhmann, a sociologist, engaged in an act of creativity and discovery when he imported the concept of autopoiesis into the language of sociology, Bauman established the relationship with sociology. He went on writing, “Sociology, one is tempted to say, is a third current, running parallel to those two [history and poetry]. Or at least this is what it should be, if it is to remain inside that human condition which it tries to grasp and make intelligible” (ibid). To put it in a different way, sociology shares with history and poetry the human capacity to create and discover. This definition allows Bauman to distance himself clearly from all those who understand sociology as a domain of what he calls “experts” (see Bauman 2000: 85). If sociologists wish to be “experts,” then they should become so by expressing that which has not yet been said of a given society, or by saying that which has already been said but in a different fashion. Only then would sociologists be “experts” in the same sense as poets are experts. Instead of simply accumulating information and data they would, as it were, rediscover the social world and then proceed to create it all over again. This is only possible, however, if sociologists, like poets, are at one and the same time close to and distanced from society, if they combine subjective and historical experiences. It is this balance between distance and proximity that enables – or should enable – sociologists to overcome their indifference; that is, their blind acceptance of all that is given and established. In other words, it is this interplay between being distanced and involved that is indispensable for any kind of critique. It is critique – that is, the critical kind of sociology – that comes close to poetry; and it is critique that helps to change social reality in lieu of simply handling facts. The critique of sociology that we find in Octavio Paz’s essays shares certain ideas with Zygmunt Bauman: it is not a rejection of sociology tout court, but a critical reflection as to how we should think about, and write on, the social and cultural realities of our modern societies. It is a reflection motivated by the acknowledgment that modernity is, above all, about critique.

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Thus, instead of a critique of sociology, we can also read into Paz a strong exhortation in favor of some kind of critical sociology. Now, it might seem that the argument outlined above only serves to reaffirm the judgment that it would be incorrect to think that Paz’s work contains solid pieces of social research; a statement that has been made countless times. The Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro, for instance, wrote the following in relation to Paz’s magnum opus: “The Labyrinth of Solitude does not pretend to be a work of scientific research that would inquire, for instance, into the economic causes or social determinants of historical processes” (Villoro 1995: 31-32). Here, Villoro is quite right: it is most clearly not an example of that kind of sociological research that is informed primarily by empirical research methods, the search for quantifiable data, and the absence of cultural and critical interests. But Paz did not relate to sociology only in a negative sense. On the contrary, from among the many different existing models of sociological research, Paz chose for his sociology one that had fallen into oblivion in the history of the discipline itself; I refer to the so-called Collège de Sociologie, founded in 1937 but enjoyed a short lifespan of only two years before it disappeared.

3. The Collège de Sociologie: The Source of Inspiration for Paz’s Sociolog y In his 1995 book that still represents one of the most thorough studies of this Mexican intellectual, Enrico Mario Santí notes that Paz was strongly influenced by the Collège de Sociologie, a small group of French intellectuals that sought to develop an understanding and critique of modern society through a combination of surrealist forms of expression and representation, on the one hand and, on the other, sociology and anthropology. This creative, experimental group and its highly unconventional proposals as to how to come to grips with the problems unique to contemporary societies, is rarely mentioned in histories of sociology and sociological thought. The Collège de Sociologie is never recognized for having made any serious contributions to the history of sociology; indeed from the perspective of current debates it may even seem rather exotic; after all, what could surrealism and sociology possibly have in common? However, in the discipline that can be regarded as sociology’s sister discipline – anthropology – a relationship to surrealism does not seem strange at all. It is in this discipline where, especially in the 1980s, the challenges of “postmodernism” gave rise to a radical rethinking of its conceptual and epistemological foundations. Especially telling in this context is the work of James Clifford, who wrote an article entitled Ethnographic Surrealism that was later incorporated as a chapter in his influential book, The Predicament of

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Culture (1988).5 In his text, Clifford explains that “ethnographic surrealism” is complementary to “anthropological humanism”: [A]nthropological humanism begins with the different and renders it – through naming, classifying, describing, interpreting – comprehensible. It familiarizes. An ethnographic surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness – of the unexpected. The two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other. This process – a permanent ironic play of similarity and difference, the familiar and the strange, the here and the elsewhere – is, as I have argued, characteristic of global modernity (Clifford 1988: 145-146).

The final part of this quotation, especially, makes clear that this revelation of otherness that “ethnographic surrealism” provides cannot be limited to anthropology in a classical understanding of the discipline. Rather, it must be understood as an important tool for that other discipline which is concerned much more than anthropology with the understanding of modernity: namely, sociology. This is what the members of the Collège de Sociologie must have been thinking as they elaborated a research program that relates to surrealism in much the same way as does Clifford. Who were they and how did they go about this? The founders of the Collège were George Bataille (1897-1962), Michel Leiris (1901-1990) and Roger Caillois (1913-1978). It was the latter that was especially important for Octavio Paz. The sociological influences that shaped this group’s thinking came from the Durkheim school through the works of such figures as Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Robert Hertz and George Dumézil, among others that could be mentioned. More precisely, it was Durkheim’s sociology of religion to which the members of the Collège felt drawn, though it is also true that they distanced themselves from Durkheim in certain key aspects. Stefan Moebius, who published an excellent book on this unconventional and almost forgotten enterprise of sociological research a few years ago, explains that what the members of the Collège actually wished to achieve was to bring to the fore “those slumbering sacralized energies of the collective stimulation that were situated in the lower levels of the social” (Moebius 2006: 14). But the members of the Collège intended not only to demonstrate that such sacralized energies still exist in modern societies – despite the common assumption that the process that led to modernity was deeply profanizing – they also thought that these sacred energies could be mobilized for political ends and to trigger the social change that was so urgently needed to free European societies from the grip of fascism. This longing for the mobilization of the sacred energies of human beings was thus not motivated by conservative or reactionary ambitions. Rather, it was the result of an anthropological – we might even say humanist 5 | The same book contains a chapter on Michel Leiris, one of the co-founders of the Collège.

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– consideration which held that social research should focus on the “total phenomenon: the human being” that cannot be reduced to homo oeconomicus or the animal rationale” (Moebius 2006: 359). One particularly important aspect of the research program that the Collège developed was the idea that in order to understand human beings in modernity comparative research was indispensable and it was necessary to “open our vision to foreign cultures”6 (ibid.). Because of the enduring importance of “the sacred” in modern societies, the project that the Collège attempted to launch was labeled “the sociology of the sacred.” Moebius provides a concise definition of the meaning of this label: “[The sociology of the sacred] was destined to [study] the vital elements of communal bonds such as collective experiences and effervescences – initiated through rituals, feasts and games – in modern society […]” (Moebius 2006: 13). As we will see below, this is precisely what Paz was attempting to do. The theoretical and methodological particularities of the research that the Collège carried out can be summarized in the concept of “heterology.” In theoretical terms, heterology refers to all aspects of real social processes that resist tendencies towards homogenization; for instance: the sacred, emotions and sexuality, among others (Moebius 2006: 14). In the methodological sense, meanwhile, heterology has to do with a “science of the unassimilated, of the secret rest and that which is marginalized from reason and homogenous order” (Moebius 2006: 16). Although today remembering the Collège may seem like a journey back to a long forgotten episode in the history of social research, it is clear that the project of this group of French thinkers was very much present for Octavio Paz. As mentioned above, Paz felt a particularly strong empathy for Roger Caillois, so much so that in an autobiographical reflections he wrote: “In 1940, a book by a young French writer fell into my hands. The author’s name was Roger Caillois and the book Le Mythe et l'homme” (Paz 2001: 23). While Paz immediately felt “a spontaneous affinity” as he read that book, his readings of other works by Caillois strengthened his conviction that they contained “the beginning of a method” that aimed to build an edifice of “concept-images” (conceptos-imágenes) (see: Paz 2001: 24) that were destined to discover the human world. What Paz most appreciated about Caillois – whom he met in 1946 and with whom he remained a friend – and his method was that while it was convinced of the “unity of the world” this method did not make the mistake of attempting to force that unity into one unique conceptual or pictorial form: “Caillois intended to discover the unity of the world through the diversity of topics. He did not try to depict this unity, as for him it was irrefutably evident and did not have to be proven but only discovered” (Paz 2001: 25). But it was another point that increased Paz’s admiration as he continued 6 | As Alfons Söllner has shown, this was particularly important for Octavio Paz (see in this book: p. 17)

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to read: Caillois did not simply mention one fact or another on the assumption that it belonged to the whole; rather, he always strove to reveal the “network of invisible relations and secret correspondences among the worlds that constitute the world” (ibid.). “Everything in the world corresponds to everything else in the world” would seem to be the basic idea from which Caillois developed his inquiries. Of course, taken to its logical limits this would mean that there would have to be connections between stones and the world of human ideas: “The stone and the world of ideas are the two extreme ends of the universe” (ibid.). Here, Paz refers to Caillois’ book Pierre réfl échies (1975), as the thesis elaborated there stimulated Paz to draw some important conclusions, above all that the language that best captures this universal connectivity of “everything with everything else” could only be that of poetry. Again Paz turns to Caillois to support his idea: According to Caillois, poetry is not a phenomenon peculiar to human language, but is characteristic of all of nature. There is some kind of unity and continuity between the physical world and the intellectual world of imagination; this unity is formal and is constituted like a poem, not like a deductive chain of meanings, but more like a system of echoes, correspondences and analogies (Paz 1994c: 469-470).

Now, this does not mean that the only legitimate means of producing knowledge is by writing poetry but, as Caillois also showed, knowledge in many different areas – sociology, for instance – must be informed by a “poetic experience” (see Paz 1994d: 468). On one occasion, Paz wrote to Caillois: “In my opinion, the experience that you are approaching is a poetic one, and it consists in seeing the world as a system of correspondences, a network of affinities […]” (Paz 1994d: 468). He felt that it was possible that human beings did indeed understand this universal connectedness, given that their deepest desire consists in connecting to other human beings and to “the worlds” in general. However, the kind of sociology that Paz yearned for and the one he discerned in the work of the members of the Collège, sought to be more than a simple sociology: it wanted to be a critical sociology. As we saw above in the discussion of Bauman, a sociology that orients itself through poetry is by its very nature critical. Enrico Mario Santí has pointed out how the critique presented by the Collège de Sociologie is to be understood and how it relates to surrealism: “What the paintings of André Masson and the work of Marcel Mauss share, for instance, is the renovation of culture through the reordering of its ‘objects’” (Santí 1997: 199). According to Santí, this kind of critical social research can be found in Paz’s Labyrinth; thus he goes on to say that […] when Paz analyzes a common custom such as courtesy, a highly valued institution like the Fiesta (festival), or a verb that is used so frequently, like chingar (to fuck), he seeks to discover in them a heretofore unexplored meaning

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[…] what he is really carrying out is an operation that may be called “ethnographic surrealism”; that is, a critique of culture or, to put it differently, defamiliarizing and reordering cultural objects in order to discover their latent “sacred” meanings and, at the same time, modify their meaning and value (200).

This kind of “intervention” (Adorno) in the meaning of the words that give meaning to social realities is nourished by the “poetic experience” and, therefore, is not meant to simply give an account of social realities and facts, but to recreate the social world.

4. Towards a Sociolog y of Solitude In the same year in which Paz published the first version of The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a book with a somewhat similar title was published in the United States: The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Its author was a North American sociologist named David Riesman. Aside from the title, at first glance this book does not seem to have much in common with Paz’s Labyrinth, as Riesman and his collaborators presented a study solidly grounded in existing debates in the social sciences, somewhere between sociology and social psychology, to be more precise. One of the central concepts of the book, as its subtitle suggests, is the notion of “social character” (Riesman 1967: xxi). As Riesman explains: “[To] speak of character in these terms is to speak of character as a ‘social character,’ the character that is clearly generalized in a society” (ibid.: 4). The author then goes on to justify his conceptual pronouncement as follows: “The assumption that a social character exists has always been a more or less invisible premise in ordinary parlance; and it is becoming a more or less visible premise in the social sciences” (Riesman 1967: 4-5). Paz, on the contrary, explicitly rejects the need to define the “supposed character of the Mexican,” and makes clear that he does not share the obsession to define that which is typically Mexican in positive terms (see Paz 1994e: 9) as so many intellectuals from his country had previously attempted to do.7 However, he also admits that “most of the reflections in this essay occurred to me while outside Mexico, during a two-year stay in the United States” (ibid). This would seem to indicate that Paz did have the opportunity to familiarize himself with the debates surrounding the concept of social character that were going on at that time in the U.S. and that also inspired Riesman. Thus it may not be farfetched to suggest that The Labyrinth was in part an attempt to participate in this sociological debate. However, more telling than these speculations is what Paz actually said about his book. In one of his last interviews, he told Enrico Mario Santí: “It is

7 | Paz argues strongly against Samuel Ramos who stated that the Mexican character is defined by an insuperable inferiority complex (see: Ramos 1990 [1934]).

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a book about a society” (Paz/Santí 2005: 18); a statement by a writer who had very clear ideas about what “society” means: A society is not just what people think, but what they say and think with each other. The phrase “with each other” is fundamental, since society is first of all a relationship, and “with each other” is, more than anything else, precisely that: a relationship (ibid.)

Relationships and the ways in which they constitute and reproduce themselves change. And it is above all this changing character of the processes of human relationships that interests Paz, and not those characters or identities that are fi xed once and forever. But how did he propose to study them? Although “methodological nationalism” in sociology and the social sciences in general is widely rejected today (see Chernilo 2006), in the 1940s and 50s it was generally assumed that talking about society meant talking about the sum total of people that shared a geographical territory conceived of as a country. Paz, however, was an early critic of this idea. He began his book not with a description of Mexicans living in Mexico, but of those who were living in the U.S., as it was especially among that population that a new culture had emerged, one materialized in the emblematic figure of the socalled pachuco. Pachuco was the name given to the members of a Mexican subculture of the 1940s, centered mainly in Los Angeles. As so often happens in urban subcultures, the pachucos tried to distinguish themselves through the clothes they wore which in this case were characterized by the zoot suit, often combined with a wide-brimmed hat (pancake tando). In 1943, however, the pachucos became the target of a xenophobic backlash at the hands of U.S. servicemen, the “Zoot-Suit Riots”. David Riesman also mentions this event and the pachucos in his book, where he writes: “The costume and manners of the zoot-suiters were a pathetic example of the effort to combine smooth urban ways with a resentful refusal to be completely overwhelmed” by modern, urban culture (Riesman 1967: 34). Riesman wrote those lines in the context of a wider discussion in which he explains the differences between what could be called “modern” and “traditional” forms of social character. According to him, the zoot-suiters represented a traditional character, while their “pathetic example” was a model of tradition’s resistance against modernity. It is not difficult to see that Riesman’s ideas were oriented along the predominant paradigm of sociology of that time, one that held sway even beyond the borders of the U.S.: namely, modernization theory and its fundamental distinction between modernity and tradition. Octavio Paz, on the other hand, appears as an early herald of those critiques of modernization theory that would later produce some of the most interesting discourses of our time.8 Although Paz also conceived of 8 | Theories of multiple modernities must be mentioned here, but also postcolonial theory, as they are all consequences of a critique of modernization theories.

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the pachuco as a kind of rebel against North American culture, he did not credit them with wishing to animate some kind of tradition. Rather, Paz saw the pachucos as, first of all, “instinctive rebels” against which “North American racism has vented its wrath more than once” (Paz 1994e: 14). But, Paz continues, “the pachucos do not attempt to vindicate their race or the nationality of their forebears. […] The pachuco does not want to become a Mexican again, but nor does he wish to blend into North American life” (ibid.). What seemed predominant in the attitude of the pachucos was, first and foremost, a desire to be different, one they expressed in and through their unique culture (see ibid.: 15). At this point, we can also perceive a clear affinity to Georg Simmel’s “stranger” (der Fremde) (see Capetillo in this book), despite the existence of other evident differences between these two writers. Most importantly, it is not the notion of the “stranger” that Paz places in the center of his thought, but the concept of solitude. In doing so, he opts for an anthropological category9 that grasps an important aspect of the human condition. As we saw in another chapter of this book (Kozlarek), Paz thought that all human beings feel alone (see Paz 1994e: 195ff.), but he did not stop there, as he suggested that it was precisely this feeling of being alone that was responsible for the fact that human beings are constantly trying to unite with, or connect to, other human beings. “Man is the only being who knows he is alone and the only one who seeks out another. […] Man is nostalgia and the search for communion” (Paz 1994e: 195). “Solitude” thus becomes a concept proposed to explain the entire impulse of human sociability from an anthropological point of view. According to Paz, then, the different ways in which human beings relate to each other are ways of dealing with the feeling of being alone. But so is culture. Paz wrote: A civilization [culture] is not only a system of values, but also a world of forms and codes of behavior, rules and expectations. It is society’s visible side – institutions, monuments, works, things – but it is especially its submerged, invisible side: beliefs, desires, fears, repressions, dreams (Paz 1994f: 395).

This quotation reveals clearly that for Paz the manifestations of human interaction are broadly understandable in terms of culture. Consequently, “culture” and “the social” do not constitute two different realms of research and should not be separated one from the other. Culture and the social are connected because they are both consequences of the human experience of solitude. In short: human culture can be explained as a means of dealing with solitude. This way of accounting for culture in an anthropological sense is very different from other attempts; for instance, from the one we find in Jan Assmann’s work. The German scholar 9 | In contrast, it must be understood that Simmel’s “stranger” is a historical category, that referred in Simmel’s sense primarily to the European Jews.

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thought that human culture is intimately linked to the fact that human beings are conscious of death (see Assmann 2000). Now, if we also take into consideration the fact that Paz devotes almost an entire chapter of The Labyrinth to the celebration of death in Mexican culture (see Paz 1994e: 47; Lomnitz 2005), it could be suggested that he would agree with Assmann’s thesis. But due to more than to any kind of thanatology, Paz’s interest in Mexico’s celebration of death was driven by his interest in the social functions that derive from it. It is in chapter three that Paz begins his discussion of this topic, though he does not enter into it directly. Rather, he fi rst introduces the question of Mexicans’ obsession with the fiesta: “The solitary Mexican,” he writes, “loves fiestas and public gatherings. Any occasion for getting together will serve, any pretext to stop the flow of time and commemorate men and events with festivals and ceremonies” (Paz 1994e: 47). It is here that Paz mentions the work of the Collège de Sociologie as a source of inspiration for his own writings: “According to the interpretation of French sociologists, the fiesta is an excess, an expense. [It is by] means of this squandering [that] the community protects itself against the envy of the gods or of men” (ibid.: 50). Paz realizes that this type of collective action is not the kind that would be expected of a thoroughly rational society, but a sort of “magical trap” (ibid.). But then again, like the members of the Collège, Paz’s desire is to penetrate to the very roots of these remnants of magic that continue to endure in modern societies. For him, the celebration of death is also a fiesta, one that has primarily social functions.10 In Paz’s terms, sociology would always have to be in some way a “cultural sociology,” understood as a kind of social research that inquires into the different and ever-changing ways in which human beings interact in and through the cultural manifestations produced by human sociability itself. Consequently, social research must always be comparative, and – though this may come as a surprise to many – The Labyrinth is just such a piece of comparative social research, since it compares the ways in which “North Americans” deal with solitude with the ways in which Mexicans approach it. Paz is convinced that Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexicans under the great stony night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods is very different from that of the North American who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts (ibid.: 19-20).

Paz does not mean to suggest in this passage that it is only North Americans who can be modern while Mexicans can not. Rather, it was clear to him that Mexico is part of a world that has long been modern, but that the Mexicans’ experience of modernity is different from the North American form in that it seems to be much more aware of ambivalences and possibilities of failure. 10 | The historical functions of the glorification and celebration of death in Mexico have recently been elucidated by Claudio Lomnitz (2005).

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Paraphrasing Roger Bartra, we can say that the experience of Mexican modernity is that of a “truncated” modernity (see Bartra 1996) or, to put it in the more recent terms suggested by Claudio Lomnitz: “[…] Mexico, compared with other countries, has the deepest and earliest world-historical experience of itself as a postcolonial and postimperial nation” (Lomnitz 2005: 30). Once again, none of this means that Mexico is not modern, only that the Mexican experience with – and within – modernity has been different from that of the U.S. For Paz “different” did not necessarily mean better or worse, as he was well aware of both the deficiencies of Mexican modernity and those of the modernity experienced by the U.S. and glorified in modernization theory. The principle problem of, and with, North American modernity, Paz suggests without romanticizing Mexican modernity, is that it builds a world of institutions and imaginaries that simulate control and domination. “Fellow citizens” and “moral precepts” are the forms that dominate in human relations, but these are human constructions destined to compensate the fear of solitude. However, it is precisely because of their abstract simulation of securities and guarantees that they impede real “communion” from taking place. Elsewhere, Paz explains that successful communion is not possible through rational, legal and moral guarantees, but requires something more; and that this something more is love. He understands love as an act of reconciliation with the world and with the other in which the self renders itself vulnerable (see Paz 2008). In Mexico’s modernity, meanwhile, the simulation of the legal and moral world that aims to protect individuals from solitude does not function because those “insatiable gods” still flicker through the fabric of all the rational inventions designed to make solitude vanish. Mexican modernity is not a “better” modernity or something even better than modernity, but it helps to understand that the simulation of coming-to-terms with solitude once and for all in the controlled and rational way that “North American” modernity represents is just as erroneous. A critique of modernity inspired in a sociology of solitude such as the one we find in Paz’s essays helps us to understand that modernity has provoked very different experiences and, consequently, different ways of becoming modern. However, a much more important message than this may be that none of these experiences has yet attained a conclusive state of human affairs. Borrowing the famous words of Jürgen Habermas, we can say that modernity is still an “unfulfi lled project”; though by the same token, Paz reminds us that this project can only be successful if it remembers all the needs and desires that our condition as human beings imposes upon us and upon our attempts to live together in societies.

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Bibliography Assmann, Jan (2000): Der Tod als Thema der Kulturtheorie, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2007): “Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another ‘Missing’ Revolution?” In: Sociology 41/5, pp. 871-884. Bartra, Roger (1996 [1987]): La jaula de la melancolía: Identidad y metamorfósis del mexicano, Mexico City: Grijalbo. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000): “On Writing. On Sociological Writing.” In: Theory, Culture & Society 17/1, pp. 79-90. Bourdieu, Pierre/Wacquant, Loïc (1999): “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” In: Theory, Culture & Society 16, pp. 41-58. Caillois, Roger (1975): Pierres réfl échies, Paris: Editions Gallimard. Capetillo-Ponce, Jorge (2005): “Deciphering The Labyrinth. The Influence of Georg Simmel on the Sociology of Octavio Paz.” In: Theory, Culture & Society 22/6, pp. 95-121. Castañeda Fernando (2004): La crisis de la sociología académica en México, México City: Porrúa/UNAM. Chernilo, Daniel (2006): “Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality.” In: European Journal of Social Theory 9/1, pp. 5-22. Clifford, James (1988): “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” In: James Clifford (1988), The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Mass./London, Engl.: Harvard University Press, pp. 117-151. Costa, Sérgio (2007): Vom Nordatlantik zum “Black Atlantic”: Postkoloniale Konfigurationen und Paradoxien transnationaler Politik, Bielefeld: Transcript. Lepenies, Wolf (2006): Die drei Kulturen: Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Engl.: Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lepsius, Rainer (1977): “Soziologische Theoreme über die Sozialstruktur der Moderne und der Modernisierung.” In: Reinhart Koselleck (ed.), Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 10-29. Lomnitz, Claudio (2005): Death and the Idea of Mexico, New York: Zone Books. Mann, Thomas (1999): Death in Venice and Other Tales, London: Penguin. Moebius, Stephan (2006): Die Zauberlehrlinge: Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie (1937-1939), Konstanz: UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft. Paz, Octavio (1994): The Labyrinth of Solitude: the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philantropic Ogre, New York: Grove Press. Paz, Octavio (1994a): “The other Mexico.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), The Labyrinth of Solitude: the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philantropic Ogre, New York: Grove Press, pp. 213-326.

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Paz, Octavio (1994b): “Unidad, modernidad, tradición.” In: Fundación y disidencia: Dominio hispánico. Obras Completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 15-22. Paz Octavio (1994c): “Fábula de la piedra.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), Excursiones/ Incursiones: Dominio extranjero. Obras Completas, vol. 2, Mexiko City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 469-470. Paz Octavio (1994d): “Piedras: reflejos y reflexiones.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), Excursiones/Incursiones: Dominio extranjero. Obras Completas, vol. 2, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 467-468. Paz, Octavio (1994e): “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), The Labyrinth of Solitude: the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philantropic Ogre, New York: Grove Press, pp. 7-212. Paz, Octavio (1994f): “Mexico and the United States.” In: Octavio Paz (1994), The Labyrinth of Solitude: the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philantropic Ogre, New York: Grove Press, pp. 355-376. Paz, Octavio (2001): “Las piedras legibles de Roger Caillois.” In: Octavio Paz (2001), Miscelánea II. Obras Completas, vol. 14, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 23-27. Paz, Octavio (2008): “Poesia de soledad y poesía de comunión.” In: Octavio Paz (2008), Las palabras y los días. Una antología introductoria, Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 93-105. Paz, Octavio/Santí, Enrico Mario (2007): “Entrevista con Octavio Paz. El misterio de la vocación.” In: Letras Libres, Enero 2005, pp. 8-20. Ramos, Samuel (1990 [1934]): “El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México.” In: Samuel Ramos (1990), Obras Completas I, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, pp. 87-184. Riesman, David (1967): The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Santí, Enrico Mario (1997): El acto de las palabras: Estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Villoro, Luis (1995): En Mexico entre libros: Pensamiento del siglo XX, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Tenbruck, Friedrich H. (1990): Die kulturellen Grundlagen der Gesellschaft: Der Fall der Moderne, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

The Walls of the Labyrinth: Mapping Octavio Paz’s Sociology through Georg Simmel’s Method 1 Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

I.

Paz and Simmel

The Labyrinth of Solitude has been hailed as a masterpiece of both Latin American and modern literature, and a key text to understanding Mexican national identity. But since this is a text that is located at the intersection of nationalism and modernity, which crosses many disciplinary borders, its analysis has proven to be a particularly complex task. Nor has it lacked critics; chief among them Emanuel Carballo, Fernando Benitez, Ruben Salazar Mallen, Leopoldo Zea, Juan Hernandez Luna, and even Samuel Ramos, who was an important influence on Paz at the time he was writing The Labyrinth. These critics argued that it was imprecise, lacking in cohesion, and methodologically confusing.2 But time has been good to The Labyrinth, for today it is generally regarded as a complex and creative work that sprung from the many-sided experiences of a unique thinker. Based on historical, sociological and psychological insights that are transformed into an original poetic prose, in The Labyrinth Paz critically examines a wide variety of Mexican myths and rituals, frozen historical forms, pre-modern elements that persist in spite of the spirit of change, repeated failures to take advantage of moments of potential cultural renewal, and specific intellectual and moral elements that have come together to shape the modern Mexican character, a complex character infused by feelings of not-belonging, of being lost in a labyrinth of solitude. 1 | A different version of this essay appeared in the journal Theory, Culture & Society 22/6, December (2005), pp. 95-121 under the title “Deciphering the Labyrinth: The Influence of Georg Simmel on the Sociology of Octavio Paz”. 2 | For an interesting discussion of the reception of The Labyrinth in Mexico see Santi’s essay El Sueño Compartido in Paz 1997: 45-65.

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While numerous analyses of The Labyrinth have appeared in the halfcentury since its initial publication in 1950, the approaches to it have been largely moral, psychological, literary, philosophical-historical and cultural/ anthropological. Its sociological content has not yet been properly analyzed, and has at times been completely ignored. Hence the present study, which seeks to bring to light Labyrinth’s sociological content by showing how closely the method and style of the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel is reflected in the structure of the work. Both the intellectual link between Simmel and Paz and the impact of Simmel’s thinking on The Labyrinth, have been regarded as too tenuous to merit more than a passing mention. The fact remains, however, that in his 1975 interview with Claude Fell (which was later published under the title “Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude”)3 Paz said this, with respect to the sources that had influenced his book: I also learned a lot from the German philosophers whom Ortega y Gasset had made known a few years before in our tongue: phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, and the work of historians and essayists such as Dilthey and Simmel (Paz 1985: 333).

This is the only time that Paz has made explicit mention of Simmel. In the interview he also notes the influence upon him of Borges, Caillois, Freud, Gaos, Lévi-Strauss, Marx, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Ramos, Reyes, Rousseau, and Vasconcelos, among others. Probably the best-known analysis of The Labyrinth, and a text that has become one of the main vehicles of interpretation of the work, is Enrico Mario Santí’s comprehensive introduction to it, entitled “El Sueño Compartido” (The Shared Dream). In this study, Santí stresses the link between Paz and the Hegelian tradition: It would be exaggerated to affirm, of course, that the primordial (or secret) source of The Labyrinth of Solitude is Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, even if it is justified to call Paz’s book “Hegelian”, in the widest sense of the word. The book barely mentions Hegel, in fact, and neither does Paz in the Fell interview, when he reviews his sources. In fact, the “forms” that are invoked throughout the book do not belong entirely to the Idealist tradition, since they are neither static nor passive but, in contrast, active recipients, molded by historical experience, if inauthentic. Thus, the conception of “forms” in the essay reflects more an intersection between Hegelian Idealism and Kantian formativity – for Kant, as is well known, only experience was, in effect, formative. Thus, the source of this intersection would not be really Hegel but 3 | This interview, along with Posdata – “The Other Mexico” in the English translation – usually published along with the Labyrinth of Solitude, since they treat the same problem of Mexican identity. In this study I will focus only on The Labyrinth itself.

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the neo-Kantian Georg Simmel, especially the Simmel of Sociology (1908), whom Paz does mention in his interview with Fell as one of “the German philosophers whom Ortega y Gasset had made known in our language.” Nevertheless, the influence of Simmel on the book is largely diff use and general, since the “forms” of Paz are not (with the possible exception of the “Pachuco”) the social “types” that he [Simmel] describes in his well-known treatise – the “adventurer,” “the stranger” or “the poor” – but inauthentic stages – in the sense of stations on the road to authenticity – and that instead go back more to the Idealist morphology which had in Hegel its most lucid exponent (Paz 1997: 78-79). In relation to this passage, Santi provides two important footnotes. In the first of these, he actually calls into question the influence of Simmel upon The Labyrinth, by suggesting that It is also entirely probable that in the conception of the “forms,” Paz had consulted Georges Gurvitch, whose Formas de la sociabilidad: Ensayos de sociologia (Forms of sociability: Essays in Sociology), in the translation [to Spanish] by Francisco Ayala, Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1941, was in fashion at the time (Paz 1997: 79).

What are we to make of such a notion, given our understanding that it was Simmel’s sociology of forms, not Gurvitch’s, which at the time Paz was writing, had drawn great attention and aroused great controversy in Europe and the United States – and given Paz’s own acknowledgement of Simmel’s influence, in his interview with Fell? In the second of these two footnotes, Santi tells us of a letter Paz had written him, in response to regarding his assertion that Paz’s “forms” were “inauthentic.” Paz writes I never thought of the Forms as inauthentic stages towards this or that, but as historical creations in which the impulse, or the idea, become externalized and turned into long-lasting expressions, in objects of participation. For example, artistic styles, juridical institutions, some social idea, a myth, a religion, etc […]. Precisely, the anguish I suffered at that time was that the inherited Forms were empty or petrified and that we Mexicans had not created another Form, our Form; that we had not realized ourselves in an enduring collective project (Paz 1997: 80).

Anyone well acquainted with the work of both Paz and Simmel can’t help but feel, on hearing those words, that Paz is virtually pointing out to Santí the need to first travel through Simmel’s Sociology of Forms in order to draw an accurate map of The Labyrinth. Be that as it may, let us begin our own analysis by noting some of the striking similarities between Simmel’s work and the Labyrinth of Solitude.

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II. Similarities in St yle and Content There are various aspects of Georg Simmel’s work that must have attracted the young Octavio Paz, living in Paris and writing his first major work in the years just after the end of World War II. Surely one was Simmel’s use of the essay as his favorite vehicle of analysis. In fact, Simmel was recognized as one of the finest essayists of his time, not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe. Another attraction for Paz must have been Simmel’s method of inquiry. As Donald Levine (Simmel 1971: xxxi) points out: His method is to select some bounded, finite phenomenon from the world of flux; to examine the multiplicity of elements which compose it; and to ascertain the cause of their coherence by disclosing its form. Secondarily, he investigates the origins of this form and its structural implications […]. The results of Simmelian inquiry are therefore a series of discrete analyses. They do not lend themselves to being integrated through a single interpretative scheme. As for Paz himself, he has long been acknowledged as one of the most refined essayists writing in the Spanish language. Fernando de Toro also points to another chief characteristic of the Paz essay: its open structure, expressive of an intense and ongoing search for a clue to human destiny. What the Pazian essay offers is “questions, points of departure, attempts at definitive solutions, but never final answers. Its questions encompass life directly, and life is not closed but open, multiple, dialectical as reality” (Paz 2000: vol. II, 39). Thus it can be said that the essays (or chapters) that constitute The Labyrinth, share with Simmel’s sociological essays the following characteristics: • A. They comprise structurally open and discreet analyses that cannot easily be integrated into a whole. • B. They use dialectic or dualism as their principal analytical tool. • C. Their analyses reveal the interwoven nature of the assembled parts of the diversity of the social world. • D. They focus on the disclosure of social forms and types, in order to draw the spirit or destiny of a particular age. This last point of resemblance is in fact the most crucial, for it is not so much the preference of both thinkers for the essay form that is relevant, as it is to their shared fondness for abstracting forms out of the historical dimension, with Paz doing this in The Labyrinth as a key aspect of his quest for Mexican identity. Indeed, their shared interest in cultural forms projected a social world in terms of the conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories underlying the dialectical dynamic of cultural identity. The dialectics that Paz inserts into the structure of The Labyrinth – with Mexican cultural identity emerging at intersections between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, loneliness or solitude and participation or communion with others – parallels

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Simmel’s dualism, wherein every aspect of life has its diametrically opposed element, so that a “form is defined as a synthesis of opposites or as a midpoint between them” (Simmel 1971: xxxv). Another aspect where these two thinkers intersect is in their similar takes on alienation. Paz’s conception of solitude hews closely to Simmel’s alienation of culture, as opposed to Marx’s alienation, based on economic factors, or Hegel’s romantic/idealist variety. Paz is speaking in The Labyrinth of the deepest sort of cultural alienation, one that leads to solitude. This situation is also reminiscent of Durkheim’s concept of anomie. In the concluding remarks I will touch briefly on the influence of Durkheim’s sociological work on The Labyrinth, an important influence indeed... In both Simmel’s essays and Paz’s Labyrinth we find an ongoing battle between objective and subjective culture, and the appearance of a certain unhealthy or even pathological objectification leading to the oppression of the cultural forms that individuals have created. For Simmel the only way out of objectification/alienation, as is also for Paz from alienation/solitude, is through the creative act – which is to say, through a belief in the primacy of subjective culture (the individual) over objective culture (the network of countless individual creations). It should also be noted that these thinkers’ shared vision of art as a unified form, and of the artist as a cultural hero, reveals them as deeply rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche. 4 Two other Simmelian themes are present in The Labyrinth: reciprocity and distance. With respect to reciprocity, or exchange, Simmel believed that no thing or event has any fi xed, intrinsic meaning. Its meaning emerges only through its interactions with other things and events. Thus, an individual’s understanding of cultural products arises strictly through his/her engagement with them. We find such instances of symbolic interactionism5 all through the chapters of The Labyrinth, as for instance in the manner the social type of the Pachuco is formed through the interaction of two forms: Mexicanness6 and the American way of life. When speaking of cultural forms, however, we must always remember that for Paz and Simmel, the place where all societal 4 | Paz underlines the influence of Nietzsche in the interview with Fell, and he mentions him repeatedly in his works. For his part, Simmel wrote a book on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. 5 | Simmel’s teachings were a prime source in the development of this sociological school in the U.S., one that was emerging at the same time Paz was writing The Labyrinth. 6 | The first studies of Mexicanness appeared at the beginning of the 20th century: Chavez (1901) and Guerrero (1901). The most prominent example of a study on Mexicanness before the publication of The Labyrinth is Samuel Ramos’ A Profile of Men and Culture in Mexico (1934). Shortly after the publication of The Labyrinth Leopoldo Zea published a series of monographs under the title Mexico y lo mexicano. For a recent example olf this type of study see Roger Bartra’s La Jaula de la Melancolia: Identidad y Metamorfosis de lo Mexicano (1987). In his essay El Sueño Compartido in Paz 1997, Santi offers a brief discussion of the history of this concept.

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events actually occur is within the mind of individuals. In other words, these men’s shared “psychologistic concept of society” rests upon a definition of societal interaction as the interaction of psychic entities. It is important to mention that the psychologistic element in Simmel’s sociology that Paz must have noted when reading his works, has been criticized by other German thinkers such as Spahn and Weber. It is hard not to feel that Paz was attracted to and influenced by it, however, given the extensive use he made of Freudian psychoanalytic theory when constructing his Labyrinth. As for that other vital element in Simmel’s sociology known as “distance,” the properties of forms and the meanings of things are for Simmel functions of the relative distances between the individual and other individuals or things: We obtain different pictures of an object when we see it at a distance of two, or five, or of ten yards. At each distance, however, the picture is “correct” in its particular way and only in this way. And the different distance also provides different margins of error [...]. All we can say is that a view gained at whatever certain distance has its own justification. It cannot be replaced or corrected by any other view emerging at another distance [...]. In a similar way, when we look at human life from a certain distance, we see each individual in his precise differentiation from all others. But if we increase our distance, the single individual disappears, and there emerges, instead, the picture of a “society” with its own forms and colors – a picture which has its own possibilities of being recognized or missed. It is certainly no less justified than is the other in which the parts, the individuals, are seen in their differentiation. Nor is it by any means a mere preliminary of it. The difference between the two merely consists in the difference between purposes of cognition; and this difference, in turn, corresponds to a difference in distance (Wolff 1950: 7, 8).

Thus, for Simmel all social forms are defined to some extent in terms of the dimension of interpersonal distance. Some Simmelian forms, such as conflict and economic exchange, bring distant people into close contact. Others, like secrecy, increase the distance between people. Other forms, such as the social types of the stranger, the poor, and the fashionable, comprise combinations of both nearness and distance. Similarly, we find in The Labyrinth the continuous use of social distance as an analytical tool, as seen in Paz’s examination of social types like the Pachuco; the relative distances Mexicans choose to adopt vis-à-vis such cultural forms as the mask and the fiesta; the lack of recognition among Mexicans themselves, known as noneness or ninguneo; the Mexicans’ courtesy, hypocrisy, and dissimulation. Then too, in a broader sense social distance is a key element in The Labyrinth, since Paz goes back and forth between the individual Mexican and the social/ cultural forms that he has developed over the years and traced through the centuries. Thus, among other things, The Labyrinth is an essay on social distance. For too long now we have been talking about the concept of “form,” albeit

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for the good reason that it is the key to understanding the sociological content of The Labyrinth. In the next section we will see how, for Simmel, the task of the sociologist is largely confined to the identification and classification of social forms, and how it is Paz’s need to identify and classify Mexican cultural and social forms which gives The Labyrinth its overall structure.

III. Simmel’s Sociolog y of Forms, and Its Relevance to The Labyrinth When Paz wrote to Santí that “I never thought of the Forms as inauthentic stages towards this or that, but as historical creations ...” and Santí relegated this important clarification to a footnote, we all lost an opportunity to analyze in depth, while Paz was still alive, the impact of Simmel’s formal sociology on The Labyrinth. For Paz’s letter “corrects” Santi’s assertion that Simmel’s influence on The Labyrinth was “largely diff use and general,” simply by informing us that the Pazian “forms” are not the social “types” conceptualized by Simmel “but inauthentic stages – in the sense of stations on the road to authenticity” that instead go back to Hegel. We don’t know why Paz did not give the secret source to Santí on that occasion, maybe because a labyrinth that provides its explorer with a clear-cut map is no true labyrinth at all? Even more to the point, only when we have accepted the notion that Paz adapts what Simmel calls “forms of sociation” (cultural forms and social relations) to make his own sense of such Mexican social types as the Pachuco, can the actual influence of Simmel upon both the sociology and the methodology of The Labyrinth be disclosed to us.

Social Types and Forms in Simmel’s work For Simmel, the world consists of innumerable contents which are given a determinate identity, a particular structure and meaning, through the imposition of those forms that humans have created in the course of their collective experience. Instead of a “bewildering array of specific events, the actor is confronted with a limited number of forms” (Ritzer/Goodman 2004: 249). Simmel’s concern with socio-cultural forms rather than contents of social interaction does stem, as Santi points out, from his identification with the Kantian tradition in philosophy.7 But to see Simmel as merely a “neo-Kantian” scholar as Santi does is reductionist. First because Simmel’s relationship to Kant is complicated and ambiguous. It is true that elements of Kantian epistemology are among the presuppositions that guide Simmel’s own 7 | Kant held that the mind arranges its chaotic perceptions by means of preconceived categories or “forms.” Thus, such ideas as cause, unity, reciprocal relations, necessity, and contingency are mind-inherent modes or forms of conceptualizing empirical processes. Such forms, like space and time, are elements of pure reason.

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philosophy and methodology. However, Simmel was inclined, particularly in his later years, to reject some of Kant’s basic premises. Second, Santi’s view ignores the influence in Simmel’s work of other thinkers, such as Goethe, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Bergson and Schopenhauer, to name the most relevant. In any case, by “contents” Simmel essentially refers to those needs, drives, and purposes that lead individuals to enter into continuing associations with one another. Forms are the synthesizing processes by which individuals combine into supraindividual unities, stable or transient, solidary or antagonistic, as the case may be. For Simmel, the sociologist’s task is to study the forms of human sociability, of human interaction, so that s/he can analyze the conditions under which they emerge, develop, flourish, and dissolve. Such investigations of social/structural properties generally proceed by extracting certain commonalities from the bewildering diversity of human interactions. Simmel’s distinction between form and content constitutes one of his most important contributions to the emergence of sociological theory; it has helped to foster the development of such new areas of study as symbolic interactionism, social psychology, urban sociology, and, indeed, postmodern theory itself. In addition, Simmel made a distinction between forms of interaction and social types. To avoid confusion – and to create meaning – people reduce their social world to a relatively few forms of interaction (Simmel noted, among others, conflict, superordination and subordination, secret societies, faithfulness and gratitude, urban life, and fashion and adornment) and a similarly small number social types (such as the ones we have heard Santi mention: the stranger, the poor, the miser, the spendthrift, the adventurer). As Simmel sees it, that reduction of the social types has been a necessary technique of psychic survival for those living in modern urban societies; categorizing our innumerable interactants by their seeming types allows us to then work backward, as it were, and encounter them more genuinely as specific persons. Throughout his studies, Simmel speaks of both forms and types to develop his unique type of sociological analysis. Both social forms and social types are forms of social interaction, but Simmel avoids a rigid separation between forms and types. And this can lead to confusion, because what is a social form or type in one context can be content in another. This is also true of social forms and cultural forms, two categories that, according to Simmel, continually interpenetrate: The facts of politics, religion, economics, law, culture styles, language, and innumerable others can be analyzed by asking how they may be understood, not as individual achievements or in their objective significance, but as products and developments of society. Nor would the absence of an exhaustive and undisputed definition of the nature of society render the cognitive value of this approach illusory. For it is characteristic of the human mind to be capable of erecting solid structures, while their foundations are still insecure […]. If therefore, we apply the “sociological method” to the investigation of the fall of the Roman Empire or the relation between religion and economics in the great civilizations or to

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the origin of the idea of the German national state or to the predominance of the baroque style; if, that is, we view this and similar phenomena as the result of indistinguishable contributions made by the interaction of individuals, or as life stages in the lives of superindividual groups, then we are, in point of fact, conducting our investigations according to the sociological method. And these investigations may be designated as sociology (Wolff 1950: 18-19).

Such a passage leads me to concur with Donald Levine’s judgment that Simmel’s “excursions into the areas where society and culture interpenetrate include some of the most imaginative, and most neglected, pages of his work” (Simmel 1971: xxviii). Certainly, such excursions became central to Simmel near the end of his life, and they will do much to illuminate his influence upon the construction of Paz’s Labyrinth. Levine (Simmel 1971: xxviii, xxix) makes three vital points about the Simmelian social and cultural forms. • A. Social forms provide us with contents that lend themselves particularly well to our elaborating into cherished cultural forms. Faith in another person, for instance, prefigures the faith elaborated in the symbolism of religion, just as the playing of social roles prefigures the art of the dramatic actor. • B. Social forms create conditions that affect the nature of certain cultural products. More particularly, the many types of exchange and the high number of interactions that characterize modern urban life create a need for distance from things; this is expressed in such cultural styles as symbolism, as well as in attitudes developed to counter the effects of the metropolis on the individual. • C. The cherishing of certain cultural forms creates a disposition to prefer social forms that are parallel to these in structure. Thus, a preference for symmetry in art fosters a like love for the planned symmetry of social forms, as under socialism. As one would expect from a Nietzschean such as Simmel, a man who saw right through all pretensions to systematic and definitive completeness, this is not a thinker who gives us any precise, explicit method of identifying social types and social/cultural forms, or of assessing their degrees and modalities of interaction. As we heard Simmel himself say a moment ago, his aim was not to uncover a new reality but to develop a method that would allow us to more comprehensively survey the whole socio-historical world. This incomplete or unfinished aspect of Simmel’s sociology is without doubt mirrored in Paz’s Labyrinth, and one can readily understand why both have been criticized for a lack of methodological coherence. Such criticism was to be expected, coming as it did at a time when “scientific” and quantitative trends in sociology were gaining ground in Europe and especially in the United States, a time when sociology was intent in proving itself to be a scientific discipline indeed. The emergence of postmodernism in recent decades, however, has brought the more qualitative approach favored by Paz and Simmel back into favor, and has allowed us to see that the “method”

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used by both men is even more akin to “style” in art than it is to “analysis” or “inquiry” in science.

Social Types and Social/Cultural Forms in The Labyrinth When we read The Labyrinth of Solitude and the work of Georg Simmel, we can’t help but feel that Octavio Paz has taken to heart Simmel’s call for the sociologist to study the forms of human sociability, and the modes of human interaction, analyzing the conditions under which they emerge, develop, flourish, and dissolve. To ensure that we begin this section on solid ground let us begin with the social types, for it is there that Santi has noted certain connections between Simmel and Paz. More precisely, we must begin with the link between the Pachuco, the protagonist of the Labyrinth’s first chapter, and Simmel’s famous essay The Stranger, a piece that triggered numerous sociological studies of social isolation and marginalization in different parts of the world.8 There are, indeed, many parallels between the Stranger and the Pachuco. First, the initial chapter of The Labyrinth is, like The Stranger, a discussion of social distance. As we have noted, for both of these thinkers the properties of social types and the meanings of things are intrinsically tied to the relative distances between individuals and other individuals or things. Simmel begins his essay by pointing out that “if wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of ‘the stranger’ presents the synthesis, as it were, of both of these properties.” The stranger, he “who comes today and stays tomorrow,” has a social position that “is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it” (Simmel 1971: 143). Paz defines the Pachuco – an individual of Mexican origin who has lived in the United States for many years or even for generations – as someone who definitely not an “authentic” North American, and yet also feels ashamed of his origin: What distinguishes them [the Pachucos], I think, is their furtive and restless air: they act like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger’s look because it could strip them naked. When you talk with them, you observe that their sensibilities are like a pendulum, but a pendulum that has lost its reason and swings violently and erratically back and forth. This spiritual condition or lack of spirit, has given birth to a type known as the Pachuco [...]. They can be identified by their language and behavior as well as by the clothing they affect. 8 | Donald Levine mentions The Stranger’s influence on Robert Park, Everett Stonequist, Louis Wirth and Robert Redfield. We could also mention its influence on Alfred Schutz’s work, and on David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. And in the world of literature, on Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

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They are instinctive rebels, and North American racism has centered its wrath on them more than once […]. The Pachuco does not want to become Mexican again, at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma (Paz 1985: 13, 14).

Note that the Pachuco, like the Stranger, can be understood only in terms of conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories – in this case, being Mexican on one part, and living in the United States on the other. Paz goes further, however, by suggesting that Mexico and the United States are true antagonists on the cultural level: The North Americans are credulous and we are believers; they love fairy tales and detective stories and we love myths and legends. The Mexican tells lies because he delights in fantasy, or because he is desperate, or because he wants to rise above the sordid facts of his life; the North American does not tell lies, but he substitutes social truth for the real truth, which is always disagreeable. We get drunk in order to confess; they get drunk in order to forget. They are optimists and we are nihilists – except that our nihilism is not intellectual but instinctive, and therefore irrefutable. We are suspicious and they are trusting. We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists, we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions (Paz 1985: 23, 24).

This superlatively Pazian passage could not be more illustrative of the dualism that characterizes Simmel’s sociology, with each aspect of life implying the coexistence of a diametrically opposed aspect. Inevitably, the Pachuco came to be defined as a synthesis of opposites or an extreme point – hence this chapter’s title of “The Pachuco and other extremities.” In a fashion similar to that of the Stranger, the Pachuco finds his meaning, his form, through his interactions with other cultural facts that are elements of the American form, such as the American city and American racism. Only in this way can the Pachuco’s marginality, odd behaviors, and hybrid fashion, be understood. Also as in Simmel, for Paz the place where all our social interactions are processed and distilled is the mind; hence the Pachuco’s “furtive” and “restless” air, his fear of strangers, and their language and clothing – all of those being aspects of “alienation in the making,” so to speak. Those allusions to clothing are not random ones, by the way, for in fact Simmel was a pioneer when it came to taking fashion as a sociological fact. So too, Paz discusses at length the sociological meaning of the Pachuco’s clothing, defining it as “grotesque dandyism”: The Pachuco carries fashion to its ultimate consequences and turns it into something aesthetic. One of the principles that rules North American fashions is that clothing must be comfortable, whereas the Pachuco, by changing ordinary

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apparel into art, makes it “impractical.” Hence it negates the very principles of the model that inspired it […]. Eccentrics usually emphasize their decision to break away from society – either to from new and more tightly closed groups or to assert their individuality – through their way of dressing. In the case of the Pachuco there is an obvious ambiguity: his clothing spotlights and isolates him, but at the same time it pays homage to the society he is attempting to deny (Paz 1985: 15f).

Similar as the Pachuco and the Stranger clearly are in some respects, though, the distance/nearness paradigm can’t help but assert itself by making them different as well. The form or type of the Stranger is constructed from the gazes of others, and hence chiefly sociological, moving as it does from outer “reality” to the interior psychic world. We sense from Paz’s descriptions of the Pachuco, on the other hand, an interior world, where a group consciousness is revealed by returning the harshly appraising North American gaze, with the overall feeling thus being even more psychological than sociological. Another clear difference: Simmel’s Stranger, while not a universal social type (in contrast to Kant, Simmel did not believe in timelessly social laws) is nevertheless a type that can be applied fruitfully to multiple historical cases. This fact helps us to understand why his Stranger has neither name, nationality, nor ethnic identity; s/he could just as easily be a Jew, an Indian, a Muslim, or a Mexican. In marked contrast to this, Paz’s stranger does have a name – the Pachuco – and he exists within one cultural form that we may call “Mexicanness,” albeit while holding an extreme position there. It is a testament to the overall ambience of The Labyrinth, however, that as we read about the Pachuco he takes on for us the quality of any marginalized, isolated human living in any part of the world. Still, what are we to make of the fact that although in this book Paz does look at such diverse social types as the Cacique, the Indian, the Criollo, the Mestizo, the Macho, and the suffering Mexican Woman, all of these are subsumed within broader social or cultural forms in the seven chapters and appendix that follow the first chapter on the Pachuco? I would suggest that the structure of The Labyrinth itself gives us a transition from social types – what one might deem the micro-Simmelian forms of sociation – to larger forms. Among the cultural (historical/ mythical) forms dealt with are the mask, the fiesta and the Malinche or Malinchismo (chapters II, III, and IV). These forms, which have solidified over time to become traditions and/or myths, are themselves then used by Paz to transition yet again, this time to an analysis of those more perishable forms that emerge, develop, flourish, and dissolve in specific historical epochs. Thus, chapter V analyzes the Pre-Hispanic world, the Conquest, and Colonial Mexico, while chapter VI looks at Independence, Reform, and the 1910 Revolution. Chapter VII, “The Mexican Intelligentsia,” analyzes the key actors and ideologies that have striven in vain to unite the subjective and objective elements of the Mexican character and thereby forge a true national identity. Chapter VIII, “The Present Day,” is of special interest because it

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was written almost a decade after the first edition appeared in 1950. Most notably germane to our present purpose is the fact that, even as in this chapter Paz discards many of the concepts he used in 1950, the concept of form remains central to his analysis. All of this transitioning leads the reader right up to the Appendix (written in 1950 along with the original work). Here Paz not only condenses and reprises the forms discovered in the prior eight chapters, but adds a treatment of eroticism, marriage, and prostitution that is recognizably Simmelian and that we shall be returning to in the ensuing section – all of this being done to depict the crossing of Mexico and Mexicans and the desolate modern Western world, with the depiction reminding us of Simmel’s “tragedy of culture.” In chapters II, III, and IV of The Labyrinth, which are devoted to an exploration of the conditions through which key mythical forms constituting Mexican identity have emerged, Paz seems to mix on his palette Simmel’s formal sociology and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, as a way of more broadly depicting the complexity of the Mexican spirit that he had drawn, almost as a caricature, in the first chapter on the Pachuco. The form of the mask, for instance, is filled with such contents as hypocrisy, dissimulation, “noneness” (ninguneo), and repression of the affective life – with all of those being found par excellence in the social type of the Mexican macho. These are also the elements that tend to construct a cultural form characterized by formulaic behavior, decorum, and outright hypocrisy. This oppressive mask came into being largely as an aftershock of the Conquest, i.e., of the confrontation between two wildly disparate cultural forms: Indigenous and Spanish. The end-product of this clash of civilizations is, according to Paz, a lack of authenticity. That’s the content that fills the mask: lack and inauthenticity. And yet however inauthentic the mask may be, as cultural form it pervades Mexican life. Surely it was this failure of Mexican subjectivity and creativity; and hence of true communion as individuals, that Paz had in mind when he wrote to Santi and told him, as noted before, that the forms in The Labyrinth are real, but alas, inauthentic, in the sense that they do not truly represent Mexicans. “It is not our form,” Paz stressed at the end of the letter (Paz 1997: 80). On the other hand, in the chapter of The Labyrinth entitled “The Day of the Dead,” Paz offers us, in marked contrast to the inauthentic character of the mask form, a dialectically opposed and liberating cultural form: the fiesta. Not only have Mexicans been able to keep the fiesta historically alive through the centuries, but both Paz and Simmel would deem it an art form, since it is characterized by “unity of spirit”: it has the power to transport Mexicans out of their solitudes, causing them to throw away their masks and participate creatively and authentically in the collective life. Let it also be noted at this juncture, given that Paz has been criticized by some9 for supposedly not making his methodological strategy explicit in The Labyrinth, that in fact every single chapter is replete with detailed 9 | See Paz’s response to his critics in his essay “Respuesta y Algo Mas.” (Paz 1997a: 563-571).

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explanations of whichever cultural form he is there elaborating upon. The chapter on Mexican masks, for example, begins with this elucidating passage: The Mexican macho – the male – is a hermetic being, closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. Manliness is judged according to one’s vulnerability to enemy arms or the impacts of the outside world […]. This predominance of the closed over the open manifests itself not only as impassivity and distrust, irony and suspicion, but also as a love for Form. Form surrounds and sets bounds to our privacy, limiting its excesses, curbing its explosions, isolating and preserving it. Both our Spanish and Indian heritages have influenced our fondness for ceremony, formulas, and order [...]. The ritual complications of our courtesy, the persistence of classical Humanism, our fondness for closed poetic forms (the sonnet and the decima, for example), our love for geometry in the decorative arts and for design and composition in painting, the poverty of our Romantic art compared with the excellence of our Baroque art, the formalism of our political institutions, and, finally, our dangerous inclination toward formalism, whether social, moral, or bureaucratic, are further expressions of that tendency in our character. The Mexican not only does not open himself up to the outside world, he also refuses to emerge from himself, to “let himself go.” Sometimes Form chokes us. During the past century the liberals tried vainly to force the realities of the country into the strait jacket of the Constitution of 1857. The results were the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and the Revolution of 1910. In a certain sense the history of Mexico, like that of every Mexican, is a struggle between the forms and formulas that have been imposed on us and the explosions with which our individuality avenges itself. Form has rarely been an original creation, an equilibrium arrived at through our instincts and desires rather than at their expense. On the contrary, our moral and juridical forms often conflict with our nature, preventing us from expressing ourselves and frustrating our true wishes […]. Our devotion to Form, even when empty, can be seen throughout the history of Mexican art from pre-Conquest times to the present (Paz 1985: 30-33).

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of that long passage, and the one most reminiscent of Simmel’s methodology (how he connects the closeness or openness of forms with history, politics, law and religion), is the way Pazian forms emerge either autochtonally – as in pre-Hispanic Mexico – or are imposed from the outside – as after the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century and via the Constitution of 1857. When Paz refers to a form as being “open”, he means that there is enough content within or beneath the form to sustain it. Gradually forms close, however, leaving the content, the participation of individuals outside of them, and producing a sense of passivity rather than activity. Social structures were largely open, for example in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic days and during the first part of the colonial era, but an event such as the tragic life of Sor Juana Ines

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de la Cruz – who was forced by the Catholic church’s hierarchy to stop writing poems, songs and plays and hand over her books and scientific instruments to the clergy at the end of the 17 th century – signaled the closing of the colonial form. Whenever a form becomes completely empty or petrified, there ensues a rupture, an explosion that generally engenders new open forms, which again enter into a process of growth and decay. Two such eruptions for Paz are the movement for Mexican Independence at the beginning of the 19th century and the Mexican Revolution of the second decade of the 20th century. A close reader of The Labyrinth can’t help but wonder whether Paz didn’t consciously assimilate there Simmel’s idea that the human mind is capable of erecting solid structures even while their foundations are still insecure – an idea that makes one think of postmodernism’s belief in a lack of origin. In chapter VI, for example, Paz looks at the Reforma, it having been a latenineteenth-century liberal critique of the old regime and a secular vision of a bold new social contract. What he sees there is a Mexico negating its past and thus erecting a structure without foundations. Thus, for Paz the Reforma form is one that that strives to affirm man and yet almost fatally undermines itself by ignoring the Mexico of the past, the Mexico of the myths, the fiesta, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. While conceding that the Reforma marks the start of modernity for Mexico by being universalistic, secular, and profane, Paz sees in this new form not the explosion and authenticity of the Independence or the Revolutionary movements (both falling under the form of the fiesta) but rather the onset of a period of historic inauthenticity (characteristic of the form of the mask) marked by widespread simulation, born in response to the imposition of an alien positivism on the Mexican soul: “not a religion but a utopian ideology” (Paz 1985: 128). The felt need for a rupture out of this oppressive form produced the 1910 Revolution, a form full of aggression but also “an explosion of reality: a return and a communion” (Paz 1985: 149), and a harbinger of a more genuine universality, one that would simultaneously insert Mexicans into world history and reintegrate them with their own past. Let us just note, in closing this section, that for both Simmel and Paz social forms and social types provide contents which lend themselves particularly well to the elaboration of certain cultural forms. We have already noted how the closed quality of the Mexican macho (a social type with such contents as hermeticism, distrust, irony, suspicion, fondness for ceremony) is mirrored in those closed Mexican forms – social, political, artistic – that, according to Paz, “choke us.” In other words, as we find in Simmel’s essays on cultural forms, in The Labyrinth orientation to certain social forms creates a disposition to prefer cultural forms that are parallel in structure. Thus, the Mexican preference for closed poetic forms, for geometry in the decorative arts, for Baroque (a closed form according to Paz) instead of Romantic art (an open form), and so on.

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IV. The “Secret Text” Finally, we arrive at our key questions: just how much did Paz read Simmel during those years in Paris, and which Simmelian texts prove the strong influence of Simmel’s thought upon The Labyrinth. We must begin by assuming that Paz had not read much of Simmel prior to writing the Labyrinth, otherwise he would have made more extensive mention of him in his comments on influential authors and sources in the interview with Claude Fell. I already have made my best case for The Stranger (1908) as a key inspiration for the first chapter on the Pachuco. Then too, Paz’s use of the Form as his central methodological tool points to his most likely having read some of the essays in Simmel’s Sociology (1908), such as “The Problem of Sociology.” It is also hard not to believe, when one recalls Paz’s meditations on fashion and style in the context of the Pachuco’s encounter with North American urban life, that Paz also had read “Fashion”(1904) and “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). Although all of the above pieces by Simmel certainly seem to show up, in one way or the other, in the structure of The Labyrinth, I believe the key text directly connecting Simmel to The Labyrinth, what I am here playfully calling “the secret text,” is a very late essay, The Conflict of Culture written in 1918, just a few months before Simmel’s death from liver cancer. This extraordinary essay with its powerful vision of the tragedy of culture is in many ways Simmel’s last will and testament. There Simmel dilates upon the eternal conflict between established forms and the needs of the ongoing life-process – the theme which, above all others, fi lled his final years. Its influence upon The Labyrinth becomes clear when one finds in it a virtual laundry list of elements vitally present in The Labyrinth: • The emergence and disappearance of forms (sometimes through revolutions). • The opposition (or dialectical relationship) between life and form. • The notion of there being a hidden rhythm to social life. • The eternal quest for originality and authenticity. • The importance of the artist, as vehicle of that creative act which represents life’s struggle to gain a glimpse of its own reflection. • The relevance of psychology to modern life. • The concept of spirit. • The presence of Nietzsche. • The ways in which forms open and close. And even a discussion of eroticism, marriage, and prostitution as forms – perfectly mirrored in Paz’s own discussion found in the appendix to the Labyrinth. One hears many of those themes being sounded in the following extracts from “The Conflict of Culture”:

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We speak of culture whenever life produces certain forms in which it expresses and realizes itself: works of art, religion, sciences, technologies, laws, and innumerable others. These forms encompass the flow of life and provide it with content and form, freedom and order. But although these forms arise out of the life process, because of their unique constellation they do not share the restless rhythm of life, its accent and descent, its constant renewal, its incessant divisions and reunifications. These forms are frameworks for the creative life which, however, soon transcends them. They should also house the imitative life, for which, in the final analysis, there is no space left. They acquire fi xed identities, a logic and lawfulness of their own: this new rigidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent […]. Herein lies the ultimate reason why culture has a history. Insofar as life, having become spirit, ceaselessly creates such forms which become self-enclosed and demand permanence, these forms are inseparable from life; without them it cannot be itself. Left to itself, however, life streams out without interruption, its restless rhythm opposes the fi xed duration of any particular form. Each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life. As soon as one is fully developed, the next begins to form; after a struggle that may be long or short, it will inevitably succeed its predecessor (Simmel 1971: 375).

Thus, for Simmel life, while manifesting itself through particular forms, is always struggling against these forms, because these become fi xed, or “petrified,” as Paz would say. This constant change in the content of culture, even of whole cultural styles is, according to Simmel, “the sign of the infinite fruitfulness of life,” but it also marks the deep contradiction between life’s eternal flux and the objective validity and authenticity of forms: “It moves constantly between death and resurrection – between resurrection and death.” This moving from one pole to another implies a certain rhythm of life, and we heard Simmel speak above of “the restless rhythm of life, its accent and decent, its constant renewal, its incessant divisions and reunifications.” So too, Paz, in his essay “Respuesta y Algo Más” (“Answer and Something More”), lets us know that The Labyrinth offers us no mere “psychology of the Mexican” but rather a description of a vital and historic rhythm (the dialectic between solitude and communion) “during one moment and in one nation” (Paz 1997: 563). Precisely because “life perceives the form as such as something that has been forced upon it,” the Simmelian ruptures and revolutions must arise in order to “burst the oppressive bonds” (Simmel 1971: 377) of the old forms and replace them with new ones. For Paz, these “crucial moments of authenticity” can be clearly seen in the Mexican Revolution, “a sudden immersion of Mexico in her own being, from which she brought back up, almost blindly, the essentials of a new kind of state.” Furthermore, the Revolution was

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[…] an explosion of reality: a return and a communion, an upsetting of old institutions, a releasing of many ferocious, tender, and noble feelings that have been hidden by our fear of being. And with whom does Mexico commune in this bloody fiesta? With herself, with her own being. Mexico dares to exist, to be (Paz 1985: 377).

Thus, both Simmel and Paz view form as a central but also an ephemeral structure, “a central idea from which spiritual movements originate and towards which they seem to be oriented” (Simmel 1971: 378) – a notion that can’t help but bring to mind Foucault’s idea of historical phases or forms as constituting “regimes of truth.” Each new regime fi lls social and cultural forms with initial contents gathered around a central idea, that change gradually as life relentlessly leapfrogs its way forward: In every single epoch the central idea resides wherever the most perfect being, the most absolute and metaphysical phase of reality join with the highest values, with the most absolute demands on ourselves and on the world […]. For Greek classicism it was the idea of being, of the uniform, the substantial, the divine […]. The Christian Middle Ages placed in its stead the concept of God as at once the source and goal of all reality […]. Since the Renaissance, this place has come to be occupied gradually by the concept of nature. It appeared as the only being and truth, yet also an ideal, as something that fi rst had to be represented and insisted upon. At first this occurred among artists, for whom the final kernel of reality embodied the highest value (Simmel 1971: 378).

Inevitably, for both Paz and Simmel as good Nietzscheans, the tragic conflict arising out of the ongoing opposition between form and spirit comes to a head in the life and work of the creative artist. Thus we are not surprised to find Simmel treating Van Gogh as a man who found a way to transcend the restrictive cultural and artistic forms of his day, or to hear that for Paz it is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s tragic life that represents the creative act as “the struggle for self identity.” In The Labyrinth, however, and in the Simmel pieces that we are here positing as its precursors and even progenitors, the accent is less on the Promethean figure of the artist as form-breaker and form-maker, and more on the seeming coldness and solidity of the cultural edifices that s/he finds ranged against him/her. Simmel notes, for instance, how The closed system aims to unite all truths, in their more general concepts, into a structure of higher and lower elements which extend from a basic theme, arranged symmetrically and balanced in all directions. The decisive point is that it sees the proof of its substantive validity in the architectural and aesthetic completion, in the successful closure and solidity of its edifice (Simmel 1971: 387).

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One immediately thinks after reading those words, of the Mexican preHispanic pyramid, used in The Labyrinth as a metaphor for form. And yet whereas in this particular piece Simmel is trying to evoke not the perpetual incipience of revolution but rather the seeming imperturbableness of the cultural form – so too, Paz’s pyramid has its higher and lower elements, is arranged symmetrically, and is balanced in all directions – for Paz the pyramid’s very shape seems to bespeak a hope of some avant garde artistic idea that will lead to new and more organic, less rigidly form-like, social structures. One could choose to think of the erotic life as a free-flowing river, and hence as not merely informal but anti-formal. Simmel and Paz are as one, though, in their understanding that it is in the realm of Eros where cultural forms and social taboos have left one of their deepest imprints in society. In keeping with our usual pattern, let us listen to Simmel first: A systematic critique of existing sexual relationships has been named “the new morality.” It is propagated by a small group, but its aims are shared by a large one. Its criticism is directed mainly against two elements of the contemporary scene: marriage and prostitution. Its basic theme can be expressed as follows: the most personal and intimate meaning of erotic life is destroyed by the forms in which our culture has reified and trapped it. Marriage, which is entered into for a thousand non-erotic reasons, is destroyed from within by a thousand unyielding traditions and legalized cruelties; where it is not wrecked, it loses all individually and leads to stagnation. Prostitution has almost turned into a legal institution which forces the erotic life of young people into a dishonorable direction which contradicts and caricatures its inner-most nature. Marriage and prostitution alike appear as oppressive forms which thwart immediate genuine life. Under different cultural circumstances, these forms may not have been so inappropriate [...]. We can see here how large a shadow falls between the will to destroy old forms and the desire to build new ones (Simmel 1971: 388).

In his appendix to The Labyrinth, Paz proposes that pure eroticism or pure love “is almost an inaccessible experience” because “everything is against it: morals, classes, laws, races, and the very lovers themselves.” He points out that When we reach out to touch her, we cannot even touch unthinking flesh, because this docile, servile vision of a surrendering body always intrude […]. Society denies the nature of love by conceiving it as a stable union whose purpose is to beget and raise children. It identifies it, that is, with marriage, the severity of the punishment depending on the time and place […]. The stability of the family depends upon marriage, which becomes a mere protection for society with no other object but the reproduction of that same society […]. As a result of this protection afforded to marriage, love is persecuted and prostitution is either tolerated or given official blessing (Paz 1985: 197).

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Can we dismiss the intense similarity of these two viewpoints as “mere coincidence”? To do so, we would also need to extend the reach of coincidence to another aspect of these men’s sociological meditations: the relevance of the religious life. According to Simmel, The forms which objectify and direct religious feeling are felt to be inadequate for contemporary life […]. The most decisive instance of this development – even though it may be full of contradictions and be eternally separated from its objective – is a tendency for forms of religious beliefs to dissolve into modes of religious life, into religiosity as a purely functional justification of religion […]. In the ultimate state of affairs towards which this new tendency is aiming, religion would function as a medium for the direct expression of life (Simmel 1971: 389, 390).

Such a passage brings to mind Paz’s own deep understanding that the seemingly extensive realm covered by the term “secular” is often only skindeep. He stresses in The Labyrinth, for instance, that merely imposed, strictly ideological forms such as the Reforma, are all too likely to be blown away by the wind, because they are not deeply rooted in the religious life of the people. Like Simmel and Simmel’s friend Max Weber, Paz knew that even if large numbers of people think that the supernatural objects of religious belief have been radically excised, the religious impulse has in fact by no means been eliminated. He was well aware that the “space of life,” which seemingly is fi lled to overflowing with those strictly secular contents, known as action, thought, and feeling, is above all permeated with “that unique tension and peace, danger and consecration, which can only be called religious” (Simmel 1971: 391).

V. Conclusion: Mapping Pazian Sociolog y It has been suggested here that what one encounters, when reading “The Conflict in Modern Culture” is not just a superbly original piece of work but also the basic sociological/philosophical framework, the method, which Octavio Paz commandeered so as to bring continuity and structure to his Labyrinth. Needless to say, those who tell us that they have detected other seminal influences within The Labyrinth are by no means deceived. Paz’s alienation, for instance, can be traced back not just to Simmel, but also to Durkheim and even to Weber’s “iron cage.” But not to Freud, for in the late Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, human liberation and civilization are opposed categories that provoke discontent and frustration when they are brought together, whereas the “authentic” form that Paz is always in search of is de facto unitary. Thus, much as I respect Enrico Mario Santí’s analysis of The Labyrinth, I do feel it leans unduly on the Freudian categories, since any use of Freudian analysis by Paz can be understood as being only a single element within the all-embracing Simmelian Sociology of Forms. Another

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problematic aspect of Santí’s analysis in “El Sueño Compartido” is that he tends to contrive new divisions or categories, as opposed to attempting incorporations; for example, he puts myth into an altogether different category from historical form and from such social types as the Pachuco. They are all forms, and they all come together to give The Labyrinth its original structure and its theoretical coherence. To return to the fact of the widespread discernible influences on The Labyrinth, it is important to underline that one also can find the concepts of open and closed forms, and of the rhythm of life in Bergson, the evolution and decay of cultural forms in Toynbee, and the importance of the religious feeling in such disciples of Durkheim as his nephew Marcel Mauss, and in others like Levy-Bruhl and, especially for Paz, Caillois. And yet none of those thinkers brought together, as Simmel did in The Conflict of Modern Culture, all of these dispersed elements into a coherent whole, and above all into a methodology that Paz could then use to analyze the intersection of nationalism and modernity in Mexico. None of this is meant to imply, however, that Paz’s relationship to Simmel, in writing The Labyrinth, was merely one of discipleship. Yes, Paz relied on Simmel, but he did so only in his own characteristically eclectic fashion. Nor do I mean to deny for a moment the value of the contributions made by Enrico Santi and others, for within The Labyrinth’s Simmelian walls we do find Paz employing Freudian analysis to substantiate his ruminations on Mexican forms, drawing upon many elements of Durkheim’s theory, and so on. And while The Labyrinth can be deemed one of the few successful examples – and certainly one of the most famous – of the application of the Simmelian method to a specific case – that of Mexican national identity – its classification within the wide discipline of sociology remains no easy task. Perhaps we do best to think of The Labyrinth less as an example of formal sociology and more as being situated within that field that was emerging at the time of its writing: the Sociology of Knowledge. This field, first developed by Simmel’s student Karl Mannheim, sought to bring together psychology, history, and phenomenology’s emphasis on mental phenomena, to create an original method to be used in the study of immaterial, intellectual/ spiritualistic realities. To fully untangle this fascinating relationship between The Labyrinth and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge would require far more time and space that is available to me here. I do however wish to mention two hopeful-looking avenues of research in this regard. The first vital difference I am thinking of here, between the Pazian and the Simmelian visions of sociology, is that the latter largely confines the sociologist to identifying and classifying the various forms of social interaction. In other words, it is for the most part non-evaluative. In this respect it is different from sociology as energetically and imaginatively engaged in by Paz and Mannheim. Their shared goal is to evaluate the systematic totality of ideas in order to derive the “spirit of the epoch” and to look for a way to transcend the intellectual crisis that modernity has imposed upon men. Second, both Mannheim

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and Paz differ from Simmel by dint of their keen interest in the functional relationship between ideas and the broader social setting. For Mannheim, sociology is “a discipline which explores the functional dependence of each intellectual standpoint on the differentiated social/group reality standing behind it, and which sets itself the task of retracing the evolution of the various standpoints” (Ritzer/Goodman 2004: 364). Surely this is precisely the kind of functionalism we encounter in The Labyrinth, a place where Paz traces the threads of all ideas – and indeed of knowledge in general – back to the social worlds from which they have emerged, be those cultural realities or historical epochs. It is true that one can easily point to a functionalist element in Simmel’s work as well. Santi has been correct, though, to sense that the functionalism of The Labyrinth is less Simmelian than of such disciples of Durkheim as Mauss and Caillois. Paz follows Durkheim’s insight into the central role played by supposedly “pathological” traits in society that block a stable and healthy functioning of the social life, as we can see in the almost deviant social types he develops in The Labyrinth, such as the Pachuco, the Macho, and the Suffering Mexican Woman, among others. This connection also reminds us that other key Durkheimian concepts such as anomie and solidarity need more attention for a complete understanding of Paz’s sociology. And of course, without this active presence of the Durkheimian elements – the latter being inserted by Santi into his category “the sociology of the sacred” – we could never admire as we do Paz’s depictions in The Labyrinth of the conflict between ideology and religion, or his deep understanding of the important role played by “religious feeling” in the ongoing construction of Mexican national identity. It could be said that Paz uses the theories of the Durkheim school much as he uses those of Freud: to draw distinctions between form and content – in the latter case the “sacred” content latent within the Mexican mythical and historical forms. All of which brings us back to Simmel by another road, however. For whereas Durkheim, Freud and other theorists helped Paz in amplifying and diversifying the scope of his analysis, it can only have been the example of the Simmelian method and style that led Paz to build the actual walls of The Labyrinth so well that they are still standing today, almost 60 years after their creation.

Bibliography Paz, Octavio (1985): The Labyrinth of Solitude. Translated by I. Kemp, Y. Milos, and R. P. Belash, New York: Grove Press. Paz, Octavio (31997): El Laberinto de la Soledad: El Laberinto de la Soledad. Edited by E. M. Santí, Madrid: Cátedra. Paz, Octavio (1997a): “Respuesta y Algo Mas.” In: Paz 1997, pp. 563-571.

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Paz, Octavio (2000): El Laberinto de la Soledad. Volumes I and II. Edición Conmemorativa 50 Aniversario, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ritzer, G. and Goodman, D. J. (42004): Classical Sociological Theory, Boston/ New York: McGraw Hill. Simmel, Georg (1971): On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited and with an introduction by Donald Levine, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Wolff, Kurth (1950): The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Kurth Wolff, New York/London: The Free Press.

Luz inteligente: The Anthropological Dimension in Octavio Paz’s First Essays 1 Liliana Weinberg

No es la luz de Plotino, es luz terrestre, Luz de aquí, pero es luz inteligente. Octavio Paz, Cuarteto It is not the light of Plotinius, it is terrestial light, Light of here, but it is intelligent light. Octavio Paz, Cuarteto/Quartet

“Luz inteligente”: infinite light, forced to limit itself in its manifestation when it touches the world of men. In this way, and paradoxically, at the same time its outreaches are limited by Earth and are amplified in the sensory dimension. This tension that evokes discovery of the excision between individual and world, the tearing apart of the lucid man before the totally lost sense at the same time that the effort to bring it back and reinvent it through the spoken word, in an illumination now condemned to be incomplete although intelligent, is, in my opinion, the great subject of Octavio Paz. It is a subject which, by the way, gives his essay an anthropological dimension that has been missed by many of his readers, and particularly, by his critics. The exquisite sensibility and the acute intuition that Paz had regarding preColumbian past and the densely rich cultural inheritance that lies beneath today’s world, as well as his interest in embarking on an archaeology of contemporary culture and enquiring on the loss of a communal sensibility, together with his early discovery of phenomena, previously studied by anthropology and history, of religions as the feast or symbol, allowed him to broaden the restricted concept of history and apply it to the revision not only of the great stages of Mexican culture, but also various artistic and literary phenomena. 1 | First published in: Héctor Jaimes (ed.) (2004), La dimensión estética del ensayo, Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Translation by Ana Laura Magis Weinberg. All translations from Paz’s works, unless otherwise stated, are mine. A.L.W.

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The same occurs with the concepts of analogy, participation, and qualification that Paz applies to the study of poetry and the relationship between the artist and his community. Although to some critics, fiesta, myth, revolution and eroticism constitute key points where Paz, a critic of linear and progressive theories of history, was to discover both the junction, and the suspension inherent in cyclical or circular temporality, though without needing to resort to a concept of collective time. There is much more to these phenomena than are apparent from a superficial glossing-over, for they also represent his interest in mapping out the point of rupture between nature and culture2, individual experience and community sense, and the proposing of a new interpretation of language and word. Simply put: from my perspective, Octavio Paz’s essay will always be linked to the profound examination of the great fiends of sense, among which it is possible to distinguish: in the first place, the recovery of the significant presence of Pre-Hispanic Mexico and the discovery of a long-term reality, corresponding to the dimension of culture, which lies under the events of the traditional historical order; secondly, reinterpretation as an experience both aesthetical and ethnographical of contemporary art and literature. In the third place, the gradually more radical exploration of zones of language and meaning which fascinated him as a creator and as a critic: word and sense. The style of Paz’s essay itself – that designs his path across antithesis and paradoxes while at the same time displays an infinite succession of circle and line between them – an interpretative spiral sustained by the model of the “ritual”, is linked with poetical creation and anthropological thinking at the same time. Interpreting the world and recreating the self’s position in that world throughout writing implies in the first place to provide experience with meaning, to keep in all its intensity in its character of act and presence, and at the same time put it in relation with the diverse dimensions of meaning. Extracting the anthropological element of Octavio Paz’s thought and writings, as with cutting out the ethnographic element in Surrealism, would amount to a great impoverishment in the comprehending his work. The following reading of Octavio Paz’s essays will devote itself to this aspect which his critics have not yet taken sufficiently into account: its anthropological dimension.3 And I am not referring only to the explicit treatment of subjects 2 | I chose to use the terms “nature and culture” rather than the more popular and musical “nature and nurture” partly because I do not fi nd the sound appealing, but also and more importantly because I find the term “nurture” not to be precise enough. After all, this text is not about an individual’s upbringing but about a community’s traditions and history; namely, a community’s culture. Ana Laura Magis Weinberg 3 | One of the few critics who mentions, very early by the way, this theme is Echevarría 1985. The author himself refers in a very synthesized way to the influence of anthropology in our essay tradition in Echevarría 2000. “In the twenties in Latin America began a whole essay tradition around cultural identity with a profound influence of anthropology, that lasted up to the fifties, roughly from Mariátegui to

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or authors linked to the anthropological field in texts such as El laberinto de la soledad (1950) or Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo (1967) nor exclusively to the discussion about specific subjects such as the presence of myth and its relationship with history, but also, and above all, to the new look of ethnographic nature that Paz – with his admirable sensibility for the great subjects and problems of our time, along with his interest for exploring and providing meaning to the most diverse experiences and cultures – was able to build. The reference to certain categories from Anthropology, most noticeably that of “participation”, “symbol”, and “ritual”, allow us to better understand the dynamics of the oppositional links which characterize the essay of this singular, and great Mexican author. It is the intent of the present chapter to attempt to track down some of the sources of the anthropological orientation of Paz’s work and its relation to the preoccupations of other artists and thinkers, and very particularly with the ideas of “ethnological Surrealism” under the category of “participation”.

First Discoveries: Essay and Ethnography In his youth, Octavio Paz’s own life experience, sensitive, brilliant, in all ways exemplary, puts him beyond those limiting periods which he will later evoke through reconstruction. His first intuition which is of an irreversible excision between the world and human language (between the blind security of material things and the fragile lucidity of men), and will return, with variations and enrichments, once and again to his work, at the same time it will give a characteristic tonality to his essay, until achieving even an important section in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The search for the present”4 , and in a no less prodigious text, “The house of the presence” (La casa de la presencia, Paz 1994), that opens as a prologue the first volume of his Obras Completas (Complete Works). The young Paz will discover solitude and loneliness at the same time that he discovers Pre-Ccolumbian culture and the communion of Art. He finds lurking, in the white tablecloth of the family home, the scent of gunpowder. He receives, throughout his visit to the Mayan archaeological site – the same one where he reflects about the juego de pelota, or Pre-Hispanic ball game, a telegram inviting him to travel to an antifascist writers’ congress in Republican Spain, thus vertiginously integrating himself into the bustling outside contemporary world. He hungrily reads the great foundational poetry of our century at the same time that he discovers the margins of the official historic records, symbols, gestures, customs, rituals – that both enlighten and alert him to an alternate world of the senses. He discovers the maladjustments between a complex and excluding reality within the liberal, Paz and Fernández Retamar. Some of these writers, Paz, for example, wrote about anthropology, as shows his Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo” (215, n. 25). 4 | Speech given in Stockholm on December 8, 1990.

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optimistic language of his elders. He finds, in the margins of a narrative supported by history as a mellifluous march – indefatigable and linear – of human progress, the plurality of human experience, poetry and art. Revolution and revolt, eroticism and death: the abyss and salvation through an aesthetical experience that has the profound realization of an experience with the sacred. Even at this early stage, Paz concerned himself with proving that the linking mechanism between man and those diverse fields is an authentic and potent experience, one that is radically significant in an interpretative exercise, accentuating participation between man and the world which is located, therefore, much more closely to the unearthing – the recovery and the ritual, the act and the presence – than to the cold or impassive gaze. If at the first, Paz has a manifestly profound affinity with the preoccupations of ethnographic French thought, particularly with those subjects such as heroes, the mythic and the sacred, later on his thought will also orient itself toward, in a gradually more comprehensive way, problems which will bring him closer to the reflections on contemporary anthropology and philosophy such as nature/culture intimacy, art, and the aesthetic experiencing of light on the horizon of sense, in addition to another series of questions that reveal his thought branching towards zones neighbouring on the reflections of Lévi-Strauss, the linguistic philosophers (Peirce, Russell, Wittgenstein), Heidegger, and Castoriadis. Eventually, the mature writer bequeaths us his creative and reflective legacy, woven in a basic interpretative matrix and writing style that owe much – as I hope to prove – to the findings of ethnographic thought while at the same time contributing much to its complexity and richness, a series of intuitions and radical inquiries into the nature of language, culture, imagination, sense, liberty, and of course the obligatory reference to the PreHispanic world; to his broken symbols, to those ruins in which contemporary man, maker of himself, will have to ask new questions about sense and meaning. In his preoccupations, the mature Paz could be qualified as promethean obsessive over the becoming of man between necessity and freedom. Prometheus, as reinterpreted by Castoriadis and Paz, is not a thief who steals wisdom from the gods, but man teaching himself how to be human, who creates himself; and in that rupture – crucial when regarding the mythical horizon which implies at the same time immersion in a world of freedom – in an anxiety-laden, although ever-creative and significant relationship between nature and culture, as has been shown by Lévi-Strauss.

Opening Enquiries Even from his earliest essays Paz established a fundamental intuition that accompanied him throughout all his work, writing in 1953: “We are, forever, the universe’s unhappy” (Paz 1999: 137ff ). There the intuition of a fracture,

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of a distance – of a radical dis-encounter between man and world, even between human beings in general – is presented; attracted by fusing himself unconsciously with everything, sinking into “the flow of things”, at the same time a witness to the excision between man and words, critically distanced and condemned to the knowledge that […] man’s destiny is not that, but another, terrible finding: to know, to penetrate. And to make things clear and easy, even despite of his riches and truth [...]. And only poetry, dark and sudden, hurts the universe and does so in its secret; in the underground darkness, in its light of over-sky, in its divination or seeing, the world gives us its shapes and what breaths behind them. But, is not Poetry a passionate, heroic dissolution of men in the world? Is not Poetry the most profound way of ignoring? (Paz 1999: 64)

The idea of an excision between men and world, as well as the attempts to repair the cut, finds its first radical expression in Romanticism, resurfacing at the end of the 19th century in the great founders of contemporary poetry, philosophy, the phenomenologists of religion and anthropologists; all devoted to the study of the ritual and the sacred. The idea of “participation”, posed explicitly for the first time by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1945) – even though the French scholar himself has been criticized for setting down his theory of a “primitive mentality” different from that of modern man – results, from my point of view, in a category which is fundamental to understand, not only for some profound analogical vinculation processes between spheres of reality which Paz postulates as well, but also the background of the metaphorical operation itself, which aids one in understanding his preoccupation with the individual’s link to particular communal experiences such as the ritual and the feast. For their part, Hubert and Mauss, in their study of the cyclical calendar and the festivity, had come to hear of some basic findings regarding the authentic character and representation of time in religion and magic, as well as its link to social practice (Hubert/Mauss 1909). Let us remember that Paz makes explicit mention of Mauss, LévyBruhl, Caillois, Lévi-Strauss, along with other important representatives of French ethnological thought in essays such as El arco y la lira, and will also evoke names such as Paul Rivet’s in his Itinerario (Paz 1993). Paz’s first intuitions join with these initial preoccupations of French ethnology, and will have a greater influence on his development than the North American anthropological works (no doubt, when Paz read Campbell, Frazer, and, very probably, other great cultural scholars), whose writings were dispersed throughout Latin America thanks to the pioneer translations published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. We cannot forget that Paz’s work establishes an implicit dialogue with the great debates among Mexican scholars of that era – in this case particularly with Alfonso Reyes, who maintained a profound preoccupation for the reconstruction of History and

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the reformulation of the concept of culture.5 When studying the origins of thought, Alfonso Reyes had formulated a basic theory out of the Greek criticism where the excision word from world was first promulgated: that primal form of communion between name and what is named is broken; from then on the human being will become poorer but at the same time richer: he will lose the innocence that granted his total integration into the world but will win the poisoned chalice of knowledge, that is – the possibility of naming new worlds: “the word goes looking for the word”6. Thus, Paz’s first great interpretative matrix, announced in his first writings, and very particularly in Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión, and formalized in his great first two essays, El laberinto de la soledad and El arco y la lira, will be nourished with his own readings and position regarding the great contemporary poets, the ground-breaking studies of religion and festivity, and with his illuminated discovery of the Pre-Hispanical world and his implicit dialogue with a reflective line headed by Alfonso Reyes. In this last aspect, Paz’s interpretation implies a new formulation in the relationship between History and meaning, in that he will take a critical position regarding a linear, progressive, culturalistic, and universalistic reading of History similar to that of Reyes’. On the other hand, instead of emphasizing the possibility of constructing a continuous historical-cultural discourse, Paz will turn his attention towards components such as “rupture” with historical time, the recuperation of the act, the authentic experience, and the “participation” of the community of meaning through poetical, political, and religious acts, and will incorporate two stages and zones of sense which did not bear any significance of their own within the discourse of other contemporary intellectuals: the Pre-Hispanic world and the Mexican Revolution. This wound or schism can have, for some, a profound biographical and existential foundation; at the other end, for some critics Paz’s vocation for the myth has some ideological underlying7. We should add to the discussion two fundamental ingredients: on the one hand, Paz’s acute awareness of the 5 | In her still unpublished doctoral thesis, “La isla encantada: Utopía y teoría en Alfonso Reyes”, La Habana, 1998, Cuban scholar Teresa Delgado Molina shows the importance that the integration of the historical dimension and the reading of certain authors of the culturalist line had in Reyes’ work. His admiration of Toynbee, for example, allows Reyes to add a new historical vision in order to understand reality. The same can be said of the early examination that Paz makes of some authors directly or indirectly linked to anthropology in his effort to start a criticism of culture. 6 | Years later, and regarding modern poetry, Paz will write: “Destruction of words and meanings, Kingdom of silence; but, at the same time, word in search of Word” (Paz 1967: 7). Paz also says in 1967: “Alfonso Reyes spoke of the human and divine (although more of the former) with grace and luminous penetration - he spoke of everything, from Goethe to Licophron, except the near and the local. He was a great critic that never ventured a judgement of his time” (Paz 1993a: 289). 7 | Thus, for example Mora 1978, refers to an “idealistic nihilism”, for whose comprehension Nietzsche’s philosophy would be imperative.

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Pre-Columbian past as an invisible reality traceable through to the present; and on the other, his preoccupation with contemporary man’s own schism, a rupture to be overcome through great striving, by authentic experience. This fundamental intuition has its basis in an experience that has many times returned Paz to the earliest memories of his childhood: a boy who finds himself apart, isolated, in the midst of the main room of the house where the gathered family ignores his first anguished solitude. This first memory is articulated with a first intuition: that of the living rupture experienced by our society, the loss of communal sense and the rarity of opportunities for our meeting and communion. The image of the tearing apart between man and world has, in my opinion, two main sources. On one hand, Paz’s own situation of existential isolation, whose footprints go back to his earliest memories. On the other, the penetrating certainty that the contemporary world hides, as the surface of an archaeological site, a broken universe – torn, but still open to exploration; which is necessary in order to reintegrate into the light of a horizon of sense. We should evoke here a wonderful poem of Paz’s entitled “El cántaro roto”.

Poetr y and My tholog y (1942) In 1942 while in Oaxaca, Octavio Paz dedicated two talks to “Poesía y mitología” (Paz 1999c: 215-233). In them he refers to poetry as a creative myth and insists in the necessity for myths and creative imagination in modern man as they allow him to satiate the human need to access an authenticated experience and participate in the universal order. As a main source for his reflexions, he quotes Roger Caillois in his book L'homme et le sacré, the translation of which he had access through the Argentinean publication Sur (Caillois 1939). Fortunately the texts of both presentations are still available. There we can read: I want to refer to purely imaginative literature, fruit of that fabulation necessity that generates myth, and that does not pretend to moralize or teach, or lecture, or, even, surprise with pure beauty, but that turns to satiate our thirst for fables, spreading, and in a way, inhibiting us and mythologizing our own life. This literature is the myth creator: the poetical imagination. Myths, truth be told, incomplete, because they are missing ritual, dance, action; that is, the people’s active participation [...]. But the powers of the creative imagination [...] have grown [...]. Deprived of rite and action, of the atmospheric magic of the festivity, modern myths are, despite everything, capable of catching on the reader, influencing his life, responding to his most secret demands and, for better or for worse, satiating his sacred necessity of action and sin, of triumph and of death, of purification and exaltation, of life therefore (Paz 1999c: 220).

There appear, as well, several of Paz’s great themes, such as the value of poetical imagination, able in our time to substitute “theology and proper religious construction” (Paz 1999c: 222). And the question of community

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is now outlined, linked, in the following quotation, to the characteristics of Fiesta, which Paz qualifies through adjectives that show his readings of the French scholars, such as “terrible” and “ineffable”: Never, like in that tragic festivity [referring to Crucifi xion], has the myth incarnated with such reality and with a truthfulness that no comparable myth has ever known. In the mystery of mass, for centuries the world has attended, participating actively and dramatically through the communion, a terrible, ineffable feast (Paz 1999c: 223).

He also refers to another fundamental theme: the coexistence of overlapping temporalities in modern Mexico: Coexistence, in Mexico, of diverse historical times, at the same time than a rich racial variety. Because I think that it is culture and not race that defines men, I think that the indígena question, from literature’s point of view, does not have a decisive importance. However, “indígena culture” does have it […]; if we get out of the city and go to the towns, we fi nd ourselves not in another country or another race, but in another time (Paz 1999c: 229).

Finally, in a brief mention of the close relationship between the poet and his time, Paz says: the poet […] cannot renounce his time. Nobody can renounce their culture, the spirit of their time. How close one’s eyes, for example, to the supra-realist movement or the contemporary novel…? Yet, on the other hand, one cannot close one’s eyes to the people, because what this is all about, is expressing this people (Paz 1999c: 231).

And he proposes a programme for Mexican literature: Not so much the imitation of an irregular and broken reality, but the invention, better yet the creation, of that reality […]. Let us not make an art in Mexico’s likeness, but an art that, answering to the secret demands of reality – to its obscure conflicts – forces it not to deform in the inherence but to mould itself according to the highest and, even better, to the most original and authentic. Why where so many have failed should poetry not triumph, revealing the secret of Mexico, showing the truth of its destiny and purifying that destiny? (Paz 1999c: 133)

A year later, in 1943, Paz published in the Novedades newspaper “El auge de la mentira”, where he said, among other things, What have Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl done but to take from the primitive myths, not to deny them like simple lies but to explain to themselves the archaic soul and society? The imagination serves man to express reality, not to corrupt it or mutilate it (Paz 1999: 356).

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I have mentioned a series of elements that, put into a dialogue with young Paz’s poetical writings, will allow us to better understand the way that the original “matrix” of how his thought was conformed, which will begin to manifest itself, as we will come to see immediately, in his first great essay, Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión.

Solitude and Communion, Structure and Communitas (1943) Paz’s fi rst fundamental intuition, that of the rupture between man and world, where words translate as the banishment of meaning, 8 also forms the background of Poesía de soledad y poesía de communion, as is announced in the title itself.9 This text, although an early one, is no less decisive; collected a few years later in a book by the author, it contains as a seed many themes which later on, would germinate and bear fruit. In fact, it is here that El arco y la lira and El laberinto de la soledad are foreshadowed. On the other hand, in this youthful essay we can already hear the pronounced inflections of the mature Paz’s interpretative style: to trace dynamics given by pairs of opposites, identify phenomena that surpass, enrich and grant us a precipitous view of modern man: magic, religion, love, death instinct. His reflection on the archaic society, and the necessary question: […] poetic operation: is this a magical or religious activity? […] poetry is irreducible to any other experience. And it is clear that poetry as an achieved fruit, as a poem, is not religion, nor magic. But the spirit that expresses it, the means that it uses and the instinctive root that originates it could well be either magical or religious […] the lyrical poet establishes a dialogue with the world; in this dialogue there are two extreme situations, within which the soul of the poet moves: one of solitude, another of communion. The poet comes from solitude moved by desire towards communion. He always tries to commingle, join, “rejoin” with his object: his own soul, his beloved, God, nature (Paz 1999: 236).

Poetry is in this way an experience irreducible to any other, although linked to a profound magical or religious root, as there does exist a profound involvement; a dialogue between the poet and the world that allows for the transformation of solitude into communion. The preoccupation with the separation, to which modern man lives condemned and the tiring search of a communion through diverse rituals 8 | As said by himself in “El trabajo vacío”: “Banished from Heaven and Hell to Earth, the only paradise offered to our voracity has lost all its seduction. If before one renounced Earth for Heaven […] now we are torn enjoyers, skeptic sufferers” (Paz 1999: 179). 9 | This essay was originally published in El Hijo Pródigo, number 5, August 5, 1943, pp. 271-278, and was later collected in Paz 1999: 234-245.

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that facilitate the overcoming of individual isolation, reminds us of the great anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1969) reflections regarding the function that rite has as a passage between structure and communitas. The coincidences between this essay by Paz and certain characteristics of the rite cited by Victor Turner are notable, and at the same time inspired in the observation of its important precursor: Van Gennep has shown that all rites of passage or “transition” are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying “threshold” in Latin), and aggregation. The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fi xed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a “state”), or from both. During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated (Turner 1969: 94-95).

In his “correction” to the vision of Reyes’ own culture, Paz prefers to adopt a position of “liminality”, giver of meaing that will allow him to make a series of interpretative transitions in the social and cultural field. Paz situates himself on the threshold that allows him to transit a “moment in and out of time”, “in and out” of social structure, and, as he makes explicit in Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión, oppose two “models of human interaction”, which Turner classically names “structure” and “communitas” and defines thus: The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economical positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or “less”. The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated. Comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders […]. The distinction between structure and communitas is not simply the familiar one […]. This is not simply […] a matter of giving a general stamp of legitimacy to a society’s structural positions. It is rather a matter of giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society (ibid. 96-97).

If we string these reflections, we will find contact points as unyielding as this one, in Turner’s words that could well be applied to Paz’s reflective mode: […] for individuals and groups, social life is a kind of dialectical process that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality. The passage from lower to higher status is through a limbo of statuslessness. In such a process, the opposites, as it were, constitute one another and are mutually indispensable (ibid. 97).

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This drives us to a fundamental question, linked to the thought and dynamic style that makes up Paz’s essays. The peculiar way of determination of pairs of opposites, characteristic of the Mexican author, finds its deepest explanation in phenomena linked to the rite, as the existence of pairs that at the same time come into opposition, share common traits, such as “integrating of each other”, “mutually indispensable” that live in a peculiar dialectic that is actualized as a ritual process. The same happens with paradox, a figure beloved of Paz, and also interpreted by Turner in the light of a complex ritual through which it reactualizes and scenifies the dangerous tension between opposite pairs. Not less illuminating do Turner’s reflections about the same ritual symbols result: “Such symbols exhibit the properties of condensation, unification of disparate referents, and polarization of meaning” (ibid. 52). The mere terms “solitude” and “communion” are the fruit of a meaningful process that shares the characteristics mentioned by Turner. This basic dynamic will return in the fi rst lines of El arco y la lira, where we will discover how these condensations, unifications, and polarizations appear in the midst of a complex semantic field that restructures time itself. But Paz’s style, which makes of the essay form an “esthetical ritual”, had originated as well in intuitions belonging to these poetic endeavours. In his study on Yeats’ essay, to which I will return further on, Charles O’Neill (1989) remembers, among others, the following passage from “Magic”: “Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the sounds of the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by?” (O’Neill 1989: 127), and he comments, later on in the following: Kenneth Burke, in Counter-Statement, writes that “if the artist's ‘revelations’ are of tremendous importance to him, he will necessarily seek to ritualize them, to find a correspondingly important setting for them” [...]. In the nineteen essays of Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats attempts to “ritualize”, through complex patterns syntax and symbol, the “revelation” of the new age he anticipated. According to Burke, “Revelation is ‘belief,’ or ‘fact.’ Art enters when this revelation is ritualized, when it is converted into a symbolic process” [...]. The early essays of Yeats are works of art: while announcing the “revelation” of a new age, they also, by means of evocative symbol and complexly cadenced prose, deliver that “revelation” in “ritual” (O’Neill 1989: 127).

Also for Paz the poet undertakes a secret ritual, a threshold experience, an act at the same time recuperating and conferring meaning: “The poet remembers; and by remembering, announces”; “The poet descends, and by descending, is dis-born. And is born, again, phoenix of the blood. He almost reaches the unknown frontiers of life and death, and they don’t exist! […]. He has seen the kingdom; participates with life and death […]!” (See Paz 1999a: 180)

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About Ethnographic Surrealism Before introducing ourselves to Paz’s first major essays, we will make a stop in the way to recover the much overlooked link between Surrealism and ethnography, which is fundamental in order to understand the author’s work. Regarding this, a text published in 1981 by James Clifford, “About ethnographic Surrealism” (here Clifford 1988), becomes invaluable. In this work Clifford proves in a convincing and well documented way the relationship between French ethnography and Surrealism in the 1920s and the fundamental role that Marcel Mauss had in the convergence of both movements. The First Surrealist Manifest sees the light of day around the same time that Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl founded the Institute of Ethnology (1925). In the light of Clifford’s examination there appear names closely linked with Paz’s thought, as well as Bataille, who worried about the relationship between rule and transgression in the cultural order, who is an author, as Métraux and Rivet, of essays prepared for the presentation of a collection of Pre-Columbian art in Paris which reflected on the conception of death among the Aztecs. Antonin Artaud makes an appearance as well, also being linked to the study of interdiction logic and collective order, who as is well known, later traveled to Mexico. Among the many and prestigious names associated with the foundation of the Museum of Men in Paris there was Paul Rivet (in whose house, let us note, Paz himself would be lodging for some time), Métraux, Leroi-Gourhan, Leenhardt, Griaule, Leiris, or Soustelle (also quoted by Paz in a study about Coatlicue): Clifford explains that for “most of these scholars the connection between art and ethnography was crucial” (Clifford 1988: 138). To these elements should be added, last but not least, one final fundamental ingredient: the studies from the teachings of Durkheim and Mauss regarding the sacred, would be carried out by Bataille, Leiris, Caillois, and other intellectual disciples of Mauss, founders of the Collège de Sociologie: Like the author of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the founders of the Collège were preoccupied with those ritual moments when experiences outside the normal flow of existence can find collective expression, moments when cultural order is both transgressed and rejuvenated. They adopted the Durkheimian concept of the sacred in order to circumscribe this recreative domain (Clifford 1988: 141).

Here Clifford retrieves a testimony of Lévi-Strauss about Mauss: In his work, and still in his teaching, unthought-of comparisons flourish. While he is often obscure by the constant use of antithesis, shortcuts, and apparent paradoxes which later on prove to be the result of a deeper insight, he gratifies his listener, suddenly, with fulgurating intuitions, providing the substance for months of fruitful thinking. […] This constant striving toward the fundamental, this willingness to sift, over and over again, a huge mass of data until the purest

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material only remains, explains Mauss’s preference for the essay over the book, and the limited size of his published work.10

And he further comments: Lévi-Strauss’s description of the great teacher's provocative use of antithesis and paradox in the presentation of ethnographic knowledge rings true […]. Ethnographic truth for Mauss was restlessly subversive of superface realities. Its principal task was to discover, in his famous phrase, the many “lunes mortes,” pale moons in the “firmament of reason”. There is no better summary of the task of ethnographic surrealism, for the “reason” referred to is not parochial Western rationality but the full human potential for cultural expression (Clifford 1988: 128-129).

Besides these intuitions, we owe to the endeavours of “ethnographical Surrealism” the innovative interpretation of the link between norm and tradition, the description of the exotic, the paradoxical and the unusual that does not end as a mere provocation but also implies “a leveling and reclassification of familiar categories”, a lower-casing of sacred categories, such as “art” and “culture”, “a principal of the relative order in which the sublime and the vulgar were treated as symbols of equal significance” (Clifford 1988: 129), “an abandonment of the distinction between high and low culture”, that “provided both a fund of non-Western alternatives and a prevailing attitude of ironic participant observation among the hierarchies and meanings of collective life” (Clifford 1988: 130). Without taking into account the facts of this radical transformation which had begun to gestate, it cannot be understood with regard to the extensive task that young Paz sets for himself by studying expressions, usages, customs which circulate anonymously, stemming as they do from the roots of popular culture. First presented in brief, youthful essays (“Don Nadie y Ninguno”, for example), the insights gained from these early studies where to become fully articulated in El laberinto de la soledad and would in the long run, flow into such radical studies as those he dedicated to the word in works such as El signo y el garabato (1973), by reflecting upon the limits imposed between sense and nonsense. But also the study of certain key elements of Pre-Columbian art persisting in contemporary Mexico, such as the mask, the pyramid, Coatlicue, that Paz undertook in irrepressible fashion, is enriched in its meaning when we evoke the atmosphere in which French ethnography and vanguard art are invigorated at the same time the relationship among psychological archaism, mythological creation, magic, ritual, or the “unexpected combinations” between diverse fields of the natural and the cultural, such as the ones that present themselves in the zoomorphic masks or the relationship totemtaboo. It is interesting to discover the recovering and integration in his 10 | Lévi-Strauss quoted by Clifford 1988: 128.

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own works of a series of figures and phenomena that the Eurocentric gaze labelled as “exotic”, “corrosive”, even of certain “disturbing syncretisms”, subsequently thereby allowing Paz to consolidate his original critical and creative contribution. In the long run, as Clifford proves, the surrealist experiences and the inquirings of French ethnography of the time will flow into a “semiotic conception of culture” (Clifford) that can be associated, in our opinion, with the definition of culture, that much nearer to our times, will be presented by Clifford Geertz.11 With authors such as Michel Leiris there are the beginnings of a bridge outlined between ethnography and self-portrayal: Leiris proposed himself a task that would be in part that of Paz as well: “the possibility of a kind of ethnography, analytically rigorous and poetic, focused not on the other but on the self, its peculiar system of symbols, rituals, and social topographies” (Clifford 1988: 142). But particularly the works of Breton and Bataille were to be the ones most intricately linked to Paz’s preoccupations, as is shown by the reflections that he dedicates to them regarding themes central to Paz himself as the word or eroticism,12 and those other texts in which he is concerned with nature and culture, rule and interdiction, individuality and collectivity, plus many other questions that will set a bridge between Paz’s work and those of other Mexican writers.13 While the “anthropological humanism” of Mauss’ important school “starts with the different, and makes it comprehensible by naming, classifying, describing, interpreting”, the surrealist ethnographical practice “attacks the familiar, causing the eruption of otherness, the unexpected”, a “permanent ironic game of similarity and difference, of the familiar and the strange, the here and the there”, that Clifford considers characteristic of global modernity and that tells us much, for our part, of the accomplishments of a writer named Octavio Paz. 11 | For Geertz, “culture denotes a historically transmitted system of meanings represented by symbols, a system of inherited conceptions and expressed in symbolic ways by means with which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and their attitude towards life” (Geertz 2000). 12 | A good sample of Paz’s interest in Breton’s work are the essays previously published in various works of the author (Las peras del olmo, Corriente alterna, Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos) that make up the section “André Bretón y el surrealism.” In: Paz 1998: 201-230. 13 | See, for example, Ponce 1968, esp. “El arte y lo sagrado”, pp. 77-100. There he says: “Bataille makes us see that in the midst of existence, in the midst of life, there is another possibility, another road in which man breaks that discontinuity and joins – with another being and with the world – in the forgetting of himself that the possibility encourages, which is none but eroticism. Here a union with the other and with life takes place, and it takes us out of time and the discontinuity that encloses the being” (p. 94).

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Paz thus integrates, through the loose pieces that he gets to know in different stages of his development, the legacy of ethnographical Surrealism and of the early reflections of the French anthropologists and sociologists of religion on which he will put his unique stamp. Heir of that PreColumbian tradition that for Europe during this period, was still peopled by exotic inhabitants with deep Pre-Cortesian and peasant roots for whom the liberal humanist vision of Mexican history had itself marginalized, Paz would rediscover his symbolic and creative keys, taking them to their utmost significance as, keys of sense. I have mentioned a series of elements that, though unrelated in appearance, will allow us, however, to explain the original “matrix” of Paz’s thought, which manifests itself in his first great essay.

The Labyrinth, the Mask, Fiesta: The Interpretative Essay (1950) There is in El laberinto de la soledad (1950) an evident effort to discover key elements that, viewed in a transverse cut, allow for the studying of history as sense and for interpreting the dense meaning of historical facts. Through language’s certain twists and expressions, symbolical forms and the evocation of myths, human types and popular customs, Paz sees the possibilities for determining what significant keys are capable of illuminating historical processes. By intuiting the existence of a whole zone of sense that escapes rationalist reduction and of a “time” of culture that escapes the order assigned to them by liberal and positivist language, Paz proposes to explore these through an “archaeology” of feeling linked to the interpretation of certain spaces traditionally delineated by Mexican cultural studies – and most particularly of language. He thus achieves, through antithesis, metaphor, and paradox, to glimpse at how few have been available to the symbolical processes through which a society generates interpretations of itself that have an “intrahistorical” existence and which are not easily reducible to the system. Paz illustrates by using all of these strategies the time throughout culture and institutions; he discovers the sense-horizon in which these insert themselves and, through elements classified as the ritual, the fiesta, the mask, discovers articulations – those intimate links – between the secret and untranslatable experience of man and the social rules that translate and give it sense. I have dedicated myself in previous works to the extensive study of El laberinto de la soledad in order to show how in this essay Paz seeks to delve – through the interpretation of use, custom, gesture, and symbol, as well as through language, and very particularly of its limit zones that are secret language and prohibited words – into the keys of Mexican culture. Paz does not fall into psychological determinisms or overdue essentialisms,

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but he does enquire into the interpretative horizon that constitutes Mexican society. In an interview with Claude Fell regarding the composition of El laberinto de la soledad, Paz mentions many of the works he consulted: One of the axial ideas of the book is that there is a buried but living Mexico. Better yet: there is in Mexicans, men and women, a universe of buried images, desires, and impulses […]. Moral criticism is a self-revelation of what we hide and, as Freud teaches, a relative healing […]. In this sense my book wanted to be an essay of moral criticism: description of a hidden reality that hurts us. The word “critical”, in contemporary times, is inseparable from Marxism, and I suffered Marxism’s influence. In those years I read Caillois’ studies and, a bit later, Bataille’s, and the teacher of both, Mauss’, on festivity, sacrifice, gift, sacred time and profane time. I immediately found certain analogies between those descriptions and my everyday experiences as a Mexican. There were also very helpful the German philosophers that a few years ago have been made known in our language by Ortega y Gasset: phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, and the work of historians and essayists such as Dilthey and Simmel (Paz 1999d: 228-229).

Paz analyzes many secret, dark corners, inhabited by myths and symbols, by gestures; practices and interdictions that reveal, and at the same time hide, key elements of Mexican culture. Thus, for example, he rediscovers a figure of strong resonance in the popular imagery: la chingada14 , linked to La Malinche, a symbolic figure of great power and depth but that at the same time has become an insult. What is even more to the point, it is a concept deformed into a curse, capable of shining a light on underlying zones of Mexican society. So it is, that “la chingada” gathers in a blighted bouquet of meanings and signifiers and at the same time its interdiction, the appeal to the law and of its transgression; it is an insult while also being an explanation of behavior, metaphor, and symbol: La Chingada is the mother who has suffered, metaphorically or literally, the corrosive and defaming action implicit in the verb that gives it its name […]. The verb denotes violence, getting out of oneself and penetrating through force someone else’s body. And also, the hurting, tearing-apart, raping – of bodies, souls, objects –, destroying body and self hood (Paz 1999d: 69). 15

14 | The Mexican verb “chingar” has its closest translation in “fuck”, both in its explicit sexual meaning and in its violent and offensive connotation. “La chingada”, therefore, becomes “the fucked one”; that is, the woman who has been violently raped. Ana Laura Magis Weinberg. 15 | El laberinto de la soledad first appeared in 1949 under the editorial seal of Cuadernos Americanos magazine, and a year later appeared in a new revised edition published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. I follow Paz 1999d.

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Mother’s name and insult, word that designates origin while at the same time can, ambiguously, turn into a curse: In our everyday language there is a set of forbidden, secret words without a clear content, and to whose magical ambiguity we trust the expression of our most brutal or subtle expressions and reactions. Cursed words that we only pronounce out loud when we are not ourselves (Paz 1999d: 67).

And we also discover echoes of an ethnological focus in the following pairs of opposites that he proposes: “Each letter and each syllable are animated with a double life, at the same time luminous and dark, that reveals and hides” (Paz 1999d: 67). Paz’s interpretation of fiesta and mask is also fundamental, a key decision that sends him once again to the best traditions of French ethnography as personified by Mauss. As Héctor Jaimes has truthfully observed (2001) regarding the myth, the reinterpretation, and the rewriting of History that Paz undertakes in this essay, the Mexican author has contributed to showing that History “should not be written only from tangible facts, but also from the hidden ones”. Paz distances himself from the visions of history predominant in Vasconcelos or Ramos and “incites us to unveil the hidden myths inside our culture” (Paz 1999d: 128). The theme of the fiesta treated in El laberinto points to the emergence of a qualified time period, to the rupture of hierarchical order and the restoration of a communitarian order, which is based on participation. In certain festivities the notion of order itself disappears. Chaos returns and license rules. Everything is allowed: habitual hierarchies, social distinctions, sexes, classes, all the guilds disappear. Through the fiesta society is liberated of the norms that it has imposed on itself (Paz 1999d: 45-46).

I also consider as fundamental the treatment that Paz makes of Mexican masks, foreshadowing also the notable interpretation that he will make on diverse occasions of many other key manifestations of the culture and art of his country. Paz is dedicated to the mask as that highly elaborate cultural object that encloses and preserves the secret and private gesture at the same time as it transforms it and shows highly elaborate public gestures through forms sanctioned by society. The dialectic between face and mask, what is hidden and what is shown, is expressed in the idea that there are values turned into “shapes that we have not created nor suffered: masks”. In the first pages of El laberinto de la soledad we read: Undecipherable at first sight, as a sacred stone covered in incisions and signs, the old man’s mask is the history of some shapeless factions, that one day emerged confusing, extracted wakeful from an absorbed look. By virtue of that look factions became face and, later, mask, meaning, history (Paz 1999d: 12).

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Asking the mask for the meaning of a society is making an enquiry much deeper than a simple question of social psychology: it is about coming to foundational features that are found in the articulation of the relationship between nature and culture, life and death, individual and society, circumstance and permanence, instant and social temporality, rule and interdiction, comparable to that place where the constituting radical imagery which Castoriadis refers to is constructed; the foundation of a culture and its institutions. At the same time, the motive behind the mask cuts through the essay’s texture, acts as a “sufficient word” capable of integrating series of heterogeneous meanings and contributes to furnishing writing with distinct characteristics.16 Paz discovers that the mask is a complex and dense symbol, built on something pre-existent, that also goes through constant processes of settingup and cultural representation. The second chapter is dedicated explicitly to “Mexican masks”. There he says that “the Mexican appears to me as a being that encloses and preserves himself: mask the face and mask the smile […]. Everything is useful for him to defend himself: silence and word, courtesy and scorn, irony and resignation” (Paz 1999d: 32). The dual process of hiding the real face while showing the social face, of reserving the direct and showing the indirect, takes us to the sense of the symbol itself: nature and life cannot be shown directly in their nakedness and are seen as transparent, covered and at the same time exhibited by their meanings, that are but rules for signifying nakedness and nature, alluding to them without ever making them evident. The mask informs us of the presence hiding behind it; hiding the private face with a mask of sociability. The mask expresses the complexity of social significances and evokes the necessary originating link with rituals and festivities that complete its sense. Thus, it is in the festivities and ceremonies where “the Mexican opens himself to the exterior”, reveals himself and talks with the deity, “discharges his soul” (Paz 1999d: 52). Fiesta is inversion and rupture, immersion in the communitarian that allows us “to jump the wall of solitude”. The relationship between fiesta and mask is a deep one, as key in the sense of participation that is the festivity. Note the reiteration of the term in this fragment: “The fiesta is participation […], the fiesta is a social fact based on the active participation of the goers. Thanks to the fiesta the Mexican opens himself, commingles with his equals and with the values that give meaning to his religious or political existence” (Paz 1999d: 58). There is another possible link among the fiesta, the ritual, and the mask: Death is a mirror that reflects the vain gesticulations of life […]. In front of it our life is outlined and immobilized. Before falling apart and sinking into

16 | For the concept of “sufficient word” (mot bastant) see Bensmaïa 1987.

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nothingness, it is sculpted and made into an immutable form: we will only change to disappear. Our death lights our life (Paz 1999d: 58).

We see ourselves driven thus to one of the keys of the Aztec vision of the world, to which vice and death are but two directions in an infinite cycle: “Life did not have a higher function than flow into death, its antonym and complement; and death at the same time, was not an end in itself; man fed with his death the voracity of life, always unsatisfied” (Paz 1999d: 59). Reaching this point, it is also interesting to highlight the complexity of the interpretative principle developed in El laberinto, a principle supported in the determination of pairs of inclusive or exclusive opposites depending on the case, which represent much more than a mere stylistic arbitration in that they allow Paz to weave a screenplay and establish a complex system of correspondences between their own thought-dynamic and the dynamic producer of sense within Mexican society. The mask forms and does not form part of the face, extends the gesture and exaggerates it, superimposes onto the human a more potent and powerful face, tied to the inside and the outside, of the individual and the social, of the individual lifespan and the history of everybody and forever. Placed within the limitations of life and death, the private and the public, the terror and the sublime, peace and war, the mask is an exquisite cultural artefact that redresses the intimacy of the face with the most refined signs of a complex culture and is capable of evoking, in the most miserable and unprotected, the virtual state of orphanhood by using all the attributes of a highly organized culture, capable of ritualizing and classifying all gestures in a more elaborate manner. By interpreting the cultural meaning of the fiesta, the mask, the language, the customs, Paz offers us an interpretation of interpretation and drives us, to put it in another of Castoriadis’ terms, to the limits of the thinkable. Here is what I consider one of the greatest contributions of the essay: his unitizing the value of a culture.

El Arco y la Lira (1956, 1967) We now come to one of the most ambitious texts of Octavio Paz, who creates out of the essay form, a true “esthetical ritual”: an enlarged interpretation of the poetical doings sustained and combined with the direct, phenomenal presentation of the poetical act itself. I take this happy expression, “esthetical ritual”, from the already quoted study that Charles O’Neill dedicates to Yeats’ essay. And I consider it doubly timely because it allows us to emphasize the active and participatory character of the interpretation that takes place in the essay. If in El laberinto many features of Octavio Paz’s style can be deduced, it will be in El arco y la lira where – and paraphrasing the own terms with which he qualifies Ortega y Gasset’s style – it extends the definition that “way of

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thinking”, that “style” which belongs only to Octavio Paz’s: “In this operating way, that combines intellectual discipline with an aesthetic necessity of personal expression, is the secret of his unity” (Paz 1993b: 296). Contrary to the voyage model, that according to Paz is characteristic of Ortega’s prose, his own operating mode adopts the form of that which O’Neill calls an “aesthetical ritual”. This scholar takes up an observation by Burke, that he will apply to Yeats’ work: Kenneth Burke, in Counter-Statement, writes that “if the artist's ‘revelations’ are of tremendous importance to him, he will necessarily seek to ritualize them, to find a correspondingly important setting for them”. In the nineteen essays of Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats attempts to “ritualize”, through complex patterns of syntax and symbol, the “revelation” of the new age he anticipated. According to Burke, “Revelation is ‘belief’ or ‘fact’. Art enters when this revelation is ritualized, when it is converted into a symbolic process”. The early essays of Yeats are works of art: while announcing the “revelation” of a new age, they also, by means of evocative symbol and complexly cadenced prose, deliver that “revelation” in “ritual” (O’Neill 1989: 127).

Also for the Paz of Vigilias the poet undertakes a secret ritual: “The poet remembers, and by remembering announces”; “The poet descends; by descending, is unborn. And is born, again, phoenix of blood. He graces upon the unknown frontiers of life and death, and they do not exist! […] He has seen the kingdom. Participates with life and death.” Let us not forget that El arco y la lira (Paz 1994a: 33-273) represents in its definitive version the radical decision of allowing poetry to start by presenting itself through the voice of its name, by making that the essay’s interpretative aspect, supported in a series of epiphanies about the poetical act. Through poetic circularity and linear prose, the essay spirals round itself, thus taking the form of a ritual, in a “demonstration” that feeds itself, leaning on a poetical “showing”. Without a doubt, facts from the outside will enter, proceeding from the history of literature: there will be names, evocations of gestures, movements, concrete literary traditions; but these facts will order themselves around a fundamental intuition; in the beginning is the poetical word, in the beginning it is the movement, the poetical rhythm, the poetical secret: “Every sacred language is secret. Every secret language borders in the sacred”, “The poem is the development of an exclamation: between development and exclamation, there lies the tension, if not it would turn into an interjection of a theorem”; “the poetical creation consists, mostly, in this voluntary utilization of rhythm as agent of seduction”. Poetry is, in its origin, enchantment, sound, orality, magic, ritual. In order to exemplify the “aesthetical ritual” of Paz’s essay it is necessary to attend with care to the first and fundamental passage sorted out according to a paralytic ordering, and condensed in brief periods with a notable rhythmical effect. This presentation will give the key to the entire text with its backbone and the tonality of its interpretation. Thus, we meet with the affi rmation in

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the present tense of a pure activity: “operation capable of changing the world, the poetical activity is revolutionary by nature” (Paz 1994: 13). Some phrases are actually translations of a ritual, even pure activity caught in the moment of unfolding. We invite the reader to reread these “encoded” ritual words, without forgetting at the same time, that to give more strength to the expression, it is redressed with a religious halo, though all the while it is pointing towards the “irreligious” concept of an aesthetical ritual: that enchanting sense of certain forms of poetry and music, that as has been foreseen by Plato in the Republic, seduce instead of convince. The opposite pairs not only name elements contrasting and appear irreconcilable, but also evoke the starting and arriving points of a ritual: “Poetry reveals this world: it creates another”; “Bread of the chosen ones: cursed food”; “Isolates, unites”; “Invitation to the trip, return to the motherland”. Overall: irruption of an order of sense and of a qualified time that suspends history’s order. At the same time, only the participation between diverse spheres allows the intersection of the various semantic fields of which Paz is reminded: time and annulment of time, language and silence, experience and sense, solitude and communion, wakefulness and sleep, are gathered through analogically diverse operations from their casual order. The ritual that accompanies the “poetic revelation” saves the torn condition of modern man: curse, impurity, isolation. Paz refers to the “reconciliation state” to which Breton also refers, for whom “life and death, the real and the imaginary, the present and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived contradictorily”; “it is not called eternal life, nor is it there, outside of time. It is time and it is here. It is the man thrown to be all the contraries that constitute him”. Paz thus takes the anthropologically virtualities of modern poetry – the key of poetry is not the selfish song of a man but the search of meaning of all men – to its utmost consequences: “The poetical experience is opening the sources of being […]. Being born and dying: an instant. In this instant we are life and death, this and that” (Paz 1994a: 155). Just as religious and poetical experience are alike in that both possess a qualified character, there exist also evident differences that this essay will strive to uncover. The poetical and religious words are confused through history. But the religious revelation does not constitute – at least in that it is word – the original act but its interpretation. Instead, poetry is revelation of our condition and, therefore, creation of man through image. Revelation is creation. The poetical language reveals the paradoxical condition of man, his “otherness”, and so it takes him to achieve what he is […]. The act in which man reveals and founds himself is poetry. Overall, the religious and the poetical experiences have a common origin; its historical expressions – poems, myths, prayers, exorcisms, hymns, theatrical representations, rituals, etc – are sometimes indistinguishable; both, ultimately, are experiences of our constitutive “otherness”. But religion interprets, canalizes, and systematizes inside a theology of institution, at the same time that churches

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confiscate its products. Poetry opens to us the possibility of a being that engulfs all births; it recreates man and makes him assume his truthful condition that is not the disjunction: life or death, but a totality: life and death in a same instant of incandescence (Paz 1994a: 155-156).

Poetry is revelation, self-creation, act, constitutive and constituted experience through words themselves: The revelation of our condition is, as well, creation of ourselves. Now, when the revelation assumes the particular shape of poetical experience, the act is inseparable of its expression. Poetry is not felt: it is said. I mean: it is not an experience that the words translate later on, but that the words themselves constitute the nucleus of experience (Paz 1994a: 157).

This essay of Paz’s is one of his most vertiginous, in that it sets itself the task of showing and proving, – naming and interpreting – through an participative association between presentation and representation of the elements, as he will do when affirming the rhythm in the moment itself of spreading it, syncopated by the moments of separation and reunion: “The experience of otherness spans the two extreme notes of a rhythm of separation and reunion, present in all manifestations of being […]. In the name this rhythm is expressed as a fall, feeling alone in a strange world, and as a reunion, agreeing with totality. All men, without exception, for an instant, have halfseen the experience of separation and reunion” (Paz 1994a: 269). The modality of the “trip” that according to Paz characterizes many of the great essayists, adopts in his case that of that “immobile trip” that is the ritual: an imaginary trip, a journey to the depths of oneself and of reality, that which invents its own stations. If Novalis was taking himself into the woods in search of the blue flower, Paz takes himself into the jungle of symbols to find meaning. Particularly important for our subject is the chapter entitled “La otra orilla”. There, Paz is concerned with rhythm, which he calls “repetition creator”, and links, through participation, poetical act, fiesta, communion, as an experience of the sacred: The poetical recitation is a fiesta: a communion. And what is distributed and recreated in it is the image. The poem is made in the participation, that is not but recreation of the original instant. Thus, the examination of the poem takes us to the poetical experience. The poetical rhythm does not stop offering analogies with the mythical time; the image with the mystical saying; the participation with magical alchemy and religious communion. All takes us to insert the poetical act in the zone of the sacred (Paz 1994a: 117).

From my perspective, one of the major contributions of this great essay is to recuperate the idea of “participation” that ethnology was already applying to the religious experience and move it to a radical comprehension of poetry:

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isn’t it through the participatory concept that we can understand thoroughly metaphor and metonym? And isn’t it as well, thanks to this notion, that the explanation of the tight link between name and named is achieved, through the act itself of naming, through the constituting word that allows participation between writing and poetry reading? Proof of Paz’s interest in incorporating the comprehension of literary phenomena the achievements in the study of the religious experience is the space that he devotes to the treatment of concepts such as “primitive mentality” or “prelogic” and “participation” supported in Lévy-Bruhl; he referred briefly also to Freud and Jung in regard to the concepts of collective unconscious and mythical archetypes, and to Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, Cassirer, Malinowski, Frazer… After having mentioned these scholars, Paz will aspire to reveal the existence of a “primitive mentality” and a form of apprehension of the world that is “a participation act irreductible to logical reasoning”. It then flows into the study of the sacred, and proposes to penetrate intuitively through a series of analogies: the somersault, the experience of the other bank, a change of nature, dying and being born. It is about a stationary journey, an arrival at that other bank that is, paradoxically, within ourselves: The divine affects in an even more decisive way the notions of space and time, fundaments and limits of our thinking. The experience of the sacred affirms: here is there; bodies are ubiquitous; space is not an extension, but a quality; yesterday is today; the past returns; the future has already taken place […]. The sacred dates return according to a certain rhythm, that is not different from that that brings bodies together or apart, shakes feelings, makes pain out of pleasure, pleasure out of suffering, bad out of good (Paz 1994a: 126-127).

Brief, affirmative, taxing phrases succeed each other alternating with sentences more extensively rhymed in their insides by the coordinated presentation of opposite pairs: “The universe is magnetized. A sort of rhythm weaves time and space, feelings and thoughts, judgments and acts, and makes one fabric out of yesterday and tomorrow, here and there, nausea and delight.” The pre-eminence of the verbs designating condition emphasizes the intuitive character even more, of revelation, of what the essayist presents: “Everything is today. Everything is present. Everything is; everything is here. But also everything is somewhere else and in another time. Out of itself and full of itself.” Thus unfurls the jump that will take us, like the ritual, to the other bank, the point of departure and arrival. “The somersault confronts us with the supernatural. The feeling of being before the supernatural is the starting point of every religious experience.” Immediately afterwards we flow into a series of affirmations reinforced by the verb “to be” as well as analogical links:

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Every rite is a representation. He who participates in a ceremony is like the actor that is in a play; is and is not at the same time in his role. The scenery is also a representation: that mountain is the kingdom of a serpent; that river that runs indifferently is a divinity. But mountain and river do not stop being what they are. Everything is and is not […]. The believer is and is not in this world. This world is and is not real (Paz 1994a: 128).

Paz is also dedicated to the treatment of the “other”, both in the perspective of scholars of religion such as Rudolf Otto – who refers to the holy as “tremendous mystery” – or Mircea Eliade, who from Baudelaire’s poetical vision will later refer to the experience of the other as experience of unity: “both contrary movements imply themselves”, and, after the “somersault”, the “jump to the other bank”, duality ceases: “We have been reconciled with ourselves”. In this way, with support in a narrative order, we close this journey, this ritual represented in the essay. Finally, in the end of the essay the theme of the passage of the states of solitude to communion is touched upon in the aesthetical, sacred, erotic experience: “The states of fondness and recognition, of repulsion and fascination, of separation and reunion with the Other, are also states of solitude and communion with ourselves” (Paz 1994a: 134). The extreme starting and returning points are presented thus: The truth is that in the experience of the supernatural, as in that of love and of poetry, man feels torn apart or separated from himself. And in this first sensation of rupture happens another of total identification with that which seemed alien and with which we have fused in such a way that it is undistinguishable and inseparable from our own being. Why not think, then, that all these experiences have as a common centre something more ancient that sexuality, economical or social organization, or any other “cause”? The three experiences (sacredness, love, poetry) are manifestations of something that is humanity’s root itself. In the three of them beats the nostalgia for a previous state. And this state of primordial unity, from which we were separated, from which we are being separated at each moment, constitutes our original condition, that to which we once and again return […]. We half-see its dialectic and know that the antagonistic movements in which it expresses itself – fondness and recognition, rise and fall, horror and devotion, repulsion and fascination – tend to be resolved in unity (Paz 1994a: 136).

All these examples – to which many more of no minor interest follow, dedicated to, among other themes, poetical experience, language and the complex task of naming the unnameable – permit showing the tight bond of Paz’s poetical phenomenology with “ethnographical Surrealism” that built the foundations for creating a bridge between artistic and religious phenomena, as well as his passion for marking an antithesis and discovering antonymities that qualified experiences allow us to overcome. Some pages ahead, Surrealism is explicitly mentioned:

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Surrealism is presented as a radical tentative for suppressing the duel between subject and object […]. Heir of Romanticism, it sets to undertake this task that Novalis gave to “superior logic”: to destruct the “old antonymy” that drains us […]. The “surrealist object” volatilizes: it is a bed that is an ocean that is a levy that is a mousetrap that is a mirror that is Kali’s mouth. The subject also disappears: the poet transforms into poem, meeting place for two words – two realities. In this way Surrealism pretends to break, in both its terms, contradiction and solipsism […]. Through the inspiration it manifests or actualizes in magnets. Through inspiration, we imagine. And by imagining, we dissolve subject and object, we dissolve ourselves and suppress contradiction (Paz 1994a: 171-172). And further on: Surrealism sets itself the task of making a poetical world, founding a society in which the central place of God or reason is taken by inspiration. Thus, the real originality of unrealism consists not in having made out of inspiration an idea, but, more radically, an idea of the world (Paz 1994a: 172).

From my perspective, in order to enrich our reading of El arco y la lira it becomes important to attend to an early essay of Lukács (Lukács 1971). Towards 1910, when posing the possibility of the essay as form, the Hungarian thinker formulates a series of principal questions, among which two are particularly interesting: the possibility of the essay as form and the relationship between poetry and essay. Lukács opposes an “images creator” principle, which he considers distinctive of poetry, to another, which “puts meanings”, belonging to criticism and the essay: “for the first there are only things, for the second only their connections, only concepts and values”, a bit later on he refines this opposition; “the distinction between image and meaning is also an abstraction, since the significance is always wrapped in images, and all image is illuminated by the reflection of a light that is beyond images”. He then adds: Poetry receives from destiny its profi le, its form; the form appears in it always and as destiny; in the writings of essayists the form becomes destiny, beginning destiny […]. The critic is he who sees the elements of destiny in the forms […] form is his great experience, it is like immediate reality that has a nature of image, the really living of his writings […]. The crucial moment of the critic, the moment of his destiny, is then that in which things become shapes; the moment in which all feelings and all experiences that were more here and beyond form receive a shape, melt and condense in form. It is the mystical instant of the unification of the extreme and the intern, of soul and form (Lukács 1971: 16-17).

I will now consider, in the light of these preoccupations, how Paz’s essay can be better valued. El arco y la lira outshines by far, any volume of conventional literary criticism, that looks precisely to evade a superficial, external

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treatment of poetry – and the consequent imposition of an external order –, such as could be given by a biographical or historical perspective. By writing an essay on poetry, Paz makes of the poetical form his immediate experience and his destiny, refusing to superimpose onto the theme a previous role but makes of this experience a form. Also for Paz, it is about the unification of the external and the internal, of the soul and the shape: the experience of poetry as an immediate reality, as pure act, is supported by the principle of participation: the form turns into destiny. Essays are not born, according to Lukács, only to explain books and images or to facilitate their comprehension, but to express a series of experiences. Therefore, it cannot possibly result in looking on this essay of Paz’s as a “manual” for finding out exactly what poetry is, or more particularly, the blueprint of poetical experience. Neither is there to be found in Paz’s work any reductionism of said experience into irrational, mystical/religious phenomena, rather the appeal to categories like “participation”, “ritual”, “fiesta”, “communion”, to gain a better view of said experience as the giver of meaning. The essay itself is linked to the things, or as Lukács says, “the essay speaks always of something that has already a shape, or at the most of something that has been; it is, then, essential for it to not extract new things from an empty nothing, but only put a new order to things that have already been lived. And as it only is putting them in a new order […] it is linked to these things” (Lukács 1971: 20). In the case of El arco y la lira, the demonstration is in many ways a visualization sustained in a participatory link between form and sense.

Lévi-Strauss: Nature and Culture (1967) If for some critics fiesta, revolution, and eroticism make up the key points where Paz, attracted by a notion of the myth, will discover the suspension of History and the return to a time-without-time within the community, these phenomena also represent examples of his deepest preoccupation with language and sense, the breaking point between nature and culture, individual experience and communitarian sense, and allow him to propose a new interpretation of language and word. So, with that in mind, Paz writes in Lévi-Strauss: The real theme of all these myths is the opposition between culture and nature as is expressed in the defining human creation: foods cooking in the domesticated fire. Prometheic theme of multiple outlets: separation between men and gods, the continuous life of the Cosmos and the brief life of humans, but at the same time mediation between life and death, sky and water, plants and animals. It would be pointless to try to enumerate all the ramifications of this opposition since it encompasses all the aspects of human life. It is a theme that takes us to the centre of Lévi-Strauss’ meditations: men’s place in nature. The position of

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cooking as an activity that jointly separates and unites the natural and human world is no less central than the universal prohibition of incest. Both are preempted by language, which is what separates us from nature and what joins us to her and our equals. Language means the distance between men and things, as well as the will to destroy it. Kitchen and incest taboo are homologies of language […]. The model of both is the word – bridge between scream and silence, the non-significance of nature and the insignificance of men. The three are sieves that sift the natural and anonymous world and transform it in names, signs, and qualities. They turn the amorphous flowing of life into the discreet quantity and in families of symbols (Paz 1996: 10).

If we pay attention to the first pages of this work, where Paz displays his interest in the theories of the French anthropologist, we will find some particularly interesting facts. Among those elements that caught Paz’s attention, in addition to the intelligence, solidity, and outstanding prose of the structuralist anthropologist, are the following: His conception of anthropology as a part of a future semiology or general theory of the symbols, and his reflections about thought (wild and domesticated), are in a way a philosophy: his/their main theme is “men’s place in nature”. In a narrower sense, although no less stimulating, his work as a “moralist” has also a philosophical interest: Lévi-Strauss continues the tradition of Rousseau and Diderot, Montaigne and Montesquieu. His meditation on non-European societies resolves itself in a criticism of Western institutions … (Paz 1996: 10).

Also interesting to Paz are some particular studies made by Lévi-Strauss that take us to the Aztec and to the pre-Columbian world in general: the representative dualism of Asia and America or the emotiveness of the serpent with a body filled with fishes (Paz 1996: 11). Paz’s sensibilities foresee something that is incipient in Lévi-Strauss’s thought which many had forgotten or overlooked while studying his work, specifically, that which was inclined to the contributions of French anthropologists to structuralism; his dimension as a moralist, his preoccupation with the moment in which they are configured, with a logic and a grammar of sense to unearth content and ciphered rules, encrypted through a witty lens capable of paying attention to the synchronic and diachronic cuts: A landscape presents itself as a puzzle: hills, rocks, valleys, trees, cliffs. This disorder possesses a hidden meaning; it is not a juxtaposition of different shapes but the reunion in a space of different times-places: the geological layers. Like language, landscape is diachronical and synchronical at the same time: it is History condensed in the terrestrial ages and it is also a knot of relationships. A vertical cut shows that the hidden layer – the invisible – is a “structure” that determines and gives sense to the most superficial ones. To the intuitive discovery of geology were joined, later, the teachings of Marxism itself (a geology of society)

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and psychoanalysis (a psyche geology). This triple lesson can be summarized in one phrase: Marx, Freud, and geology taught him to explain the visible through the hidden, that is: to look for a relationship between the sensible and the rational […]. Not less decisive for his formation were structural linguistics and the sociological work of Marcel Mauss (Paz 1996: 11-12).

I consider that the study of the great themes and the great intuitions present in Paz’s work cannot be reduced only to existentialist nor merely ideological questions: all creative experience comes from the luminous encounter between the individual situation and the private experiences of the artist with the sensual baggage that is offered by its social and cultural environment through language, the contents of his culture, the rules, the institutions. On the other hand, Paz contributed to acclimatizing the creative and critical fields with the concept of participation. If some of Paz’s observations regarding Mexican anthropology, like those he makes regarding the work of Carlos Castaneda, can result in irritation for many, there is another series of discoveries that his always cunning anthropological perspective has in store for us. Such is the case of language, a social institution by definition, one of the themes that link Paz’s works with the new approaches, as is also the problem of the imagery and of the aesthetical experience. In what follows I will explore some of these interpretative possibilities.

The “Anthropologist” Class and the “Poet” Class (E xploration of Essay and Anthropolog y) (1973) In one of Paz’s early “Notes” we read: “Montaigne knew more about the soul of the Mexicans than most of the novelists of the Revolution.” Here lies an attempt of the young intellectual to break with provincialism, of rescuing the stoicism of the early Montaigne, but also of building bridges between essay and comprehension of a world and its values. If Montaigne was the first to formulate auto-ethnography in a modern sense, with its attempts to penetrate with a clear and intelligent look that complex society in which he was living, in light of his comparison with the diverse societies that the exploration of new continents were discovering, Paz was formulating his own when trying to unveil Mexico’s historic and contemporary culture through an archaeology of meaning. Far from exhausting himself in his intellectually formative years, the interest shown explicitly by Paz towards anthropology continued to grow. It is evident, as we have seen, by his Lévi-Strauss, as well as other texts linked to accurate anthropological discussion. I will take as an example, a polemical essay he dedicated in the seventies, to a work that marked a period in Mexico: Las enseñanzas de don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda. In it, and at the same that he highlights the anthropological and poetic value of Castaneda’s work, Paz

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greatly criticises the lines of anthropological thought predominant in the Mexico of those years. The text transcribes a strong criticism of the dominant tendencies in Mexican anthropology of the seventies and eighties; that was, according to Paz, under “the influence of North American behaviourism and vulgar Marxism that reigns in the Mexican social studies” (Paz 1998a: 432). These words are eloquent regarding the author’s position on Anthropology and the social sciences in Mexico, which according to him take the incomprehension of certain phenomena, and very particularly of religious processes and the rituals: As the missionaries of the 16th century had done, the Mexican anthropologists approached indigenous populations, not so much to know them as to change them. His attitude is contrary to Castaneda’s: […] the missionaries wanted to extend the Christian community to the Indians; our anthropologists want to integrate them to Mexican society. The fi rst’s ethnocentrism was religious, the second’s, was progressist and nationalistic […]. For the missionaries the religious beliefs and practices of the Indians were something perfectly serious, devilishly serious; for the anthropologists they are aberrations, mistakes, cultural products that have to be classified and catalogued in that museum of curiosities and monstrosities that is called ethnography (Paz 1998a: 432).

Thus he addresses the point of view that Castaneda gives to the initializing experiences in Las enseñanzas de don Juan, concluding with these words: “Sometime Bertrand Russell said that ‘the criminal class is included in the man class’. One could say: ‘The anthropologist class is not included in the poet class, except in some cases’. One could say that one of those cases is Carlos Castaneda” (Paz 1993c: 437). When speaking of the enigmas of the Castaneda phenomenon he says: “The first one of those enigmas refers to his nature: anthropology or literary fiction? It will be said that my question is pointless: anthropological document or fiction, the meaning of the work is the same. Literary fiction is already an ethnographical document and said document, as its most fervent critics recognize, possesses an indubitable literary value” (Paz 1998a: 429). And he continues: The example of Tristes tropiques – an anthropologist’s autobiography and ethnographical testimony – answers the question. But does it really answer it? If Castaneda’s books are works of literary fiction, they are so in a very strange way: its themes of anthropology and the victory of magic […] the revenge of the anthropological “object” (a witch) over the anthropologist by eventually turning him into a sorcerer (Paz 1998a: 429).

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Opinions such as this deeply contrast with the position about Castaneda that anthropologists like Marvin Harris – to whom “the phenomenology of don Juan” forms a part of the “obscurantism” in all opposing the foundation of a materialistic anthropology.17 On his part, Paz recognizes the distrust of the anthropologist before a work in which the “object” of study (the shaman) becomes the “subject” that studies at the same time the anthropologist: Not only does the position of the relationship’s elements change, but it is itself that changes. The subject/object duality vanishes and in its place appears that of master/neophyte. The relationship of scientific order transforms into one of magical-religious order. In the initial relationship, the anthropologist wants to meet the other; in the second one, the neophyte wants to turn into another. The conversion is double: that of the anthropologist into a warlock and of anthropology into own knowledge […] Castaneda’s books border on one extreme with ethnography and in another with the phenomenology, more than religion, of the experience that I have called otherness. This experience is expressed in magic, religion, and poetry but not only in them: from the Palaeolithic to our times it has been a central part of the life of men and women. This is a constitutive experience of men, like language and work. It spans from children’s play to the erotic encounter and from knowing oneself alone in the world to knowing oneself as part of the world. It is a detachment from the “I” that we are (or think to be) towards the other whom we also are and who is always different from us (Paz 1998a: 430).

Ar t and Aesthetic E xperience To conclude, let us add that one of the fundamental contributions of Paz to the reflection of our times is that which is linked to art and the aesthetical experience. From the progressive coming together of anthropology and aesthetics, he gives account of the doings of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, or Jaques Maquet. The latter, in his work The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts (Maquet 1986), is concerned with questions such as “art in the human experience”, “the aesthetical object as a symbol”, or “the aesthetical object as a cultural one”, themes that very much remind us of the topics dealt with by Paz in his essays on art, later collected into “Los privilegios de la vista”. When speaking of “The visual forms as symbols”, Maquet chooses the concept 17 | Harris devotes to Castaneda opinions strongly opposed to Paz: “Castaneda’s description differs from others in that it is written from ‘inside’, purposely allowing that the emic dimension and his own subjective sensations dominate the narration. He pretends with this resource to make the reader participate in the shaman’s intelligibility system and prove that reality is the daughter of social consensus” (Harris 1979: 348).

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of “participation”, before mentioned by us, as the most adequate one to characterize the relationship between the symbol and its meanings: “the symbol participates with the nature that represents it” (Maquet 1986: 137). A very brief and intense essay, “Escultura antigua de México”, written in Paris in 1947 and published in Sur (Buenos Aires) the same year (Paz 1994c: 69-91), is the key to showing Paz’s insertion in the “surrealist ethnography” line. There he refers to the “seduction that primitive peoples cast upon the modern ones”; he refers to “this world of magical correspondences”, in which the goddess of death is also the goddess of life. The serpent is winged. He also corrects the perception that “style is man”: for the ancient, “style is society”. He apprehends the general through the concrete – reality’s mask – and expresses jointly movement and rest, forms of a same totality. He touches in addition, upon the theme of participation: “All the elements of reality are sacred because in each fragment breaths the whole, not in a symbolic but in an effective way […]. Each work is a world in itself and not a fragment.” He refers to the contemporaneousness of Aztec art: the taste for abstraction, horror sentiment; – a “kind of vertigo in front of the abyss of reality” –, the magical worth of blood, the absence of anthropocentrism, the taste for a beauty that does not exclude the horrible and the grotesque. If, as Jorge Schwartz says, Surrealism enters the utmost Mexican field at first related with the plastic arts and later, in the fi fties, makes itself present in Paz’s poetical work,18 we count this text as a valuable precedent, in which the essay and aesthetic problems articulate. The theme of participation appears in various stages of Paz’s essay, who dedicated himself to it as a link perceived as connatural between men and diverse spheres of reality, but also as the integration of the individual into the collective. Thus, in “Los pocos y los muchos”, after speaking of one of the great recurring themes in his works, he writes: Men recognize themselves in the works of art because these offer them images of their hidden totality. Even when they express the dispersion and the atomization of societies and individuals, as happens in modern poetry and novel, they are an emblem of the lost community […] the preservation of collective memory for a group, however small, is a true lifesaver for the entire community. In these lifesavers the traditions and the cultures sail the seas of time (Paz 1994: 535-550).

18 | The critic mentions the coming to Mexico of various representatives of surrealism and adds that “visual arts, and not literature, were benefited the most by the influx of [surrealism]. In literature, even though criticism has turned all its attention on this school and the Contemporáneos generation has discussed many of the theoretical points of the movement, proper surrealist poetry appears lately with Octavio Paz in the fifties” (Schwartz 2002: 447).

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I find this passage key in linking an old and central preoccupation in Paz: the possibility of crossing the bridge between solitude and communion, with another subject that he had been working on implicitly from his first essays but which becomes explicit in his text from the eighties onward, a particularly central theme also in Castoriadis: the relationship between art and radical imagination, the need for art. The young Paz’s preoccupation for finding a bridge that joins solitude and communion is met here with another preoccupation, decisively contemporary: the search, through imagination, of an utmost horizon of sense, fundamental and at the same time ethical and aesthetic that saves what is culturally significant. The same occurs with the Prometheical theme, to which Castoriadis (1991) will devote one of his most dazzling essays: “Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean self-creation of Man”, where he analyses a fascinating idea that appears in Antigone “To put it in philosophical terms: Man himself posits himself; the essence of man is self-creation […]” (Castoriadis 1991: 31). We remember Paz’s words: “The revelation of our condition is, at the same time, creation of ourselves”. “El arte de México: material y sentido” (1977)19 contains, as the title implies, one of Paz’s great intuitions: a deeply contemporary concept, the intense relationship between those extremes that are not, as are for many specialists, matter and form, but matter and sense – as the insertion of art in a sensory horizon – in an imagery that explains at the same time that it is being explained by it. In this case, it is regarding none other than Coatlicue. The essay is organized as a descent from the superficial to the profound, from the historical facts (that “histoire événementielle” to which Fell alludes) to cultural meaning, and, in an analogical way, from matter to sense. Paz evokes the avatars of discovery and the immediate re-covering of Coatlicue: at the end of the Eighteenth Century it is excavated but it is again buried in order to not rekindle the Indians’ beliefs. Unearthed again after the War of Independence, the Coatlicue is a massive statue that still causes a shudder to go through those of delicate sensibilities, that produces “curiosity and blushing”, and its moving from one place to another marks “the changes of sensibility that we have experimented during the last four hundred years”, during which time Coatlicue has gone, in the public consideration, “from goddess to demon, from demon to monster, from monster to masterpiece” (Paz 1994d: 76). After this brief narrative introduction to the museographical fate of Coatlicue, Paz puts himself – and us as readers/spectators – before her, in order to evoke again, with terms that remind one of the “tremendous mystery” of the sacred to which Rudolf Otto refers, the powerful attraction of the stone goddess: “the statue is an object that, simultaneously, attracts us and repels us, seduces and terrorizes us”: 19 | Text published as the preface to the Catalogue of the Mexican Art Exposition in Madrid, 1977, and appearing a little time afterwards in the Sábado supplement of the Unomásuno newspaper, reproduced in Paz 1994d: 75-88.

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What we call “a work of art” – an equivocal designation, especially when applied to the works of antique civilizations – is maybe nothing but a configuration of signs. Each spectator combines these signs in a different way and each combination emits a different meaning. However, the plurality of meanings resolves itself in an only sense, always the same. A sense that is inseparable from the sensorial (Paz 1994d: 76-77).

After this “first station”, on the road from History to sense, a great passage opens dedicated to reflecting on, from the reactions before Coatlicue, “what must have been experienced by the European conscience at the discovery of America” (Paz 1994d: 77). For Paz, it is not only about the encounter between two cultures, but between two visions of the world, just as, more profoundly still, of two “imaginaries” fundamentally as diverse as can be, this clash between the organizational “brought” of the then European point of view and the vision supported in a world situated on four cardinal points of the Mesoamerican cultures. He explains how it was not about the fi nding of a new nature but of a new History: “The historical European conscience faced from the beginning the impenetrable American civilizations” (Paz 1994d: 78). After each “covering” operation “the American otherness reappeared. It was irreducible.”

End and Beginning: Return In 1967 Octavio Paz writes: Each age chooses its own definition of man. I think that the one of our time is this: man is a broadcaster of symbols. Among the symbols are two that are the beginning and end of human language, its plenitude and dissolution: the intertwining of the bodies and the poetical metaphor. In the first, union of sensation and image, the apprehended fragment as a mark of totality and the totality scattered in the caresses that transform the bodies in a dispenser of instant correspondences. In the second, fusion of sound and sense, wedding of the intelligible and the sensible. The poetical metaphor and the erotic embrace are examples of this moment of almost perfect coincidence between one symbol and the other that we call analogy and whose real name is happiness (Paz 1994e: 316).

An Octavio Paz in full intellectual maturity condenses in this quote many of the intuitions that accompanied him from his youth, and at the same time gives them a new turn towards a universal vision of the symbols, towards the problem of language and sense, towards the synthesis between many capital moments in which nature articulates with culture, and humans look for their reintegration with totality, in a dispenser of correspondences, coincidences, meetings. From a definition that matches that of philosophers such as Cassirer

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– to whom man is a symbolical animal – or Clifford Geertz – to whom the analysis of culture is an interpretative science – Paz traces a counterpoint system; beginning and end, plenitude and dissolution, fragment and totality, sound and sense, the intelligible and the sensorial: the two opposites need each other, participate in a same totality, oppose themselves and meet. The intertwining of bodies and poetical metaphor are also corresponding symbols that take us to integration, fusion. The essayist-interpreter traces a constellation of oppositions; these will resolve themselves within a present of enunciation that allows the showing before the analysis, revealing before explaining, which links the contrary through a rhythmical prose, para-tactical, and this, far from subordinating ideas within a system, coordinates them through the repeated use of conjunction. The essayist immediately refers to the state of fusion, abandon, forgetting of oneself, to that “immeasurable instant” in which the “gift of the ‘I’” is produced, and even its abolition. In the moment of speaking of a great fusion, he changes imperceptibly from the “I” to the “we”, and appeals to the ritual of rituals of poetry: succession of images and metaphors, that link man with the world and evoke the passage of the poet through le forêt des symboles sung by Baudelaire: […] we are the sparkling of a broken glass touched by the meridian light, the vibration of a dark foliage when going through the meadows, the crackling of wood in a cold night. We are very little and, even so, totality deserves us, we are a sign that somebody makes to someone, we are the transmission channel: through us languages flow and our body translates them to other languages (Paz 1994e: 317).

An I that participates in the we, a presence actualized and expanded in a qualified, authentic time and place, in a present time that reinforces the word as an act. Once achieved, through the ritual of the word – and there has been a passage through the three phases: separation, margin, and bond – the fusion is completed, the return is produced, and the “us” identifies now with all humanity. This reconciliation, that end of the ritual that is at the same time a beginning, is manifested as act and as presence: “The doors open widely: man returns. The universe of symbols is also a sensitive universe. The forest of significations is the place of reconciliation.”

Bibliography Bensmaïa, Réda (1987): The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Refl ective Text, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Original published as Barthes à l'essai: introduction au texte réfl échissant (1986). Caillois, Roger (1939): El mito y el hombre, Buenos Aires: Sur. Original: idem (1938), L'homme et le sacré, París: Gallimard.

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Clifford, James (1988): “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” In: idem, The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Mass., London, England: Harvard University Press, pp. 117-151. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1991): “Figures of the Thinkable.” In: www.toodoc. com/Cornelius-Castoriadis-ebook.html (August 10 2009). Echevarría, Roberto González (1985): The voice of the masters: writing and authority in modern Latin American Literature, Austin: The University of Texas Press. Echevarría, Roberto González (2000): Mito y archivo; una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Geertz, Clifford (2000 [1973]): La interpretación de las culturas, transl. by Alberto Bixio, Barcelona: Gedisa. Harris, Marvin (1979): Cultural materialism: the struggle for a science of culture, New York: Random House. Hubert, H./Mauss, M. (1909): Mélanges d'histoire des religions, Paris: Alcan. In Spanish: idem, (1946): Magia y sacrificio en la historia de las religions. Transl. by Eduardo Warschaver, Buenos Aires: Lautaro. Jaimes, Héctor (2001): “El laberinto de la soledad: El mito y la historia.” In: idem, La reescritura de la historia en el ensayo hispanoamericano, Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, pp. 119-142. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1945 [1922]): La mentalidad primitive. Transl. and foreword by Gregorio Weinberg, Buenos Aires: Lautaro. Lukács, Georg (1971): “Über Wesen und Form des Essays: Ein Brief an Leo Popper.” In: Die Seele und die Formen Essays, Neuwied/Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, pp. 7-31. Maquet, Jacques (1986): The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts, New Haven: Yale University Press. Molina, Teresa Delgado (1998): “La isla encantada: Utopía y teoría en Alfonso Reyes”, La Habana: unpublished doctoral thesis. Mora, Jorge Aguilar (1978): La divina pareja: historia y mito en Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Ediciones Era. O’Neill, Charles (1989): “The essay as aesthetic ritual: W. B. Yeats and Ideas of good and evil.” In: Alexander J. Butrym, Essays on the essay; redefining the genre, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, pp. 126-136. Paz, Octavio (1967): Corriente alterna, Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores. Paz, Octavio (1993): Itinerario, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1993a): “Una de cal.” In: Fundación y disidencia: dominio hispánico. Obras Completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores, pp. 279-292. Paz, Octavio (1993b [1984]): “El cómo y el para qué: José Ortega y Gasset.” In: Octavio Paz (1993), Fundación y disidencia: dominio hispánico. Obras Completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores, pp. 292-302. Paz, Octvio (1994): “La casa de la presencia.” In: La casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia. Obras completas, vol. 1, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores, pp. 15-27.

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Paz, Octavio (1994a [1956]): El arco y la lira. El poema. La revelación poética, Poesía e historia, 3rd. ed., México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Reproduced in La casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia. Obras completas, vol. 1, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores (1994), pp. 33-273. Paz, Octavio (1994b): “En búsqueda de la presencia”. In: Fundación y disidencia: Dominio hispánico. Obras completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores, pp. 31-41. First published in: Vuelta 170 (January 1991). Paz, Octavio (1994c): Los privilegos de la vista II: arte de México. Obras Compleatas, vol. 7, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1994d [1977]) “El arte de México: material y sentido.” In: Los privilegios de la vista II: Arte de México, Obras Compleats, vol. 7, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Círculo de Lectores, pp. 75-88. Paz, Octavio (1994e [1967]): “La nueva analogía: Poesía y tecnología.” In: La casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia. Obras completas, vol. 1, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores, pp. 299-317. Paz, Octavio (1996 [1967]): “Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo.” In: idem, Ideas y costumbres II: Usos y símbolos. Obras Completas, vol. 10, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores, pp. 491558. Paz, Octavio (1998): “André Bretón y el surrealismo: Las peras del olmo, Corriente alterna, Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos.” In: Excursiones/ Incursiones: Dominio extranjero. Obras Completas, vol. 2, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 201-230. Paz, Octavio (1998a): “La mirada anterior.” In: Octavio Paz (1998), Excursiones/ Incursiones: Dominio extranjero. Obras Completas, vol. 2, pp. 428-441. Paz, Octavio (1999): Miscelánea I: Primeros escritos. Obras completas, vol. 13, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Círculo de lectores. Paz, Octavio (1999a [1935]): “Vigilias: diario de un soñador.” In: Paz 1999, pp. 137-179. Paz, Octavio (1999b): “Primeras letras (1931-1943).” In: Paz 1999, pp. 135-401. Paz, Octavio (1999c [1942]): “Poesía y mitología.” In: Paz 1999, pp. 215-233. Paz, Octavio (1999d): “Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad (Conversación con Claude Fell).” In: Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad. Posdata. Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad", 3ed., Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. First published (1981), reproduced in El peregrino en su patria. Obras Completas, vol. 8, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Círculo de Lectores (1996), pp. 239-260. Ponce, Juan García (1968): La aparición de lo invisible, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Schwartz, Jorge (2002): Las vanguardias latinoamericanas; textos paradigmáticos y críticos, transl. by Estela dos Santos, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Turner, Victor (1969): The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Par t IV: Octavio Paz and Philosophy

Octavio Paz’s Poetic Reply to Hegel’s Philosophical Legacy 1 Hugo Moreno

While in the 1940s the Spanish-Mexican philosopher José Gaos characterized aesthetic thought as one in which Hispanic-American thinkers had made their most outstanding contributions to Western philosophy, by the 1970s both immanentist and transcendentalist philosophers in Latin American regarded aesthetic thought as alien to philosophy proper.2 As a result of the erasure of aesthetic and poetic modes of thinking from the Latin American philosophic tradition, historians and theorists of Latin American thought have overlooked some of the most creative and original responses to hegemonic Western philosophical categories produced in the region. This article seeks to examine Octavio Paz’s poetic response to Hegel’s dialectical philosophy. Before we proceed, I will describe the poetic reply to philosophical metaphors, and argue for its utility as a practice capable of both recognizing the influence, and challenging the hegemonic status of Western philosophic discourses in the Latin American context. The rest of this discussion will serve as a transgression of the poetry – philosophy divide by way of Octavio Paz’s poetic reply to Hegel’s dialectic philosophical discourse. Discussing Paz’s approach to dialectics is not meant to showcase his transformation of hegemonic philosophical terms as some sort of ideal poetic reply. Rather, the purpose is to observe how treating philosophical categories in the terrain of poetry facilitates our understanding of language and the complex relations that exist between philosophic and poetic modes of being in the world.

1 | First published in Hispanófila 145 (2005), pp. 33-46. 2 | See Salazar; Zea; Miró; and Roig.

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The Poetic Reply in Western Philosophy Richard Rorty has argued that in the 20th century there have basically been three replies to the question of “how we should conceive of our relation to the Western philosophical tradition: […] The Husserlian or ‘scientistic’ answer, the Heideggerian or ‘poetic’ answer, and the pragmatist or ‘political’ answer” (Rorty 1991: 9). It is the poetic reply with which we will concern ourselves here. For Rorty the poetic philosophers are those for whom Heidegger serves as an example of how one might poetize in philosophy, and especially how one might creatively appropriate or invent new philosophical metaphors. Poetic philosophers are not necessarily those who rely on Heidegger’s metaphors, but rather those who, like Heidegger, never treat any philosophical discourse as “final.”3 The poetic strategy of engagement – which seeks to undo or radically question philosopher’s metaphors – is especially useful to those like me who do not necessarily wish to orient themselves towards the West, but who feel that a project seeking to negate the influence of the West is impossible. Latin American and Western experience and thought cannot be conceived independently of one another because they have been formed in response to, and against, one another since the colonial moment. However, power relations between Latin America and the West have decidedly favored philosophic perspectives biased toward the West. Western metaphors inexorably, but only partially, shape our relations with the world. Thus we need a strategy of engagement that allows us to confront those metaphors without buying into the terms under which philosophers intended those metaphors to be used. Rorty’s poetic reply demands that we do just that. The poetic reply defines an attitude that allows us to play with already uttered metaphors, subverting their original metaphoric intents to suit the needs and tasks we ourselves define as vital. In fact, poetic replies not only allow such subversion. According to Rorty, they only achieve their purpose when they utterly and differently reconstitute earlier philosopher’s metaphors, practices, and assumptions about the world. An example of how the poetic attitude can subvert dominant philosophical discourses is Rorty’s approach to Hegelian dialectics in general, and Auf hebung 4 in particular. For Rorty, Hegelian dialectics “is not an argumentative procedure, or a way of unifying subject and object, but simply a literally skill – skill at producing surprising gestalt switches by making smooth, rapid transitions from one terminology to another” (Rorty 1989: 78). According to Rorty, Hegelian Auf hebung does not capture the 3 | According to Rorty, a “final vocabulary” is “a vocabulary which is no mere idiosyncratic historical product but the last word, the one to which inquiry and history have converged, the one which renders further inquiry and superfluous […]” (Rorty 1989: 96). 4 | “Auf hebung” is frequently translated as “sublation.” It implies the triple act of negating, preserving, and raising an idea to a higher (epistemological) level.

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way “a concept like ‘Being’ breaks apart, sunders itself, [and] turns into its opposite,” as Hegel and other Hegelian thinkers have claimed (Rorty 1991: 126). Rather, it is we who break the concept of ‘Being’ apart and turn it into its opposite. Using new vocabularies, we interpret and transform philosophical concepts. As Rorty puts it: [W]e nominalists [...] construe [Auf hebung to mean] [...] that one can always make an old language-game look bad by thinking up a better one – [one can always] replace an old tool with a new one by using an old word in a new way [...] or by replacing it with a new word. But this need for replacement is ours, not the concept’s. [The concept] does not go to pieces [on its own accord]; rather, we set it aside and replace it with something else (Rorty 1991: 126; his emphasis).

Rorty’s treatment of Hegelian dialectics and Auf hebung allows us to approach philosophical concepts with a less reverent and static attitude. It rids us of the notion that dialectics is strictly a philosophically rigorous method of inferring propositions in which only scientifically minded, professionally trained, philosophers can engage. If we take Rorty’s cue and view dialectical reason and literally skill, then the hegemonic place dialectical philosophical discourse has occupied over and above poetic discourse becomes unstable. That is, dialectical reason’s claim to apprehend or disclose actuality in a manner not available to other types of discourse, including poetic discourse, becomes unsustainable. This treatment of dialectics in Hegel also allows us to widen the field of literary formats in which we look for and develop philosophical concepts. With this license, I now turn to Paz’s approach to dialectical discourse as a literary skill. Whereas other Latin American thinkers have treated Hegel’s dialectical discourse as either an autonomous “channel of Truth”, or as a powerful tool for rigorous philosophical analysis, Paz appropriated Hegel’s dialectics as a literary skill that he might adopt and transform for his poetics purposes. In this sense, Paz did not take the Hegelian dialectical system as “the final word.” Nor did he subscribe to traditional dialectic’s presumption that inference represents the most viable way of attaining knowledge. In this sense, Paz’s unique approach to dialectics constitutes a poetic reply to Hegel’s philosophical legacy. However, unlike Rorty, Paz clearly believed that philosophy and poetry were two entirely different modes of approaching actuality and being in the world. While Rorty has sought to question the traditional divisions between philosophy as the realm of “human reason,” and poetry as the realm of “pure creativity,” Paz was quite comfortable with such a distinction. Nonetheless when we analyze the logic of Paz’s discourse and reflect on the source of his most recurrent philosophical metaphor – freedom – it becomes evident that Paz wanted to realize the same ideal that dialectical philosophers from Hegel to Marx to Leopoldo Zea have privileged. However, for Paz, poetry, not argumentation, presents the most effective means of keeping and renewing the force of the idealist metaphor of freedom.

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Below we will explore Paz’s position regarding the task of poetry, and examine his strategy of fulfi lling that task. Finally we will reflect on Paz’s poetic dialectics as a thinking paradigm and observe the subterranean exchanges between Paz’s poetic dialectics and Hegelian dialectical reason.

Freedom as the Deferred Promise of the Word: A Reading of Paz's Libertad bajo palabra The title Libertad bajo palabra reads like a sign that points in different, sometimes contradictory, directions. Figuratively, the title can mean “freedom under oath,” which suggests that this book is a promise or a commitment to realize freedom. Literally, “freedom under the word” hints that freedom is concealed under the word. Thus, the title suggests that the word simultaneously occludes screens, envelops, and displaces while, at the same time, potentially disclosing, embodying, and actualizing freedom. In either case, the word concurrently serves as the poet’s pledge, and as the currency that he uses to fulfill his promise. Giving his word and offering his poetry, Paz proposes to realize freedom, the foremost potentiality of logos. Unlike speculative philosophy, which claims to actualize freedom by means of the dialectical unfolding of reason, Paz, promises to do so by means of the poetic disclosure of the word. For Paz, poetry is the highest expression of humanity’s effort to break away from the realm of necessity and realize freedom. It is also an effort to keep History’s unfulfilled promise of freedom alive. Hence, Libertad bajo palabra revives the ideal of freedom that has so far remained buried in Nature and History. Paradoxically, while poetry disinters freedom, language at the same time reburies it. That is to say, while freedom appears as the promise and quest of Paz’s poetry, words for Paz are simultaneously key and puzzle, way and impasse, door and wall. Libertad bajo palabra embodies Paz’s poetic struggle to dialectically domesticate the polysemy of the word. It is a quest to release the word’s latent liberating power by releasing it from its past meanings. As the title poem says: “Against silence and noise I invent the Word, freedom that invents itself and invents me every day” (Paz 1985: 18).5 The act of inventing alludes to four operations: “to think up; devise or fabricate in the mind […] to think out or produce […] [to] originate, as by experiment; devise for the first time [...] to find; [or] discover” (Webster 1980: 741). The act of inventing is thus not achieved by discerning, understanding, or reasoning – all connected with the use of the intellect. Neither does it imply unveiling something that is latent, hidden, or buried. Rather, the act of inventing involves fabricating what was previously non-existent, or unknown in the world. It may also involve bringing forth what was previously conceived, imagined, or desired. The act of invention is thus partly oriented towards conjuring up the unreal, the fictitious, the fabulous, the chimerical, and the utopian. 5 | English Translation: Paz 1973.

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In this sense, realizing freedom for Paz is about bringing forth what thus far is absent, denied, inexperienced, or deferred in the world: namely, the Word. But this Word must first be invented. To invent the Word, the poet must free it from what came before. In this sense, freedom is realized by the act of freeing and inventing words. This “inventing” of words is the process of evoking and invoking the originary logos, which is precisely what constitutes the act of thinking in Paz’s poetry. But how does this process take place – what strategy does Paz employ? Paz’s poetic thinking in Libertad bajo palabra (Paz 1985) involves the strategy known as reverie. Reverie involves “dreamy thinking or imagining, esp[ecially] of agreeable things; fanciful musing; daydreaming” (Webster 1980a: 1217). It suggests a state of “abstractedness,” “thoughtfulness,” or “trance” (Roget’s 1977: 1177). Unlike dialectical reason, reverie does not distinguish between the real and the imaginary, or between thinking and feeling. As Gaston Bachelard says, “by following the ‘path of reverie’ [...] consciousness relaxes and wanders and consequently becomes clouded. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it” (Bachelard 1969: 5). Instead of separating the rational from the sensual or the imaginary, like the dialectical logic proposes, poetic reverie expresses these elements in their immediate unity as they are ordinarily perceived by consciousness. Therefore, Paz’s use of poetic reverie may be regarded as a rejection to mainstream philosophical understanding of dialectical reason since, as Hans-George Gadamer states, dialectical reason is “precisely an effort to clear the mind from the cloudiness of sense perception” (Gadamer 1976: 79). In Libertad bajo palabra the narrator is engaged in poetic reverie. He is essentially a vigilant dreamer who displays by way of poetic discourse the content and the motion of his dream images. The narrator restlessly wanders, thrills, hallucinates, meditates, and projects. He constantly struggles to arrest the incessant movement of his mind, and to reconcile the multiple and often contradictory images that he conceives. His mind is a stage of contingently reflecting images and ideas that he desperately tries to escape from. At times it seems that he has found the exit, but ultimately it is only another reflection turning him back toward his selves, and obligating him to continue to perform, improvise, and reinvent. The only thing that makes his life bearable is poetry, which is, in the narrator’s words, “La puerta condenada [...] que abre comunicación con el instante” (“the condemned door [...] that opens communication with the instant”) (Paz 1974: 66). Poetry is that moment on the labyrinth-like stage performance from which a fleeting image of freedom emerges – when words are made instantaneous – lacking a past and a future. Paradoxically, while freedom for Paz implies leaving the world of images, and the realm of time, poetry can only achieve such a freedom for an instant before the waves of images and past meanings swallow his words up again. The goal of Paz’s poetic thinking is, thus, to escape the labyrinth-like stage, or never-ending performance of dialectic discourse. His poetic thinking is a form of poetic idealism that seeks to bridge the gap between

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actuality and potentiality, existence and poetry, fact and vision, objects and words. But, in Paz‘s theory, existence, words, and objects are purposefully isolated from their historical context, and made subordinate to the apparently autonomous whim of “the imaginary.” In Paz’s terms, poetry seeks to take the “mortal leap” to reach the “other shore” in an attempt to overcome all forms of “duality,” “reconcile with ourselves,” and achieve “Unity” (Paz 1956: 116). According to Paz, That state of primordial unity, from which we were previously separated, from which we are constantly being separated, constitutes our original condition, to which we return again and again. We glimpse its dialectic and we know that the antagonistic movements in which it expresses itself – strangeness and recognition, rise and fall, horror and devotion, repulsion and fascination – tend to be resolved into unity (Paz 1956: 119; my emphasis).

Paz argues that this “primordial” condition is achieved in accordance with the logic of poetic dialectics where opposite entities get sublated, and resolved into a higher unity. However, this for him does not imply achieving a superior form of knowledge, but recovering a pristine mode of being which is both mythical and utopian in character. For Paz, poetry is the means by which he brings into unity what rational consciousness renders inherently antithetical and hopelessly irreconcilable. The dialectical process of reconciliation with otherness that takes place in Paz’s poetry apparently divorces itself from reason, and relies on myth. In his early works, for instance, human existence is not depicted in its historic complexity and messiness, but only as Paz imagines it originally was in mythical times, and as has he believes it ideally should be again. According to Paz The poetic miracle, the sole creation of man, the only operation that truly liberates, has its equivalent in myth [...]. Myth is a much purer and more lasting truth than any empirical and rational truth, because it is a product of the senses and the imagination, and of the deepest demands and the most unbearable needs of man.6 (Paz 1988: 76)

Myth is for Paz truer than rational and empirical accounts of human existence, because it is a product of the imagination. Myth is closer to the primordial Truth because it is created out of desire and yearning, not out of reasoning or experience. In this sense, Paz’s conception of poetry depends upon a “pure” conception of the imagination, unmoored from historic experience. This does nothing to problematize the relationship between myth and human existence, but rather creates a further distance between the two. Paz’s poetic dialectics does not fully challenge philosophical dialectics in that it does not question its core assumption that reason and fancy, fact and myth, are 6 | Translation: Hugo Moreno.

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separable. Rather, he reinforces the perception that poetic and philosophical thinking have nothing to do with one another, leaving intact the hegemonic distinctions of dialectical reason. In a related gesture reinforcing the difference between poetic and philosophical tasks, Paz proposes that poetry creates a reality of its own that its autonomous and distinct from the “real” world. As he explains, A landscape by Góngora is not the same as a natural landscape, but both possess reality and consistency, although they live in different spheres. They are two orders of parallel and autonomous realities. In this case, the poet does something more than tell the truth: he creates realities possessed of a truth: the realities of its own existence [...]. But this aesthetic truth of the image is only valid within its own universe. Finally, the poet affirms that his images tell something about the world and about ourselves, and that this something, although it seems absurd, really reveals to us what we are (Paz 1956: 92-93).

Paz’s distinction between the poet’s landscape and the naturalist’s landscape resonates with Romanticism’s notion that art does not imitate reality, but is the artist’s creation. At the same time, the relationship he posits between poetic and natural landscapes also implies the Enlightenment idea that reality is found rather than created.7 Paz’s argument suggests that in poetry words are used to create a wholly new world, while in the naturalist’s description words are chosen to conform with historic practice of description such that they merely “represent” the world. But, by establishing this rigid dichotomy, Paz fails to recognize the extent to which the language that a poet uses to create his or her “aesthetic” landscape is as much a product of historic renditions of landscape as the language that non-poets use to describe a “natural” landscape.8 Paz posits an utter difference between poetic and a non-poetic description, but this distinction is unsustainable since both poetic and non7 | As Rorty notes, these confl icting, but mutually complementary notions are founded on entirely different premises. While Romanticism claims that the imagination is the central human faculty, the Enlightenment posits it is reason. Moreover, while Romanticism argues that truth is not “out there” but made, and that the role of philosophy, science, and art is to re-create the world, the Enlightenment maintains that reality is “out there,” and that science can discover it (Rorty 1989: 3-7). 8 | As cognitivie scientists have shown, all intellectuals “employ the very same conceptual resources and the same basic conceptual system shared by ordinary people in their culture” (Lakoff/Johnson 1999: 338). Scientists, theorists, humanists, and poets simply refi ne, expand, and redescribe the conceptual resources and conceptual system that they obtain from their own culture and fellow citizens. Thus, contrary to what many modern theorists and poets have made us believe, neither poetry creates totally new metaphorical discourses, nor philosophy offers completely new conceptual accounts.

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poetic descriptions are equally subject to what Rorty calls “the contingency of language.” It is true that a poet can describe a landscape with a set of metaphors that posit novel relations and unexpected allusions. It is also true that the non-poet typically depicts a landscape with rigidly delineated, wornout metaphors following the rules that others have created. But the fact that a poet’s landscape is described in an unfamiliar terminology does not mean that his or her metaphors or words are somehow “autonomous” from historic uses of words and concepts. Poetry’s potential as a thinking strategy is not based on its ability to free itself from the contingency of language. Rather, its potential lies in poetry’s ability to call attention to and productively make use of the contingency of language. In Paz’s poetry we can observe this potential, but we also see that potential diverted into an argument for a sovereign realm of poetry that cuts short the critical possibilities of his poetic and critical endeavor. Below we will examine Paz’s dialectical poetics at work, and ask how his assertion of the utter difference between his project and those of philosophers affects the critical power of his approach.

Paz’s Poetic Dialectics at Work, and His Distinction bet ween Poetr y and Dialectics I open this discussion with and interpretation of the first stanza of “Palabra,” one of Paz’s best early poems. This stanza displays a neat dialectical configuration, and helps us set up the terrain to discuss how Paz distinguishes the dialectics of poetry from the dialectics of reason. Word, exact voice, even though, equivocal; obscure and luminous; wound and fountain: mirror; mirror and brightness, brightness and dagger, living beloved dagger, no longer dagger, but soft hand: fruit (Paz 1985: 31)9

“Palabra” both describes and embodies the nature of the linguistic sign. It emphasizes the word’s multifaceted and contradictory attributes in dialectical terms. This stanza consists of a series of metaphors that describe different attributes of the linguistic sign, which both complement and negate each other. It is divided into two parts, each containing three series of antithetical metaphors that get sublated in a single image. One way to read it is to imagine it as a dialogue of seven where three individuals negate the assertions of three 9 | Translation: Hugo Moreno.

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others, and a seventh one proposes a synthesis that sublates all six statements (in the triple sense of Auf hebung of negating, preserving, and superseding them). Thus, “equívoca” negates “exacta;” “oscura” negates “luminosa;” “herida” negates “fuente;” and “espejo” sublates them all. Subsequently, the synthesis “espejo” becomes the initial hypothesis of the proceeding “dialogue.” In the latter, the hypothesis is then negated by an antithesis, which subsequently becomes the new hypothesis. This process continues until “fruto” evolves as the metaphor that sublates all previous images. In The Bow and the Lyre, Paz observes that poetic images often display a “dialectical pattern” (Paz 1956: 86). He says, however, that this is the result of a “similarity” in the way poetic images and dialectical reason work, and argues that there is no intimate relationship between the dialectics of poetry and the dialectics of reason (Paz 1956: 86). He gives the example of a simple metaphor that equates stones with feathers and explains: In the dialectical process stones and feathers disappear in favor of a third reality, which is no longer stones or feathers but something else. But in some images – precisely the best ones – stones and feathers continue to be what they are: stones are feathers, without ceasing to be stones. The heavy is the light. There is not the qualitative transmutation demanded by Hegel’s logic [...]. In short, the image is [ultimately meant to be] also a shock and a challenge to dialectics, [because it violates] the laws of thought (Paz 1956: 86).

Clearly, Paz is aware of the dialectical quality of poetic images, and contends that Hegelian dialectics does not fully capture their logic. In fact, he claims that the logic of poetic images escapes not only dialectical reason, but all forms of logical reasoning as well. According to Paz, dialectical reason is “an attempt to preserve logical principles – especially the principle of contradiction – threatened by their increasingly visible incapacity to digest the contradictory nature of reality” (Paz 1956: 86). In Paz’s view, the dialectics of poetry also preserves the principle of contradiction, but shifts the terrain of the dialectics of reason from a concern with “actuality” to a concern with the “imagination.” This shift in terrain is necessary in Paz’s mind because it is the best way to rebel against Western philosophy’s historic tendency to develop a “clear” and “trenchant” distinction Being and non-Being (Paz 1956: 87). As Paz notes, Since Parmenides our world has been the world of the clear and trenchant distinction between what is and what is not. Being is not nonbeing. This first extirpation – because it was an uprooting of being from the primordial chaos – constitutes the basis of our thinking. On this conception was built the edifice of “clear and distinct ideas,” which, if it has made Western history possible, has also condemned to a kind of illegality every attempt to lay hold upon being by any means other than those of these principles. Mysticism and poetry have thus lived a subsidiary, clandestine and diminished life (Paz 1956: 87).

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In other words, dividing the word into what really is, and what is imaginary has banished mysticism and poetry to the margins of thought by assigning them exclusively to the “lesser” realm of imagination. Paz believes that philosopher’s anchoring words and things to a stable reality, and requiring reasoned thoughts to be constructed from such anchored entities have ultimately increased the distance that exists between words and things. He does not take issue with the philosophical project of recuperating the unity of words and things and searching for originary, rock-solid concepts. He simply asserts the greater adequacy of poetry for recuperating word’s mythical (“originary”) nature. For Paz, poetry can recuperate the lost unity of word and thing by evoking an experience with language that foregrounds the possibility of opposites existing one with the other: rocks and feathers are heavy and light, and neither at the same time. Only in the realm of the imagination can language so utterly disorient and reorient our sense of the possible and the actual. His philosophy of poetry is modeled on the principles he believes Eastern philosophy espouses. Contrasting Western and Eastern philosophy, Paz claims: The Western world is the world of “this or that;” the Eastern, of “this and that” and even of “this is that.” In the most ancient Upanishad the principle of the identity of opposites is plainly stated: “Thou art woman. Thou art man. Thou art the youth and also the maiden [...] Thou art the seasons and the seas.” The whole history of Eastern thought begins with this very ancient assertion, in the same way that the history of Western thought originates with Parmenides (Paz 1956: 88).

Paz utilizes Eastern philosophy as a strategy to critique Western practices of apprehending the world. Paz asserts that the “Eastern” approach holds that knowledge is not transmissible through formulae or discourse (Paz 1956: 89). He observes that, in Eastern philosophy, knowledge is only attainable by renouncing past perceptions and tuning in to how one personally and distinctly experiences the world in the moment (Paz 1956: 89). By contrast, as Gadamer notes, from Plato to Hegel Western dialectical philosophy has portrayed truth as being rational, logical, knowable, transmissible and, above all, cumulative (Gadamer 1976 5-34). Ultimately, for Paz philosophical dialectics is “a labyrinth of mirrors” where “man is in exile from the cosmic flux and from himself” (Paz 1956: 87). According to Paz, dialectical reasoning has contributed to the distance between words and things by allowing the metaphoric power of language to dwindle (Paz 1956: 96-97). This is because dialectical reasoning views language as a cumulative project of approximation. The task of language for philosophical dialectics has been to approximate reality, where reality is constructed from metaphors that become reified in the fossilized record of knowledge. The realm of reason is thus the rocky terrain of fossilized conceptualizations that point to or represent a reality no longer experienced

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in the here and now. Using this understanding of reason and philosophical dialectics as his foil, Paz creates a poetic dialectics where the task of language is not to approximate reality, but to re-create it. According to Paz, “[ordinary] language indicates, [and] represents [whereas] the poem does not explain or represent: it presents. It does not allude to reality; it tries to re-create it – and sometimes succeeds” (Paz 1956: 97). For Paz, prose orients the polysemy of words in a single direction in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity (Paz 1956: 109). This makes prose more a “trying to say” than a definitive form of stating (Paz 1956: 109). Poetry is meant to do something quite different. Paz asserts that poetry ought to maximize the expressive quality of words, and aim to produce multiple layers of meaning instead of a single, unambiguous, meaning. At the same time, Paz says that poetry gives birth to objects that have a “concrete reality” (Paz 1956: 110), and possess a unified and definitive content and form that cannot be modified without altering their meaning. At first glance, this seems contradictory. How can words be deliberately expressive of multiple meanings, and at the same time express a unified and definitive content that is unalterable? Paz’s desire is to produce multiple layers of meaning in a bid to make his poetry-objects inseparable from any of their meanings. The point of this, though, is not to infuse his poetry-objects with instability or ambiguity. Rather, anchoring his poetry-objects to a series of contradictory, but coexisting, meanings is meant to make them immune to unauthorized, prior, or subsequent meanings outside his construction. The goal of a coalescing multiple meanings is to create self-enclosed metaphorparadigms where “the meaning of the image is the image itself” (Paz 1956: 94). According to Paz, “[the image] cannot be said with other words. The image explains itself [...] The poet does not try to say: he says” (Paz 1956: 94-95; his emphasis). Therefore, according to Paz, in addition to restoring the “original nature” of language, poetry performs an even more radical function: it “transcends language” (Paz 1956: 111). This implies that poetry somehow escapes the “labyrinth of mirrors” where language dwells. Paz argues that this is so because poetry, unlike other forms of languaging, does not primarily point to, but creates objects. As a result, he contends, “far from increasing, [in poetry] the distance between the word and the thing decreases or disappears” (Paz 1956: 97). Paz’s theory of poetry and language is founded on several problematic notions. First of all, his claim that poetry restores the “original nature” of language implies that language has an intrinsic, fi xed nature that is independent of history and usage. Rather than contributing to the renewal, growth, and diversification of language, history and usage appear to merely pollute and degenerate language. Poetry’s function, according to him, is essentially to remove these “impurities” and “excrescences” from language. Similarly, his claim that poetry “transcends language” suggests that somehow poetry is able to overcome the “mirroring” effect of words. However, the only way that he can defend this claim is by proposing that a poem is a sort of sign

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that refers only to itself, and is not only autonomous and self-sufficient, but also “final.” In his theory, a poem is supposed to be not only an organic and perfectly balanced unit, but also an object that is able to somehow overcome the vicissitudes of time, and the contingency of language. As such, the poem becomes a quasi-sacred object, and the poet a quasi-divinity, that stand over and above the rest of humanity’s creations and members. Furthermore, as argued above, Paz’s poetic dialectics is premised upon the unproblematized and apparently natural distinction between poetic and philosophical discourse, as well as between the “aesthetic” and the “material” worlds. Herein lies Paz’s theory’s fundamental non-radicalness, and its ultimate capitulation to the hegemonic claims of mainstream philosophical discourses. Paz cedes to mainstream philosophy the fundamental difference between imagination and reason, and simply asserts the superiority of poetic thinking founded on “pure” imagination. This leaves unproblemized the role of the imagination in shaping how we experience and perceive the “material” world, and the role of metaphors in giving us imagined categories through which we can conceive of reason. Paz’s theory of poetry and language’s fundamental drawback is that he seeks to resolve the problem of the distance between words and things in this modern era by arbitrarily cutting off the always historical and experiential context in which strategies of expression take place. Unlike Rorty, Paz aims not to de-center, and disturb language – thereby transforming thought. He merely disassociates poetic language from the rest of language, claiming that poetic discourse belongs to an entirely separate, autonomous, and somehow superior, and a-historical, realm. As argued above, the central philosophical metaphor of Paz’s poetry in Libertad bajo palabra is freedom. If, as Rorty says, new theories are “metaphoric redescriptions” of old theories (Rorty 1989: 17), Libertad bajo palabra can thus be regarded as a poetic reply to Hegel’s speculative philosophy’s positing of the realization of freedom in the world. Paz’s poetry endeavors to restore the power of the metaphor freedom, a metaphor Paz feels has died off into literalness in the realm of philosophical dialectics. As I have shown, dialectical reason’s “dead” metaphor of freedom served as a platform and foil for launching Paz’s “new” metaphor of freedom. But Paz’s poetry does not sublate dialectical reason, or interrupts the mirroring effect of words, or escapes the contingency of language. His claim that poetic discourse is like a rock-solid pyramid that withstands the test of time, unlike the “crystal castle” of philosophical dialectics, is based on the false premise that poetry is capable of issuing a “final vocabulary.” However, there are no final vocabularies in the world – only historically contingent ones that either change, or become fossilized and anachronistic. While Paz’s poetic dialectics claims to offer something entirely “different” from philosophical dialectics, his search for something wholly apart from dialectical discourse ends in buying into all the key presumptions of hegemonic Western philosophical thinking. Specifically, a close reading of Paz’s poetic dialectics thus brings home that it is not critical of dialectical reason’s aspiration to arrest the contingency

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of language, or eliminate the distance between words and things. Rather, his contention is simply that dialectical reason is not properly equipped to do the job. In the tradition of philosophical dialectics, Paz also sets out to transcend the contingency of language, accepting the two main premises of dialectical reason. First, he accepts that contingency is our curse – that which alienates us from our true selves. Secondly, he shares dialectical philosophy’s belief in and yearning for an “originary” language capable of universality and definitely expressing our relation to things. He differs with philosophers in their contention that reason is the space in which an originary, universal language can be found again. Paz’s objective, then, is to convince us that when poetic dialectics properly manipulates the rules of language governing the realm of imagination they cause “the distance between the word and the thing [to] decrease or disappear” (Paz 1956: 97). In this sense, Paz the poet dialectician shares the same goal as the dialecticians of reason: to effectively repress the unruly and volatile space between the intended meaning an author bestows upon a word, and the meanings inferred when it is read and re-said. The main difference between Paz and his philosopher rivals is the strategy he uses to try and hold words’ meaning captive. While Rorty’s poetic reply achieves its goal when it reminds us that all language is historically contingent, Paz’s poetic dialectics aim is to escape the historic contingency of language that he sees as a plague on philosophy. Still, Paz’s work is a philosophical-poetic reply in that it transforms the concept of dialectics into something quite different from that promulgated by adherents to dialectical reason. Yet, in this transformation, he retains philosophy’s core conceit – that “final” vocabularies capable of universally describing the world in its unified and originary wholeness are still possible and desirable. Like the dialecticians of reason, his theoretical practice still requires and aspires to a grounding center. As a result, Paz’s poetic dialectics transforms terms and strategies, but is not transformative of the spirit of the dialectical philosophical project.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston (1969): The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Translation by Daniel Russell, Boston: Beacon. Bloch, Ernst (1995): The Principle of Hope. Translation by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, vol. 1, Cambridge: MIT UP. Gadamer, Hans-George (1976): Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutic Studies. Translation by P. Christopher Smith, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gaos, José (1986): Obras completas, vol. 7, México City: FCE. Lakoff, George/Johnson, Mark (1999): Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books.

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Miró Quesada, Francisco (1981): Proyecto y realización del filosofar latinoamericano, Mexico City: FCE. Paz, Octavio (1956): The Bow and the Lyre. Translation by Ruth L. C. Simms, Austin: University of Texas Press. Paz, Octavio (1967): Alternating Current. Translation by Helen R. Lane, New York: Viking. Span. original: Corriente alterna, Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Paz, Octavio (1973 [1963]): Early Poems 1935-1955. Translation by Muriel Rukeyser, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos William, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Paz, Octavio (1974): Las peras del olmo, Barcelona: Seix Barral. Paz, Octavio (21985): Libertad bajo palabra, Mexico City: FCE. Paz, Octavio (31986): El arco y la lira, Mexico City: FCE. Paz, Octavio (1988): Primeras letras (1931-1943). Edited by Enrico M. Santí, Mexico City: Vuelta. Paz, Octavio (1990): Obra poética (1935-1988), Barcelona: Seix Barral. Roget’s (1977): “Reverie.” Roget’s International Thesaurus. 4th ed. Edited by Robert L. Chapman, New York: Harper-Collins Publishers. Webster (1980): “Invent.” Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language. 2nd ed. Edited by David B. Guralnik, Cleveland, OH: William Collins Publishers, 1980. Webster (1980a): “Reverie.” Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language. 2nd ed. Edited by David B. Guralnik, Cleveland, OH: William Collins Publishers. Roig, Arturo Andrés (1994): El pensamiento latinoamericano y su aventura, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina. Rorty, Richard (1989): Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard (1991): Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Salazar Bondy, Augusto (1968): ¿Existe una filosofía en nuestra América?, Mexico City: Siglo XXI.

To Hear the Inaudible, To See the Imperceptible: Modernity and Otherness in Octavio Paz 1 Xavier Rodríguez Ledesma

… the principle fact of these years: plurality. And I add: it does not suffice to hear the others, also necessary is a merciless criticism of ourselves. Octavio Paz2

To fully appreciate the significance and contribution of Octavio Paz’s thought for the cultural, intellectual and even political life of the 20th century, one must first comprehend its transcendence as it confronted a closed political and cultural milieu characterized by the vacuum of criticism that is one of the defining aspects of all undemocratic societies. Postulating and reestablishing the right to voice dissent, the need for impudence in a political-intellectual ambience constrained by formulisms that mask authoritarianism and dogma, opening windows to ventilate the dominant, rarefied cultural atmosphere of the Mexico in which he lived, these are just some of the achievements of Paz’s reflections that, in fact, went much further in their zeal to vanquish the arbitrary and vaporous frontiers of nationalism. His critique of existing socialism and his profound reflections on the meaning of modernity – both begun in the 1940s – place Paz as a vanguard intellectual in the most precise sense of that term; that is, as a universal thinker who, by going against the current and thinking ahead of his time, was able to demonstrate the fundamental contradiction existing between the socialist ideals extracted from the best of Marxism and the authoritarian reality that emerged in the so-called socialist countries. In addition, his reading and analysis of the meaning of modernity in general and, in particular, of what this represents for countries located outside the orbit of 1 | First published as: Rodríguez Ledesma, Xavier (2008): “El lunar del sol. La otredad de la historia.” In: Gloria Vergara (ed.), Visiones de Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Porrúa, pp. 1-36. Translation by Paul Kersey. 2 | Paz 2008: 87.

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Western Europe, constitutes one of the richest, most original and culturally precocious veins of thought that this Mexican Nobel Laureate produced. Octavio Paz, a poet, writer and humanist who wished to be remembered only as a poet, bequeathed a vast intellectual baggage to the field that in contemporary rationality is denominated by the Social Sciences. Taking on phenomena that left the history, sociology, anthropology and political science of the second half of the 20th century pensive, limited and lacking imagination, or simply blind, his vision emerged from poetry – i.e., from beyond the hegemonic epistemological and geographical-cultural frontiers – proposed reflections, positions and questions that were either not understood at the time or did not have the transcendence that time would attribute to them while laughing at previous certainties. Precisely because Paz’s critical imagination was not constrained by the dominant formulisms, dogmas, protocols and scholasticisms of the academic world, it remained free to examine analytical horizons that were unimaginable during that period. Paz perceived, thought, critiqued and wrote to his world from poetry and thus illuminated social reflection with unsuspected colors that made it possible to observe details, shadows and chiaroscuros that could not be espied from the portal of the Social Sciences. Today, distanced as we are from the conflicts and polemics that clouded his clarity, Paz’s political works are beginning to be evaluated from other perspectives, even by his detractors, thus allowing us to highlight one especially curious and significant cultural phenomenon: though the – politically and philosophically – critical reflection in Paz’s works is highly esteemed, it is still shunned by history, which deems it the product of a writer and poet born in a nation on the margins of modernity. The fact that Paz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990 in no way refutes this statement. To the contrary, his winning of the most prestigious international award for Letters actually reveals the full discriminatory nature of the disdain that the academic cultural “establishment” has showered upon Paz’s reflections on modernity (otherness, plurality, diversity, tolerance, time, etc.) in contemporary discussions of these now so fashionable topics; issues that this Mexican poet began to ponder in the 1940s and continued to examine right up to his final writings, always with astonishing lucidity.3 Paz was well aware of this and it frustrated him. Though seldom expressed openly, he never ceased to lament the fact that as a Mexican intellectual writing from Latin America, his voice lacked the resonance reserved for those of European

3 | On this point Pascale Casanova states: “The irremediable character of, and the violence of the schism between, the legitimate world and its outskirts are only perceptible to writers on the periphery who, as they must struggle quite literally to ‘find the entrance door,’ as Octavio Paz writes, and to make themselves known in the center (or centers), write more lucidly of the nature and form of the relations of literary force” (Casanova 2001: 65).

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scholars who dominated the “family chats” on the reason of being and the condition of the advanced societies; their societies, not ours. 4 From its beginnings in the 50s, his critique – acute and against the grain – of socialism in its concrete manifestations gradually built up the specific weight that consolidated it as an ineluctable reference on these questions throughout Latin America. A second line of thought involved his profound and vanguard reflections on modernity. If Paz was widely cited to embellish discourses that were critical of socialism, Marxism and totalitarian societies, the same cannot be said of his works on modernity. Though this topic became fashionable in political, philosophical and cultural discussions only a couple of decades ago, Paz’s works are conspicuously absent from that concert. In fact, it is not at all rare to find that the works of several key authors, whose texts represent seminal works on certain aspects of contemporary reflections on modernity, contain ideas and discoveries proposed by Paz decades earlier. How can we explain the fact that this facet of Paz’s works has suffered, and continues to suffer, such blatant disregard and neglect? The causes of this disdain are rooted in the introduction, above: • The idea that those works are the reflections of a poet, “just a poet,” and not those of a philosopher or social scientist; and, • that he was, moreover, a poet from the margins of modernity. Here, a crucial paradox arises: once reason becomes institutionalized, it constructs the mechanisms and discourses that sustain those elements that pretend to achieve recognition of true knowledge. Any explanation that fails to satisfy the rules, as established by reason and defi ned in scientific discourse, cannot possibly succeed in earning the merit of being endorsed by reason and, hence, will be expelled to the nebulous regions of myth and poetry, where “the real,” “the true,” “the rational,” etc., have no place. Criticism, an element inherent in the exercise of reason, is abandoned when it sees itself reflected in its own postulates. By renouncing the basic exercise of its own historization, critical reason ends up closing the doors to other forms of understanding reality, to other forms of knowledge, and to other forms of conceiving and comprehending the world, thus also negating itself. It is for reasons such as these, then, that the reflections of a poet merit scant attention, while even less meritorious are those of a poet from the strange and distant reaches of the cultural periphery. Paz was a poet and he was born in Mexico – i.e., Latin America – a region that, according to 4 | “[…] what annoys him most is that the new reflections on postmodernity – and we all know to what texts everyone refers – do not include his reflections on the end of modernity. Once again, we see a Paz that debates with a European, or Eurocentric, discourse, that deliberately leaves out works such as his, those from a marginal Latin American writer. He sees himself excluded once more from such discussions, that supposedly include reflections from the periphery, because if there is one thing that truly characterizes postmodernity it is a broad recognition of a polycentric world” (Santi, cited in Grenier 2004: 150-151).

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modernity’s own definition, is a constituent part of the suburbs of civilization. Once the power relations of the international republic of Letters are defined, it is difficult indeed for the cultural metropolis to accept and value the idea that those outer reaches would be capable of producing reflections that might help it to understand itself; and this generates a second great paradox. It was precisely because Paz was a Latin American poet that he had the possibility or, perhaps better, the sensibility, to advance in elucidating the meaning of modernity well before the oft-cited European authors of the past twenty years. The poet’s relationship with language, his way of understanding words and concepts, is what allows him to understand so clearly both existence and the meaning of that black spot on the sun of which Nerval wrote: The writer is [one] who sees a small black spot on all things, even the clearest ones. Nerval puts this admirably: “I looked at the sun and a black spot remained on my eager gaze.” That “black spot” is the conscience or, more precisely, the sensation of the general relativity of things. The black spot causes a distancing from reality and is expressed in two directions that, though opposite, are often complementary: the critique of reality and the invention of other realities (Paz 2001: 145).

As a poet, Paz could distance himself from reality and understand that truths are relative and constructed. Poetry allowed him to conceive and comprehend that words are just metaphors of reality. As a poet – one who lives and works in the freedom in the use of language that poetry provides – Paz was able to conceive and create “elm trees that yielded pears,” something unimaginable in the vision of agronomic or botanical rationality. Words and concepts are not things, because the poet creates the world as he goes about naming it. By understanding the freedom of words in the face of reality, he is able to visualize that black spot on the sun that represents the “general relativity of things,” including that of all truths.5 The unavoidable possibility and necessity of allowing a drop of doubt to fall on all certainties comes, in the final analysis, from accepting that words – concepts – are not things and, hence, the permanent possibility that everything may be different, that there exists another way of understanding, comprehending and conceiving the world. From poetry – and due to it – Paz began to visualize other meanings, 5 | “Language and myth are vast metaphors of reality. The essence of language is symbolic because it consists in representing one element of reality through another, as occurs in metaphors. Science verifies a belief shared by all poets at all times: language is poetry in its natural state. Each word or group of words is a metaphor. […]. Man is man thanks to language, thanks to the original metaphor that made him the other and set him apart from the natural world. Man is a being that has created itself by creating language. Because of the word, man is a metaphor of himself” (Paz 1994: 61).

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other ways of explaining all reality. As a poet, he was able to perceive and recognize the existence of otherness, a fundamental concept of all reflections on modernity, but this poetic sense would be completed by a second element that is constitutive of his profound reflection on otherness: the Mexican self.6 It was in 1937, after a shocking experience at ciudad universitaria in Madrid, that Paz suddenly realized that the others, those who are different, were human beings just like “us.” He would recall that profound experience fifty years later: I could narrate other episodes but prefer, in conclusion, to evoke an incident that marked me deeply. I once went with a small group to visit […] Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid, which was on the warfront. Guided by an officer, we passed through buildings and salons that had once been classrooms and libraries [now] transformed into trenches and military outposts. Upon reaching one large room, fi lled with sandbags, the officer gestured us to be silent. From the other side of the wall we heard, clearly and distinctly, voices and laughter. I asked in a low voice, “Who are they?” “They are the others,” the officer replied. His words stunned me, and later I felt an immense shame. I had discovered quite suddenly – and forever – that the enemy also has a human voice.7

The impact of this discovery of how otherness could be incarnated in human form led the young poet to ask himself about the nature of difference; that is, what was that otherness made of? Building an answer to this question would mark all of his later work. Two years before his death, in the last interview he gave, Paz made explicit the transcendence of the concept of otherness in his opus: Politics is the art of co-existing with others. All of my writings are related to – even co-exist with – what is sometimes called otherness. In my most intimate poems, those in which I speak with myself, I speak with the other that I am; in my erotic poems [it is] with the [feminine] other; in my writings that touch on topics of religion, metaphysics or philosophy, I interrogate the Other. We, women and men, live always with others and before the Other. This and that: we pertain to two distinct and inseparable worlds (Peralta 1996: 168-169).

6 | “Poetry leads us to touch the untouchable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world within this world, the other world that is this world. The senses, without losing their powers, are transformed into servants of the imagination and make us hear the inaudible and see the imperceptible” (Paz 1996a: 213). 7 | “Discurso inaugural del Congreso Internacional de Escritores, celebrado en conmemoración del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Escritores Antifascistas de julio de 1937” (Paz 1995: 446).

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In his youth, the poet had questioned his own identity: who was he?; what did he have in common with an us?; and, how was this us seen by others? He began to visualize answers once he took his distance and was thus able to look at them from afar. Poetry and criticism united in poetic critique would allow him the flexibility and malleability required to open himself to those other worlds with which we live, and in whose synchrony or diachrony we debate permanently in the search for, and construction of, our own identity. If poetics is one fundamental factor to be taken into account in explaining the meaning of Paz’s reflection, a second and equally important axis is that he was a Latin American. Discussing these issues from our – historical and cultural – region imbued his views with a hue that only the daily, ongoing and historically constructed coexistence with otherness could have granted him. For Latin Americans, it is not only that otherness configures our everyday horizon, but also that we, in turn, constitute otherness as this is perceived from the vantage point of modernity. It was because of this duality that Paz’s dissertation on modernity and otherness anticipated by at least a quarter century its appearance and coming into vogue in the cultural metropolises. As far as modernity is concerned, Latin America is just one of many other worlds. Gabriel García Márquez has explained that the most difficult task that Latin American writers face is not to imagine credible realities but, rather, to make credible the reality in which we live. This idea synthesizes the other part of the explanation as to why Paz, a poet from the suburbs of modernity, was able to ponder, so far ahead of his time, problems that Europe’s own intellectuals would not even conceive for several decades. Otherness has always been here, we have always been the others and, in turn, as this us we have always lived with others. Paz identified this clearly when, upon inquiring into who we are, he observed us from a little farther away. Once he began to walk along the trail he blazed with The Labyrinth of Solitude, he never left it. In his explanation of the Mexican self he found the others and, in consequence, began to understand the meaning of us. Otherness became the focal point in the analytical axis from which Paz thought as a poet, writer and Latin American intellectual. It is highly significant that as long ago as 1949 he would choose as the epigraph for a text that, as time has shown, would become one of the most emblematic of his works, the lines of a poet – precisely a poet! – who speaks of otherness. On the first page of The Labyrinth of Solitude, the reader finds this epigraph, taken from Antonio Machado: The other does not exist: thus says rational dogma, the incurable belief in human reason. Identity = reality, as if everything must be just so, absolutely and necessarily, one and the same. But the other does not let itself be eliminated; it subsists, persists; it is that hard bone to gnaw on which reason dulls its teeth. Abel Martín, with poetic faith, [which is] no less human than rational faith, believed in the other, in “The essential heterogeneity of being,” as if speaking of the incurable otherness that the one suffers.

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“The incurable otherness that the one suffers.” Though, behind its mask of rationalist faith, modernity makes everything that exists vanish into thin air, otherness is present, conserving itself as part of oneself. Otherness is inconceivable in the absence of the malleability of spirit, openness to judgment [and] the ability to be totally and completely consequential in the exercise of criticism, which, we must never forget, constitutes the intellectual banner that modern rationality itself has raised. Otherness is, without doubt, “that hard bone to gnaw,” the reality that, though negated, will remain present even after the dissipation of the fog of ideologies, of modernity as a unique and exclusive form of development, of the linking of progress to an unequivocal notion of the future, and of the installation of one sole conception of time as unique and hegemonic. At the end, otherness is still there, reminding us that the world is not as simple or one-dimensional as it is presented and elucidated to us by modernity; that time is neither unique nor exclusive; and that in order to understand this, conceive it and assimilate it, one must criticize everything, beginning with one’s own critical judgment; that is, it is necessary to historicize history itself. Thus, in order to comprehend where we are, to perceive our historical role, we must know how to listen to the other voice or, better still, other voices. In The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz uncovered otherness for his readers and revealed its existence in our present.8 He found that the history of Mexico has been a long struggle to negate, conceal and unmask otherness. He was half a century ahead of his time as he blazed the paths that future discussions on multiculturalism and interculturalism would be bound to follow. The vision of history that Paz posits, and that twenty years later in Posdata (1969) he would take to a more radicalized and committed posture with respect to the concept of democracy, was profoundly provocative, especially so because it appeared precisely as Mexico lived the drunken dream of progress and of development, galloping unbridled in its bid to reach tomorrow. In the early 1950s, Mexico had committed itself to the wild race to attain a future that was, by definition, unreachable. As the country strove to achieve this future promise that was equated with such concepts as development, growth and progress, its past became shackles of which it would have to rid itself or, at least, try to sweep under the carpet of the hegemonic politicalhistorical discourse. Paz laid the foundations for tearing asunder the unity of Mexico’s official history because his essay lifted up the carpet beneath which Mexico intended to hide those other Mexicos; thus, the poet showed that those pasts not only continued to be present, but that they were central elements for understanding the national identity:

8 | “Universality, modernity and democracy are today inseparable terms. Each depends on, and demands, the presence of the others. This has been the theme of everything I have written on Mexico since the appearance of The Labyrinth of Solitude” (Paz 1994c: 31).

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In our territory there co-exist not only distinct races and languages but also several historical levels. There are those who live before history; others, like the Otomies, displaced by successive invasions, [live] on its margins. Without going to these extremes, various epochs confront each other, ignore each other or devour each other in the same lands or at the distance of just a few kilometers. […] Past epochs never vanish completely, and blood still drips from all their wounds, even those most ancient. At times, like those Prehispanic pyramids that almost always conceal others, in one city or one soul, hostile or remote notions and sensibilities are mixed and superimposed (Paz 1961: 11).

The history of history shows us convincingly the constitution of this one voice, of this exclusive way of conceiving the world, its constitution and its future. Time, art, science, religion, education, god, food, nature, society, sexuality, democracy, beauty, representativity, etc., are, obviously, all concepts charged with cultural – i.e., historical – connotations. The recognition, acceptance and assimilation of this – something easy to write and even easier to say – is precisely the quid of the issue. To speak of cultural definitions of concepts that, thanks to the hegemony of one particular conception of the modern western world, pretend to be ahistorical, is to begin to rupture this notion of universality and to begin to recover that other voice. To advance, as Paz did in 1949, in the appraisal and admission of the existence of distinct cultures, different social groups that do not necessarily share an appreciation of that which defines us, meant advancing several decades ahead of his time in the conceptualization and understanding of contemporary issues with greater assiduity in sociopolitical reflections expressed in discussions of universality, plurality, multiculturalism, tolerance, interculturality and, most generally of all, democracy. Almost fifty years later, towards the end of his life, the poet wrote: We wish to be universal, but the only way to be so is to keep ourselves faithful to our own emotions, to our own vision of life, and in this sense we are particular. […] In the political sense, we also know that in order to attain an understanding of the world, we must comprehend others. Politics fi nally found democracy. Tolerance: acceptance of the existence of others (Paz 1996: 11).

The theme of the relativization of our certainties and the aperture to recognize other forms of perceiving the world is not an easy one to conceive, and one much more difficult still to assimilate. Its complexity entails, among other things, a cardinal point: the difficulty in accepting the existence of an other that is comparable in value and values to one’s own. However, this facet of the issue is complemented by a second theme, one perhaps even more problematic than the first; the one incarnated in current discussions of pluralism and tolerance. What does this mean? It means that upon recognizing the other we will also be recognizing ourselves; to conceive of the existence of the other means advancing in the comprehension and admission

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of our own historicity. If the other exists and, with it, certain values related to life, death, love, education, progress and, in general, its entire existence, then we ourselves may become aware of the historical, geographical, political and, in general, cultural, limits inherent in our own value system. It is before the other that we define ourselves and that it, in turn, defines us and defines itself before us. In the interior of identity, otherness appears. The difference is not out there among the many but, rather, within one. This contradiction is more serious than the one that opposes the one to the many and, moreover, seems insurmountable: the self is different from what it is. Identity is not broken or dispersed: in itself it is duality because, while not ceasing to be what it is, it is also another. […] Otherness is another thing: it is the difference within identity. Unity is not dispersed or spilled out: closed in upon itself, shut in, it contains its opposite. Not the non-self, but the other (Paz 1996: 29-30).

Having reached this point of analysis it is necessary to refer, though only briefly, to one of Paz’s fundamental ideas, delineated and nurtured throughout his grand essayist opus. In their pro-modern, pro-progress and pro-future logic, groups that have survived from the past and that evidence our mestizo self, far from being cherished as elements of cultural distinction, value or richness that have contributed their profi le to the constitution of our national identity, are seen as genuine shackles that have impeded us from achieving the levels of development that we should have reached. In other words, the conviction is established that in its ledgers universal history would have set aside for us the role of a protagonist if it had not been for the misfortune of having included in the construction of our own particular history those atavistic social groups that tie us to premodernity and backwardness, those that are out of phase with history. This is how we may begin to understand the tragic and apparently incomprehensible fact that in our present time the dead Indian is praised, while the live Indian is despised and repudiated. Once severed from his past, the Indian becomes useful because he provides positive elements of identity because the existence of those grand “Prehispanic” civilizations are a source of pride and recognition; in contrast, the direct descendants of those ethnic groups, the living Indians of today, are not considered a reflection of that glorious past, but as incarnations of the living representation of a present marked by a backwardness that precludes us from achieving the future that was predestined for us. It is for this reason that we see in Mexico a phenomenon that at first glance and from the point of view of nationalist history is both incomprehensible and inconceivable: racism directed against its Indians. More than thirty years after writing The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz would return to the theme he opened there: “The Indian world was from the beginning of the world the other one, in the strongest meaning of the term

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Otherness that for us, the Mexicans, is resolved in identity, distance that is proximity (Paz 1994a: 305). Approaching the study of history (in general) by assuming this conceptual framework in which otherness plays a fundamental role, meant opening the doors wide to admit notions that would later be called intercultural and/or multicultural. In 1950, positing the existence of one sole voice in the conformation of our social, political and historical certainties – as Paz did – meant radically upsetting the ideological elements constitutive of the hegemonic conception of how we conceived ourselves, our culture, the world and, in a word, history itself. Around the mid-20th century Octavio Paz, a Latin American intellectual, a Mexican poet, through his critical reflection on the way in which history was defining and constructing the essential characteristics that would identify it when it saw itself in the mirror, fertilized the field for the full development and understanding of the critique that would later emerge from within western history itself. The idea then, as Paz points out in The Labyrinth of Solitude, is to become capable of seeing ourselves historically, of historicizing history, of historicizing our self (and our beliefs) with all that this entails, which is a great deal and very difficult to assimilate and digest. Questioning and overcoming our cultural and epistemological certainties is one of the most difficult intellectual exercises to carry out. Hegemony, the weight of the history we have shared throughout our lives, makes our hand tremble as it attempts to let a drop of inquiry fall upon our certainties. The effort required to conceive otherness and then to comprehend it as something that not only exists outside of us, but that it is on that basis that we define our own sense of existence, is complicated at the personal level, but even more so at the social and historical levels. It entails assuming, from its roots and with all its consequences, the need to relativize (historicize) our life, our convictions and our certainties, as a means of situating them in their just historical terms; and this is nothing short of opening ourselves to the existence of other forms of understanding and conceiving life, history, time, the world, society, etc. …, concepts that we would not only have to “respect” and “tolerate,” but also assimilate as enriching, valorizing and potentializing elements of our own life, existence and history.9 In synthesis, otherness constitutes us in our own identity. 9 | The current urgency to assimilate the proposal made decades ago by Paz is evidenced in the following lines: “Tolerance – that is, dialogue – and its contradictions, constitute a universal problem, one posited today to conscience – and to legislation – with an urgency unknown up to this point in history. From this optic, our culture seems perhaps ill-prepared for the tremendous transformations of the world that affect our lives, our societies and our values. In these enormous changes there are no longer, as in the past, compact cultures closed in upon themselves in the edifice of their own values, almost unaware of the existence of distinct value systems in other cultures” (Magris 2008: 13).

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From the scientistic logic that modernity imposes upon us, we believe and are convinced that there exists only one path. The possibility of visualizing, understanding and assimilating otherness must, therefore, come from beyond those canons. Paz forged his path there from poetry, and this could not have happened in any other way. It was the freedom through antonomasia that the conception of language assumed by Paz grants poetry that made it possible for him to visualize and comprehend otherness. That is why he chose a few lines penned by another poet writing on otherness to welcome readers to The Labyrinth of Solitude I would continue to insist that understanding and accepting the profound meaning of otherness is no easy task because the world in which we are created, and that we re-create, convinces us that our existence (flat, unilinear, one-directional and univocal) is the only one that exists, and that it is into this existence that we try to integrate all reality. The poet began to show us that this reality is neither unique nor what it seems to be; to the contrary, it is multiple, diverse and only one among an infinity of forms of seeing and assimilating it. Hence, what is needed is the simply realization that other realities exist. Conceiving their existence is the first step, but then comes the most difficult part: understanding them on their own terms, respecting them and, ultimately, comprehending and assimilating the conviction that co-existence with them is a motherlode that will lead us to mutual enrichment. As long as we fail to accept this, we will continue debating with ourselves on our effort to integrate them into our reality and to make them participants in our insane race towards the future that, by definition, is unattainable; we will continue to see them through the screen of progress and, therefore, continue to exclude them because they are “archaic” and/or different. What becomes clear, then, is the imperious intellectual necessity to situate historically the conceptions of history and sociology that tradition has established as hegemonic. Indeed, ever since the Enlightenment, the notion that there exist superior and inferior representations of reality has reined. How and why was this superiority defined? Clearly, all debates on the meaning of existence itself and on the scientificity of different methods of comprehending reality, etc., are as ancient as the literature on them is vast. The Enlightenment produced a specific discourse (science) that became hegemonic and that qualifies, approves and issues – or refuses to issue – certificates of veracity to expressions that pretend to explain “reality”: […] if a new revolutionary thinking is to emerge, it will have to absorb the traditions disdained by Marx and his heirs: liberty and poetics, the latter understood as the experience of otherness; it is no less certain that this thinking, like Marxism, will be critical and creative; knowledge that embraces society in its concrete reality and in its general movement […] and changes it. Active reason (Paz 1994: 305).

History and sociology defined as sciences, with all that this entails, and the multiple discussions (largely from its Byzantine perspective) of its

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epistemological statutes, are the heirs of notions that view science as the only mechanism, discourse, method – or however one may wish to denominate it – through which human beings become capable of glimpsing, knowing or grasping reality that, in turn, is understood in only one way and can thus be broken down, analyzed and understood by a subject capable of utilizing the appropriate methods and protocols. It is well known that the Social Sciences are something like the poor relations of scientific zeal and science’s obsession to understand reality (in this case, social), because all of them (history, sociology, politics, economy, etc.) were born and constituted under the stigma of seeing their own sense of existence questioned. For this reason, they have devoted themselves to the task of constructing the most ill-assorted and absurd epistemological pretexts in an attempt to see their respective objects of knowledge catalogued, potentially, as appropriate for “scientific” study. These desperate attempts that seek to adjust reflections on social phenomena to the paragons established by science have left aside a basic question that should never have been lost from view: the methods of analysis that science devised and instituted were developed specifically to approach objects of study that are perfectly defined and that comply fully with the meaning of reality that was required in order for them to be approached in just such a way. The impediment that makes it difficult to approach the so-called Social Sciences using the methods designed for the hard sciences is a disquieting page in (cultural) history and its zeal to understand reality. The historical weight of those hegemonic implants is brutal, as are the rest of the multiple forms of constituting hegemony that must have the ability to turn invisible the profound contradictions upon which they are founded and that they themselves generate. Thus, the question is: what kind of notion of reality permits the historian or sociologist to imagine and design tasks appropriate for history and sociology? Clearly, the answer is constructed as a function of history’s own desire for a particular, historically determined reality. This helps us understand more fully just why Paz’s essayist reflection on the milieu of history and the Social Sciences in general, was greeted with such disdain by the specialized guilds that claim to be the only legitimate possessors of the capacity to explain and to create knowledge. Let us probe this issue more deeply. It is an epistemological contradiction that those disciplines that postulate the need to historicize and criticize all concepts exempt themselves from that very intellectual exercise, and thereby attempt to raise theirs up as the only discourses that are valid and efficacious for attaining an understanding of what the past was, for explaining what the present is, for expressing how to conceive time, and for stating its own reason for existence as a culturally hegemonic discourse, etc. Diversity – i.e., the recognition of otherness – cannot be left at the level of discourse, but neither can it be remitted to the exclusively political domain when it speaks of culture. Indeed, if it is to be consequent then it must recognize, respect, value and enrich by establishing bi- (or multi-) directional relations with other forms of conceiving the past

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and examining the present that have nothing to do with notions that can be historicized perfectly; concepts such as linear time (past-present-future), nation, fatherland, progress, and others characteristic of a social (historical) conception linked to the enthroning of science as the hegemonic discourse of modernity. The fact that the foundations of positivism were laid so many centuries ago, it presents a series of challenges that are extremely difficult to resolve: to remove its lenses, to build and learn a new way of thinking and, finally, to conceive otherness with all of the consequences that arise from its acceptance. Moreover, the disdain and neglect of other forms of conceiving the world and, therefore, of linking oneself to it, entailed in what the vision of western modernity would call epistemology, involves a certain form of racism, because on the basis of a “universal” value (science and its positivist incarnations with regards the humanities), all other types of knowledge, all other ways of relating to nature and, when all is said and done, all other conceptions of the world, are discriminated against. In the face of generalizing, all-embracing concepts of the “global” or “universal” type – as Paz reminds us – particularity must also be posited. Time, and the way in which it is conceived, is a nodal concept. Modernity established a linear conception of time (past-present-future) in which the future is synonymous with change and this, in turn, with progress. This resulted in the world being divided into just two parts: the modern and the ancient; the latter being the guiding epithet for all those societies that do not share modern ideas and institutions. By dividing the world into “developed” and “underdeveloped,” the impossible was attained: uniting multiple realities in one sole concept, integrating a multitude of cultures in one sole definition. Thus, it is necessary to identify this cunning cultural hegemony and emphasize once again that there is no one, unique, civilization on the basis of which the level of progress achieved by others can be evaluated, qualified or criticized and, worse still, the fact that the other is delineated and viewed only from that voice (of progress) that has been instituted as hegemonic when, in reality, no culture exists in which development is linear. Therefore, to put it simply: history knows nothing of straight lines. The universal temporality that modernity postulates makes this notion uniquely and exclusively characteristic of the West. Almost half a century after writing The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz published the following reflection that seems to refer to what he helped discover through that seminal essay: Mexico searched for the present outside [but] found it within, buried, but alive. The search for modernity led us to discover our antiquity, the hidden face of the nation. An unexpected historical lesson that I am not sure everyone has learned: that there exists a bridge between tradition and modernity. When isolated, traditions become petrified and modernities volatilized; at the same time, one animates the other and the other responds by proffering weight and gravity (Paz 1994b: 36-37).

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The establishment of the future as a time to which we must inexorably arrive and towards which each and every human effort is directed, has meant that when this future is questioned or when the doors that give access to it close, the totality of modern culture finds itself in the throes of a crisis: its objective has ceased to exist and civilization experiences what can only be called a crisis of identity, one in which all beliefs regarding evolution and progress are negated and impugned, because the principle that really sustains our time is not an eternal truth, but the truth of change. Latin America and, with her, Mexico – wrote Paz – appropriated the ideas of modernity from French, British and North American political philosophy. The political philosophy of modernity was adopted by, but not adapted to, our nations, and this meant that our history became eccentric. With respect to our countries, modernity should not refer to quantitative patterns of development, but should entail a movement towards the capacity to criticize and self-criticize society in a search of a modern form that is more in accord with our histories and our ways of being. In the face of this panorama, it becomes necessary to recognize our plurality of cultures and civilizations and the plurality of historical times that this signifies; only then may we confront the linear and univocal conception of time that characterizes modernity. We should turn our gaze upon our otherness. Our history did not begin five hundred years ago and is still far from reaching its end. If we follow this line of reflection the conquest, for example, is thought of as a change of civilization, and the reason why ever since that period Mexico has seen the Prehispanic world as the other world, as the other side. But we must pause and reflect upon this question. Mexico’s history cannot be pondered in such a simple and completely linear way. Certainly there is continuity, but it would be a crass error to consider it exclusively in a linear and onedirectional fashion; instead, we should examine it as a series of juxtapositions of distinct societies. Such an intercultural vision as a basis for the historical and sociological analysis of Mexico rests precisely on this point: recognizing otherness, a concept that Paz proposed as a means to understand ourselves in 1950, and one that bears repeating as many times as may be necessary. Undoubtedly, otherness was the element that marked the totality of Octavio Paz’s opus. He, more than anyone else, understood it with perfect clarity and fully recognized and valued the horizons with which it endowed his reflection: otherness as his astrolabe for navigating the seas of criticism. The possible adoption of this concept as a guide in the search for answers to such questions as “who we are” and “where we are going” is the key to criticism, no matter what the object of analysis may be. Criticism is not restricted to the wider (social) meaning of phenomena, but begins with that which is most intimate, most particular and closest: first, the self, the selfness of the self in its daily life that permeates and, in turn, is permeated by, an infi nite range of factors. In a comment to Enrico Mario Santí, Paz noted that otherness “designates daily life, everyday life, in its radical strangeness.” What we are dealing with, then, is the experience of “being in the world,” of “being in the

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here and now […] Otherness is the enduring spring of poetry and, also, of the novel and theater; it is life itself” (Santí 1997: 307). From the vantage point that otherness provides, the world is seen as, and is, in effect, distinct. It is only this vision that offers a panoramic view sufficiently broad and rich as to understand that doubt – inquiry – is the potion, and that we should let a few drops of it fall upon everything, absolutely everything, that makes up our universe, beginning first of all with the individual self that is each one of us, and the certainties that this self has already constructed. The richness of criticism resides in many places, not only in those institutionally recognized as such, and one of the principle duties of the intellectual spirit is to be sufficiently flexible so as to be able to recognize them and act in consequence. Otherness defines us. We are the others. In late 1993, Paz published two books simultaneously. One, Itinerario (Itinerary), was an approach to a first, brief, balance of what might be an intellectual autobiography, marked and defined – as we have seen – by the discovery and recognition of otherness. The second, entitled La llama doble (The Double Flame), closed the circle on the meaning and importance of this notion for defining and understanding the world from the most immediate life of the individual. It was not enough to transform the world, it was also necessary to explain it from its most particular foundations. The guiding threads of Paz’s reflection in La llama doble were none other than love and eroticism; the first an urge for completeness, a huge bet that no one is sure of winning because it entails a side bet that depends on the freedom of the other; the second, “above and beyond all else, the thirst for otherness” (Paz 1996a: 220). Love is the hinge that the poet used to join these two grand notions: freedom and otherness. Near the end of his life, Paz succeeded in completing the circle. The other continued to be that hard bone to gnaw upon which reason dulls its teeth. The work he began with The Labyrinth of Solitude found possible closure in his reflection on love and eroticism, as these two concepts lead to the understanding of the existence of the individual, always as a function of the appearance of, and respect for, the other; respect in the first place for his freedom. Our urge for completeness depends on an accord with the other in which one assimilates its freedom to accept or reject our request for reciprocity.10 The other requires recognition of its existence and, fundamentally, acceptance of its freedom, only thus can it be constituted as an integral part of ourselves: the otherness incarnated in the loving couple. It is for this reason that love is the great modern subversion: 10 | “Exclusivity requires reciprocity, an accord with the other, its will. Thus, unique love abuts another of the constitutive elements: freedom. […] True love consists precisely of the transformation of the appetite of possession in giving oneself. Thus, it asks for reciprocity and radically disrupts the old relation between dominion and servitude” (Paz 1996a: 284).

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Love has been, and is, the great subversion of the West. As in eroticism, the agent of the transformation is the imagination. It’s just that, in the case of love, change unfolds in the opposite relation: it does not negate the other nor reduce it to a shadow, but is the negation of one’s own sovereignty. This self-negation has a counterpart: acceptance of the other. Contrary to what occurs in the dominion of libertinage, the images incarnate: the other, male or female, is not a shadow but a carnal and spiritual reality. I can touch it and also speak with it. And I can hear it and, moreover, drink its words. Once again, transubstantiation: the body wrought voice, meaning; the soul is corporal. All love is Eucharist (Paz 1996a: 288).

Otherness is incarnated in the loving couple. Paz, the poet, arrived once again before this door at the age of eighty. The journey begun in the late 40s of the previous century was coming to its end. Paz had anticipated that otherness would be capable of seeing our history, both social and individual, in other ways. Otherness, the touchstone of Paz’s thought and work. Otherness contemplated and recorded by the poet several decades before philosophers and social scientists. At the end of his life, Paz emphasized once more the urgent need to historicize our certainties, to assume the existence of an infinity of times. At that point, love served him as a kind of polarized glass that allowed him to distinguish the traces of otherness, and so become able to recognize the presence of diverse times and, with that, to question, historicize and combat the unilinear notion imposed by modernity.11 Having just written these words, I hasten to qualify: Paz did not reach that door; rather, he constructed it as both the starting point and eternal destination of all his thought, because it constituted the agglutinating element of his poetic opus and served, in addition, to endow it with meaning and to anchor such concepts as freedom, love, criticism and time. Paz understood this with perfect clarity, so much so that in one of his most representative poems he wrote verses that would serve – would have to serve – as a guide in our eternal wandering in search of ourselves: all the others that we are-, I am another when I am, my acts are more mine if they are also of everyone, for me to be I must be another, emerge from myself, search for myself among the others the others that are not if I do not exist, the others that give me full existence. (Paz 1997: 231). 11 | “Love does not vanquish death: it is a gambit against time and its accidents. Because of love we glimpse the other life in this one. Not eternal life, but […] pure vivacity […]. Reconciliation with the totality that is the world [and] with the three times. Love is not eternity; nor is it the time of calendars and watches, successive time. The time of love is neither large nor small: it is the instantaneous perception of all the times in just one, of all the lives in an instant …” (Paz 1996a: 352).

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Bibliography Casanova, Pascale (2001): La república mundial de las letras. Colección Argumentos 258, Barcelona: Anagrama. Grenier, Yvon (2004): Del arte a la política: Octavio Paz y la búsqueda de la libertad, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Magris, Claudio (2008): La historia no ha terminado: Ética, política, laicidad, Colección Argumentos 386, Barcelona: Anagrama. Paz, Octavio (1961): The Labyrinth of Solitude, New York: Grove Press. Paz, Octavio (1994): “El arco y la lira.” In: La casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia. Obras Completas, vol. 1, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 33-185. Paz, Octavio (1994a [1984]): “La tradición liberal.” In: Fundación y disidencia: dominio hispánco. Obras Completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 304-307. Paz, Octavio (1994b): “La búsqueda del presente (Nobel Lecture 1990).” In: Fundación y disidencia: dominio hispánco. Obras Completas, vol. 3, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 36-37. Paz, Octavio (1994c): “Entrada retrospectiva.” In: El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de México. Obras Completas, vol. 8, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 15-32. Paz, Octavio (1995): Ideas y costumbres I: La letra y el cetro. Obras Completas, vol. 9, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (1996): “Nosotros: los otros.” In: Ideas y costumbres II: Usos y símbolos. Obras Completas, vol. 10, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 29-30. Paz, Octavio (1996a): “La llama doble: Amor y erotismo.” In: Ideas y costumbres II: Usos y símbolos. Obras Completas, vol. 10, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio et al. (1996b): “Particularismo, universalismo y literatura.” In: Vuelta 235 year XX June, p. 11. Paz, Octavio (1997): “Piedra del sol.” In: Libertad bajo palabra. Obras Completas, vol. 11, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Paz, Octavio (2001): “Silueta de Ireneo Paz.” In: Obras Completas, vol. 14, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Paz, Octavio (2008): Cartas a Tomás Segovia (1957-1985), Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Peralta, Braulio (1996): El poeta en su tierra: Diálogos con Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Grijalbo. Santí, Enrico Mario (1997): El acto de las palabras: Estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

The Blue Fire of the Double Flame 1 Juliana González Valenzuela

As the original fire of universal life, sexuality rules living beings with a single and determining end: reproduction; key to survival and renewal of life itself. But in humans – as Paz highlights – sexuality goes beyond this one end; it diversifies limitlessly, transforming itself into eroticism. “Eroticism is not mere animal sexuality: it’s a ceremony, a representation. Eroticism is transfigured sexuality: a metaphor. The agent that moves both the erotic and poetic acts is imagination”2 (Paz 1993: 10). They are not equivalent. “Animal” sexuality is programmed and ruled by a single imperative: survival. Not so human sexuality, which does not remain as such but is instead, transformed into eroticism, its manifestations pluralized without losing its natural and instinctive root as another facet of the vital fire. “Eroticism is the human dimension of sexuality, that which imagination adds to nature” (Paz 1993: 117); it is an inventive mode, innovative. Sexuality, for its part, is uniform, reiterative: “Sex is always the same”, says Paz. Eroticism would be polymorphic – in Freud’s terms –, in contrast with mere genital reproductive sexuality. Even – as the author of The Double Flame highlights –, eroticism is characterized by an essential ambiguity: it is solar and nocturnal, sublime and perverse: “it is repression, permission, sublimation and perversion” (Paz 1993: 17). Eroticism is, in summary, historic. It is created and recreated in human time and space: it is culture and not just nature (though it never stops being nature and body). But eroticism is not the only dimension that’s exclusive to humankind. Humans are also capable of another particular transformation: that of eroticism into love, in the essential meaning that Paz gives to it. It is – so to speak – a double metamorphosis: the first, from sexuality 1 | First published as: Juliana González Valenzuela (2009): “El fuego azul de la Llama doble.” In: Enrico Mario Santí (ed.), Luz espejante: Octavio Paz ante la crítica, Mexico City: UNAM/Era, p. 651-662. Translation by Santiago Outón G. 2 | All quotes are translated from: Paz 1993.

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to eroticism; the second, from this into love: blue vortex of the flame. And if eroticism is an exception in sexuality, so too is love in eroticism: it is a transfiguration of eroticism, without losing its erotic and sexual roots. The “double”, and at the same time, “single” flame, expresses the essential enigma of that which we can call the paradoxical continuity-discontinuity that is human life (see Changeux/Ricoeur 1998): simultaneously body and spirit. It is the harmony of opposites which expresses the metaphor of the “double flame”, opposed to the dualist conception and the separation of “soul” and “body” that markedly characterizes Plato, in Paz’s view.3 It is true that Octavio Paz acknowledges that Plato reveals the fundamental key of love as he conceives, on one hand, as a radical desire for completeness. He remembers thus, the two great myths of the Symposium. One about Eros as the radical impulse of each human towards another, that which constitutes the complementary half of oneself (symbolo, in Greek); as the primordial imperative to recover the original unity possessed by mythological prehistoric humans (pre-humans) that, according to the myth of Aristophanes, had existed before they were “cut in half” thus ending as humans, reduced to their separated selves. Eros would be thus, the primordial desire which lies in the deepest reaches of every human to recover in the you the being that it’s lacking. Paz describes it as follows: “We are incomplete beings and the desire of love is perpetual thirst for “completeness”. Without the other, I will not be myself” (Paz 1993: 41). This idea of Eros coincides, in essence, with another myth, culminating in the Symposium – and also highlighted by Paz – in which Socrates speaks what Diotima revealed to him about Eros as the “son” of richness (poros) and poverty or lack (penia). Love – the poet says – “communicates light with shadow, the empirical world with the ideal one. As the son of Poverty, he seeks riches; as the son of Richness, he shares goods. It is the wisher who asks, the wished who gives” (Paz 1993: 42). However, the author of The Double Flame also highlights the “incorporeal” sense that love already acquired in the Symposium, “platonic” love; he emphasizes how for the Greek philosopher, the experience of love turns into a process of ascension, from the beauty of a loved body and soul, to the love for beauty itself, that is, the Idea of Beauty, that lies beyond the beauties in this world and beyond this reality made of shades. Paz does not accept this platonic dualism: he refutes the idea of love as a separation from the body and the world or love as an impulse towards abstract Beauty, located beyond the soul-body unity that constitutes each particular human being: “Because of the body, love is eroticism and thus 3 | As I will show now, the interpretation of Paz of the platonic idea of love is viewed from a perspective of platonic creation, a “classic” reading based foremost on some passages of The Banquet, seen themselves under the light of the dualism in the Phaedo and The Republic. But there is another possible reading, especially of the Fedro, that in retrospective would support a unified and dialectic view of love (spiritual/carnal) of the Double Flame. See González 2000, chapter 1.

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communicates with the biggest and best hidden forces of life. Both, love and eroticism – the double flame –, are fed by the original fire: sexuality” (Paz 1993: 207). In the same way, the distinctive characteristic that Paz attributes to love is its literally interpersonal character. This is the other transformation of sexuality, beyond eroticism. Love expresses the sublime dimension, specific to humans, where humankind gets closer to the “completeness” that Eros desires. Love is an attraction towards a particular person: towards a body and a soul. Love is choice; eroticism, acceptance. Without eroticism – without any visible form that enters through the senses – there is no love. But love goes beyond the desired body and seeks the soul in it and, in the soul, the body. The whole person (Paz 1993: 53).

The mystery of love – we can say – coincides with the mystery of the person, which is definitely the mystery of humankind itself. That is, it coincides with the sense of radical unity that defines what is most human about humans; that which makes each human being an end in itself (as Kant already saw), insofar as a unique and irreplaceable person. From here the intrinsic need for fidelity: “For us, fidelity is one of the conditions of the loving relationship” (Paz 1993: 46). In this sense, fidelity would not express anything but the attraction for the loved one in her identity and oneness as well as the consequent exclusive commitment arising out of love. For the poet, this is what constitutes the passion of love: insofar as it is radical affection for a concrete person, “in body and soul”. “Each person is unique and for that it is not an abuse of language to talk about the “sanctity of the person” […]. Yes, each human being, even the vilest, houses a mystery which is not an exaggeration to call holy or sacred” (Paz 1993: 95). And all this does not mean in the end anything else than recognizing in love the highest form of freedom – and that is how Paz expresses or implicitly conceives it. Eroticism is the manifestation of the condition of freedom in humans, in the sense of the capacity to go beyond natural sexuality and reach fulfi llment in many historical ways, from every sign, both positive and negative, which are inscribed in the reign of cultural freedom. But the blue fire of love, the fiery vortex of love, the highest intensity of the flame, which is passion concentrated on the person, is only understood as the expression of human freedom. The person itself, individuality, is freedom. In love – as Paz sees it – we reach the miracle of the meeting of two persons, supreme choice of the loved one in herself and by herself, in her unity, her intimacy and irreplaceable essence. “Love is acknowledgement, in the loved person, of that gift of flight that distinguishes every human creature. The mystery of the human condition resides in its freedom: it is fall and flight” (Paz 1993: 95). But the author of The Double Flame penetrates also the dialectical character of freedom, and therefore, of love. Freedom is neither pure nor

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absolute, but it is conjugated with destiny. Fatality, its opposite, is also not pure or absolute: Fatality manifests itself only with and through the complicity of our freedom. The knot between freedom and destiny […] is the axis on which all loved ones have turned throughout history […] it is the unbreakable union of two opposites, body and soul (Paz 1993: 128).

Even though Paz does not say it, it is implied that freedom is also “double”, like the flame: it expresses two dimensions of the human capacity to transcend or go beyond mere nature without ever breaking with it. In as much as it is interpersonal, love touches both soul and body, it does not abandon it, as the Plato of the dualist reduction believed, but on the contrary: love is also – we can say – a projection of corporeality and, with it, of the sexuality that, in its essential meaning, is the primordial impulse of life, as Paz understood. That is why love is not “platonic” in the habitual sense that this notion has acquired. 4 “Without body and the desire that ignites the lover, there is no ascension towards the archetypes. To contemplate the eternal forms and participate from the essence, we must traverse the body” (Paz 1993: 206). But, notably, a re-reading of the platonic Phaedrus can corroborate what Paz defended: the integral (psychosomatic) meaning of love. I think the metaphor of the “double flame” is not in essence far from the platonic metaphor (allegory) of the winged chariot. In this dialogue (written after the Symposium, in the transition towards the phase called “self-criticism” or “second maturity”), the problem of the irrational and corporeal character of love appears. This is a question to which Plato proposes a new and wondrous answer: that the “soul” (Psyche) is movement in its very essence (it moves itself and therefore is immortal); that it is pulled by two contradictory passionate forces: a “white horse” that symbolizes good passion and a “black horse”, symbol of concupiscence, of the lower passions: one impels from above and the other from below. The movement is directed or driven by the “charioteer”, the rational part of the soul: the driving force, but, by itself, immobile. The “soul” (actually the human being: anthropos) is configured in this triple structure, intrinsically contradictory, confl ictive, always pulled in two opposite directions: down below, when the power of the lower passions prevails, or up above when another madness (mania) born from the other passions, prevails. When this happens, this soul/body is driven towards the heights, to the world where Beauty itself resides. And this ascension is explained because the soul is attracted to and possessed by the god of its choice: because it is prey to its own enthusiasms. Love is madness in every case; but it can be madness that can save or lose – so to speak –; that takes you up or down, elevate or fall. 4 | Even though we must insist this “platonic” love is a simplistic and vulgarized form that is very far from what love really is for Plato, if we understand his whole context.

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What the allegory reveals as decisive, is in any case, that there is no proper soul without a body: the soul carries within itself corporeality when it ascends: both horses, and these are, in essence, (the body), the engine of the movement of the soul. The soul is a double flame and only with its libidinal strength, does it ascend.5 The Phaedrus, in essence, would agree with Paz. Even though it is also true that the platonic concept of love which permeates western history is not this concept, which originated in the Phaedrus, but rather the one about the two worlds and with it, the need for love to separate itself from the world, of the reality that deceived the senses. The world of here/now is abandoned in favor of one beyond: the “celestial place”, without time or space. Paz says repeatedly and accurately that our image of love is historical and changing. It is a cultural fact and as such, it is “invented” in every tradition even though there are always communicating vessels and common elements, essential ones, between times and cultural traditions. Love, especially, has not always been conceived of in the same way (which is why it is a work of freedom). The Double Flame pays close attention to these historic/cultural variations, revealing the poet not only as a notable scholar of the subject, but also and precisely his deep awareness of the historical character of the phenomena known as love as well as the realization that it is not actually a natural fact, but a human “image”, a product of imagination, born of necessity and freedom, of the “given” and the “created”. In his journey through historical imagery, beginning with the Hellenic conception of Eros, Paz stops to linger over some of the innovations which Greek, and particularly Roman poets and writers introduced.6 Rome, in particular, is for Paz a model of civic and other important freedoms that enrich erotic life, freedoms most markedly demonstrated by the presence of the Roman woman. He also alludes to some aspects of the twists and turns love will take in the Christian world, particularly the damnation of body and eroticism, focusing his attention next on 12th century France, where a new form of love arises, a form that for Paz is the real thing, love in the strictest sense, referred to precisely as “courtly love”. The poets called it “fin’ amors”, purified love, “refined” love, characteristic of Provençal poetry as well as the ballads of troubadours and court singers, which flourished within the context of a singular civilization of vital refinement, thereby privileging the ascendance of love as an interpersonal sublime link, while at the same time maintaining the erotic. In that moment in France, where the oriental cultures (especially Arabic ones) commingled

5 | And its descent, its fall, is also integral: corrupt love, dangerous madness (evil in itself), is not a thing of the body: it is “movement” of the whole soul: body/ soul, reason/passion, simultaneously. 6 | Of this journey, which spans a great part of the work, we must limit ourselves by pointing out here, and very briefly, just a few moments, without referring to the notable flood of authors and works than Paz attends to.

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with western tradition, those new ways to conceive the love life appeared and from that time, would nurture the flow of the culture of love. The interpersonal character of love implies a reciprocal free condition of the lovers; it therefore carries with it, in Paz’s view, the progressive liberation of women, now thought of as subjects of love. In that sense, the principle of reciprocity (which is not equivalent with correspondence) would become the basis of love. Lovers are most certainly persons, and it is this status that women must reach before, according to the poet, we are able to speak of love. It is certainly heterosexual love that is preferred by the author of the Double Flame. It is love in this form which constitutes for him the model, among other things, since it is in this form that women are considered essential for love: “The rise of love is inseparable from the emergence of women: There is no love without female freedom” (Paz 1993: 72-73). Nevertheless, in Paz’s book, homosexual love does have a significant presence. He cannot truly navigate the history of love and its cultural manifestations without paying attention to the great poets, writers and scholars who dealt with and championed homosexual love (from the ancient Greeks to the modern thinkers),7 even though, for him, the image of courtly, heterosexual love has a paradigmatic meaning. This image of courtly love, as the Double Flame states, permeates every western tradition through to the present, insofar as love is founded on interpersonal freedom, in the liberation of women and the consequent possibility of the sublime character of love, blue vortex of the double flame. This does not mean, however, as Paz clearly affirms, that love is a feeling exclusive to the occidental world or that it did not exist prior to 11th and 12th century Provence. Paz apprehends correctly that the emotion of love is universal, it belongs to all times and all places. Another way to put it is that “the idea of love adopted by a society and an age” which is formed into “a way of life, an art of living and dying” (Paz 1993: 34-35). The poems of Sappho – Paz notes – are not a philosophy of love: they are a testimony in which that strange personal tendency to be magnetically drawn towards a single person has been crystallized. This is the transformation of the “erotic object” into a “unique and free subject”. But both the feeling and the image or idea of love, that is, the supreme expression of freedom and the interpersonal bond, that blue flame of love, is precisely what is threatened with oblivion or extinction in our time, according Paz in his sharp critique which makes up the most crucial pages of this book. In the present, we have the diametric opposite of a purely spiritual love,

7 | It is important to remember in this point that – unlike many interpreters that deny it or undermine it – Octavio Paz acknowledges with marked respect, the notes concerning a possible homosexual element in Sor Juana’s life and works. (See Paz 1982, and my essay González 1998).

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separated from sexuality and body. “Modernization has de-sanctified the body and publicity has used it as an instrument of propaganda” (Paz 1993: 159). Sexual liberation in our time has resulted in the opposite affi rmation – a purely impersonal sexuality and therefore, has all the marks of the agony of love. Even eroticism itself is assimilated within mere sexuality to be absorbed by the market forces and publicity machines. Capitalist and democratic society has applied the impersonal laws of the market and the techniques of mass production to erotic life. Thus, it has degraded it, even though as a business, its success has been enormous (Paz 1993: 158). Our age denies the soul and reduces human spirit to a mere reflection of bodily functions. It has thus mined the very notion of person out of its center […]. The notion of soul constitutes the person and without person, love regresses to mere eroticism (Paz 1993: 129).

And the agony of love is the agony of what is truly human; the agony of freedom and creativity, of erotic imagination and spirituality. It is a new form of barbarism, technological and turned into publicity: Our time is simplistic, concise and brutal. After having fallen into idolatry of the ideological systems, our century ended up in the adoration of Things. What place does love have in a world like ours? (Paz 1993: 151). The great absent one from the erotic revolution of this century has been love […] true breaking that has turned us into cripples not of the body, but of the soul (Paz 1993: 153-154). The brain and other organs today possess nearly all of the faculties of the soul. The body, without ceasing to be body, has turned into soul (Paz 1993: 165).

Today the body is affirmed for the sake of the body itself; sexuality for sexuality, with the consequential de-personalization and mechanization of the bonds. A crisis of the human condition and of our freedom to be human. On the other hand, it would seem that the subject of love, of its history and destiny, would have little or nothing to do with another theme of the Double Flame, which is relative to some crucial advances in the contemporary sciences: cosmology, biology or especially, neuroscience. This is only in appearance, though, since as with great accuracy and sharpness the poet notes, the scientific revolutions of our time bring with them some of the most primordial and fundamental questions that humankind has faced since the beginning to light, and now they take on a singular importance. Questions about the origin of life and the universe; about the place that humankind has in the cosmos – as Scheler, the philosopher expressed it – from which our very humanity depends on, and thus, our freedom, our capacity for eroticism and love.

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Paz highlights, among other scientific ideas, the one relative to “black holes” in modern astronomy, calling attention to those new dimensions of scientific thought in which notions such as antimatter, chaos and others must be seen. These are dimensions in which the “random” factor becomes as or even more powerful than necessity: what is the place of freedom in the new image of the universe, the poet asks? Regarding the advances on neurobiology, Paz notes the biologist tendencies than conceive the spiritual (“the mind”) in body’s terms, such as the neurological construction. This, in consequence, makes the idea of the self disappear, the idea of a subject who acts, who makes decisions (and is therefore responsible for them). The spiritual life is conceived, as Paz says, as if it were an orchestra that played without a conductor. In summary, the laws of necessity and universal “objectivity” prevail over freedom and individuality. The notion of person. It is the fundament of our political institutions and our ideas about what justice, solidarity and social coexistence should be. The notion of person is confused with that of freedom […]. What is the place of freedom in a universe ruled by immutable laws? (Paz 1993: 163).

We have a real and very noteworthy resurgence of the mechanism – as Paz highlights – in the de-humanizing consequences that are the results of the unconditional defense of artificial intelligence: Is [the human person] a mere limited body, a group of physical and chemical reactions? Is it a machine, as the specialists in artificial intelligence believe? […]. It stops being the result of natural evolution and enters the order of industrial production: it is a fabrication (Paz 1993: 165).

Some philosophers, who – echoing thoughts found in the Double Flame – talk about the end of philosophy, an idea that Paz not only rejects, but turns upon itself. Our time is the moment to join science with philosophy, to provide a meeting ground that allows us to ask about the questions brought forward by science. He believes that […] the time is ripe to start a philosophical reflection, based on the experiences of contemporary sciences, that illuminates us about the old and permanent issues that have set the human intellect alight: the origin of the universe and life, the place of humans in cosmos and the relationships between our thinking aspect and our emotional aspect, the dialogue between body and soul. All of these subjects are directly related with this book’s objective: love and its place in the horizon of contemporary history (Paz 1993: 199-299).

It is pertinent to mention also that we need a proper meeting ground with the human aspect of humankind, which is, to a large extent, based upon our capacity for love. And this meeting implies, in the metaphorical context

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of Paz, fanning the flames in order to intensify the blue light of the double flame. What it is not about, according to the philosophical and poetical view of Octavio Paz, is a return to the old image of platonic love that has been left behind in the dust of history by today’s science – and we add, by today’s philosophy as well. It is not about leaving this world in pursuit of another one which will give this one meaning. The Double Flame expresses the final mystery of the unity/duality of love and humankind, because to restore love is to restore “the humanity of humans”.8 Poetry, more than philosophy (at least philosophy of “no contradiction” so prevalent in the western world), has always had the capacity to penetrate into the opposites, to acknowledge that what exists in this world is struggle and harmony between them. Only a meeting with dialectic philosophy – of the Heraclitean kind –, closely related to Paz, makes it possible to penetrate to the real substructure of what is human, the essence of life and love. Paz states that human imagination is “set since the beginning into resolving the opposition of elements in unity” (Paz 1993: 65). This is the reason why love is basically a union of opposites. Love is natural destiny and free choice; it is corporeal and spiritual, earthly and sublime. It is a meeting between fatality and freedom, ascension and descent. The poet expresses it thus: “Loving attraction […] is made from animal humors and spiritual archetypes, of the childhood experiences of ghosts that populate our dreams” (Paz 1993: 126). And, markedly, the transcendental meeting between time and eternity is made in love. Love does not definitively conquer death, although you could say that perhaps it defeats death at the same time that it doesn’t. An extreme example of poetic synthesis would be the supreme paradox of Quevedo: “dust in love”; prodigious union to which the essential pages of this book are dedicated to. Paz teaches that love, the blue fi re of the double flame, achieves the miraculous interpenetration of here and there. Love, he says, is vivacity, intensification of life in the loving instant that transcends death; and thus he expresses it in two incomparable passages: Beyond happiness or unhappiness, even though it is both, love not only gives us eternity but also vivacity, that minute in which the doors of time lie half-open: here is there and now is forever. In love, everything is two and everything moves to become one (Paz 1993: 131). 8 | I believe that this redundancy: human human, “human man” (sapiens sapiens) is necessary to comprehend this being, radically contingent, which can be “human” or “inhuman”; that can be humanized or dehumanized; that must acquire and maintain its humanity, its human quality, via actions. The main quest science and technology undertake today is defining what is human about humankind, what – in my view – can be conceptualized as the homo humanus (see González 2005).

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The loving impulse rips us from the ground and the here; the awareness of death makes us return: we are mortal; we are made from earth and must return to it […]. Love is life fulfi lled, united with itself: opposite of separation. In the feeling of the corporeal embrace, the union of the couple turns to feeling and this, in turn, transforms itself into consciousness: love is the discovery of the unity of life (Paz 1993: 144). So it is confirmed, that both poetry and love have the prodigious capacity to penetrate into that deep “world”, that horizon of sense, contained in this very world and not beyond it. Or as Octavio Paz expresses it with the unique quality of his words: “The poetic testimony reveals to us a new world within this world, the other world that is this world […]. Isn’t this what happens in dreams and erotic encounters, actually?” (Paz 1993: 9)

Bibliography Changeux, Jean Pierre/Ricoeur, Paul (1998): La nature et la règle: Ce qui nous fait penser, Paris: Odile Jacob. González, Juliana (1998): “Sor Juana and scholarly ignorance.” In: Carmen López Portillo (ed.), Sor Juana y su mundo: una nueva mirada actual: Memorias del Congreso Internacional. Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Mexico City: UNESCO-FCE. González, Juliana (2000): El poder de Eros, Mexico City: Paidós – UNAM. González, Juliana (2005): El poder de Eros and Genoma humano y dignidad humana, Barcelona: Anthropos; Mexico City: UNAM. Paz, Octavio (1982): Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, Barcelona: Seix Barral. Ocatvio Paz (1993): La llama doble: Amor y erotismo. Seix Barral, colección Biblioteca, Mexico City: Breve.

Notes on Contributors

Juan Álvarez-Cienfuegos Fidalgo received his PhD from the Universidad del País Vasco. He is professor at the Facultad de Filosofía de la UMSNH in Morelia, Mexico. He is researching about humanism and the constitution of modernity as well as about the artistic vanguards of the 20th century. He is author of the book: La cuestión del indio: Bartolomé de Las Casas frente a Ginés de Sepúlveda (2001). He edited with Marina López López, Republicanos y Republicanismos (2008). Jorge Capetillo-Ponce is presently Director of Latino Studies, Associate Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development at University of Massachusetts at Boston. He has publications on such issues as social theory, race and ethnic relations, immigration, media studies, art, Latino Studies, and U.S.-Latin America relations. Dr. Capetillo-Ponce is the editor of two books: Images of Mexico in the U.S. News Media (2000) and (with Sam Binkley) A Foucault for the 21st Century (2009). His latest published articles are such as “Deciphering the Labyrinth: The Influence of Georg Simmel on the Sociology of Octavio Paz.” In: Theory, Culture & Society, December (2005); “From ‘A Clash of Civilizations’ to ‘Internal Colonialism’: Reactions to the Theoretical Bases of Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Hispanic Challenge.’” In: Ethnicities 7/1 (2007). Bolívar Echeverría is professor at Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His books include: El discurso crítico de Marx (1987), Valor de uso y utopía (1998), Las ilusiones de la modernidad (1995), La modernidad de lo barroco (1998), Definición de la cultura (2001) and Vuelta de siglo (2006). Rubén Gallo is director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, he is the author of Mexican Modernity: The AvantGarde and the Technological Revolution (2005; winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize). The chapter included in this book is an excerpt from Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2010).

260 | Octavio Paz

Juliana González Valenzuela is Professor Emeritus of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Emeritus Scholar of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. She is also a member of the Institut International de Philosophie (Paris). Currently, she is a member of the Government Board of the Colegio de México and part of the Consulting Council of the National Human Rights Commission as well as the National Bioethics Comission. Her work includes 7 books and 15 more co-authored, as well as over 150 specialized articles. Among her books stand out the following titles: El malestar en la moral (1986); El poder de Eros (2000); Genoma humano y dignidad humana (2005); and the editions: Dilemas de Bioética (2007) and Perspectivas de Bioética (2008). Yvon Grenier is professor in the department of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University (Canada) and author of Guerre et pouvoir au Salvador (1994), The Emergence of Insurgency in El Salvador (1999), Art and Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom (2001; Spanish trans. in 2004). He edited (selection of texts and introduction) a book by Octavio Paz, Sueno en libertad, escritos politicos (2001). His most recent book, co-authored with Maarten Van Delden, is Gunshots at the Fiesta, Literature and Politics in Latin America (2009). Oliver Kozlarek teaches political and social philosophy as well as social theory at the Institute for Philosophical Research at Universidad Michoacana in Mexico. Currently he is a visiting professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico-City. Recent books include: De la Teoría Crítica a una crítica plural de la modernidad (2007), Entre Cosmopolitismo y “conciencia del mundo” (2007). Humanismo en la época de la globalización: Desafíos y horizontes (2009) (with Jörn Rüsen). Hugo Moreno is assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His work includes articles on Hispanic analogical thought, Octavio Paz’s philosophical poetry, and Alfonso Reyes’s humanism. His book Between Literature and Philosophy: Paz, Zambrano, Borges, and the Analogical Tradition of Hispanic Thought is under contract with the University of Toronto Press. Xavier Rodríguez Ledesma is professor at the National Pedagogical University, Mexico. For the last 20 years he has conducted research on modern cultural history of Mexico. He is author of numerous books, among them: The political thought of Octavio Paz: The traps of ideology (1996); Writers and political power in Mexico: The republican duality, 1968-1994 (2001); The power facing the letters: Republican vicissitudes, 1994-2001 (2003). Alfons Söllner, is professor of political theory and the history of ideas at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany. He studied political science, philosophy and the history of literature in Regensburg, Munich and Harvard.

Notes on Contributors | 261

Dr. phil. University of Munich, Habilitation Free University of Berlin. His research is focused on the history of Frankfurt School, the emigration of social scientists after 1933 and the political ideas of the 20th century. Recent publications include: Crítica de la política. Emigrantes alemanes en el siglo XX (2001); Fluchtpunkte: Studien zur politischen Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2006); “‘1968 – eine Nachlese.” In: Mittelweg 36/ 17 (2008), pp. 33-60; “Zwischen Europa und Amerika. Hannah Arendts Wanderungen durch die politische Ideengeschichte.” In: Leviathan 2 (2008), pp. 292-310. Rolando Vázquez is assistant professor of Sociology at the Roosevelt Academy of Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His research circles around three interdisciplinary topics: ‘postcolonial thinking’, ‘visual social experience’ and the ‘critique of modern time’. His research brings together a variety of fields such as: social theory, continental philosophy, postcolonial thinking, visual studies and aesthetics. He has written about Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, photography and the critique of modern time. Liliana Weinberg is scholar at the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América Latina y el Caribe of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She teaches at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the same university. Her work is dedicaded to the study of Latin American essays in relation to cultural and intellectual history. She is author of the following books: Ezequiel Martínez Estrada y la interpretación del Martín Fierro (1992), El ensayo, entre el paraíso y el infierno (2001), Literatura latinoamericana: descolonizar la imaginación (2004), Umbrales del ensayo (2004), Situación del ensayo (2006), Pensar el ensayo (2007).

Index of Names

Actaeon 125, 127, 132 Adorno, Theodor W. 13, 19-30, 31-44, 68, 148 Akhenaton 66, 67, 70, 71, 78 Apollinaire, Guillaume 113, 122 Aragon, Louis 62 Arendt, Hannah 11, 12, 23 Assmann, Jan 150, 151 Bachelard, Gaston 221 Balzac, Honoré de 28 Bartra, Roger 152 Bataille, George 145, 190, 192, 192 fn. 13, 194 Baudelaire, Charles 103, 105, 106, 202, 212 Bauman, Zygmunt 143, 147 Benitez, Fernando 155 Benjamin, Walter 12, 22, 18, 55, 99f, 102f, 105-109 Bergson, Henri-Louis 131, 162, 175 Bhambra, Gurminder 140 Borges, Jorge Luis 67, 156 Braque, Georges 112 Bravo, Manuel Alvaréz 107 Breasted, James Henry 77, 78 Breton, André 49, 52, 54, 62, 77, 128, 129, 192, 199 Brunkhorst, Hauke 33, 38 Bruno, Giordano 126, 127 Burke, Kenneth 189, 198

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 56 Caillois, Roger 55, 145, 146, 147, 156, 175, 176, 183, 185, 190, 194 Caistor, Nick 53 Campbell, Joseph 183 Camus, Albert 52, 54 Carballo, Emanuel 155 Carpentier, Alejo 56 Carrington, Leonora 128 Caso, Antonio 68 Cassirer, Ernst 201, 211 Castaneda, Carlos 206, 207,208 Castañeda, Fernando 36, 138 Castañeda, Jorge 55 Castoriadis, Cornelius 55, 182, 196, 197, 210 Castro, Fidel 55 Cernuda, Luis 58, 59, 128 Che Guevara 55 Clifford, James 144f, 190ff, 208 Coatlicue (goddess) 190, 191, 210 Cortés, Hernán 25, 37, 70, 71, 72, 73 Costa, Sergio 140 Cuesta, Jorge 52, 52 fn.11, 91 Dalí, Salvador 111, 113, 130 Darío, Rubén 59 de Certeau, Michel 102, 104 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Ines 37, 73, 80, 82, 168, 172, 244 fn. 7 Delgado, Honorio 84 Derrida, Jacques 62, 65, 67 Diana (goddess) 43, 125

264 | Octavio Paz

Díaz, Porfirio 76, 168 Dilthey, Wilhelm 156, 162, 194 Doña Marina see La Malinche Duchamp, Marcel 14, 111-117, 119-127, 130-133 Dumézil, George 145, 201 Durkheim, Émile 145, 159, 174, 175, 176, 190

Huret, Grégoire, 125 Husserl, Edmund 49

Eliot, T. S. 62, 128 Engels, Friedrich 57, 59 Estrada, Ezequiel Martínez 84 Fell, Claude 67, 156, 157, 170, 194, 210

Kaf ka, Franz 28 Kahlo, Frieda 67, 69, 73 Kandinsky, Wassily 112, 122 Kant, Immanuel 40, 49, 55, 156, 161, 162, 166, 251 Kircher, Athanasius 125 Krauz, Enrique 37

Ficino, Marsilio 126 Fidel see Castro Foucault, Michel 11 Frazer, James G. 183, 186, 201 Freud, Sigmund 13, 49, 62, 65-84, 156, 174, 176, 194, 201, 206 Friedman, Milton 55 Gadamer, Hans-George 221, 226 Gaos, José 156, 217 Geertz, Clifford 192, 208, 212 George, Stefan 139 Giddens, Anthony 23, 33 Gide, André 53 Gingerich, Willard 49 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 28, 142 Griaule, Marcel 190 Guillén, Nicolas 56 Gurvitch, Georges 157 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 13, 42, 152 Harris, Marvin 208 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 14, 24, 31, 49, 156, 157, 161, 219, 226 Heidegger, Martin 49, 94, 96, 182, 218 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple 131 Hertz, Robert 145 Horkheimer, Max 22, 24, 34 fn. 2 Hubert, Henri 145, 183

Jäger, Lorenz 31 Jaimes, Héctor 195 Jarry, Alfred 125 Joyce, James 122 Juárez, Benito 76

La Malinche 25, 37, 71f, 73, 194 Leenhardt, Maurice 190 Leiris, Michel 145, 190, 192 Lepenies, Wolf 138, 139 Lepsius, Rainer 142 Leroi-Gourhan, André 190 Levine, Donald 158, 163, 164 fn. 8 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 49, 156, 181, 182, 183, 190, 191, 201, 204 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 175, 183, 186, 190, 201 Luhmann, Niklas 143 Luna, Juan Hernandez 155 Machado, Antonio 43, 236 Malinowski, Bronislaw 201 Mallarmé, Stéphane 122, 129 Mallen, Ruben Salazar 155 Mannheim, Karl 52, 175f Maquet, Jaques 208 Mariátegui, Jose Carlos 84, 180 fn. 3 Márquez ,Gabriel García 236 Marx, Karl 13, 23,24, 47-51, 55-62, 81, 156, 159, 206, 219, 241, 259 Mauss, Marcel 145, 147, 175, 176, 183, 190ff, 194, 196, 206 Métraux, Alfred 190 Moebius, Stefan 145f Mondrian, Piet 122

Index of Names | 265

Neruda, Pablo 48 fn. 5, 52, 53, 54, 128 Niceron, Jean-François 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 24, 43, 58, 62, 156, 159, 162, 170, 184 fn. 7 Novo, Salvador 66 O’Gorman, Edmundo 91 O’Neill, Charles 189, 197, 198 Orozco, José Clemente 90, 91 Ortega y Gasset, José 49, 156, 157, 194, 197 Otero, Lisandro 56 Ovid 125 Pallen, Wolfgang 128 Papaoianou, Kostas 55 Pawlowski, Gaston de 125 Peirce, Charles Sanders 182 Pellicer, Carlos 53, 128 Péret, Benjamin 55 Picabia, Francis 113, 130 Picasso, Pablo 112, 127 Proust, Marcel 28 Ramos, Samuel 42, 66, 68, 84, 91, 148 fn. 7, 156, 159 fn. 6, 195 Retamar, Roberto Fernández 55, 56, 180f fn. 3 Reyes, Alfonso 49, 68, 75, 91, 156, 183, 184, 188 Ringer, Fritz 33 Rivera, Miguel Primo de 51 fn. 10, 90, 91 Rivet, Paul 183, 190 Rorty, Richard 218f, 223 fn. 7, 224, 228, 229 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 156, 205 Roussel, Raymond 113, 125 Rousset, David 54 Russell, Bertrand 182, 207 Said, Edward 7, 65, 67, 69, 83f Santí, Enrico Mario 9, 10, 54, 144, 147, 148, 156, 157, 161f, 164, 167, 174, 175, 176, 244

Sarduy, Severo 56, 92 Sartre, Jean Paul 77 Scheler, Max 255 Schopenhauer, Arthur 159 fn.4, 162 Schorske, Carl 74, 77f Schwarz, Arturo 131 Schwarz, Jorge 209 Seel, Martin 31f, 38 Sélavy, Rrose see Duchamp Serge, Victor 52, 54 Sheridan, Guillermo 54, 54 Simmel, Georg 150, 155-176, 194 Siquieros, David Alfaro 90 Socrates 250 Soriano, Juan 53 Soustelle, Jacques 190 Stalin, Josef 54, 56 fn. 20 Tablada, José Juan 128 Tenbruck, Friedrich H. 141 Tocqueville, Alexis de 49, 55 Turner, Victor 188, 189 Varo, Remedios 128 Vasconcelos, José 90, 91, 156, 196 Villaurrutia, Xavier 128 Villegas, Daniel Cosío 80, 82 Villoro, Luis 144 von Hayek, Friedrich 55 von Mises, Ludwig 55 Weber, Max 160, 174 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 182 Yeats, William Butler 189, 197, 198 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 67 Zapatista 61 Zea, Leopoldo 155, 159 fn.6, 217, 220

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