Heterogeneity of Being: On Octavio Paz’s Poetics of Similitude 0761865241, 9780761865247

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Heterogeneity of Being On Octavio Paz’s Poetics of Similitude Marco Luis Dorfsman

University Press of America,® Inc. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Copyright © 2015 by University Press of America,® Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Aquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955514 ISBN: 978-0-7618-6523-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN: 978-0-7618-6524-7 (electronic) Cover images © Alex Dorfsman, courtesy of Patricia Conde Galería. TM

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For the Dorfkins, Lori, Gabriel, and Marcela, life travel companions. And to the memory of Jessie, who forever dwells in the summer solstice.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4

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Turns and Returns, Vueltas y Vueltas The Inheritance of the Labyrinth From the Subject to the Negative and Back: Paz’s Mexicans The Ancient Quarrel between History and Poetry 1. The Lyric, Identity, and Modernity 2. History, Difference, and Temporality Heads or Tails 1. Heads: Identity or Difference 2. Tails: Poetry, Hybridity, Thought Sun Stone: Circling Back to the Threshold 1. First Turn 2. Return on the Way to a Conclusion: The Threshold of Saying On the Field of Representation

1 15 31 51 51 58 71 71 80 89 89 107 113

Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Octavio Paz wrote about time, about the fullness and alienation of the present. His poetry marked my understanding of the gift. Thanking is impossible, as impossible, one might say, as thinking. Debts are unpayable, they are at best acknowledged. This study has had a long trajectory, both in time and space. It was written in Mexico, Granada, Gothenburg and New Hampshire as well as in planes, trains, and forest clearings. It reflects years of readings and conversations in solitude and in community. First, I want to thank the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire for providing me with a fellowship to embark upon this project. I also want to thank my students at the University of New Hampshire who shared and collaborated in the passing revelations the work of reading, writing and translating bestowed, Abigail Bechert, David Brefini, Leah Crosby, Kane Ferguson, Alexander Joy, Gareth Morgan, Kristina Reardon, Amy Trueworthy, and countless others. And I want to thank my colleagues and interlocutors, readers, reviewers, arguers and encouragers, Patrick Dove, Janet Gold, Erin Graff Zivin, Janice Jaffe, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Katherine Jenckes, Brett Levinson, Alberto Moreiras, Catherine Peebles, Jaime Rodríguez Matos, Chloe Rutter, Sergio Villalobos Ruminott, Scott Weintraub, Gareth Williams, Próspero Saíz and many others who have shaped and framed my thinking so as it could eventually unfold. Finally, I want to thank my father, Jaime, whose passion, tenacity and inspiration have always been with me. I want to do all these things, but I cannot; all I can offer is an apology and a simile of gratitude: meaning. Little Rock, Arkansas, 2014 vii

Chapter One

Turns and Returns, Vueltas y Vueltas

Poetry is always an unforeseeable anticipation. Poetic saying never quite knows what it says, but it is always a presentiment of sense. That is to say, poetic saying is a kind of enunciation that articulates a moment of affect (the sense that something is wrong, or right; something gives pleasure, or it hurts), which does not yet have a meaning but sets out in search of it. In Spanish one would say, “El decir poético quiere decir,” poetic saying wants to say, or simply, poetic saying means. The search itself is solitary, perhaps; but in order to be a search, it depends on the other, or on the possibility of the other, or at least on the specter of the other. Something like the other is what calls or demands for the saying in the first place. The sense that wants to say is, by definition, an attempt at articulation, a response, to an otherness whose call is felt. 1 Whether poetic saying is uttered as an affirmation or as a negation, or whether the supposed call to which it responds is (as it could always be) a mere misunderstanding or error, the important point is that the structure of the saying, as an attempted articulation, is the structure of a joining, a response, a reply. It thus has something in common with the philosophical structures of hermeneutics and dialectics. It is like them, in some sense. Hermeneutics also parts from a presentiment, an intuition that presents itself to thought and calls it. Thought responds and situates itself in its context, its horizon, and pushes out, in order to eventually return to the originary sentiment. Having done so, it repeats, clarifies, expands that intuition with an articulated difference. It completes a differential repetition. Its logic is circular and paradoxical. Hermeneutics only fits uncomfortably within a linear temporality. This discomfort itself, then, is a new intuition or presentiment that calls for further thought. Just like the poetic sense, the hermeneutic

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presentiment is a rigorous remaining open to the call. It is, in a way, a form of waiting. The demand on philosophy is to think being, and hence, with it, the possibility of non-being, of disaster, of termination and of extermination. The demand on poetry is to say it. To a certain extent, the basic question is how the two are related to what is unthinkable and unsayable, for that is the very presentiment that affects both. It is important to reiterate the circularity of the process. The imperative of thinking is to approach the unthought; the imperative of saying is to articulate the unsaid. But once something is said or thought, the presentiment remains; the call continues demanding a response. Now then, unless we have arrived at the end of history, art and philosophy, as Hegel says, in which case there is nothing further to think or say, the unthinkable and the unsayable continue demanding a response and an articulation. These are the poet’s responsibility. Whether s/he succeeds or fails, the poet responds. Octavio Paz begins one of his early poetry collections, Águila o sol, as follows: “Comienzo y recomienzo. Y no avanzo. Cuando llego a las letras fatales: una prohibición implacable me cierra el paso.” 2 The call seems clear. The answer seems necessary. However, the path, the expression or presentation of the case seems impossible. I say seems because it is necessary to emphasize that the poem is not a simple negation of itself, nor is it merely using a rhetorical formula to highlight the difficulty of the task, and then turn itself into a simple affirmation of itself. The poem is not saying, observe how I do the impossible. There is a start, there is a blockage, and, by dint of a circular structure, there is a new differential beginning. There is sense, if not yet meaning. Something similar happens in César Vallejo’s poem, “Intensidad y Altura”: Quiero escribir, pero me sale espuma, quiero decir muchísimo y me atollo; no hay cifra hablada que no sea suma, no hay pirámide escrita, sin cogollo. 3

The poetic act is the presentation of the impossible, which is not the same thing as saying the poetic act itself is impossible. It is the response to an unthinkable presentiment. As such, it is the presentation of its own limits. But this is not the same thing as a self-negation. There is a demand that is full of sense (feeling, not meaning, although both apply to “quiero decir”). In a sense, both Paz and Vallejo begin by entering a movement that had already begun, they fail in their attempt to arrive where they thought they were going, and they return to where they had begun in order to start again at a similar beginning. Similar here means both same and different. It seems that they fail, but it also seems that they succeed. The simile of success as failure

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and failure as success puts into play a poetic circular logic, which, like the circular logic of hermeneutics, presents a finite circular world that always returns. In what follows we shall try to pose a question so simple as to be almost banal. At the same time, it is a question so broad as to be the main question (at once asked and forgotten) of Western thought. It is the ontological question, which, reduced to one of its best, though perhaps also most jaded formulations, can be stated as: to be or not to be? In existential terms, this is the question of the relationship between being and acting. In phenomenological terms, it is the question of the primacy of intuition: to see or not to see? In cybernetic terms, it is the question of whether and how messages of any kind are sent and received: to me or not to me? It is a question that we hear all the time, and yet, it remains unheard of. Hearing this question and thinking it through requires an ear tuned to its poetic nuances. It is not an informational or conceptual question. It has no answer and calls forth none. Nonetheless, it calls for a response, it is the poet’s responsibility. Parmenides had already formulated the question thus: estin e ouk estin, is or is not. 4 Parmenides states that this opposition is the basis for the decision (krisis) about whether beings can come to be (genesthai) or perish (ollysthai). Being never was and never will be; its mode of being is always is. Coming to be and perishing are thus themselves extinguished, unheard of (apesbestai). But this does not necessarily mean that they are not, that they have no being. As long as they can be thought, they too are, “for thinking and being are the same” (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai) (III). Today we can only hear in the question an echo of Shakespeare. In Parmenides it said something quite different. The process of thinking being is not equivalent to that of naming being. Even though they are mere names (toi pant onoma estai), being and non-being, or more precisely, the “to be and not” (einai te kai ouchi), still call forth a decision (krisis) (VIII 40). As opposed to most versions of the question, in Parmenides it is not posed as an “either/or” proposition but as an “and” apposition. For Parmenides, being does have a furthermost limit or boundary (epei peiras), but this does not mean that it is bounded by nonbeing. Being is incapable of being more than being or less than being. Being simply stands on its own, equal to itself in every direction, like a “wellrounded sphere” (eukyklon sphaires) (VIII 43). In a sense, then, being is bounded but unrestrained. The post Relativity Theory discovery that the universe is finite but unbounded was already intuited in Parmenides. But as long as there are names, there is a crisis, a need to make a decision. The perfect sphere is imperfect. Fragment VIII of Parmenides ends with a warning to any would be “ontologist” that might hear him. The whole exposition on being and non-being, he says, was presented in fallacious ornaments (i.e., words, verses: kosmos apatelos) or, more precisely, it presented a deceptive universe (kosmos apatelos) (VIII 52). The question of being is a question that

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puts into question the status of the question itself. It is a question that must remain, by necessity, open, unanswered. In his essay, “La esfera de Pascal,” Jorge Luis Borges takes up the question as follows: “Quizá la historia universal es la historia de unas cuantas metáforas.” 5 He then goes on to offer a brief sketch of various historical glosses on Parmendes’ “well-rounded sphere.” He takes the sphere or circle to be a guiding metaphor for much of Western thought (what he calls, “historia universal”). Borges’ sketch is a series of quotes and variations on the theme of circularity. He mentions Plato’s Timaeus, where the sphere is considered the “most perfect figure,” and through a canon of classical, medieval and renaissance authorities, he presents various comparisons of circles to solitude, God, the universe, the intellect, the subject and so on, arriving finally at Blaise Pascal’s version, which reads, “La naturaleza es una esfera infinita, cuyo centro está en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna” (qtd. in Borges). Besides the difficulty in visualizing this image, we should recall that Borges is presenting it as a paradoxical example of the various uses of metaphors. Borges is making a strong, positive and affirmative statement about everything: Universal history is the history of a few metaphors. That is to say, the representation of the whole, the most important thing, truth, even, is really nothing but the history of a small number of insignificant comparisons. The statement is total and all-encompassing. The most important is the least important. However, he modulates this assertion by prefacing it with a “quizá,” maybe. It is thus important to try and hear the tone in which this assertion is stated. It is more like a suggestion, a feeling or a presentiment. Borges puts the strong affirmation in quotation marks, and thus highlights that tone, which adds sense or sentiment (but not necessarily meaning) to presentation, is what matters. His discussion of the Pascal quote, in fact, turns on a philological interpretation which concerns, not so much its meaning as its tone. He cites the relevant authorities and manuscript evidence to show that Pascal meant to write “Una esfera espantosa” (effroyable), rather than “una esfera infinita” (ibid). This is not the place to analyze the difference in meaning between espantosa and infinita, which in Pascal may well be synonymous, but simply to point out that fear, espanto, is an affect, a sentiment, closely related to nothing necessarily present. Moreover, while infinito may very well cause fear, it is nonetheless merely a description of an object. Espanto is another word for specter. At any rate, after having reviewed and glossed the various metaphors of circularity, Borges appropriately circles back to his opening statement and reiterates it, with a difference: “Quizá la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonación de algunas metáforas” (ibid). It is worth noting that the statement is thus further “minimized.” It is not even the metaphors that matter, but the tone in which they are deployed. This does not reveal a universal truth, but rather the fact that minimal variations of the

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same are what constitute the sense of truth. The hermeneutic circle starts at some point, develops a theme and variations and returns to the point of departure (which is not necessarily the point of origin, although it may seem so). It repeats the same, differently. In his reading of the Borges essay, Alberto Moreiras points out that among the many “metaphors” discussed, the writer seems to leave out, or at least not arrive at another famous formulation of circularity, that of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same. Moreiras cites from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “En cada Ahora comienza el ser; alrededor de cada Aquí rueda la esfera del Allí. El centro está en todas partes. Curvado es el camino de la eternidad.” 6 Moreiras highlights as well the centrality of the question of tone, which he reads, following a Nietzschean affiliation in German as Stimmung. The term Stimmung means not only tone, but also key (as in musical key), mode and mood. It is an affective state which determines how content, or thought, might be received (sensed). It is a state of openness, analogous to the presentiment we have been discussing, a kind of predisposition. In other words, it is the unforeseeable anticipation of poetry. Moreiras identifies the dominant mood in Borges as sadness and mourning, and he points out that “la literatura es el lugar donde la promesa filosófica encuentra el temor de la muerte” (163). If philosophy responds to its demand, it makes a promise. But it finds its limit against poetry when it is forced into what we, following Borges, are calling the constant reiteration of “algunas metáforas.” The philosophical promise can neither be fulfilled nor not fulfilled, it can only be reiterated. Because philosophical language is metaphorical, philosophy gets carried away by poetry, but it also carries away, in circles, all possible origins and ends of philosophy. As Paul de Man famously put it, “Philosophy turns out to be an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature.” 7 Whether via the metaphor of philosophy or the philosophy of metaphor, the process is always the same, but different. And yet, it is this difference that makes metaphor not metaphor, poetry not poetry, and philosophy not philosophy. The question of philosophy, then is for Borges, for Parmenides and for Pascal, a question of form. And the question of form is a question of affect, in this case fear of finitude. A small difference that turns a metaphor into a simile. The question of the question is a formal question. It turns back upon itself and forms a circular logic. It cannot address itself. The most rigorous and most logical of formal systems is mathematics. But it too is caught in a certain circularity. When mathematical logic is called to represent or stand in for something (say, reality) it inevitably forms what Douglas Hofstadter calls a strange loop: “The ‘Strange Loop’ phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.” 8 The problem of self-reflexivity is inevitable. Parmenides confronted it in his saying (log-

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on) and thought (noema) about the truth of the world (aletheies) and had to turn back towards a fundamental deceptiveness in language. Kurt Gödel confronted the same quandary in modern mathematics. 9 If mathematical language is coded to represent itself (i.e., mathematical language) it will fail to coincide with itself; its logic will backfire. This is known as “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem,” which states that any logical formulation of number theory is bound to include undecidable propositions. When a system applies to itself, it fails to apply. Gödel’s theorem is basically a translation into mathematical language of the Cretan liar paradox. The statement “All Cretans are liars” can only be valid if uttered by a non-Cretan. When a Cretan like Epimenides says it, it forms a strange loop, a circular reasoning which cannot be resolved because it is intrinsically self-contradictory. As Douglas Hofstadter puts it, “there is a discrepancy between human reasoning and mechanical reasoning” (Hofstadter 87). If a system is complete it is inconsistent, and if it is consistent it is incomplete. The consistency of its internal logic cannot be proved from within the system. This is basically the problem of a metalanguage. Gödel’s point is not that there can be no proofs, but that all proofs are extrasystemic (i.e., metalinguistic). But this theorem itself has no proof that does not appeal to heterological axioms (i.e., principles outside the metalinguistic system, i.e., a metametalanguage). And so on ad infinitum. In literary circles we call this a mise-en-abyme phenomenon. It is not new; structurally, essentially, it cannot be. In his essay “From Science to Literature,” Roland Barthes addresses this very problem. Science treats language as if it were transparent, whereas in literature the opacity of language is essential. Barthes sees the possibility of developing a literary science which would subvert the pretensions of scientific discourse; it would rid itself of the illusion that it possesses a privileged metalanguage in which to represent its objects. 10 Such is the science posited as well by Gödel, Heisenberg, Mandelbrot, among others, outside the literary field. But such was already the science set forth by Parmenides. The roundness of Parmenides’ sphere can only be seen from outside the sphere, but the sphere has no outside. We are back where we started, but, of course, we cannot know that. Hofstadter refers to Gödel’s theorem as a pearl, and to his proof, as “a complex living beast whose innards give rise to this mysteriously simple gem” (17). Underlying the simplicity of roundness we have a monstrously contradictory and complex system. It must by necessity put into question the simplicity of the result. Ironically, a pearl starts from an imperfection, a grain of sand from outside the oyster. It also ends there. The simplicity of roundness is precipitated by a crisis. For Parmenides a sphere is perfect, bounded, centered. As did Borges, Gaston Bachelard also looks at various images (poetic and philosophical) of what he calls being round. In his “The Phenomenology of Roundness,” 11 he

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offers another listing of variations on “algunas metáforas.” Among them, he cites Karl Jaspers (“Every being seems in itself round”), Vincent Van Gogh (“Life is probably round”), and Jules Michelet (“A bird is almost completely spherical”). “Such images,” says Bachelard, “cannot be justified by perception” (233). It is interesting to note that Bachelard specifically excludes Parmenides from consideration since his sphere has played such an important role in Western thought that it has lost what he calls its “primitivity” (235), its phenomenological purity. Bachelard finds that roundness is the perfect image for being. But as a phenomenologist, he must bracket out the separation between image and being. Roundness must be being, and not, as in Parmenides, a fallacious ornament. He finds the perfect formulation in the tree evoked by one of Rilke’s Poèmes français. The tree, he writes, “developpe en rond son être . . . Se donnant lentement / La forme qui élimine / Les hasards du vent” (240). An essential roundness somehow overcomes all contingency. The tree’s growing green spheres are, says Bachelard, “a victory over accidents of form and the capricious events of mobility” (ibid.). However, the tree does not offer a perfect image of roundness. Rather, it presents the process by which roundness is supposedly perfected. Similarly, Bachelard’s own method cannot offer us a perfect image of roundness. Instead, he prunes away the contingencies evident in his own examples. He paraphrases Jaspers’ statement, reducing it, for the sake of phenomenological purity, to “das Dasein ist rund, being is round” (234). Thus Bachelard gets rid of a cumbersome protrusion: the word scheint, seems, which Jaspers had used to qualify his statement. The perfection of roundness is supplemented by Bachelard himself, smoothing out the rough edges. Similarly, he has to drop out Van Gogh’s probably and Michelet’s almost “which moderate the formula uselessly” (237). The perfect image of being must be perfected, for the extant versions are not. Bachelard’s contention, then, that being “when it is experienced from the inside, devoid of all external features, cannot be otherwise than round” (234), finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being unable to demonstrate its inner experience without an implicit reference to the outside. Like Gödel’s theorem, Bachelard’s phenomenology is either incomplete or inconsistent. It is my contention that all circles, all notions of roundness, are incomplete and imperfect, but that it is only the minute imperfections which allow us to perceive that there is such a thing as roundness. The Borgesian “algunas metáforas” turn out to be similes instead. Contingency is more fundamental than essence. Besides writing numerous circular poems (Piedra de sol, Blanco, Vuelta), as well as essays on circularity, tropes and metaphors (“Signos en rotación”), Octavio Paz also founded the journal Vuelta, (return) in 1976 and edited it until his death in 1998. For him, circularity was intimately related to the notions of language and critique. The word “vuelta” of course means return,

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but it also means turn, curve, circumference, gyration, as well as, metonymically, a walk around (as would be practiced by a flanneur). Moreover, it comes from the Latin, voluta, from which the modern volute also derives. The volute symbol is used in Mexico, from the pre-Columbian codices to our day, to indicate speech, language. Not all the meanings of vuelta are reassuring. In “Revuelta, revolución, rebellion,” an essay that deals with the same words cited in its title, Paz points out many of the multiple meanings of the word “revuelta.” Most of them have something to do with a particular notion of return that is “asociada con el desorden y el desarrelgo.” 12 The idea of revolt is one of negation and destruction. It does not offer a return to the origin, but rather, a return to some sort of primordial chaos. Revuelta is a double return, a return to the beyond of the return, or to the point of no return. Paz contrasts revuelta with the word revolución, which is also a kind of return, but one that is pronounced in a different tone. He draws a brief history of the word, which was imported from the realm of science and astronomy to the field of politics and history. The idea of revolution is also one of negation and destruction. However, it is not simply associated with disorder, but rather, with a kind of cyclical time of regularity and repetition. It is coherent, which is not to say it is without violence. Quite the contrary, revolution “Ungida por la luz de la idea, es filosofía en acción, crítica convertida en acto, violencia lúcida” (148). As Paz underlines, both words are related to the Latin verb “volvere: rodar, enrollar, desenrollar” (ibid), and both imply a return to a beginning. But whereas revolt is simply “el presente caótico o tumultoso,” (ibid.), revolution offers a vision of cosmogony and “afirma la primacía del pasado” (152). In the poem “Vuelta,” Paz develops these ideas. He presents Mexico City as a kind of Pascalian sphere where you are always in the center (or else there is no center), and you can’t find the circumference. The poet is a kind of flanneur who goes out for a walk (a dar una vuelta) in the city. But Paz’s Mexico is not Baudelaire’s Paris. The poem ends: Camino sin avanzar Nunca llegamos Nunca estamos donde estamos No el pasado El presente es intocable 13

There is a certain circularity to Octavio Paz’s work which permeates his utterances: the false beginning, the unattainable end. Paz’s poetry tries to deal with time, to conceive of an alternative to time. The figures of turn and return are tropes, circles, not quite metaphors, but perhaps similes.

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What seems to be at work in Parmenides, Pascal, Gödel, Bachelard, Borges and Paz is a process by which a geometrical figure becomes a figure of speech. The problem of roundness is not so much a geometrical problem as a problem of language and representation. Nonetheless, of course, the opposite is also true: The problem of language is not so much a problem of representation as a problem of geometry. As Michel Serres points out, the very first word in Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, a founding text for Western thought on time and space, is semeion, point, but the word also means “sign.” 14 There is an infinitely rapid oscillation between rhetoric and geometry. But how can one simply describe the movement from geometrical figure to rhetorical figure and viceversa without resorting to rhetorical and geometrical figures to do so? Is the movement circular? Chiasmic? Both? Since it is impossible to escape the circularity of this reasoning, we must instead try to think it through to its limit (peras). The dual problem of rhetoric and geometry is a problem in movement and dynamics as well. And it has an important relation to the ontological problem which lies behind it. The most fundamental question, the ontological question, the to be or not to be question is a problem of statics (the very word statics derives from the Greek estin, to stand, to be). But any approach to the question is in effect a problem of dynamics. Euclid identifies three kinds of movement: euthus, straight, palgios, oblique, and peripheres, circular (Hermes V 169). It is the play between statics and dynamics that constitutes the figure. According to Lyotard, the figure is what disrupts the stability of representation. 15 The ontological question cannot be represented. Instead, such attempts will reveal the work of the figure, which presents the incommensurability of statics and dynamics, being and discourse, ontology and epistemology, one might even add revolt and revolution. But this in no way puts an end to either the ontological or the epistemological project. The epistemological is off balance but it strives towards the equilibrium of the ontological (episteme literally means equilibrium). Hence its need for straight assertions, oblique references and circumlocutions. Similarly, the stability of the ontological is grounded, as we saw in Parmenides, on a very unstable lack of ground. Roundness is imperfect. The circle is only a special case of geometrical figure belonging to a family that includes ellipses, hyperbolae, and spirals. In his reading of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Serres shows how minute disturbances in the apparent stability of perfect circles or straight lines create turbulences which are in fact more primordial than the so-called perfect forms. 16 If there is being, it is only because there are turbulences, collisions between atoms. 17 As long as there is gravity, there can be no perfect circles. Roundness comes up against a crisis, the circle faces the chiasmus, a spiral is constituted. But both language and the world thrive in this milieu; in fact, that is how they are constituted. As Paul de Man puts it, an obstruction, an aporia does not put an end to logic, instead, it generates history. 18 As Serres

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puts it, “la critique, c’est le langage même. Et nul ne sortira jamais ni de crise ni de critique, sauf à quitter le monde où les invariants sont absents, sauf à quitter le monde et le langage” (H5 162). As Paz puts it, “La crítica del universo (y la de los dioses) se llama gramática.” 19 Both crises and aporias are blockages that close off the path. It does not matter if the path is blocked materially or cut off by an abyss, the crisis is the same, and demands a turn around, a bordering, or circuitous route. Grammar offers bridges as well as detours; but eventually, in order to cross, it appeals to metaphor, that is, to rhetoric. Poetry is like rhetoric and like grammar. For Paz, then, poetry, or rather critical poetry puts forth a poetics of similitude, which, without excluding the other, eschews dualities. Without avoiding the crisis, he refuses to choose between grammar and rhetoric, identity and difference by offering instead something like them. He operates through simile, more than through metaphor, through revolution, more than through revolt, through proximity, more than through union, and through poetry more than history (identity-rhetoric) nor philosophy (difference— grammar). “Espiral de los ecos, el poema / es aire que se escultpe y se disipa.” 20 If this seems convoluted, it is because it is one among a series of variations on the circle: variations like the rhetorico-geometrical figure of the spiral, a circle which is not a circle, a return which never returns exactly to itself. It leaves itself open to the dangers of the return of the repressed, perhaps, or the eternal recurrence of the same. The method is not so much that of the hermeneutic circle as that of a hermeneutic vortex. If Gödel transported the Epimenides paradox into a number-theoretical formalism, one could also propose that a valid translation, in the age of technology, of the Greek aletheia (Heidegger’s truth-as-unconcealment) might very well be white noise, static. All translations, however, as Paul de Man has shown in his reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” are in effect impossible. Nevertheless, they happen. “They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure . . . reveals an essential failure.” 21 The question of failure, however, like the aporia, can be circumvented by being embraced. As a prelude to the reading of Paz, we can offer two anecdotes about major twentieth century works (one in art and one in philosophy) that embraced and developed their own “failure.” They provide, not so much a context as a tone, a mood, or a Stimmung to the thinking of the presentiment of poetry. One is Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, which puts into question the very category of the visible. It points up the impossibility of transporting (translating) anything between the heterogeneous spaces of the bride and the bachelors. And yet, the two realms do affect each other, although the precise nature of their articulation or interaction is indeterminable. Duchamp called this work a “delay,” rather than a “painting,” and he worked on it for about ten

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years, from 1913 to 1923, when he abandoned it, as he said, “finally unfinished.” 22 The other “failure” is Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, of which only divisions one and two of the first part of a projected two part treatise, which was to have three divisions per part, was completed. Heidegger abandoned the project of a fundamental ontology not because it was essentially flawed but because he found that the flaw was essential. Our task, said Heidegger, “is to cease all overcoming and to leave metaphysics to itself.” 23 The incompleteness of these two works is critical. As Paz put it in his Nobel prize lecture, “La búsqueda del presente,” “nuestro tiempo es . . . irreversible y perpetuamente inacabado.” 24 It is only by being unfinished that they remain open, they call forth thinking, and they refuse closure. Octavio Paz brings together two inheritances, both divided and contradictory, both linear and circular, both sometimes open and sometimes closed, and both certainly unfinished: the European legacy, which includes Christianity, philosophy, science and modernity, and the pre-Columbian legacy, which includes creation and destruction, greatness and defeat. His “search for the present” is a keen consciousness of the experience of time, of being “literally dislodged” (ibid). Much of his work is a return to the origin (and origins) as well as a denial of the possibility of such return. In other words, his work is like a return to the origin. As such, it is also the creation of an origin (a new origin). The sense (or is it mood?) in which Paz picks up his (our?) two legacies is by presenting (not putting forth but following) cosmogony. Thus he highlights the circular structure of thought in general. Cosmogonies are literary, poetic presentiments more than presentations of origin. They often put time (and hence ends, completeness or fulfillment) into question. Let us briefly look at two such cosmogonies, one “ancient,” “non-Western,” and “mythical,” the other “modern,” “Western,” and “literary.” According to one of the Maya myths of creation, Time was born out of nothing and nowhere, and he started walking. As he walked, he left footprints. These footprints constituted Space. As Time walked, Space, and hence the universe, kept growing and growing. Eventually, nobody knows exactly why, Time decided to return. Perhaps he was tired, perhaps his load of tracks was too heavy, perhaps he was just homesick. Hence he returned to the origin and, along the way, he picked up all the tracks that he had left so that, as he moved, he left nothing behind. Little by little, the universe became smaller and smaller. When Time jumped in and disappeared in its beginning, Space too disappeared, and there was nothing left until Time, again, perhaps sensing something, a presentiment, was born out of nothing. For the Maya, space was not an emptiness that could somehow be filled with people and things and beings, but it was instead considered to be a fluid process in which

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people and things were part of the very texture of the universe. Surprisingly, this Maya cosmogony seems to have anticipated the Big Bang theory. 25 “Games Without End,” a short story by Italo Calvino, deals with the “steady state theory” of the universe which is opposed to the Big Bang hypothesis. 26 According to this theory a single new hydrogen atom is created about every two hundred and fifty million years, and it is that which fills the expanding space of the universe. Calvino’s story involves two beings, Qfwfq and Pfwfp who, as children, played with the emerging atoms, sending them along the curve of space “like so many marbles” (63). They had an agreement to share the new atoms fifty-fifty, but once the atoms were played, they could be won and lost. Both players cheated at the game. First Pfwfp, by hiding a “source” of new atoms and rubbing off the electrons to make them look old; and then Qfwfq, who made “fake atoms” out of “scrapings from magnetic fields [and] neutrons collected in the road,” all stuck together with saliva, and then placed them at the secret source. The fake atoms, moreover, looked “spanking new” (65). As the games progressed, the stakes got higher and, eventually, still as part of the contest but now in anger, Qfwfq flung all his atoms into space and formed a galaxy which “whirled and whirled and at a certain point became a spiral of constellations never seen before” (67). Qfwfq clinged to the galaxy and it carried him away. But soon he found that Pfwfp was in hot pursuit, following him in a brand new galaxy of his own and screaming: “Qfwfq, you’ll pay for this now, you traitor!” (ibid). Upon closer examination he was able to see that behind Pfwfp there was another Qfwfq and in front of Qfwfq there was another Pfwfp and so on ad infinitum. The story concludes in a somber tone: “We had lost all pleasure in this game of chase, and we weren’t children any more for that matter, but now there was nothing else we could do” (68). These two stories are something like allegories of circularity. The symmetry and circularity of the cosmogonies need not be doubly emphasized. At the origin we have an ambiguity, an imperfection, a crisis. The singular event which opens the circle is an event which breaks the rules. And yet, the singularity of such an event cannot be found. It is not a point but a series of reverberations. What we have is a sign for a point. As Borges would call it: “una de esas ambiguas analogías que pueden significar la identidad del buscado y el buscador.” 27 This is also the event which closes the circle. But the distinction between open and closed is impossible to make; it itself must remain open. This openness is a mood, a Stimmung, one might say a receptivity. It is somewhat like desire and somewhat like will, but neither. Sometimes it presents itself as a desire for origin and sometimes as a desire for the new. It has been articulated (and ridiculed) as a desire for philosophy (Nietzsche) or, more recently, as a desire for cultural studies (Jameson). It is expressed as the

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desire for the political, for agency, for the subject, for ethics. But all these formulations are merely different tonalities of a more essential incompleteness. Octavio Paz sometimes expresses this incompleteness as a desire for presence. This “desire” is both poetic and critical. We could also call it literary. It is that which exceeds all appropriation. Articulating and disarticulating these realms is a game without end. Analysis, as we know, is interminable. But still, there is rhythm, there is song: Fort. . . . Da. . . .

Chapter Two

The Inheritance of the Labyrinth

Like much of Octavio Paz’s work, his book, El laberinto de la soledad, has often (if not mostly) been interpreted as an essay on Mexican identity. One of course can easily read it as a brief review of various Mexican themes, as a condensed bird’s eye view of Mexican history, and as an engagement with some currents of Mexican thought. It is also a speculation into many aspects of what could be called, in general terms, the search for Mexican identity. However, it is not, in any sense of the word, about either knowledge or understanding of such identity. It is instead a presentation of the fact that the question of identity itself is a problem. Paz does not set out to produce any knowledge about identity, but rather to interrogate the question of knowledge itself. How is knowledge of identity and difference produced? It is one of the founding texts, one could say, avant la lettre, of cultural studies. The problem with finding identity is that there is nothing to find. There are instances, events, passings that seem like identity, but they do not remain. They can be expectations or memories, promises or legacies, but not, here, now, objects of knowledge. His discourse tries to move away, not always successfully, although certainly poetically, from the very categories of identity and difference that are necessary to produce a clear understanding. It also, of course, always returns to them. His method is neither to renounce knowledge, and turn his project into mere mystification of identity, nor is it to affirm and posit knowledge and thus turn the project into one of appropriation of difference. Although Paz’s thought seems dialectical, he does not work through the logic of identity, which, in the final analysis is the logic of difference, nor through the logic of difference, which, in the final analysis is the logic of identity, but rather through a logic of similarity, which is a false version of both, and hence can operate as either one. His thought puts forth a kind of 15

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poetics of similarity. While Paz certainly uses metaphors, the overall structure of his writing is more closely tuned to simile. Metaphor says this is that and replaces it (identity or difference), simile says this is like that and sends the reader by a circuitous route on a path that is uncanny and ghostly (identity and difference). El laberinto de la soledad is an early draft of a lifetime critical and poetic project, in effect, a meditation on language, time and inheritance. The problem of identity (Mexican or otherwise) is only corollary to that of the paradoxical temporal structures of the promise (what I/we want to become) and inheritance (what I/we no longer are). In the Introduction (or rather in a preliminary note) to his book Postdata, Octavio Paz responded to what he perceived were widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of his earlier work: “Tal vez valga la pena aclarar (una vez más) que el Laberinto de la soledad fue un ejercicio de la imaginación crítica: una visión y, simultáneamente, una revisión” 1 We should note the strange temporality that seems to be at play here. First, the text is a preliminary note to a postscript that Paz wrote to The Labyrinth of Solitude almost twenty years after the fact and already having experienced the events of Tlatelolco in Mexico in 1968. This “clarification,” then, is neither part of the Laberinto, nor part of the Postdata proper, but it occupies an intermediary liminal place. Its function is to try and establish a tone either for a rereading of the Laberinto or for the reading of the Postdata itself. At any rate, the latter text is already a supplement to the former text, and this liminal text is an exergue to the latter. In any case, it is outside and in between as well as inside both texts. The function of this small supplementary text, then, is to make a few corrections, to offer, in 1970, some clarifications about what was said in 1950. Something is wrong with the original utterance. Of course, Paz presents the problem as one of multiple misinterpretations by others. However, it is also an (impossible) attempt to change what he himself had said. Before analyzing the content, let us make a brief comment on the form, the tone, of the statement. Paz says, “Tal vez valga la pena aclarar (una vez más)…” The phase might merely be formulaic and rhetorical, “it might be worth clarifying (again)…” but it highlights a couple of important points. One, it seems to be a hesitation, an expression of doubt, as if the speaker is debating whether the utterance and the following explanation are worth the trouble. They may still not understand, as he expresses in the exasperated parenthesis “(again).” The problem with implying that he has been misread, is that the author himself at this point is merely another reader, welcome to enter the debate over interpretations, but not able to settle it. The formulaic expression, “vale la pena” also highlights two important issues. One, the question of value, which is, par excellence, the question that underlies Western thinking; it makes exchanges possible between unequals and in its relativism and arbitrariness (read contextualization) leads to nihilism. And two,

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the question of pain, suffering and punishment, which is itself a value and is here given a very specific value. Of course, these questions are not the crux of what Paz’s note is trying to say. Nonetheless, they need to be considered as background (or background noise) to the tone of what is said, especially when the work in question is one that analyzes the relationship between formulaic language and identity. At any rate, Paz is trying to say, “My book was not about identity.” While I would agree with that proposition, most evidence points to the contrary. It is clear from his Paz’s statements and writings of the period, not just from later interpretations of his work, that he thought he was writing about Mexican identity. It is just that he no longer recognized what the discourse on identity was doing with his words. As he said in a letter to Alfonso Reyes, he was tired of the theme of Mexicannes (mexicanidad): “un nacionalismo torcido que desemboca en la agresión si se es fuerte y en un narcisismo y masoquismo si se es miserable, como ocurre con nosotros.” 2 Finally, in reference to tone, it might be worth comparing the tone of the note with the opening lines of the Laberinto itself. There he says with great certainty and aplomb, “A todos, en algún momento, se nos ha revelado nuestra existencia” (Paz 11). We will analyze this beginning further on. For now, suffice it to say that this statement is positive, absolute and universal, while the one from the note is timid, doubtful, partial and particular. Now then, returning to the paradoxical temporality of the note, we should recall exactly what it is that Paz wants to clarify. The Laberinto had been, “un ejercicio de la imaginación crítica: una visión y, simultáneamente, una revisión.” Throughout his work, Paz constantly reiterated that the function of the intellectual was, par excellence, to critique. That is to say, by definition, the intellectual should question and negate what is given. The faculty of the imagination is the means by which the thinker makes images, and hence apprehends the world and the universe around him. The critical imagination invoked by Paz as his own and proper to the intellectual is contradictory, but productive in its contradictions. What the imagination presents, critique destroys. It is a presentation, which is at the same time a negation and a representation. It is an exercise in circularity. Furthermore, Paz also describes this operation as “una visión y, simultáneamente, una revisión.” A vision is supposed to be merely a viewing, a survey. Ideally, it is pure perception (aesthesis), the presentation to and by the imagination of the visible, sensible reality; while a revision is an interpretation of that reality, a transformation and a change. Literally, a revision could simply be another viewing of the same, but more often it is also a critique. Temporally speaking, a revision is secondary, it is a repetition of an original vision and comes after it. However, Paz insists here that already in the original Laberinto, the vision and revision were simultaneous. The question is, in the here and now of the moment he writes the note to introduce the

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postscript to the Laberinto, is this last revision also simultaneous with the first two? Supposedly, at least by its own rhetoric, the note does not really change anything, it does not really add anything, it merely clarifies (again) what in effect always was or should have been clear from the beginning. Obviously, what operates here is a kind of alternative temporality, a poetic temporality. As Paz had already said, even before he wrote the Laberinto, “ver las cosas como son es, en cierta forma, no verlas” and hence it is necesary to “ver poéticamente” (cited in Krauze 22). Paz is working, not just through analogy, but through a poetics of similitude. The original operation, the writing of the Laberinto, was never a pure presentation (of Mexican identity or anything else), nor was it a simple survey. That is why it had to be revised from the start. A return to the origin, a simple presentation of history, even if it includes all the facts perfectly, is already a complex re-presentation. As Paz had already put it in the original Laberinto, “La historia podrá esclarecer el origen de nuestros fantasmas, pero no los disipará” (57). We could restate the situation as follows: The vision presented the Mexican; the simultaneous revision presented a doubled, spectralized other “Mexican.” The second is in quotation marks because it is pronounced with a different inflection, a different tone. It is a ghost of the first, but by a paradoxical circularity, it is both anterior to it (it is what haunts the Mexican, with no quotation marks) and posterior to it (it is what remains after the Mexican dies). It is similar to the identity in question, but it is also radically different. This specter still haunts Paz twenty years later when in the note to the postscript he needs to re-revise and clarify (another word for dissipate): The original Laberinto was “Algo muy distinto a un ensayo sobre la filosofía de lo mexicano o una búsqueda de nuestro pretendido ser. El mexicano no es una esencia sino una historia” (235). Very different but of course very similar. The essay was not a presentation of Mexicanness, Paz had said so from the beginning. The heterogeneity of such purported being, the impossibility of defining such essence was in fact the starting point of the inquiry. It is not surprising that the text seems to be an essay on Mexican being, but it distinguishes itself from that by putting such being in quotation marks, or perhaps more precisely, under erasure. What the text is really about, if one could ever use such a formulation, is about the inheritance of something called Mexico and its promise. In other words, it deals with its legacy and its ghosts, terms which must be thought of as genitively objective and subjective to Mexico (i.e., what “Mexico” gives and what it receives). As Jacques Derrida points out in Specters of Marx, “an inheritance is never gathered, it is never one with itself.” 3 By definition, an inheritance is ambiguous. It always comes from the past, from a passing and from a passing on. It cannot be separated from death and mourning. An inheritance is therefore always related to memory and, as such, to responsibility. Derrida is presenting what he calls “the radical heterogeneity of an inheritance” (ibid.,

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emphasis in the text). The structure of an inheritance is such that as an act, or as an event, that is to say, as an arrival, it should for all intents and purposes be “mine.” But because an inheritance is a legacy, it needs to be read; that is, interpreted. An inheritance is like a text of an injunction. It says read me, here is my treasure, this is what you must do (to live up to it, to deserve it, to carry it on). Because it is an arrival, it is temporal, it separates itself from where it comes from. It demands that the receiver do the same. It cannot simply be viewed and accepted, it also needs to be reviewed, as Paz would say, simultaneously. An inheritance is tied to a testament, that is to say, an injunction that says “choose and decide from among what you inherit” (ibid). Because in involves a choice, then, an inheritance cannot be singular, and neither can an heir. An inheritance is divided, and an heir can only inherit by dividing himself. The structure of inheriting is always temporal, it comes from the past and from the dead. It is therefore anachronistic and it involves a ghost, a specter. Derrida develops the notion of inheritance through a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Prince Hamlet’s inheritance is, in essence, the responsibility to fix what is wrong the universe: “That time is out of joint; o cursed spite. That ever I was born to set it right!” (Act I, Scene 5). Inheritance is like a gift, but it is also like a curse. It gives those who inherit the responsibility to divide and reconstitute. Inheritance, then, can only take place at a particular juncture, an articulation, a joint. While ideally an inheritance would unproblematically mark the smoothness, even the coincidence of transition, the identity between the between the legator and the legatee, what Derrida shows in his discussion of the various permutations of conjunctions, disjunctions and injunctions is, again, that inheritance introduces a radical heterogeneity at this juncture. Because of this heterogeneity, the question of the inheritance is not only a question of legality and legibility (rightful vs. wrongful heirs), it is also a question of ethics. “Let us not be surprised when we read that the OED gives Hamlet’s phrase as an example of the ethico-political inflection” (Derrida 20). There is a close connection between the problem of disorder or disadjustment and the problem of justice. In the same way that an inheritance cannot simply and unproblematically be accepted, it also cannot be denied. The heterogeneity in question is always both there and not there, like a phantom, like a specter. Octavio Paz’s Laberinto de la soledad is an attempt to come to terms with the specters, the multiplicity and the heterogeneity of the Mexican inheritances. 4 He identifies and discusses, among others inheritances, a particular “triple herencia,” for Mexico, “la española, la del pasado indígena y la del catolicismo” (Paz 137). Even though he claims that all these legacies are in some way negated, in fact he argues that the history of Mexico is a series of constant negations of its own legacy, what I would like to highlight here is that none of the three legacies is singular to begin with. The Spanish legacy is already at least two

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Spains, one closed and traditionalist, “castiza,” and the other open and universalist, “heterodoxa” (108), not to mention older Roman, Visigoth, and Moorish Spains, which go in to the aforementioned two. Similarly, the Indian legacy is fractured, violent and elegant, imperial and disinherited. And the Catholic legacy is a living faith, yet rigorous, maternal, but also producing orphans (112). And this list does not include other contradictory inheritances, like the Enlightenment, the Reform movement, positivism, the revolution and so on. Paz, and the Mexicans in general, the supposed beneficiaries of the estates are left to “choose and decide among what [they] inherit.” They are also left with the task of accounting for it, explaining it, justifying it and, in a sense, fixing it and passing it on. Whether “they” want to accept the legacies or reject them, or choose among them, they need to respond to and for them. Their responsibility is also to mourn. For an inheritance, like death, is always undeserved, it just arrives, like a differing/deferring injunction, a dif/herencia. It is not surprising that the legatee is divided, torn apart. There is always, in Octavio Paz, a visible split, an operating dichotomy. Perhaps it is the result of his essentially dialectical thinking. He has an eye for contradictions and a great ability to resolve them. But his thinking is not dialectical per se, or at least not successfully so. His resolutions and sublations are always negative or incomplete, they often seem to be parodies of dialectics rather than applications. One could perhaps say that Paz’s relation to Hegelian thinking, inherited through phenomenology and existentialism as well as all of the aforementioned legacies, is ambiguous at best. In one of his earliest writings, Paz quotes approvingly Malraux’s statement that “La tradición no se hereda, se conquista.” 5 It is interesting to note that for an epigraph to the Laberinto de la soledad, Paz chose, not some resonant Mexican citation, but a quote from Spanish poet Antonio Machado that describes an apocryphal, sententious, heterodox character and teacher called Abel Martín. Identity and legacy are central to the epigraph, as is dialectical thought, which is parodied and ridiculed by Machado. The text is like an echo chamber of phrases and formulations from Western enlightenment and romantic philosophy. Lo otro no existe: tal es la fe racional, la incurable creencia de la razón humana. Identidad=realidad, como si, a fin de cuentas, todo hubiera de ser, absoluta y necesariamente, uno y lo mismo. Pero lo otro no se deja eliminar; subsiste, persiste; es el hueso duro de roer en el que la razón se deja los dientes. Abel Martín, con fe poética, no menos humana que la fe racional, creía en lo otro, en “La esencial Heterogeneidad del ser,” como si dijéramos en la incurable otredad que padece lo uno. 6

What would this have to do with a book that, as we have seen, seems to be about Mexican identity? First of all, Paz is in a sense constituting his own inheritance. He is choosing what to inherit and conquering/constituting his

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own tradition. Normally, this would be the process of forging an identity. But secondly, the citation puts into question the whole notion of identity. The enlightenment asserts identity with fervor, with faith, but not with reasons. Reason, moreover, is presented as a disease, of sorts, a solipsistic belief in itself. It is a mockery of the Hegelian formula, which asserts that the real is rational and the rational is real. But otherness, unreal, irrational and unreasonable, simply does not go away. It seems to have a corporality and materiality that remains. It is a tough bone to chew, like Hegelian dialectics, and it haunts identity like a ghost. The spirit is a bone, Hegel is known to have said. Paz is constituting his identity out of a tradition where that identity cannot be constituted. Paz is not yet making comparisons. But since he is quoting Machado outside of his own work, in order to set a tone for the reading of the Laberinto, one cannot help but sense that somewhere in the sequence of syllogisms there is a counterpoint between Old and New World (which at some point did not exist), between reason and its “inexistent” other. There is a parallel between the other that will not go away and the Mexican that stands before (behind) the Spanish. This sense gets stronger when we remember that it is Abel Martín, an apocryphal character of Machado, who does not “exist.” Abel Martín enters into the tension when we are told that he believed in otherness with poetic faith. We are moved away from the philosophical discourse into another, perhaps inexistent realm, poetry. But note that both “poetry” and “reason” suffer of the same “incurable disease,” faith. It is because neither self nor other, neither reason nor poetry are grounded, except, perhaps, on each other, that the question of existence presents itself as a problem, hence as a malady. Faith is a disease because it is neither belief nor disbelief, but something akin to what Derrida calls, in a different context, “the radical experience of the perhaps” (35). Nonetheless, Machado’s comparison between poetic faith and rational faith is not symmetrical, it cannot be resolved by a dialectic. “La esencial heterogeneidad del ser,” in quotation marks in the quotation, places the discourse on an epistemo-ontological plane (i.e., it presents otherness as an object for knowledge), but as it evolves into a malady it becomes an aesthetico-ontological sense (i.e., it presents otherness as a feeling). Otherness is sensed as a feeling of separation, of division (of being/from being) from which one suffers. The sickness is that being is in crisis, it is cut, divided from itself, from the beginning. To make the comparison, Machado uses another phrase perhaps inherited as well from the enlightenment: “como si dijéramos” (as if we were to say) is the conjunction which joins heterogeneity with disease. But it is not the Kantian (and perhaps Mallarméean) heritage of the conjunction that I want to underline here, but rather the fact that “as if” is a kind of negative simile. It is a comparison that points to a similarity that is pre-

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sumed not to be operative, or at least whose functionality (or lack thereof) is not taken into account. The point, in any case, is that the being in question is presented (or almost presented) as sick, split, cut, wounded by its own inheritance. And this is the being that Paz takes up to guide the constitution of his own inheritance. One could imagine a tradition or a heritage amorphously called European thought. This thought produces, articulates and administers concepts. Historically, concepts are modalities of appropriation with which this tradition relates itself with its own limits and with the otherness that appears (or fails to appear) on its horizon. This appropriation can be conscious (instrumental, imperial, colonial) or unconscious (accidental, imperial, colonial), but either way, it is inescapably a process of absorption, ingestion, incorporation and familiarization. As such, the process is an inevitable and inescapable destruction of the other as other. But, as Machado points out and Paz reiterates, that otherness is a hard bone to chew. It remains, wounded, maimed and sick; and it cuts back, breaks teeth, wounds and infects. Paz is appropriated by Western thought; he properly belongs to the tradition of Western thought and to its “cosmopolitanism.” However, from the position of otherness, he also appropriates Western thought at its limits and reveals the limits of appropriation itself. The process reveals a difference, which expresses itself as the contradictory injunction (demand, necessity, law, responsibility, obligation, depending on the context and the mood, Stimmung) operating in every appropriation: to join (gather, bring together, conjoin, conjugate) and to separate (limit, respect, disjoin, choose). The injunction is tied to appropriation and inheritance. It differs and defers. It has the sense of what I have been calling dif/herencia. Dif/herencia is the difference that comes from your inheritance and marks you in such a way that you must split yourself, cut yourself open in the enjoyment and suffering of your inheritance. The term dif/herencia utters the question of identity as difference, heritage, inheritance and burden (all meanings of the Spanish term herencia). Dif/herencia cannot be appropriated, or rather, it can only be appropriated in a process that simultaneously disappropriates. One does not inherit; one loses oneself to the inheritance. Dif/herencia is the expression, the arrival of the legacy, and hence the law, as “la esencial heterogeneidad del ser.” One cannot appropriate it; instead, one is appropriated by it. One is subject to it like one is subject to the law. In its active form, as a verb, dif/herir is that which in differing and deferring, it cuts open, it wounds, dif/hiere. Paz says that “La conciencia de la separación es una nota constante en nuestra historia espiritual. A veces sentimos la separación como una herida y entonces se transforma en escisión interna, conciencia desgarrada” (“Búsqueda del presente” 12). Derrida describes the specter (the otherness) that arrives with every inheritance as: “That is the originary wrong, the birth wound from which he suffers, a bottomless wound, an irreparable trage-

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dy, the indefinite malediction that marks the history of the law or history as law” (Derrida 21). And Jean-Luc Nancy describes how bodies inherit an inappropriable world in the form of a spacing, a difference: “La presentación y la desgarradura parecen ser las formas reconocidas, y por lo demás combinadas, del agenciamiento humano en general.” 7 These formulations of dif/herencia speak to what is always already wrong at the origin of any possible identification. Something is the matter. Things are not quite what they seem. Being does not coincide with itself (time is out of joint, there is an essential heterogeneity). Something is just a little bit off, not quite right with what we inherit. The difference can be very small, barely noticeable (a penas se ve), but it is painfully sensed. Language is the place where time and being are conjugated, but language is also the place where the two are disjointed. There is something wrong with reality, with being, with essence and existence, and with language. And it demands to be set right. Literary or poetic language is the place where identity and difference can have it both ways, or at least, the place where the process of appropriation and disappropriation does not simply come to a stop. More precisely, it is in a poetics of similitude, as in Octavio Paz, that identity can be like difference and vice-versa. Dif/herencia is not a concept or a metaphor; it is more like a simile or a pun. It thrives on its ambiguity and imprecision. It oscillates, revealing and hiding its origin and its inheritance. The word herencia, in Spanish, has at least two etymologies. 8 It comes from the Latin haerentia, which means something that is next to something else, contingent or touching upon it, influenced by it, as in adhere or inhere. Its meaning applies not only to goods, rights and responsibilities, but also to features and circumstances. It is also related to hereditas, which refers to an estate, a piece of land belonging to a single owner, in principle indivisible, but of course always divided. The word herencia and the word herida are not etymologically related, they are different, except that in dif/herencia they are contingent. Herida comes from the Latin ferire, which means to damage by poking, cutting, tearing or striking. But the verb herir, besides hurting, also has multiple lesser known meanings; among them, to impress upon the senses, to illuminate, to touch upon the essential point, to tremble, and to affect the stress of a syllable or a note (i.e., to create a tone or mood). 9 All of these are operative in dif/herencia. Moreover, ferire is adjacent and similar to fere, which means almost, nearly and just, exactly; as well as fero, which means to bear or carry, as in metaphor. The multiple, contingent, related and interrelated meanings gathered around the inheritance allow us to “see” the essential heterogeneity of being, and to sense (feel) its sense (meaning). They hide something, to be sure, but they also reveal something, they allow something to appear. As Paz said in that introductory note to Postdata, he was interested not so much in “el caracter nacional” as in “lo que oculta ese caracter” (235). A

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poetics of similitude can reveal something about the national character, letting it appear (aparece); it can also, by analogy reveal what it looks like (se parece); and finally, by fortuitous similitude or an orthographic pun which would only work in Latin American Spanish but not in Castillian, it can reveal how that character is not one, but, at least two, a pair, split from itself, although contingent, adhering to itself (pareser: pairbeing and stopbeing). This poetics of similitude offers a momentary revelation, which is also instantly lost. Contingency, metonymy and simile seem to be more originary than metaphor, identity or difference. Plays on words are signs of coincidence and non-coincidence. That is why there is something wrong with any possible identification. Still, as Wittgenstein has clearly shown, family resemblances do make identification possible, and hence, inheritance. Dif/herencia thus marks the existence of both the pain and the enjoyment that come from identification. They both call for responsibility. The moment there is a “one,” there is a dif/herencia, a pair, an other from which it inherits. “One never inherits without coming to terms with some specter” (Derrida 21). There is no being which is not marked so: not the chosen one who inherits, nor the multiple dispossessed many who do not. They are all gathered into the responsibility of the inheritance. One never knows when or if one is the rightful heir, or if one was denied its rightful inheritance. Nonetheless, one is called to the responsibility of mourning, with or without the “compensation” of the inheritance. The past is dead; however, it speaks in the present and demands that justice be done, that a cure be found, that the work be finished. Octavio Paz often presents Mexicans as ambiguous inheritors of numerous failed and negated legacies, Indigenous thought and Christianity, but also the enlightenment and the revolution. Something is wrong with all of these legacies. Mexicans don’t even know with certainty if they are the rightful heirs (to me or not to me? to use another Shakespearean formula), and if so, of which particular legacies. But one senses the dif/ herencia, which is a legacy that hurts. To deal, not so much with the legacy of pain, but with the feeling itself, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies three “formal structures.” The herencia/herida could be a wrong that needs to be observed as a ritual and thus offer an opening to truth. Nancy identifies this attitude with Oedipus. The herencia/herida could be a sickness which needs to be cured so that it can lead to salvation. Nancy identifies this attitude with Parsifal. The herencia/herida could be an exposition to the world and hence the pain, or enjoyment, simply need to be borne. Another word for this is simply existence. 10 All of these have to do with the past, but all involve a decision that implies a future. The state of things is such that it hurts, but it also promises. Hamlet needs to decide what to do about his father’s ghost and his demands for retribution, if not restitution. Mexicans, standing in the desolation of their history, which Paz interpreted as a vision of meaningless

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life and meaningless death, need to read their legacy and not fulfill but reiterate its promise. 11 As we turn the page from Machado’s epigraph to begin reading the Laberinto de la soledad, we encounter a discussion no longer of essence but of existence. Octavio Paz begins the book with the following sentence: “A todos, en algún momento, se nos ha revelado nuestra existencia como algo particular, intransferible, y precioso” (11). Beside the certainty with which the poet here seems to make apparently uncritical universal assertions, it is worth noting at least three things. First, he begins with “A todos.” Whether we have access to truth or not, whether we understand the significance of the revelation or not, we are told that everybody, and that includes any possible us, has undoubtedly had the experience of being, the epiphany and the revelation that “I am me.” Secondly, however, this experience happens “en algún momento,” which means that the revelation must be temporal and partial. It is presented more like an “I was me” than “I am me.” The fact that it happens at some particular moment means that it is not always available and within reach. A moment, moreover, is not just a point in time, it is also a constitutive element, a part of an unfolding larger whole. In dialectical terms, a moment is the event and/or agency that negates and subsumes, sublates its other in the process of arriving at a more complete moment. It is always part of a series and thus cannot be an end, a goal or a telos. The revelation that Paz proposes, therefore, is more like a feeling than a knowing; it appears, it is sensed, and then it recedes and remains as a memory, perhaps, or as an expectation, since, apparently, it is renewable. That is to say, for Paz, there was a moment (in time, yes, but also a partial element, a fragment or a building block) which was anterior to consciousness, in which existence seemed amorphous, scattered, and dispersed. The moment of revelation makes it particular, it gives it form, and also limits. Paradoxically, the moment achieves two contradictory effects. One, it joins what is disjointed; and two it disjoins itself from whatever is left out of the moment (i.e., the rest of the world). The revelation divides, allots or apportions, and specifies; it thus also allots concreteness, value, propriety and property to the moment. “I am me” is also a way of saying “This is mine.” The revelation is like an event of appropriation; that is, the happening, the arrival of exact (fere) coincidence. However, for Paz, this revelation also bears (fero) with it the feeling, the pain of solitude. “El descubrimiento de nosotros mismos se manifiesta como un sabernos solos; entre el mundo y nosotros se abre una impalpable, transparente muralla: la de nuestra conciencia” (ibid). We are thus cut away from the world, wounded (ferire). Achieving the unity of consciousness means losing the unity of the world. But note the unusual and porous phenomenology that Paz is beginning to sketch out. The expression “sabernos solos” is both an epistemological assertion, we have knowledge about the empirical

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fact that we are alone, and an expression of pathos, of a feeling or sense, more a mood than a knowledge. At best, it is an expression of a flavor or a taste (the relationship between saber and sabor could allow us to render the expression as “we taste ourselves alone”). Note as well that the so called wall between the world and ourselves is “impalpable” and “transparent.” Despite the fact that this event is a concrete revelation, of consciousness, no less, it does not produce positive knowledge. What it does produce is a feeling of disadjustment and separation. The process is analogous to the one described by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents, where he posits, although by second hand, claiming he himself has never felt it, a certain amorphous “oceanic feeling” of unity with the world that antecedes consciousness and individuality: “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’. . . it is the feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” 12 Like Freud, Paz is representing a kind of infantile stage, where world, mother, food, excretions, etc. have not yet been differentiated into the me and the not me. In any case, for both, this lost feeling of unity which comes with consciousness, leaves an affective (and effective) mark, something like a negative shadow that continues to have symptoms long after the fact. Freud even speculates that it might be the origin of religions. Nonetheless, it is significant that he discusses this “feeling” in the work in which he also posits a negative and self-destructive instinct, the death-drive. In any case, for Paz, this revelation is equivalent to the self’s entry into temporality and finitude; it is also the taking of consciousness of time. One could compare it as well with the Nietzschean discussion of the Apollonian principio individuationis in tension with the Dionysian loss of self, where nature (or the sacred) rejoins all individuals into a single amorphous thing where “I am me” is no longer possible. 13 With the arrival of self-consciousness, of course, also comes the consciousness of another, and the discovery that one is separated from the other, although the other remains “present” in some way as other (as an adjacent influence, a mark or track, a desire or a pain, a memory or a dream, a phantom or a promise). This constitutive element in Paz could also be compared with that originary moment described in Plato’s Symposium by Aristophanes, where he posits our being as having a primordial hermaphrodite nature that was violently split into the two interlocking sexes, and which Aristophanes cites as the origin (and wound) or erotic love. 14 This moment marks for Paz a primordial event, which is perhaps authentic, but nonetheless instantly lost and hence irrecuperable. But, importantly, as a feeling, it can be infinitely reiterated. The Pazian narrative of consciousness, this story, which has happened to us all (“a todos”), is presented somewhat naively as a kind of development from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. Children, we are told, overcome their solitude through play, and adults do so through work. One

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could easily criticize the simplicity of the metaphor, which would seem to place the “Mexican” in a permanent state of rebellious existential adolescent crisis in comparison to say “European” and “American” presumably adult identities. But that would miss the point. The “Mexican” self is like an adolescent, not because it is growing, developing towards a telos but not yet there, but because it occupies a privileged liminar site, perhaps the only site where something like a self is possible. Adolescent being is like a threshold. The self is lost in play and work, but it hurts in adolescence (note the etymology of the word, related to dolor). The event of the revelation of existence, for Paz, is accompanied by a very strong sense (both feeling and meaning) of wonder; an affect, which is not quite knowledge or understanding but more like a thrill at the promise of plenitude to come mixed with a sad nostalgia at the memory of an already lost plenitude. Paz says, “El adolescente se asombra de ser” (ibid). The sense is somewhat amorphous, but it has some rather specific characteristics. It is a feeling of surprise, accompanied by desire and fear. It is a moment of recognition that cannot help but be uncanny, because it presents together features that are familiar, as well as hitherto completely (or still) unrecognizable features. 15 Along with the sense of the uncanny, then, goes a feeling of incredulity. “Is this me? Could it be?” One could say that this imaginary (or symbolic) “adolescente” is confronted with a choice between Machado’s “fe poética” and “fe racional,” but in his astonishment, is unable to believe in either. “Asombro” is not just surprise, amazement or astonishment, it is also a putting under a shadow, a darkening that does not allow one to see clearly. This is how Paz describes the revelation: “Y al pasmo sucede la reflexión: inclinado sobre el río de su conciencia se pregunta si ese rostro que aflora lentamente en el fondo, deformado por el agua, es el suyo” (ibid). It is clear that the language here is not expository, critical or philosophical language. But, like Abel Martín’s fe poética, it is definitely in a relationship to and dialogue with that very language. It is a poetic statement that explodes in a multiplicity of meanings, but somehow always returns to consciousness and reflection. “Y al pasmo sucede la reflexión” could be translated as “reflection follows a surprise (or a convulsion).” The word “pasmo” is normally used simply as shock, but it literally means a specific disease, tetanus, which usually comes from cuts or wounds and produces stiffness and muscular spasms. But the phrase could also be translated as: “suddenly, reflection happens” or even, the other way around, “reflection happens to surprise.” And reflection could of course be defined as thought, or merely as an effect of light. Note the circularity of the logic. But further, Paz creates a small allegory (a simile), where we see a boy, perhaps, looking over a river at his own reflection (like Narcissus); but the river is not outside himself, it is his own consciousness in flow. It is that image, which we are told is deformed, that leads to the self questioning and to his incredulity. In other words, by the

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circularity of reflection, it takes us back to the spasm or the shock that precipitated the reflection in the first place. Reflection follows the shock, but the shock is caused by the reflection. Moreover, the face on the image slowly comes into appearance by flowering, by imperceptibly separating itself from its background (fondo), which is also its foundation and its origin. But everything of course is in movement and there is no stable foundation. Everything is distorted, uncanny, not quite right. Identity fails to coincide with itself, which is precisely what leads to the questioning in the first place. Paz presents the sense that something is wrong poetically, but as an origin for philosophy: the origin, if you will, of the search for origins. Paz concludes, “La singularidad del ser . . . se transforma en problema y pregunta, en conciencia interrogante” (ibid). The emergence of critical thought is a kind of birth from turbulent waters. It is a birth, but as a separation and a crisis, it is also a wound, and even a death. Critical thought, which for Paz begins with a poetic question, also inaugurates a process of mourning (duelo, it should be noted, like adolescencia, is also associated with dolor); it also inaugurates a process of caring (for the wound) and of curing. Critical consciousness points up the fact that identity needs to be sutured, from the beginning. It is worth recalling that “pasmo,” tetanus, is a disease that takes hold as an infection following a cut or a wound. It is a contamination of the inside from the outside at the origin of both (i.e., of their very separation). Paz’s transformation of “la singularidad del ser” into poetic critique is describing something similar to what Jean-Luc Nancy has called “Being singular plural.” Nancy says, “we do not gain access to the origin: access is refused by the origin’s concealing itself in its multiplicity . . . we do not penetrate the origin, we do not identify with it. More precisely, we do not identify ourselves in it or as it, but with it” 16 With it here means alongside it, contingent upon it, not in the sense that being comes after the origin, but in the sense that it touches upon it, is adhered to it, and separates itself from it. Paz’s singularity of being is inherent upon reflection, which means that it is an inheritance. Paz’s singularity of being is multiple. Nancy says, “The plurality of beings is at the foundation [fondement] of Being” (emphasis in original, 12). Let us return briefly to the face that Paz’s budding, poetic, critical consciousness sees flowering “lentamente en el fondo” Let us recall that there is at least a double vision here, or as Paz would perhaps call it, a simultaneous vision and revision. First, the face is emerging slowly from the bottom (fondo) of the river, barely coming into focus against the background of moving water. It is distorted. It is something visualized as if it were outside. But second, the river is the “río de su conciencia,” so the face is actually coming from his own inner depths (fondo). The flowering taking place is the flowing of a slow mind (lenta mente) coming into critical awareness, as if it were inside. “The ‘outside’ of the origin is ‘inside’” (11). The process is very slow,

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although it happens very suddenly, “Al pasmo.” There is no punctuality. The mind is not slow as in weak, but as engaged in a different kind of temporality. Octavio Paz begins El laberinto de la soledad, by positing the emergence of a poetico-critical consciousness as the origin and foundation of a Mexican inheritance. There was of course no unity there, but this only made its promise and possibilities richer. There was no identity to find, as we can see from the very first page, but the plurality of the moment, in all its constitutive elements, would keep Paz returning to the river for the next fifty years.

Chapter Three

From the Subject to the Negative and Back Paz’s Mexicans

Alain Badiou has defined modernity as the period in which the category of the subject predominates and organizes the world around it. 1 This category is a Western category, which does not necessarily mean that it does not operate as well outside of the West, around its periphery, in Latin America, for example. It operates as well in the interstices of the West, as in the Hispanic community of, say, the American Southwest or the West Coast. But when we state that something operates “as well,” we do not only mean also, we could be stating that something operates with the same amount of efficiency; that is to say, just as well as “as poorly.” The category of the subject is, to use JeanLuc Nancy’s term, “inoperative,” which is not to say that it does not still organize the world around it. 2 The poetic subject hesitantly coming into being in Octavio Paz’s thoroughly modern entity. But it is also totally heterogeneous, with multiple ancient inheritances. For Paz, as for many Latin American thinkers, the main problem is how to relate to modernity. This problem is political, philosophical, cultural, and personal, as well as artistic. “La modernidad es una palabra en busca de su significado: ¿es una idea, un espejismo o un momento de la historia? ¿Somos hijos de la modernidad o es ella nuestra creación? Nadie lo sabe a ciencia cierta. Poco importa: la seguimos, la perseguimos.” 3 Note that for Paz here the very idea of modernity is a problem, which, interestingly, as we have seen, is also the way he defines consciousness or subjectivity. For Paz, modernity is like a subject, and like a subject, it is also split. It is founded upon an uncertain ground, which is itself in question and is divided into at least two questions. Is modernity our inheri31

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tance? Is modernity our promise, and hence our responsibility? For Paz, at any rate, there is something wrong with Mexican modernity (although one could add that this applies to modernity in general). Before being able to express if what is Latin American or what is Mexican is modern at all (or premodern or postmodern), one needs to inquire as to whether the very category of the subject is applicable to that which is Latin American or Mexican. In other words, is there a modern Mexican subjectivity? Octavio Paz’s Laberinto de la soledad is the beginning of such an inquiry. As we have seen, Paz puts in motion a pseudo-dialectical procedure. It has various formulations throughout the book, but all of them are concretized around particular features and tensions Paz identifies with the Mexican. Thus he presents a dialectic between the open and the closed, solitude and community, the self and the other. Like Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave, they all operate by paradoxically negating and appropriating their symmetrical other moment. Hegel had identified such dialectic as one that was literally (and by that of course he probably meant allegorically) a fight to the death. Paz therefore chooses to begin his inquiry, peculiarly, as follows: “Por eso, al intentar explicarme algunos rasgos del mexicano de nuestros días, principio con esos para quienes serlo es un problema de verdad vital, un problema de vida o muerte” (15). The first chapter, entitled, “El pachuco y otros extremos,” explores what for Paz might be the ultimate limit of Mexican identity. According to Patrick Dove, “Paz poses the question of what it means to be both modern and Mexican.” 4 As Mexico comes together as a modern nation and forges its identity of modern subjects and citizens, this newly formed subject also becomes aware of itself as backward and somehow excluded from modernity. Dove highlights the tension in Paz between his admiration and endorsement of Mexico’s artistic modernism (which is rich, fertile, robust, renewed by ethnic and popular elements) and its incomplete and inoperative social modernization (which of course clashes with the former). Modernity, as complete, self-identical national and cultural autonomy, is a split image that is divided between its promise and its heritage. Paz will try to generalize the argument, but his starting point is MexicanAmerican culture in Los Angeles during the 30s and 40s. There, according to Paz, the crisis of modernity reaches its extreme moment (“un problema de vida o muerte”), for the subject in formation is haunted by the ghost of what it “wants to be” (modern, technologically advanced, rich, American) and what his heritage tells him he “is” (archaic, underdeveloped, poor, Mexican). The parameters of Paz’s inquiry had already set up the whole problem of identity as one of adolescence. It is not surprising that he then goes on to read Mexican-American culture, for all intents and purposes, as dominated by the attitude of increasingly disaffected macho young men. Paz has little or no understanding of the specificity of Mexican-American life. He does not analyze the pachuco world of the forties with the respect

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and rigor of an anthropologist, but rather, he witnesses it with the fascinated horror of a cultured middle class spectator. His critical eye is sharp, and his psychoanalytic and existentialist discourse is smooth, provocative and persuasive. Paz’s presentation of pachuco culture became so influential that one could say that he almost created many of the stereotypes that dominated much discourse around the area for years to come. The pachucos were ashamed of their origin, moving around with an “aire furtivo e inquieto” (15); as if they had something to hide, they were grotesque dandies who always wore a disguise and were often involved in criminal activity (17). And all of this was self-evident: “Como es sabido, los pachucos son bandas de jóvenes, generalmente de origen mexicano, que…” (16). Paz’s view of the pachucos is somewhat superficial and not in the end particularly revealing. Pachuco culture is singular and contradictory, complex and specific, and embedded in a social context that involves many different problems, interactions and nuances: poverty, exile, bilingualism, assimilation (or lack thereof), commercialism, music, and yes, violence and crime. When Paz says that their identity is a matter of life and death, he is not exaggerating. In many cases individuals did lose their lives because of the clothes they wore. 5 However, Paz does not analyze any of these facts in detail. We should not look here for an objective, accurate or fair representation of pachuco culture, but rather, review the process by which Paz is attempting to portray a difficult, divided and conflicted “Mexican” subjectivity. The life or death question that interests Paz is expressed figurally (which does not in any sense make it less real). Paz’s pachuco is a poetic figure, a philosophical concept, and, to a certain extent, a personal symbol. In a text entitled “How and why I wrote the Labyrinth of Solitude,” Paz himself traces the reasons back autobiographically to three key experiences of “childhood vulnerability.” 6 In the first one, he remembers himself as a small child crying desperately in the middle of a room while apparently nobody hears him or responds to his cries: “Interminable moment. Hearing myself cry amidst universal deafness” (8). This, he says, left him with a feeling that he describes as “not a wound, but a hollow” (ibid), a palpable emptiness. The second experience had to do with having moved to Los Angeles as a child and having had great difficulties adjusting to school because of language problems and other kids making fun of his pronunciation. And the third one had to do with his return to Mexico and again being unable to fit in, since he was treated as a foreigner, “a gringo, a Frenchy, a dago, it was all the same to them.” (10). All three of these moments relate in one way or another to the problem of language and communication. They express an inability to communicate with the other, and hence to belong to a community, to commune with the other. This personal experience of solitude and abandonment will then be transferred metaphorically to all Mexicans. The feeling of being excluded

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and of having one’s most visceral emotions ignored is certainly not new, or even revelatory. These are of course more narrative reconstructions of memory akin to revisiting, recreating, or reinventing primal scenes on a psychoanalyst’s couch than to explanations of the essence of pachuco or Mexican identity. Nonetheless, what Paz addresses in his narrative of the construction of the individual and collective subject is the sense and the meaning of recognition. When Paz saw angry young men asserting their difference in garish attire and engaged in what he, for all intents and purposes, interpreted as a berrinche (tantrum), “I recognized myself in the pachucos and in their mad rebellion against their present and their past. A rebellion that ended not as an idea but as a gesture”(17). Independently of whether the gesture is or is not suicidal, as Paz claims, independently of whether he is correct or incorrect in his interpretation of the pachuco, the point is that he is horrified, he does not understand, and that he sees himself in the very figure he fails to comprehend. What Paz confronts is the failure of meaning, in other words, the problem of nihilism. Paz interprets the little boy’s crying and the pachuco gestures as attempts to express a pain that cannot be articulated: an emptiness, a wound, a nothing that is existential. The child doesn’t cry because he is hungry or just lost his toy; the pachuco doesn’t taunt because he doesn’t have a job or his novia just went off with an American sailor. Instead, they both express a deeper wound that hearkens back to being thrown into a hostile world . . . alone. Paz’s argument is general, universal. When one looks at the concrete details, it sounds either simplistic or pathetic. That is why it is always both right and wrong. And that is why he constantly needs to return to it to clarify misinterpretation. The heterogeneity of being is not of the order of meaning; it is always expressed as something else, a cry, a gesture, “the revenge of the imagination,” (ibid). Paz’s Laberinto de la soledad is a text that, like Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, puts forth a diagnosis of culture. If for Freud the meaning of being civilized was to be unhappy and hence neurotic, for Paz the meaning of being Mexican is to be alone and excluded. Therein lie both the argument’s strength and its weakness. Much of Paz’s discourse engages with various movements from poetry and philosophy, one of which is Heideggerian existentialism. Being-in-theworld is being thrown into the world and others and hence being exposed to them. Being-in-the-world is, in a sense, to be wounded by intersecting and being intersected by one’s environment. To be in the world is to be in time, and thus to be torn asunder. As Paz puts it, “Nuestra soledad . . . es una oscura conciencia de que hemos sido arrancados del Todo” (Laberinto 23). Paz will not follow Heidegger through all the ins and outs of his analysis of the history of Being and the existential analytic of being-towards-death. Nonetheless, many of the questions put forth by the Laberinto have a Hei-

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deggerian inflection. There is a certain inauthenticity to all culture, and Paz follows its modalities through Mexican culture. A primary modality of being-in-the-world is being with others, in the everyday. When one is with others, one cannot be oneself, for the customs and conventions of culture and the social world around the subject as well as the historical world of the ancestors, all live through the subject and alienate it from itself. This can be experienced as middle class malaise, religious angst, or as an ethnic identity crisis. For Paz in the Laberinto, the latter is the dominant mode, although the other two are also present. One’s heritage is experienced as a burden, even as a wound. The wound, which Paz goes as far as calling “vergüenza de su origen” (15), can be either affirmed or denied. What Paz sees in the pachuco is instead its shameless display: “No es una intimidad que se vierte, sino una llaga que se muestra, una herida que se exhibe. Una herida que también es un adorno bárbaro, caprichoso y grotesco; una herida que se ríe de sí misma y se engalana para ir de cacería” (20). There is an interesting issue that Paz is beginning to elucidate vis-à-vis the construction of the pachuco subject. He is cut by the wound of his inheritance, by a difherencia, and he displays this inheritance as a sign of his abjection. This display too is part of his heritage, for it recovers at least two important motifs, both themselves at least double. One, the “barbaric” display of battle scars, worn proudly as ornaments and hence belonging to a kind of macho warrior code, whether of Aztec or Medieval Spanish lineage. (A similar display of course can also be at times confused with the way beggars traditionally display their misery and abjection.) Two, the Christian, and particularly the baroque Colonial catholic display of the Passion in all its spectacular realistic detail: “Los Cristos ensangrentados de las iglesias pueblerinas” (26), also related to an indigenous tradition of spectacular violence and sacrifice. This too can at times be confused with beggarly display. The difference between the pachuco performance and the traditional displays is that what we have here is a parody, an ironic and highly stylized exhibition of the traditional uses of abjection. Traditional displays had a telos, the wound displayed within a horizon of meaning, the possibility of suture, healing, and community; the pachuco display has no such illusions. The zoot suit worn by the pachuco is like the skin of the sacrificed god, but without its aura. It no longer has the power of a sacred metaphor but is merely a degraded simile, a parodia (odio: hate), “una herida que se ríe de sí misma.” Paz’s reading of the pachuco and all the other extremes is itself an ambivalent gesture which is and is not trying to search there for his own, or Mexico’s, “verdadera herencia.” Paz’s discourse is a critical articulation with an imaginary past as well as an eccentric and exorbitant present. These are being reconstituted and represented by Paz, but in the process, he is also distorting, misrepresenting and even betraying his object (i.e., the inheritance

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he is attempting to claim). If the pachuco is ashamed of his origin, Paz in turn is ashamed of the pachuco. But shame here is not a simple negation. It is also a form of appropriation. The process puts in motion what appears to be an economy of shame. However, because of the series of identifications at play, there is a radical uncertainty about who or what is the object of the shame and who or what its subject. The truth of the inheritance is precisely what distorts the inheritance. In a different context, Gilles Deleuze has said that we experience shame at being human whenever we witness suffering. “We are not responsible for the victims but we are responsible before them.” 7 Shame is a mode of identification, which does not produce solidarity or even community, but it demands responsibility and repetition (representation). The subject is constituted, shamefully, before the display of the wound of inheritance. In Paz each representation is a repetition (a return) but also a differentiation, a distortion, and hence a betrayal. What, then, is the status of the “verdadera herencia?” The true inheritance is the grotesque parody that hurts, the difherencia. It is something like the truth, but it is also a distortion and a betrayal of the truth. Paz and the pachuco are both confronting the failure of meaning of Western modernity. Gianni Vattimo has used the Heideggerian term Verwindung, to describe a mode of appropriation of the truth that is at the same time its twisting and its distortion: Los lectores de Heidegger saben que intentó resolver el problema de la imposible superación de la metafísica—esto es, de la soberanía del espíritu, es decir, de la supremacía de occidente—elaborando una problemática noción que en alemán tiene el nombre de Verwindung—no superación (Überwindung), sino distorsión, resignación, aceptación irónica. ¿De qué? Justamente de la herencia metafísica, por tanto, de Occidente y su supremacía, y de la noción de universalidad. 8

One could say against Paz, that the pachuco is not simply affirming “su exasperada voluntad de no-ser” (Laberinto 20), but rather, that his parody is an ironic resignation. The grotesque distortion is a testimony to a tort, to a wrong that cannot be otherwise articulated. One could also say, with Paz, that the performance is a disguise that really has nothing to hide except the act of hiding itself. This offers another twist, another layer of irony, for Paz is as involved in dissimulation as his parodic double. What they both share is a feeling, not necessarily a consciousness, of orphanhood. Later on Paz reminds us, “orphanos no solamente es huérfano, sino vacío. En efecto, soledad y orfandad son, en último término, experiencias del vacío” (226). An orphan is one who has nothing to inherit. That seems, but only seems to be, the case with the pachuco, the Mexican, and Paz himself. The pachuco claims his inheritance

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by means of pure style; Paz through poetry. In the end, both are philosophical modalities, variations on the rhythm of dialectics; they are at the same time a tantrum and a fight to the death. It is impossible to say if there ever existed a time when the world was simply given, before the pachuco crisis, before the trauma of conquest, before the little boy started crying in the middle of the room, or before the mirror stage, for that matter. But one of the meanings of nihilism, if it can have any meaning at all, is that today the world seems progressively less and less given (Vattimo 33). The loss of sense implied by this, whether because of the death of God or the aftermath of the Second World War (Paz wrote the Laberinto in post-war France), leads to a case of fragmentation that can only be called Romantic. Paz claimed that things should not be seen as they are, as they are given, but rather, that through the poetic imagination, they should be intuited as they could or should be behind appearances. 9 This is of course an aesthetics of romanticism. It is significant that Paz begins the chapter on the pachucos by citing Novalis on dreams, 10 and ends the chapter by citing Hölderlin: “Hölderlin expresa en varios poemas el pavor ante la fatal seducción que ejerce sobre el universo y sobre el hombre la gran boca vacía del caos” (29). If the enlightenment invented the modern subject, romanticism put it into crisis. Paz’s inquiry into Mexican identity alternates between these two positions. Now, in the same way that Octavio Paz does not simply apply the categories of existentialism to the pachuco context, our reading of the construction of both the poetic subject and the Mexican subject in Paz is not a matter of applying the poststructuralist critique of the subject to his own discourse. Paz’s work articulates heterogeneous genres. He shows how categories such as “the West” or “the subject” or “modern” are all themselves problematic and divided from the beginning. If Badiou is right that the category of the subject predominates and organizes the modern world, then his question, “¿el pensamiento de nuestro tiempo exige que esta categoría sea deconstruída?” (26) seems central to Paz’s inquiry. In the context of Western thought, and in particular in the context of French philosophy which Badiou analyzes, the answer is double. For figures like Lacan, the answer is of course no, although the very category of subjectivity is radically reorganized in Lacanian thought. For figures like Lyotard, Derrida, or Nancy, the answer is yes, since subjectivity is taken to its end, limit, culmination, or consummation (ibid). Either way, the subject in the end is finished. 11 A common response to this quandary in places like Latin America and other peripheral or non-Western sites is to try and reconstruct the deconstructed subject, since all of a sudden those who had been excluded to begin with now find themselves without the agent of change. The subject seems to be “necessary” for any possible project of emancipation. Paz himself starts from these principles. A divided subject is a subject with possibilities. Before

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Badiou, Paz had noted that the subject was divided by the simple fact that it was divisible. It had always already been a problematic category. Paz noted thus that the Latin American subject was doubly, or perhaps exponentially divided. It is divided from itself in that it separates itself from the presumed European subject (itself already divided, in any case), and it further separates itself from an imagined indigenous subjectivity, until, in the case of the pachuco, it breaks away from any and all forms that would claim to operate within it. The subject is constituted at an intersection of elements, or rather, fragments that can be added up, but do not add up to completion. It might be worth asking to what extent Badiou’s question is applicable to the pachuco abject, or to the subaltern. 12 And to what extent is it possible to recover here a “verdadera herencia”? Is it possible to conceive of an “almost truth”? Truth, a revelation is at the same time a concealment. Truth is an event that constitutes its own subject (and/or object, project, abject). It is a mode of appearing and arriving and departing. It is not willed, as much as the pachuco, or Paz, may wish to will it. It is a presentiment of what often cannot be presented, more a sentiment than a fact. It may sound oxymoronic, but what operates in Paz is an aesthetics of imprecision. Truth happens through simile, not metaphor. Not truth, but something like truth, is allowed to take place: a poetic, more than a philosophical, event. At the end of his chapter on the pachucos, Paz says the following: “Mi testimonio puede ser tachado de ilusorio. Considero inútil detenerme en esta objeción: esa evidencia ya forma parte de mi ser” (30). He has just presented his theory of identity in general, and Mexican identity in particular, as the negation and rejection of itself. The argument reflects at least three levels of generalization: First, the Mexican-American as an example that metonymically represents the Mexican. The pachuco negates himself, therefore, the Mexican does so as well. Second, the Mexican becomes a metonymical representation of humanity as a whole. Everyone negates himself, for that is the only way to achieve consciousness. That is the status of modernity and subjectivity. It is a philosophical procedure, Hegelian dialectics, and it is a poetic operation, mobilizing a metonymical chain. At this particular juncture, however, Paz presents this procedure as something else, a testimonio, a personal eyewitness account. His use of the term seems significant. Obviously, he is not referring to the Latin American literary genre of testimonio, which, even though it was already around, had not yet been recognized and codified as a separate entity. Later in the Laberinto, Paz does cite and briefly discuss the Mexican prototypical testimonio, Juan Pérez Jolote, by Ricardo Pozas, 13 so he is clearly aware of its possibilities as a mode of address. But the genre itself implies a communicative situation that emerges out of a collaboration between a “subaltern” individual, who normally has no access to means of communication or the media, and an “intellectual” mediator, often an anthropologist, who by means of dialogue

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and convivencia (temporal and temporary life sharing) is able to provide a forum from which a relatively “authentic” voice that otherwise would remain silent can be expressed. In a letter to Elena Poniatowska, Paz pointed out some of the problems that will later bring a serious crisis to the genre as a whole: “Y entre paréntesis: ¿quién recibe los derechos de J.P. Jolote: el transcriptor o el verdadero autor?” 14 Testimonio is also a form of display of wounds. In Latin America, this hybrid genre, part literature, part anthropology, part history, part chronicle, has become an important feature of the cultural and political landscape. 15 But this is not the kind of text that Paz puts forth. Quite the contrary, there is no dialogue established at all with any specific individual pachuco. Paz did live in Los Angeles, but it is doubtful that he met or established any sort of convivencia with the pachuco subcommunity, or the Mexican-American community for that matter. His eyewitness account probably itself comes mostly from the media. As a witness of pachuco everyday life, he is a distant witness. Paz analyzes a symbol, not an individual, and certainly not a community or a culture as such. Nonetheless, Paz’s distance does not necessarily mean that his facts are not true or that his analysis is wrong. In fact, it has become clear that the sad fate of many subjects of testimonial literature has indeed been to cease being individuals and become symbols (representatives of a community, a cause, a crisis). As symbols, they have rarely had control over the meaning given to their existence. It is understandable that contemporary Chicano culture violently rejects Paz’s analysis and representation. In a way, he is simply expressing horror before the rabble and shame before the victims, none of whom was ever approached or asked anything (“Pardon me sir, when you wear that garish suit, are you in fact affirming your will to non-being?”). Nevertheless, rejecting the particularity of the representation (“We are not like that!”) does not imply that, on a structural level, the dialectic of negation (“I am not like you!”) does not apply. Paz’s Hegelian moment demonstrates that negation is criticism and that criticism is the essence of modernity. Despite the rather stereotypical presentation, the pachuco project is, for Paz, a philosophical, political and artistic project (albeit not a teleological and certainly not a practical one). It is worth revindicating the pachuco, not only from the American culture that rejected it only to reappropriate it years later, but from Paz’s interpretation as well. The pachuco in its modern appropriation is certainly more affirmative, more interesting, more revolutionary, if you will, than in Paz’s formulation, but he is nonetheless still a symbol—only now, he has also become a commodity. Paz’s testimony in this sense, as a remark upon an ontological wound, upon the difherencia, is hence still valid. Obviously, Paz is not offering testimony in the legal or theological sense. He is not presenting facts of concrete motivations. There are no references to

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specific individuals who may or may not belong to specific groups, or gangs, and who may or may not have participated in specific acts (whether or not of violence) for specific reasons. The weakness of his “case” thus allows, as Paz clearly notes, that what he is saying may indeed be illusory; that is to say fictitious, or maybe simply poetic. Elsewhere, Paz has said that the self itself is a grammatical or poetic invention, “que el ‘yo’ es una construcción ilusoria” (Poniatowska 117). Thus Paz admits that his testimony does not look like a testimony. It only seems to be one, its revelations are only like truths. But his answer to the objection is the rhetorical equivalent of “this is my story and I’m sticking with it.” He has interpreted a particular reality (which involves the negation of identity and the assertion of difference), he has seen what he has seen (although not necessarily seeing things “as they are,” but better), and the evidence (another legal term, although not applicable in its legal sense here), is now part of his own being. In a passage resonating with Nietzschean overtones, Paz asserts that he forcefully believes his own story, independently of futile, useless objections. 16 He appropriates the will of the pachuco for his own critical project, and is thus able to negate mere arguments of fact. “Pensé entonces—y lo sigo pensando—que en aquellos hombres amanecía ‘otro hombre’” (Laberinto, 30–31). While he does not go as far as calling him an over- or superman, Paz portrays the voluntaristic pachuco as indeed beyond good and evil. Moreover, Paz’s testimony is outside the moral sense of truth and lie. The pachuco is a superman with an Aztec twist. “En cada hombre late la posibilidad de ser o, más exactamente, de volver a ser, otro hombre” (ibid; first emphasis, mine; second in text). The eternal recurrence of the same is the rhythm (of poetry and of dialectics) of a beating heart. The reason for highlighting this rhetorical aspect of Paz’s presentation is because it illuminates the problem of truth, or of something like truth, not only in literature, but also in testimony. For Paz, the purpose of the intellectual is to do an interminable critique, to put negativity to work, and to constantly point out that he or she does not accept the status of things. The intellectual, the critic, is the one that bears witness to the fact that there is always something wrong. In this, his work may have something in common with testimonio. But Paz is not interested in the revelation of particular wrongs, which could then be taken to the realm of litigation and demands for restitution. He is not interested in unmasking a particular reality so that we can all then see its true face. Rather, he is interested in the process of masking and unmasking as it takes place in and around the Mexican context. Paz’s analysis remains very general (life, death, being, solitude), but it is inflected towards particular themes (the conquest, the independence, the reform, the revolution), and it talks about specific classes of individuals (the Indian, the mestizo, woman), although all of these

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often simply become symbols (i.e., fragments that only have meaning in relation to a process). The mask is one of these symbols. Paz’s chapter, “Máscaras mexicanas,” is not an unmasking of anything Mexican; it is not a revelation of what hides behind the mask. Paz picks up on the double valence of Mexican folklore (but of most discourse in general) to point up how the process of masking and unmasking constitutes truths as moving and repeating events. Unmasking can be a form of hiding and revelation can be just another mask. The display of wounds, for example, is not a revelation of the truth of being, but a speech act calling for a specific response. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the fact of the wound; it lies in the sense that it may produce and the action that it may mobilize. Paz starts the chapter with an epigraph from a popular Mexican song, “Corazón apasionado / disimula tu tristeza” (Laberinto 32). There is a paradoxical logic, repeated indefinitely, of having a song that displays a “broken heart” be the very means by which that very heart is hidden (or told to hide). What is being revealed is the act of hiding. The heart, of course, while always already a cliché, is not, in the Mexican context, an arbitrary symbol. Besides the melodramatic overtones, it is also overdetermined. In the context of Paz’s disquisitions on masks, it echoes half of the Aztec definition of the human, which is the diphrasism face-heart. A true symbolon; the face and the heart must fit each other exactly. The heart is also the sacred bleeding heart of Catholicism, as well as the sacrificed heart of Aztec religion. Both are displayed as wounds, and both need to be hidden at particular moments. Paz’s work sets up a dialectic of producing and covering, in which it is often impossible to tell which of the moments is the revelation and which the concealment. He is not really interested in seeing behind the mask, but rather in following the rhythm and movement of the mask. In Spanish, máscara, is also más cara, that which is more valuable, dearer and more expensive, but also that which is more of a face, more than the face. The máscara is the face that is given to a particular situation. It is not what hides some other truer being, but that, in the being, that is exposed to the situation and to the other. Sometimes it is a wound, sometimes it is a heart; always, it is a display, and always, it is what regulates all relations (political, amorous, literary, cultural). As Robert Neustadt has pointed out “Paz’s metaphor of the mask applies to the practice of nationalism itself.” 17 There is a long tradition of Mexican masks that goes from pre-Columbian times, through the Santo Oficio, to wrestling idols like El Santo, presidential tapados, jungle guerrilleros, and Chicano performance artists. But what lies beneath the mask is of course always just another mask. The face itself, says Paz, is a mask: “Viejo o adolescente, criollo o mestizo, general, obrero o licenciado, el mexicano me aparece como un ser que se encierra y se preserva: máscara el rostro y máscara la sonrisa” (Laberinto 32). Paz is actually here setting in motion a

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kind of phenomenological discourse. The statement “me aparece” is simply a way of saying “it seems to me,” but it is also referring in more general terms to that which appears to the subject, that which manifests itself. To appear is thus at the same time to arrive and to arrive as; that is, the coming into presence of a being and the coming into presence of the being as something else. The double valence of “me aparece” is unavoidable in that it refers to appearances as well as apparitions. Moreover, the mask may be what hides being, but this hiding is precisely what keeps and maintains (encierra y preserva) being from the exposure, which nonetheless is its due. The phenomenology gets further complicated when we see that Paz is also using the mask as a mirror. “Plantado en su arisca soledad, espinoso y cortés a un tiempo, todo le sirve para defenderse: el silencio y la palabra, la cortesía y el desprecio, la ironía y la resignación” (ibid). In fact, there is no keeping and preserving without at the same time showing and exposing. Paz’s eye for contradiction keeps the dialectic alternating between the open and the closed. “El ideal de la ‘hombría’ consiste en no ‘rajarse’ nunca. Los que se ‘abren’ son cobardes” (32–3). The Mexican man is closed, hermetic; the Mexican woman is suspicious because she is open: “Su inferioridad es constitucional y radica en su sexo, en su ‘rajada,’ herida que jamás cicatriza” (33). But then the process is reversed: The Mexican man is truly himself when he opens himself, in laughter, revolution or fiesta; the Mexican woman is an example of disimulo that closes out the true opening. Each moment always becomes its other. Interestingly, Paz finds such a situation already at play in the relationship between Spain and Latin America. It too is both open and closed and ambiguously gendered. “España se cierra al Occidente y renuncia al porvenir,” while on the other hand, “es un rasgo permanente de la cultura hispanoaméricana [estar] abierta siempre al exterior” (108). And similarly, some lines of Mexican-American thought have continued this Pazian metaphor (and narrative) to refer to the relation between Mexico and the United States: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the third world grates against the first and bleeds.” 18 Not surprisingly, the line between the open and the closed seems to be a fluid boundary. It is never possible to determine exactly where it is, although it is quite clear that it hurts. The oscillation between identity and difference is what creates a flow. This is the process that we have been calling difherencia. It is the flow of difference within the identity of the heritage, which Paz has also called a tradition of rupture. 19 The difference is not just a difference but also a similarity or rather, a chain of similarities. The Mexican is like the Spanish and like the Indian but it negates both, the pachuco is like the Mexican and the American but it denies both, the border and the origin are like a wound, identity is like difference and the face is like a mask. But the mask cannot be removed without removing the face. “Nuestro grito desgarra

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esa máscara y sube al cielo hasta distenderse, romperse y caer como derrota y silencio” (Laberinto 71). It is worth recalling that the Aztec priests removed the skins of their sacrificial victims to reveal the gods beneath. They then wore them as masks and disguises. Perhaps, they already knew what Paz is slowly discovering. As Paz begins the chapter “Conquista y colonia,” he returns yet again to the word testimony: “Cualquier contacto con el pueblo mexicano, así sea fugaz, muestra que bajo las formas occidentales laten todavía las antiguas creencias y costumbres. Esos despojos, vivos aún, son testimonio de la vitalidad de las culturas precortesianas” (98, my emphasis). The metaphor of beating is important because it takes us to the heart of the matter. The heart is the essence of the matter at hand, the truth of the problem. In the Aztec tradition it is also that which is removed when the body is open for sacrifice. What Paz is implying again is that the heart of the Mexican is not what it seems; that the heart itself might be a mask. His reading is applying a poetics of similitude, disguises and facsimiles. Everyone that interacts with Mexico will notice this. The Mexican seems modern, Christian, democratic and/or revolutionary, but his heart says otherwise. The phrase, “esos despojos, vivos aún,” calls for special attention. Paz refers to the ancient customs as refuse, garbage that has already been discarded, rejected. And yet, it does not disappear. There is always a remainder to every dialectical negation. It is as if the removed heart continued beating after the sacrifice, which in effect would be the ideal of sacrifice. In a way, this would be the pure literality of the narrative of sacrifice. The instant of transition would be the pure present, which Paz searches throughout his oeuvre. The logic of sacrifice insists that the heart live and beat indefinitely. That too is the logic of dialectics, which has sacrificed sacrifice. The Indians of the New World were sacrificed, but their beliefs, mere refuse (despojos), which were abandoned, disinherited, and disappropriated, continue to beat. Paz’s may indeed be a ghost story which, like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” is witness to the vitality of a culture that was radically destroyed. Again, Paz encounters in relation to pre-Columbian civilization, the same radical failure of meaning that he experienced in relation to the pachucos in Los Angeles: “su lucha final es un suicidio” (102), or rather, a now futile sacrifice. In reference to the contemporary philosophical situation, Alain Badiou has said, “La destrucción total de la tierra es el horizonte necesario de la técnica” (31). For Heidegger, the age of technology means the complete and total appropriation (at least as a possibility) of everything. When everything is standing in reserve, when everything is a resource that can be controlled and administered, then again, at least in theory, everything can be consumed or disposed of. This is the horizon of the complete destruction of the universe. But what happens to a culture that has already undergone that experience?

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There is a culture in which the destruction of the universe has already happened, not once, but numerous times in its collective memory. And its heart continues to beat. How does one interpret such a culture? How does one interact with a culture that would thus not really be there? The complete destruction of a universe does not happen punctually. Like all events its temporal structure is such that it has already happened before it is felt or understood (that would be the meaning of nihilism), and it continues to have effects long after it already happened. It is a spectral event, and one is always haunted by it. Destruction, like emancipation, is announced and it is remembered, but it is not experienced in the here and now except as a sense (pure pain or simple joy) without meaning. One is reduced to asking if it happened, if it will happen, if it is happening. Confronting despojos (discarded masks or faces) Paz gets a sense, a presentment, a hunch of an alternative temporality (the instant he is always searching for). In Spanish, the term “me late” means “I have a hunch,” or “my heart tells me,” but it literally means “it (the heart) beats to me.” There is a beating, a rhythm, a shimmering, a rapid fluctuation of presence and absence, question and answer, creation and destruction, fort and da, which is what we call temporality. Is it happening? In reference to a certain Juan, one of those authentic “despojos,” the Chamula Juan Pérez Jolote, Paz says, is “nuestro contemporáneo según el Registro Civil, nuestro antepasado si se atiende a sus creencias” (117). In reference to another Juan, a perhaps “fake” “despojo,” in the introduction to Carlos Castaneda’s Las enseñanzas de don Juan, Paz says, “Todos vimos alguna vez con esa mirada anterior pero hemos perdido el secreto. Perdimos el poder que une la mirada con aquello que mira.” 20 Both speak to Paz from a different place, a place that is no longer with us. And both, like that other Juan, the apostle, speak of the end of the world. Whether real or imagined, both are testimonios in which voices from a destroyed culture continue to resonate. We thus have a testimony of the end of the world. Before today’s nihilism, when confronting a world without ground or meaning, the loss of the “other” as well as his survival can serve as paradoxical legacy. We can perhaps read the survival of the end of the world, when meaning stopped being, although sense continued to be felt. 21 We do not know much about the temporal experience of preColumbian cultures, except that the destruction of the universe was part of their experience and it continues to haunt ours. There are perhaps many ways to deal with ghosts: remembering them, forgetting them, concealing them, displaying them, mourning for them. But what does it mean, in referring the conquest of México, to call “el suicidio del pueblo azteca” the often forgotten circumstance, which “me parece la más significativa” (104)? The pre-Columbian world came to a drastic and brutal end. Is the fact that this end was predicted enough to shift the “blame” to some kind of presumed Indigenous subjectivity or agency? “Mediodía y medianoche son horas de suicidio ritual. Al mediodía, durante un instante,

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todo se detiene y vacila; la vida, como el sol, se pregunta a sí misma si vale la pena seguir” (ibid). Paz is missing the rhythms of indigenous temporality, the swift alternating movement of life and death, even when he sometimes perceives them, in the myth of Quetzalcoatl, for example. At the beginning of the world, when the sun threatened to burn everything by not moving, “sólo el sacrificio de Quetzalcóatl pone en movimiento al Sol y salva al mundo del incendio sagrado” (118). 22 Yet he does perceive them as poetic rhythms. For him, the end of the world experienced by the Aztecs is analogous to the malaise of the end of the century experienced by the symbolist and decadent (fin-de-siècle) poets. Significantly, as an explanation for the Aztec attraction towards death, he cites (as an authority?) Paul Valéry: “Je pense, sur le bord doré de l’univers / A ce goût de périr qui prend la Pythonisse / En qui mugit l’espoir que le monde finisse” (104). In either context, it is not an easy matter to attribute any kind of intentionality to death. It might seem that Paz is attempting to recover the logic of sacrifice. One could read this moment as a nostalgic vision towards another time, where death meant something. But Paz is not mourning the loss of sense, he is in the process of inventing a new poetic sense. Recall that Paz said, “me parece,” referring to this suicide; this should echo with the statement he made referring to the manifestation of all Mexicans as masks, “me aparece.” The ghost does, however, beat “late,” suggest itself and return to him, “me late.” Paz has little or no understanding of the specificity of indigenous life and of the magnitude of “their” loss. This may very well be his failure, and he can be rightly criticized for being too facile in his appropriation of these figures as mere symbols for his own critico-poetical discourse of negation. The “other” has always played such a role. But Paz’s failure is symptomatic of a larger problem. The other, to be truly other, must remain by definition unthinkable and unappropriable. It is not a question of knowing the other; if it is truly other, it cannot be known. But for Paz, there is always a heterogeneity within. The problem is that the equation of the interior otherness with the pachuco, or indio, or mujer, depending on the context, does not follow. Instead of appropriation, we should pursue articulation. By saying that the indigenous world of Mexico is other, we are not saying that it should simply be mystified, left alone and respected (in a way, that would also be a way of destroying it). We are saying instead that there are limits to objective knowledge of another (whatever it may be). But this does not change the fact that we will always interact and negotiate (both in good and bad faith) with other worlds. One always presents a mask that intersects in some way with the mask of the other. The mask is a mode of engaging with the outside; it is a mode of interacting, whether ritually or politically, with a particular context. Since it both hides and preserves something while at the same time exposing and revealing something else, the mask is a modality of truth. Negation is

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only one of the ways to pursue this articulation. And negation always leaves remains. Paz’s reading of Independence brings to the fore another dead body and another mask. Like the previous destruction, although without the cosmic implications, it too is a birth and a death at the same time. “La Independencia se presenta también como un fenómeno de doble significado: la disgregación del cuerpo muerto del Imperio y nacimiento de una pluralidad de nuevos Estados” (129). In his description, myth has merely become politics; religion has become philosophy. Ideas themselves reveal nothing, but the process again follows a dialectical and poetic rhythm of revelation and concealment, which itself is revelatory. Criticism, as such, is formalized. The historical process is difficult to interpret because again its meaning is multivalent: “una vez más [note, as always in Paz, there is constant repetition, reiteration and return], las ideas enmascaran a la realidad en lugar de desnudarla o expresarla” (131). For Plato, ideas are reality. Is Paz saying here that ideas are mere representations? Is he suggesting that the ideas of the Enlightenment, imported from Europe to serve as a foundation for Independence, are not really ideas? No. Ideas do not mask Latin American reality because they are somehow wrong; it is their very mode of revelation that is a concealment of the Latin American real. In this, again (and again and again) a Nietzschean Paz is profoundly anti-Platonic. Ideas are a negation of reality. This is made clear to Paz in the project of Reform, which reveals the true meaning of Independence. It is a critical denial of the past and of all heritage. He calls it a “triple negación: la de la herencia española, la del pasado indígena y la del catolicismo—que conciliaba a las dos primeras en una afirmación superior” (137). In a sense, the constitution of 1857 rejects all identities. Indians do not exist, although theoretically everyone is welcome into the republic as an individual and a citizen. The Church is expropriated, although a huge part of the population is devoutly Catholic. And death is proclaimed to the Spaniards . . . in Spanish, of course. Even though the “Leyes the la Reforma,” by their very name proclaim themselves to be gradual, thoughtful and deliberative change (reform, not revolution), in effect, they “promueven la destrucción de . . . nuestra triple herencia” (ibid). But inheritances are not destroyed so easily. All change, whether political or poetic, is established by means of a paradoxical rupture, which ends up adopting fragments of what it has just broken. There is no dialectic without a remainder. The beating heart, for example, always continues to interpellate. This does not mean that everything remains as it was, of course. What has been supplanted no longer obtains, but it still wears a mask. Moreover, the past, by being inoperative, becomes a ghost. Paz himself says, “La historia podrá esclarecer el orígen de nuestros fantasmas, pero no los disipará” (81). The past is a phantasm, but its irreality produces secondary effects.

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The Reform movement was a clear project of negation of the past. It was a plan that looked towards the future, an intellectual attempt to bring Mexico, even violently, into modernity. It was, to be sure, full of ideas. Paz traces a lineage of intellectual and political inheritances. In the positivism that follows reform, “las ideas se convierten . . . en máscaras” (143). Every inheritance is a disinheritance, every new truth becomes a simulation and every simulation becomes a mutilation. In the pages preceding Paz’s discussion of the Mexican revolution, he constructs the labyrinth, not so much of solitude, but of difherencia itself. The words heredar, heredero, herencia, filiación, deseheredados are constantly repeated and reiterated; they alternate with terms like mentira, inautenticidad, equívoco, desfigurar, envenenar, esterilidad, asfixia, soledad. They all lead to setting up what he calls “el universo sin salida” (146), which explodes in the Revolution. Unlike the Reform, which looked to the future, the Revolution was a return to the past. While the former had many ideas and plans, the latter was characterized by “la falta de ideas de los revolucionarios” (159). Paz states that the revolution will claim no inheritance. It is a true intellectual orphan, and it wears no mask. “Desnuda de doctrinas previas, ajenas o propias, la Revolución sera una explosión de realidad y una búsqueda a tientas” (153). It does not really look towards the future, it feels its way blindly. The Mexican revolution will be sensed, more than thought through. And it flails its way through. In many ways, it is chaos, a kind of fiesta or carnival of death. But it follows its own logic. It is the negation of negation in a truly Hegelian sense. Not surprisingly, like the pachuco and the Aztec, the revolutionary too will commit suicide, “grito de orfandad y de júbilo, de suicidio y de vida, todo mezclado” (162). Although, this time, the death will somehow be productive, at least momentarily. In an Aristotelian mode, Paz recovers something tragic or cathartic from the revolution. In a Bataillean mode, he revindicates the revolution as pure excess and expenditure. In a pious mode, he reads it as a sacrifice, although he remains ambivalent. And as a vanguardist poet, he presents the revolution as poetry, as the moment of authentic poetic revelation. At any rate, he says, “La Revolución es una súbita inmersión de México en su propio ser” (ibid). It seems to be the exit to the labyrinth of solitude, for there, “el mexicano conoce al fin, en abrazo mortal, al otro mexicano” (ibid). But of course, this too will turn out to be just another mask. What we have is the presentation of a series of masks and unmaskings, where subjects are constructed by negating their own subjectivities and laying bare the emptiness of their inheritances. Thus the pachucos negate their own past and wear the zoot suit as a mask of identity, only to then violently rip it off. Colonial Indians negate their past idolatry and construct a hybrid mask of devout Catholicism, which crumbles as well. The liberals of 1857 negate their multiple heritage and construct with the emerging positivism a pale mask, a poor imitation of the critical face of the Enlightenment. And the

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revolution, perhaps the most authentic because it set up a confrontation with the interior nothingness of being, only managed to produce a new mask, an institutional mask, the PRI, whose transfigurations and unmaskings continue to this day. The chain of identities, Spanish, Indian, Mestizo, Catholic, liberal, conservative, revolutionary, Mexican, Chicano, etc., can all be inherited and disavowed, they are all interchangeable and all empty. What all these moments have in common is that they are constitutive of what Paz calls “la revelación del instante,” and what Hegel would call the Absolute. Immediately after the description of the revolution as the true revelation of Mexican being, in the aftermath of that cathartic moment, Paz tells us the following: “Reducir la poesía a sus significados históricos sería tanto como reducir las palabras del poeta a sus conotaciones lógicas o gramaticales. La poesía se escapa de la historia y lenguaje aunque ambos sean su necesario alimento” (163). Paz is hazarding a poetic reading of the politics of identity, elaborating a complex dialectic between poetry and history. The tension between poetry and history is certainly not new. In his Poetics, Aristotle had long ago identified the very same quarrel, and he too, like Paz, had privileged poetry over history. According to Aristotle, poetry was more philosophical than history because it needed to create its own coherence and unity, whereas history simply related the events as they happened. In history, causes and effects were not necessarily clear; the narrative, with its beginning middle and end did not yet come into view. While on the surface it might seem that Paz is preferring poetry over history for the opposite reason (its power to present instant revelation, as opposed to narrative or logical coherence), in effect, he makes an argument that in the end is quite similar to Aristotle’s. For Paz, the poetic instant, like the revolutionary moment, is primordial because it transcends the contingencies of history and allows for consciousness, no longer of logical coherence but of critical thought, to come into its own. Poetry cuts across history, even while the accidents of history continue cutting into its articulation. The revolution, as a historical event, belongs to a certain extent to something called “reality”—as the field of suffering and joy, the articulation and intersection of bodies, and the construction and deconstruction of coherences and coinheritances. Aristotelian poetics, in the service of philosophy, would help organize and provide the history of this reality with some narrative coherence. Pazian poetics, instead, will highlight the rupture of coherence, the difherence, as marked by the utterance of the sacred word or the curse (“¡Viva México hijos de la Chingada!” [82]) as an irruption of reality (both subjective and objective genitive). The rupture is the rhythm and the caesura of poetry (and dialectics) where meaning as such fails. This instantaneous moment of truth and poetry, of “auténtica revelación,” is no longer recoverable for history except as mere pathos. Sense as affect is translated into sense as feeling and the game of masks and unmaskings continues. Poetry may escape from history, but the

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problem of poetry, for Paz, is not an escape from the political (since the political always recovers and covers over the rupture), but rather, a particular kind of engagement with the political. Echoing Aristotle, Paz would say that poetry is more critical than history. Solitude is impossible. The labyrinth of solitude is a ruse, somewhat like the Cartesian methodological pretense that makes the “I am” evident. 23 The speech act that utters, “somos, de verdad, distintos. Y, de verdad, estamos solos” (Laberinto 22), is an impossible articulation. Paz’s solitude is an expression of a shared commonality, the sharing of which is felt like a cut. In Spanish, the word “compartir” makes this more obvious. To share oneself with another is to be divided from oneself. Shared community is thus felt like partition and hence it is a type of alienation (“la esencial heterogeneidad del ser”). The one thing that is most difficult to find in the Laberinto de la soledad, is a little peace and quiet, a little solitude. The text is crowded with noisy, loud, obnoxious, in-your-face busybodies constantly cutting into each other’s space and into each other’s bodies. And that rowdy multitude is always a “we.” Being-with is not, cannot be, aloneness. It can be negation. It can be the denial of community and identity. But such a denial is always already a touching (a contingency) and hence a withness, a betweenness, a withinness. Paz ends the book more or less where he started. “Estamos al fin solos,” (210), he says with what seems a sigh of relief and hope. At the beginning, solitude was the emptiness, which was inauthentic and needed to be constantly covered over with masks. After all the unmaskings we arrive at the same emptiness, except this time it will be the ground to “vivir y pensar de verdad” (ibid). Ergo summus.

Chapter Four

The Ancient Quarrel between History and Poetry

1. THE LYRIC, IDENTITY, AND MODERNITY According to Octavio Paz, even though Latin America does not own a tradition of great philosophers, critical thinking is nevertheless part and parcel of its poetry. Latin American literature has an ambiguous relationship to the European tradition. On the one hand, it absorbs and imitates canonical authors and thinkers, but on the other hand, it makes every effort to differentiate itself from them. The relationship is one of imitation, rejection, and finally, parody. Such parody eventually becomes itself a model, which does not mean that Latin American literature lacks seriousness or depth; on the contrary, this parody implies that it is a literature that is all too aware of its intertextual, hence abyssal, status. What Paz says about poetry’s relationship to language in general could also be applied to his view of the relationship between Latin American literature and its models: “Lo que caracteriza al poema es su necesaria dependencia de la palabra tanto como su lucha por trascenderla.” 1 There is a double move which simultaneously accepts and rejects that which constitutes the mover. The poem is set in motion by words, but at the same time it attempts to go beyond them. And such is precisely the critical gesture. José Lezama Lima’s notion of Latin America as “la imperfecta copia” 2 captures the complexity of the matter perfectly. The copy is not only a replica but it is also a copia, an abundance. Latin America distorts European culture, but at the same time it multiplies it. Such multiplication is not precisely a transcendence but rather a recognition that dependence is in fact double. To this situation we could also add the notion of “replica” suggested by Octavio Paz. The replica is not only a copy 51

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(abundant or otherwise), but it is also a reply. Latin American literature is constituted by means of a dialogue with and an opposition to European culture. It is critical because, from the position of a second, it contests (at once answers and challenges) the primacy of the first. Beyond the multiplication of elements, the process by which this challenge is effected is by the addition of pre-Columbian elements which are external to Europe. However, these elements do not form another first to be opposed to the first first; on the contrary, they are themselves merely copies and replicas which at once cover up and replace some lost originals. It is thus that Latin America is constituted in a kind of exile, in an indeterminate place, and in relation to two others, neither of which can be appropriated as the same. Not surprisingly, the problematic of identity is central to the work of Octavio Paz. It has implications that go beyond the cultural to ontological and poetical questions. The category of Latin American literature as such does not appear until the advent of modernity. Such a category therefore refers to a literature in crisis and hence to a critical literature. Even if we were to retroactively extend this category to include the Romantic and Baroque periods, we would find that literary production during such times is defined by a rupture. In Romanticism we find the crisis of the subject, along with the desperate attempt of Latin America to “catch up,” by means of positivism, with that Enlightenment to which it feels it arrived “too late.” Needless to say, this effort only makes the situation worse. Although such worsening is precisely the point, literature begins to become criticism. As Paz sees it: “Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment, and was therefore determined by it; it was one of its contradictory products.” 3 The problem for Latin America is that it did not confront the same Enlightenment and it did not do so in the same way. Hence, its Romanticism, if it had one, is, first a learned experience, and second a hybrid. As Michel Serres has put it, “Tout apprentissage consiste en un métissage.” 4 Paz sees in Romanticism a defining moment for literature in both Europe and Latin America. For the first time, “critical insight and poetic originality” (59) are combined. Thus Romanticism was already a hybrid before it was transplanted, translated, or metaphorized into Latin America. How does the New World copy this critical moment? How does it reply to it? In a sense, its crisis is a crisis squared, because it consists of confronting a crisis which it itself never confronted within itself. Romanticism was characterized by both an enthusiasm for and a horror of the French Revolution. The revolutions of Independence in Latin America were not the implacable culmination of Enlightenment thought but rather its excess, its residue. Romanticism was characterized by turning the critical insights of reason against reason itself. Since Latin America did not have a tradition of Enlightenment thought, it received both the Ilustración and its

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reaction at the same time. The critical moment that Paz wants to identify follows the structure of the après coup. But this structure is itself ambivalent: Is Latin America more critical than Europe or less so because of its belatedness? Paz argues that English and German Romanticism show “a consciousness that the ‘I’ is at fault, a mistake in the system of the universe” (78), and that such consciousness is lacking in Latin America. His whole argument, however, shows precisely the opposite. That very lack of consciousness is what constitutes consciousness, après coup. The problem, of course, is one of temporality, and hence of modernity. Romanticism engenders a series of translations. Says Paz: “Modernismo was our real Romanticism and, like Symbolism [the French real Romanticism], its version was not a repetition but a metaphor: the other Romanticism” (88). And the problem of modernity is not so much the problem of identity but rather, among other things, the problem of criticism. In the Baroque we find that other crisis, the crisis of identity, as it emerges in the New World, and which Paz has already investigated in his book on Sor Juana. “Desde su nacimiento la literatura novohispana tuvo conciencia de su dualidad. La sombra del otro, verdadero lenguaje de fantasmas, hecho no de palabras sino de murmullos y silencios, aparece ya en los poemas de los poetas del siglo XVI.” 5 Like all language, the word “other” in Paz has a double valence. The self can only be in relation to the other, but the other is also what threatens the very possibility of a self. However, unlike Romanticism, the Baroque is completely unconcerned with the crisis of the self. As Paz himself points out, both are reactions to a certain Classicism, and both are based on a poetics of transgression, but the former is concerned with the constitution (or dissolution) of the subject while the latter focuses on the transformation of the object. In any case, in both, it is the ontological category of identity that is put into question, and it is the problematic of difference that is addressed. Paz traces a similar structure in reference to the Baroque in Colonial Nueva España as he did with reference to Latin American Romanticism. He finds the same pattern: The New World confronts the two abysses of Pascal, but even more, it inhabits them. Any search for an authentic Latin American identity is destined to end up in a series of crises. These crises, however, cannot be reduced to simple aporias but are instead productive crises. As Paz says in Los hijos del limo, “The singular variety of Baroque poetry that was born in Spanish America was not only the exaggeration but at times the transgression of the Spanish model” (138). There is a certain cosmopolitanism evident in Sor Juana, for example, which is both the site and the source of these contradictions. From it there emerges the tradition of what Paz calls critical poetry. It is perhaps ironic, but not altogether inappropriate, that Paz, in order to formulate his theory of critical poetry, has to refer not so much to Latin American authors but to the father of Symbolist poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé.

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Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés declares the impossibility of the poem as a representation of the universe. For Mallarmé, poetry no longer refers us to the world but on the contrary it reveals the withdrawal of the world and the silence that it leaves behind. All language is mediation. If poetic language wants to express an immediate experience it must, as language, fail to do so. However, this failure, paradoxically, makes itself felt immediately. Silence is not transmitted or mediated, it simply is. Hence, in the poem, success and failure are confused. Un Coup de dés is a poem that at once affirms and denies the role of chance in all poetic creation. It is, as Maurice Blanchot has pointed out, the recognition of the futility of all desire to dominate chance, even by means of a measured and sovereign death (which was still the project of Igitur). 6 If Igitur represents Mallarmé’s modern literary production, Un Coup de dés in a sense inaugurates a postmodern writing. From this crisis, from this failure emerges the literary space, the possibility (and impossibility) of the universe itself as a poem. In El arco y la lira, Paz says: Poema crítico: si no me equivoco, la unión de estas dos palabras contradictorias quiere decir: aquel poema que contiene su propia negación y que hace de esa negación el punto de partida del canto, a igual distancia de afirmación y negación. La poesía, concebida por Mallarmé como la única posibilidad de identificación del lenguaje con lo absoluto, de ser el absoluto, se niega a sí misma cada vez que se realiza en un poema (ningún acto, inclusive un acto puro e hipotético: sin autor, tiempo, ni lugar, abolirá el azar)—salvo si el poema es simultáneamente crítica de esa tentativa. (271)

For Paz, the important thing about Mallarmé’s failed project is that it reveals poetry as a kind of transcendence. But is it? Does Mallarmé offer us any transcendental possibilities, even negative ones? Paz sees Mallarmé seeing poetry as the only possibility of reaching the Absolute. They are both alluding to Hegel, and to the dialectics of history which has already been completed and on which the poet is but a moment in the staircase of absolute knowledge coming to itself. In a sense, Mallarmé is unconditionally accepting Hegel’s conclusion (and it is a conclusion) but changing the modulation. The absolute is not knowledge but poetry. The absolute is also absurd and hence unknowable. Igitur is a coming to terms with impotence and mortality. It strives towards self-knowledge, even if such knowledge only comes with death, “que s’immobilise en un calme narcotique de moi pur.” 7 Igitur, the old child, feels he is the culmination of his race, of history, of knowledge. But he only achieves this “feeling” “grâce à l’absurde, l’existence de l’Absolu” (55). In other words, what produces the feeling is the feeling itself. The argument is tautological: human speech cannot conceive it, but rather, it conceives itself. As Igitur throws the dice and dies, he “trouve l’acte inutile, car il y a et n’y a pas de hasard” (ibid). Transcendence is impossible, and, moreover, to the

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infinite, it is irrelevant. And yet, there is time (es gibt Zeit). The very name of Igitur is postpositive, therefore, an articulation. There can be no self-knowledge, no self-coincidence, and definitely no self-conception because Igitur, by definition, is only a relation between heterogeneous elements. What gives time is nothing, which Igitur articulates as he dies. Mallarmé is echoing Hegel, but also, again, parodying him. The Absolute is split from within. It does not know what it incorporates when it takes in negativity. Paz is right to point out that poetry in general must contain its own negation, that in fact the negation of the poem is the poem. The end of art, to put it in Hegelian terms, is art itself. And yet, there is time. When Igitur is lost, at Midnight, in the darkness of the threshold of the tomb, he hears “le battement d’ailes absurdes de quelque hôte effrayé de la nuit” (48). This beating is the revelation of the truth of time; that is, of time as rhythm and as withdrawal. The beating of wings is a moment in a series of transformations, from the sound of the clock, through the wings, to a gasping or panting. What we have here is a phenomenology of spirit, perhaps, but, more importantly, a parodic revelation of truth. From beating of wings (in Spanish we would say aleteo) to beating of breath (halètement) there echoes a certain doubly negative truth, alétheia. Truth is the unconcealment which conceals and the concealment which reveals. At its very heart is oblivion. It is a process which unfolds in time and such depends upon a void. To put it in thermodynamic terms, both the wings and the breath depend on a pressure differential. Every inspiration conceals the death that makes it possible and viceversa: “se confond la clarté” (47). What is it, then, that Paz sees in Mallarmé as a revelation of poetry as transcendence? Transcendence is not a matter of choice. One does not go “beyond language;” one does not somehow “overcome metaphysics.” If poetry is the possibility to identify with the absolute, it is because it denies both the absolute and itself. The poem is in constant conflict with itself, and it is this very conflict that points towards an instant in which neither the self nor history can take place. Transcendence “happens” precisely because of this failure to take place. “RIEN . . . N’AURA EU LIEU . . . QUE LE LIEU.” 8 Time itself is the mo(ve)ment of transcendence, but no longer towards the absolute but rather towards dissolution. Time happens, but time is not. Its withdrawal leaves nothing behind because it always already carries nothing within. Again, Mallarmé echoes Hegel: “une élévation ordinaire verse l’absence [an everyday uplifting pours out absence]” (ibid). At one level, the line simply describes the movement of the waves, which establishes a rhythm of presence and absence, and which should recall the beating wings and the panting from Igitur. The poem in fact describes the sail of the capsized boat as a wing “par avance retombée d’un mal à dresser le vol” (412–3). But on another level, the

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Hegelian tonality is unmistakable. The hinge of the dialectic, sublation, becomes nothing more than the ordinary elevation achieved by each wave as it crests. The Aufhebung is a moment of destruction and of transcendence in the process of the Absolute, but Mallarmé knows that such a moment is not an event, it is not singular. When time temporalizes it divides the moment. In doing so, it also divides the boat, it tears it apart. Like a wave, time can perhaps be “ridden” but it always eventually breaks. Already in Igitur Mallarmé made fun of our attempts to calculate time; here the crisis is exasperated. The smallest unit of time, the second, always implies a first. Does the pouring out of absence imply any possibility of presence? This is literally the sublime and the ridiculous. There is neither presence nor absence but rather only the movement of the capsized boat (i.e., the movement of time). The crest of a wave is always already falling, hence it cannot ever be a crest. It will not yield a result. There is no perspective from which the pouring out of absence can be seen. And yet, it can be felt, as the wing that cannot fly shows. But felt by whom? “[L’] événement accompli en vue de tout résultat nul / humain” (426–7). The transcendence of the poem is a transcendence that is irreducible and impossible to appropriate. There is nothing human about the event. What transcends is no longer an I, it is not even poetry itself, but rather the temporalization of time. There is no past, present, or future, there is only time, the promise of an event that will not come or the memory of one that did not take place. Time is the condition of possibility of an event. Another name for it might be chance. And no act, no throw of the dice, even an impersonal one, will be able to abolish it. The problem of transcendence is thus a shipwreck, it is the problem of the self (of its disappearance) and the problem of modernity. Modernity takes (or does not take) place in the age of calculative thinking and measurement. Igitur, as we said, attempted to measure his own death and took his “nébuleuse science” (95) to its limits. Measuring time and being, as the above brief exposition on fluid mechanics reveals, is an impossible task, which modernity tries to accomplish. As Paz puts it, “La historia de la poesía moderna es la de una desmesura. Todos sus grandes protagonistas, después de trazar un signo breve y enigmático, se han estrellado contra la roca” (Arco 253). The shipwreck he describes is one caused by a lack of restraint, an excess, but we should also recall that desmesura is unmeasure, lack of measurement. Paz recalls the phrase by Rimbaud, “Je est un autre,” and in it he recognizes not only the question of the modern in general, but also the problematic of Latin American identity (of its impossibility). Before abandoning poetry altogether in order to dedicate himself to revolutionary action, Rimbaud had said, “Il faut être absolument moderne.” 9 Both Mallarmé and Paz are aware of the futility of such an act. It neither accomplishes nor abolishes anything (or nothing). And yet, it is the critical act and thus the

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transcendental act. For Paz, Rimbaud’s absolute uprooting, his unconditional and unmeasured identification with otherness, along with Mallarmé’s simultaneous and contradictory attempt to control, abolish, and let chance be, are paradigmatic notions of the situation of Latin America which finds itself, like poetry, completely lacking in past and future. And yet, lacking a present as well, it waits. Now then, why does Paz need to refer to European authors in order to develop his notion of the critical poem, a notion which he claims is crucial to Latin America? In the first place, because thus he can show that otherness is an integral (and internal) part of the European tradition from the beginning. America, as the other of Europe, has always already occupied a place within the latter. And in the second place, because the temporal structure revealed by Rimbaud and Mallarmé’s poetry resembles the situation confronted by Latin America’s other other: the Indian culture. The symbolist moment, postromantic and post-Hegelian, is also the moment in European thought in which Schopenhauer will develop the philosophy of pessimism. The constitutive elements of concepts like nihilism and the death drive are beginning to make themselves felt. But for Paz, pre-Columbian cultures had an intuitive knowledge of these developments (as did for Schopenhauer the cultures of India). As Paz puts it in El laberinto de la soledad: “La victoria del instinto de la muerte revela que el pueblo azteca pierde de pronto la conciencia de su destino. Cuauhtémoc lucha a sabiendas de su derrota.” 10 For the native populations the confrontation with Europe was their catastrophic entry into history. For the Europeans, the latter half of the nineteenth century was their catastrophic exit from history. Like birth and death, these are two sides of the same coin; but also like birth and death, these catastrophes are fictions. They are “engendered” by language’s attempt to cope with the structure of temporality which depends on beginnings and ends but yields none. Poetry is transcendence and liberation because it transforms “the nightmare of history” into an authentic vision of time, if only for an instant. But such poetry is no transcendence and no liberation, because the authentic vision it reveals is a vision of nothingness. Paz’s Cuauhtémoc is akin to some of the “higher men” addressed by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the prophet, the sorcerer, the ugliest man, the beggar, the shadow. He is reactive in the face of his own destruction, but he is active in the face of the withdrawal (or death) of his gods. “Is not something thronging and pushing in you—man’s future?” 11 asks Nietzsche rhetorically. The answer is both yes and no, for Cuauhtémoc is able to die a beautiful death, a tragic death, and to do so laughing. What the European higher men still have to unlearn, he already does not know. “Cuauhtémoc y su pueblo mueren solos, abandonados de amigos, aliados, vasallos y dioses” (Laberinto 87). For Paz, then, Cuauhtémoc’s death becomes a poetic act, like Igitur’s throw of the dice. Hence, in poetry, revolution can be confused with fiesta,

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orgasm can be confused with death. This in fact may be a sign of Paz’s own romanticism. His poetics, based as they are on the fusion of opposites (that baroque coincidentia oppositorum mentioned already by Gracián, among others), in a sense tries to hide something that Paz himself recognizes when in El arco y la lira he cites Heidegger: “Llegamos demasiado tarde para los dioses y muy pronto para el ser” (268). The orfandad Paz finds in Cuauhtémoc is thus akin to that which Heidegger finds in Hölderlin. It is a complete loss of origin, a total displacement, and yet a gesture towards an unknown and unkowable destiny. But, more relevantly, perhaps, Cuauhtémoc also shares many aspects of Mallarmé’s Igitur. Igitur is an ancient child who is burdened by the weight of his “immemorial race” (100). Paz, following López Velarde, describes Cuauhtémoc as a “joven abuelo” (LS 76) who also carries the weight of his past. He too is the pinnacle of his race, and he too achieves this status only in and by his death. His heritage hurts him and makes him old. Like Igitur, he is a hence, an articulation between Mexico’s Indian (mythological) past and modern (historical or fictional) present: “La tumba del héroe es la cuna del pueblo” (ibid). But unlike Igitur, he is not a therefore, a logical articulation. It is impossible to determine to what extent there is any bad faith in the poetic transcendence postulated by Paz (and in general by any modernist project), but at any rate it does suggest a different way of thinking through history. As he puts it in El arco y la lira, seeming to play Hegel in a different key: “Poesía: búsqueda de un ahora y de un aquí” (256). 2. HISTORY, DIFFERENCE, AND TEMPORALITY A thorough interrogation of the relationship between poetry and history must begin with an investigation of the relationship of each to time and temporality. Such investigation will raise, again and inevitably, the problem of modernity. The concept of modernity is not modern, that is to say, it is neither recent nor contemporary. The problem of modernity is, I repeat, the problem of temporality. The modern is what returns, time and time again, as the crisis of temporality. Time tears the modern apart, and that being torn apart is being modern. Both poetry and history emerge from this rift, and both are modulations of this rift. Although they might be engendered by this temporal rift, time is not their source in any simple sense. Time is always a repetition, already split from itself. History tries to order time into a narrative; poetry disrupts it and reveals it as presence, as absence, as the difference and articulation between the two. According to Paz, “Contradiction between history and poetry is found in all societies, but only in the modern age is it so manifest” (Children v). Ignoring for a moment that this is a sweeping historical statement with all too poetic pretensions, let us

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consider it carefully. Modernity is the crisis of having to make a choice between living historically or living poetically. The two are contradictory because one is passive (or at best, reactive) while the other is active. As Nietzsche puts it, again, like Paz, rather poetically, “We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those from which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it. . . . We need it for the sake of life and action.” 12 Modernity is the contradiction about how we relate to history. Modernity is the necessity to both affirm and deny history at the same time, but modernity is also the impossibility to do so. This is why for Nietzsche, modernity is always untimely. Philosophy too is untimely because its role is to point out the untimeliness of modernity and to therefore rebel against the present. For the early Nietzsche, philosophy demystifies history, but still recognizes its necessity, in moderation, for life. Philosophy is a kind of radical medicine which reopens the temporal wound (there but unacknowledged) to prevent it from festering. Philosophy, then, is Nietzsche’s treatment for “a consuming fever of history” (60), not for the sake of knowledge but for the sake of health. As Deleuze paraphrases Nietzsche, “philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against time, critique of the present world.” 13 Paz too recognizes the same “striking symptoms of our age” (59), as Nietzsche calls them. Speaking, not of Nietzsche, but of Kant and Hegel, Paz says: “The last great philosophical system of the West oscillates between speculative delirium and critical reason; it is a thought which sets itself up as a system only to split in two, curing schism by schism” (Children 27). The later Nietzsche will eventually reject even this radical philosophical mode of turning reason against itself as being too caught up in history. As he says of the project of his own Birth of Tragedy, for example, “I should have sung, this ‘new soul’—and not spoken.” 14 The critique of the present remains, without knowing it, in the present. The attempt to measure out the right amount of “history” we need for life and action is doomed in the end to serving knowledge. Art and poetry, on the other hand, are action and life in themselves. The relationship of song to time is primordial. Poetry, as an affirmative act, is essentially modern, for its very mode is to break with itself and with its past. Nietzsche does not simply propose a poetics of affirmation without at the same time developing a critique of affirmation. Poetry does not affirm any thing; on the contrary, what poetry affirms is its own rending. The poetic act is double because it affirms time as the nothing which tears it apart; in doing so, affirmation becomes active, joyful destruction. Inasmuch as poetry and art in general are affirmative in this sense, they are also critical acts. Such is, for Nietzsche, the image of health. In his dialectic between history and poetry, Paz retraces Nietzsche’s path, although he gives the movement from critique towards song a Hegelian twist

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which is precisely what Nietzsche was trying to avoid. Kant and Hegel were the last great systematic thinkers. They took the enlightenment to the limits of its vision, either in the darkness of the thing in itself or in the equally obscure, because blinding, light of the Absolute. “Reason turned upon itself,” says Paz, and “ceased to create systems” (Children 25). Paz’s diagnosis of the ailments of critical reason is analogous to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the ailments of history. “It traced its limits, judged itself, and, by so judging, destroyed itself as a guiding principle” (25). The question in a sense is: How much critical reason is useful for life? According to Paz, the self-destruction of reason is essential for the development of modern poetry, that is, of critical poetry. As opposed to history, which either tries to reconcile or cover up the double bind of critical reason, poetry is an other response. It wholeheartedly takes in the otherness of reason and affirms difference itself as not only useful but necessary to life. When reason, and therefore, history, are left without foundations the abyss of temporality is revealed. Reason and history are self-contradictory, they cannot inhabit the same present; yet, this contradiction accounts for the experience of the present: the present passes, the present passed, the present past, such is the structure of the modern. The abyss makes a primordial relation to time again possible. This relation is neither historical nor critical, although it includes elements of both, but rather, it is a poetic relation. It has to be fashioned or made in the sense of poiesis. And it has to be affirmed, in spite of the fact that it entails death. But Paz, through a peculiarly existential reading of Heidegger, understands death as the very meaning of life. “La muerte es inseparable de nosotros. No está afuera: es nosotros. Vivir es morir. Y precisamente porque la muerte no es algo exterior, sino que está incluida en la vida, de modo que todo vivir es asimismo morir, no es algo negativo” (Arco 149). Life understood as death, or death understood as life, are precisely what the modern confronts and what poetry affirms. Unlike critical or historical reason, poetry neither judges nor interprets the life-death matrix, it simply reveals it, and, in doing so, establishes a relation to primordial time. Poetry neither represents nor expresses time, but rather it unfolds in time, it gives time. In other words, it withdraws. The role of poetry is not simply to reconcile opposites but also to reveal the union of contraries in their very difference. That is why it is necessary (and not just useful) for life (and death). Paz says: “Nietzsche decía que los griegos inventaron la tragedia por un exceso de salud” (155). The affirmation of death and of tragedy is thus in effect an affirmation of life. And it is a poetic act because in such affirmation our relation to time (i.e., our relation to life-death) is actively made, fashioned. Like Nietzsche’s, Paz’s affirmation is contradictory and untimely. This is how Paz describes the situation:

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The return to primordial time, before history and inequality, represents the triumph of criticism [a “triumph” which is of course paradoxical]. Thus we can say, however surprising the proposition may appear, that only the modern era can bring about the return of primordial time because only the modern era can deny itself. (36)

The “triumph of criticism” by itself is sterile, it simply reveals an abyss, an aporia. However, the affirmation that comes “after” the modern denies itself can happen only in the poetic mode, where self-destruction is the beginning of song. It is thus that Paz can justify a rather paradoxical affirmation of his own: “modernity is never itself; it is always the other” (1). This succinct description of the modern echoes, for example, Baudelaire’s description of the crowd: “C’est un moi insatiable de non-moi.” 15 Structurally, he is simply restating the Nietzschean privileging of becoming over being. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Paz’s reading of the modern, since it does not account for the Eternal Return, allows becoming (under any of its many names, difference, separation, otherness, plurality, novelty, revolution, in short, the future [17]) to become a foundation in itself. In other words, in Paz, and in spite of himself, becoming is again fixed, stamped by being. But what does Nietzsche say about the relationship of history to art and of both to time in general? In his second untimely meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” he argues, very convincingly, for the rejection of the former in favor of the latter. Like all of Nietzsche’s writing, his argument here is effective because it is a combination of insightful critique and rhetorical virtuosity. He sets out to describe history as the main cause of the modern condition, which is “a feeling by which I am constantly tormented” (59). The way to deal with the torment of modernity is not to apply the tools of reason to critique it, but rather, to “revenge myself upon it by handing it over to the public” (ibid). Nietzsche’s method self-destructs. The feeling of which he speaks is the feeling of being paralyzed by history and hence being unable to act, to make history. The “solution,” which emerges out of a rational necessity, the need to initiate the movement of critique, is to hand over the “causes” of paralysis to the already paralyzed, but unconscious, public. This, however, by its own internal logic, will accomplish nothing, it will not get anything moving. And yet, and here comes a reversal which is not critical but affective, he hopes that the public will prove him wrong, that someone will show him that it is he, Nietzsche, who is unconscious of history. Setting aside the ironic tone of this whole line of reasoning, let us consider one important deduction: the actual “solution” to such paralysis turns out to be in fact the necessity to forget history. “Forgetting is essential to action of any kind” (62), he tells us. In order to make history, we have to ignore it.

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Forgetting history is a way of transcending it, but not in the name of anything, neither truth, nor justice, nor even art. In fact, the very transcending (or rather, overcoming) of history is art itself, but art as life, and hence as action. Overcoming history is a way of overcoming the self and in the process, completing the self. Never mind that this process is also the process of dying; it is, more importantly, the process of living. Paradoxically, only by forgetting history can we, to put it in Pazian terms, authentically relate to primal time. Nietzsche puts it as follows: Then [we] will learn to understand the phrase “it was”: that password which gives conflict, suffering and satiety access to man so as to remind him what his existence fundamentally is—an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one. If death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act it at the same time extinguishes the present and all being and therewith sets the seal on the knowledge that being is only an uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself. (61)

It is of course impossible to forget the past, and Nietzsche does not call for absolute forgetting but rather for active forgetting. Active forgetting is recognizing the pastness of the past and its inaccessibility, as past, to knowledge. And yet, Nietzsche is not unaware that the past continues to exert its pressure on every present. Only man is able to remember; in fact, memory is what constitutes the animal called man. History and philosophy relate to the past by means of representation. This attitude ignores the pastness of the past, the imperfectness of the conjugation; it pretends it can produce knowledge out of what is in fact the loss of knowledge. What Nietzsche calls for is for man to extricate himself from memory, history, and representation and to accept, without reserve, the oblivion that is, at any rate, part and parcel of every remembering. Philosophy and representation are not “wrong,” they simply fail to recognize that as error is constitutive of truth and death is constitutive of life, so oblivion is constitutive of memory. Knowledge can be produced out of the loss of knowledge, but such knowledge paralyzes action and is thus a disadvantage (Nachteil) to life. Like Mallarmé, Nietzsche is in a sense responding to and contesting Hegel. Historical man may indeed be at the summit of absolute knowledge and at the end of history. As Nietzsche says of Hegel, “the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided for him with his own existence in Berlin” (104). But if that is the case, historical man is thus also outside time; he is already dead and no longer dying. Unlike in Hegel, where negation and contradiction are in the service of knowledge, affirmation in Nietzsche tries to keep the imperfect “it was” from becoming a perfected “has-been,” and thus he keeps open the possibilities for life. Active forgetting is, as it were, “an attempt to give oneself a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate” (76). Such an attempt is always dangerous, and it can only come from the artist,

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not from the historian. Art, then, and not mastery, is the risk of death, and for the sake of life, not of recognition. Nietzsche identifies three types of history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Monumental history commemorates and celebrates, but in doing so it neglects the life of the past. In the very act of memorializing (and embellishing) individual facts, persons, or events, it also forgets a whole array of specifics. Nevertheless, monumental history does have the capacity to engender life, by celebrating death, even though, in the hands of “inartistic natures” (71) the results could be disastrous. As long as the present does no more than imitate the past, everything merely becomes an “uninterrupted colourless flood” (ibid). Antiquarian history indeed tries to preserve the life of the past. It offers a corrective to some of the “injustices” of monumental history. However, unlike monumental history, it has no notion of becoming and thus it neglects the life of the present: “For it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it” (75). In spite of its efforts, this kind of history can only preserve what it mummifies. The third mode of history, critical history, works against the first two, and does so for the sake of life: “If he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve the past” (75). Here, Nietzsche’s notion of critical history overlaps with Paz’s notion of critical poetry. In both what is at stake is the relation to time and the recognition of an authentic temporality. Neither is interested in the knowledge of such time and temporality but instead in their implications for life. Nietzsche says: “Every past is worthy of being condemned. . . . It is not justice which here sits in judgement; it is even less mercy which pronounces the verdict: it is life alone, that dark driving power that insatiably thirsts for itself” (76). Nietzsche takes the notion of critique to its utmost. Critical history does not condemn this or that aspect of history but the very concept of history. The critique of history by history is no longer structured historically but rather genealogically. This does not mean that history is in any way overcome. The relationship between history and genealogy is a complex one, and can be defined depending on the type of representation that is used as an organizing principle. Genealogy adopts the life-engendering power of the monumental, while history in general is closer to the antiquarian. Moreover, genealogy is structured according to the structure of the will to power, although the Nietzsche of the Untimely Meditations does not yet call it that, and thus looks forward towards self-engendering. While history, on the other hand, is structured narratively, and, at least since Hegel, dialectically; and thus it can only look backwards. Nevertheless, as Paul de Man has shown, both depend on a notion of continuity and are at times thoroughly implicated in one another. 16 In any case, what is at work here is the will to power, not as a desire for domination but as a will to will. As life thirsts for itself, critique critiques itself; it is a constant process of self-overcoming. Genealogy does not simply

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replace history, it engenders it. The origin of history, says Nietzsche, “must itself be known historically, history must itself resolve the problem of history, knowledge must turn its sting against itself” (103). This series of musts make up the will to power itself as it unfolds in time. The condition of modernity, as articulated by Nietzsche, consists of a simultaneous denial of the past and the discovery of the impossibility of such denial; or rather, the discovery that such denial somehow itself belongs to the past. To be modern is to be unable to be modern; hence, to be modern is to overcome one’s own modernity. The will to power is thus the negation of the transcendental (one could perhaps say the overcoming of overcoming); it is also the apotheosis of critique, and this is the very condition of (past) modernity. Paz arrives at a similar insight: “the very essence of modernity is the criticism of eternal time: modern time is critical time” (Children 24). As is the case for Nietzsche, for Paz modernity is both necessary and impossible. For both, the pivoting moment is the double bind of criticism. Nietzsche’s thought embraces the divided moment wholeheartedly; Paz in a sense only makes a gesture towards it. What Paz misses are the necessary conclusions implied by the total critique, if we think of critique now in terms of will to power. Reason, and the narrative that goes with it, will fail, although the narrative of this failure can continue to be told. Even when Paz seems to be arguing for poetry and against history, he is still arguing and hence he is still squarely within history. Nietzsche’s notions of self-engendering and selfaffirmation do not deny this, they simply sidestep the issue. The will to power is not concerned with escaping from some thing (say history) but simply with overcoming itself; and that makes the question irrelevant. Paz, on the other hand, is trying to escape from history, and thus, in spite of himself, he remains a Hegelian. For example, towards the end of Los hijos del limo, Paz tells us that modernity no longer has the critical power it possessed when it was still a new phenomenon. He says: “I am not saying that we are living the end of art: we are living the end of the idea of modern art” (149). His distinction is of course a moot point, since even for Hegel any art that could no longer reveal something to consciousness is modern art. Moreover, the distinction between the thing in itself and the idea of it is also the very problem confronted, and sublated by Hegel. Paz does not see that to the genealogical structure of the will to power these distinctions are irrelevant. Thus, to describe his own version of the condition of modernity, he reverts to a critico-historical matrix which nevertheless is genealogical: “The present will not tolerate the past; today will not be yesterday’s child.” It is here that Paz is closest to Nietzsche, although he may not know it. On the surface, Paz seems to be attacking the genealogical structure, although that attack, as any dialectitian would know, only reinforces the structure itself. However, from the polysemy of the word “tolerate” we can see what is in fact the object that Paz’s preposition destroys: the

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dialectic. The Hegelian Aufhebung puts negativity to work; its double meaning, destruction and elevation, raises the moment to a higher plane, towards the level of consciousness and the Absolute. Genealogy will not tolerate this movement. And modernity will not tolerate genealogy. It is the tolerance of the dialectic that is here severely strained. The modern negation of the past is the failure of the dialectic; the past will not be sublated, the Aufhebung will not be tolerated. This impossible situation, then, forces us to rethink the problem of temporality in relation to modernity. For Paz, as for Nietzsche, the modern is the place where time showed/will show itself. Depending on how each relates to time, Nietzsche recognizes two kinds of men. Historical men, who expect a future and believe that existence is meaningful, and who thus look back into the past in order to understand the process of history. And suprahistorical men, who see “no salvation in the process and for whom, rather, the world is complete and reaches its finality at each and every moment” (66). What is interesting about this notion of temporality is how, despite all its “negative” overtones, it tends to consecrate the instant as a self sufficient and independent unit. Suprahistorical man negates the past, forgets it, as if the past were something that could be pinpointed, as if the moment of negation were not itself negated as it passed. Time, even for the suprahistorical man, is conceived along the lines of what Heidegger calls the “vulgar notion of time.” According to Heidegger, from Aristotle to Hegel, time is thought in terms of the instant, the nun or the present, and the instant is thought in terms of eternity. This is perhaps the eternity that according to Paz modernity critiques. That is to say, modernity not only criticizes eternity, but in the same move it also cuts the moment apart. However, the very nature of the cut makes it impossible to specify when or where this division takes place. The moment, cut, cannot be pinpointed. Paz describes time in terms very similar to those of the suprahistorical man; although, to be sure, the tone here is “positive.” In referring to Blake’s affirmation of time, he says: “The time of origin is not a before, it is a now. It is a reconciliation of a beginning and an end; every now is a beginning and every now is an end” (157). What do the finality of every moment and the beginning and end of every now have in common? Both Nietzsche and Paz seem aware of the fact that the moment and the now are very problematic if taken as units, yet they both miss what could actually be their most valuable insight: that the now is always contaminated by the not now. On the one hand, both Paz and Nietzsche display a naive concept of time, one that separates it into distinct calculable units, be they beginnings, ends, or both. On the other hand, as long as one has a concept of time in general it is impossible that this concept not be naive (or vulgar). Moreover, such a concept would already be critical and problematic from the beginning.

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As Derrida has shown in “Ousia and Grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” Aristotle’s nun is not simple but articulated, while Heidegger’s thought on primordial temporality is subject to the same “vulgar” (i.e., metaphysical) presuppositions he imputes to the line of time concepts from Aristotle through Hegel to Bergson. 17 Both Nietzsche and Paz seem to recoil from their insight that time is something other than a succession of instants; Nietzsche towards lack (the “finality of each and every moment”) and Paz towards plenitude (“every now is a beginning and end”). They both momentarily see, to put it in Derrida’s words, that “movement and time are neither (present) beings nor (absent) nonbeings” (62), but to this insight belongs, by necessity, and at the same time, to its own negation. Plenitude and lack include each other, always, already. The hinge is in that little word, hama, in Aristotle, which Derrida reads as being “neither spatial nor temporal” (56), but meaning “both together,” “all at once.” In the instant, time and space, beginnings and ends make their appearance together, hama. Time cannot thus be a succession of instants in a line, but rather the trace of a complex of inscriptions. Speaking of time in Nietzsche’s second untimely meditation, Paul de Man puts it as follows: “articulated time, an interdependence between past and future that prevents any present from ever coming into being.” 18 Or, as Lacoue-Labarthe has put it, hama, by coincidence speaking of the same Nietzsche meditation: “the authentic instant is pure division.” 19 It is thus that both Paz and Nietzsche confront the paradox of modernity. They are, in effect, neither historical nor suprahistorical men, but rather literary men. But literature only tries to go beyond itself towards “the consecration of the instant” or “the reality of the moment.” 20 It is when it confronts this reality as pure division, however, that literature becomes aware of its temporal nature and of its inner conflict. As de Man says, literature folds back upon itself and “engenders the repetition and continuation of literature” (Blindness 162). In other words, it engenders history, or, as Paz puts it “Ese conflicto crea la historia” (Arco 190); although hence history must be thought differently. For both Nietzsche and Paz, the fact that time is out of joint, so to speak, has significant ontological implications. They both raise the question, not so much of a national identity, as of the possibility to define a national being and a national thought. And this thought is inextricably entangled in the problems of time and history. In his reading of the second of the Untimely Meditations, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe sets the thrust of Nietzsche’s political argument down into two succinct propositions: “1. Germany does not exist. 2. Germany does not exist because it has no proper being” (217). It is because they lack an authentic culture, art, and thought that the Germans have become a historical society. Nietzsche says:

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for we moderns have nothing whatever of our own; only by replenishing and cramming ourselves with ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy of notice, that is to say, walking encyclopedias. (79)

For Nietzsche, the most acute symptoms of the modern condition are identified with a cultural indigence which he finds particularly German. Lacoue-Labarthe calls this a state of depropriation. It is analogous to the condition (also modern) which Paz finds to be particularly Mexican. In El laberinto de la soledad, Paz says: “Nuestras ideas, asimismo, nunca han sido del todo, sino una herencia o conquista de las engendradas por Europa” (151). For Nietzsche, the feeling that goes along with this depropriation is one of interior misery or distress, Not. For Paz it is one of absolute “orfandad,” where orphanos, as Paz points out, means not only the lack of parents but lack in general, void. What is characteristic of both views is the acute feeling that a national culture does not exist, that, in general, culture is elsewhere. But, more importantly, in both cases the question being raised is the ontological question par excellence, the question of (non) being. As long as there is no autochthonous national culture, there are no national peoples. However, even though the problem is an ontological one, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, Nietzsche describes the depropriation of the German people by means of the aesthetic categories of form and content. A “walking encyclopedia” would privilege content over form, but even that, says Nietzsche, the Germans do poorly. The crisis of (German) modernity is the impossibility of adequation between inner and outer, subject and object. For life, and for art, as Nietzsche conceives it, these categories would of course be irrelevant. And yet, Germans are still stuck with/in them. For Nietzsche, if a German civilization is to exist, it has to consist of a “single living unity” (80) which cannot be divided into form and content. For such civilization, its style would thus be indistinguishable from its works, and, moreover, from the life of its people. However, what Nietzsche actually finds is, as Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, that “The Germans have never been a proper culture, but a mere knowledge—by itself alienating—of what culture is. . . . Lacking a true internal principle, they seek their models more or less everywhere” (219). Germans are outsiders, or at best, latecomers to the stage of Western civilization. This is precisely the situation Paz finds in his inquiry into Mexican and, more generally, Latin American culture. For Paz, Mexicans have no coherent past or history, and yet, they are desperately trying to reinscribe or rediscover themselves as a part of a universal tradition. Paz cites López Velarde: “Hijos pródigos de una patria que ni siquiera sabemos definir, empezamos a observarla. Castellana y morisca, rayada de azteca” (Laberinto 137). It is interesting to note that even though Paz here quotes the poet López Velarde, the context of his discussion is the philosopher José Vasconcelos. In fact, in the

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passage it even almost seems that he attributes the quote to the latter. The “error” would not be significant, except for the fact that in Paz’s discourse there is always an ambivalent distinction between poetry and philosophy. The content of the quote is the heritage of Mexican identity and a suggestion of self-recognition. López Velarde is involved in a simultaneous act of vision and revision of the three legacies of the past. Interestingly, the role of the latter inheritance, the Aztec, is to write upon or cross out the other two. Rayar means to inscribe, mark, overwrite, limit, guide, look like, ruin and cross out. Rayada de Azteca could thus mean, among other things, that the Aztec either is ruined by the Mexican or that it ruins the Mexican. Although, in a way, it is simply pointing to a similarity: While the Mexican is like the Aztec, they are both also each other’s limit. The line (raya) that divides them is the wound of the inheritance, the difherencia. To be sure, the pathos of Paz’s meditation is entirely different from the pathos evident in Nietzsche, and yet the terminology they use is quite similar. Furthermore, structurally, their attempts to describe and define their respective peoples (or lack thereof) are virtually identical. Mexicans, like Germans, are outsiders and latecomers to Western culture, and, perhaps for this reason, their “intelligentsia” has embraced the enlightenment with the fervor of true converts. Positivism, for example, had a stronger impact in Latin America than it ever had in Europe. Latin America produced its own version of “walking encyclopedias,” drawing copiously from “Europa, ese almacén de ideas hechas” (153). But if the enlightenment found a fertile ground in the New World, so did its reaction, romanticism, and then modernism. The appropriation by Mexican culture of Aztec and Indian themes, for example, is analogous to the appropriation, much admired by the early Nietzsche, of Norse mythology by Wagner. In both cases the result was a mixture of ancient and modern, rational and mythical elements mediated, for the most part, through a particular reading of the Greeks. However, both Paz and Nietzsche reflect their distrust of precisely this kind of cultural development. It produces, in Nietzsche’s words, “nothing but anxiously muffled up identical people” (Untimely 84). Now Paz, as Nietzsche before him, expresses the problem in terms of the same aesthetic categories of form and content, inside and outside. If Mexicans do not yet have a thought of their own it is because “no hemos encontrado la Forma que nos exprese” (Laberinto 151). Like the Germans, the Mexicans are also, to use Lacoue-Labarthe’s term, depropriated. They are, moreover, doubly depropriated, because the themes and concepts they appropriate are already obsolete from the moment of appropriation. Paz says, “En un sentido estricto, el mundo moderno ya no tiene ideas” (153); “es una oscilación entre varios proyectos universales, sucesivamente trasplantados o impuestos y todos hoy inservibles” (151).

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For Paz, then, the problem of defining a Mexican culture and thought is the same as the problem Nietzsche had in defining a German civilization, and it is really an aesthetic problem, that of adequating inner and outer, form and content. But, like Nietzsche, Paz knows this is a false problem; the true artist is not an aesthetician. So Paz proposes his own version of the Nietzschean “single living unity” to develop (in the future, for he claims it does not yet exist) a truly Mexican philosophy, a truly Mexican thought. It will gladly take all its ideas from the European “warehouse,” even though it knows them to be obsolete. The difference is that “La autenticidad de la reflexión hará que la mexicanidad de esa filosofía resida sólo en el acento, el énfasis o estilo del filósofo, pero no en el contenido de su pensamiento” (153). This thought will be characterized by its style, which will hence be indistinguishable from the people. Thus we see that for Paz, the problem of a Mexican culture and philosophy is really a problem of poetry. And poetry has no proper place within the discourse of philosophy. Poetry yanks the self out of the false continuities established by philosophy and history and confronts him with the reality of the moment, which is, in effect, the reality of the nothing. It is because nothing is proper in being that, as Lacoue-Labarthe says, “The most extreme depropriation provides the only chance for authentic appropriation” (222). Moreover, for Paz, the problem of poetry is also a problem of language, of life, and of the relationship between the two; all of which are essential elements in the problem of ap/de-propriation. In fact, Paz is very clear about the fact that the question of poetry is a question of belonging, or not belonging to language. As he says, speaking of Mallarmé in Los Hijos del limo: “Poetry [is] the mask of nothingness. . . . It is language that speaks through the poet, who is now only a transparency” (77). It is not language that is transparent, language is dense; it is the poet, however, who in the most extreme depropriation, that of becoming nothing, can belong to the thickness of language. Such belonging, such appropriation, is of course paradoxical. It depends as well on a moment in which the poet interrupts language and asserts his own opacity, when the poet is not “pura transparencia,” but rather, “The poet speaks, and as he speaks he makes. This making is above all a making of himself: poetry is not only self-knowledge but self creation” (60). Here again we have the problem of temporality. The poet makes himself when he interrupts language, but he only interrupts language by means of (poetic) language, and thus the interruption itself is nothing but language speaking through the poet. The poet does not reconcile these opposites, he merely keeps them together, hama, in their irreconcilable difference: opacity is transparency. This keeping together is a form of belonging to language, but, this belonging is also a making of one’s self, a self-creation. Paz might as well be describing here his own version of what Nietzsche calls “the

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plastic power of a man, a people, a culture: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds” (Untimely 62). Such is, in effect, Paz’s whole poetic project.

Chapter Five

Heads or Tails

1. HEADS: IDENTITY OR DIFFERENCE A central question for much of Octavio Paz’s work is recognizing a poetic potential in the crisis of Latin American identity. Further, he sets up the task of recreating an identity by means of the poetic utterance that gathers only what is other, what is past, foreign, or strange. Inasmuch as it fashions something Latin American, it imitates, incorporates, and transforms the Greeks (just one example among others) “only up to the point where they have ceased being inimitable” (Lacoue-Labarthe 224). The very concept of there being such a thing as a Latin American identity is already a kind of conceit. The concept/conceit (in Spanish the word for both is concepto) is forged by means of a violent juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements whose unity consists precisely in the impossibility of their unity. In Latin American literature, a literature which is neither Latin nor American, this impossible union acquires a kind of emblematic power. Paz makes use of such conceits in his notion of the eternal conflict between poetry and history. It is a conflict that ends up being rather harmonious. For example, the emblematic title of the work that could be called Paz’s ars poetica, El arco y la lira, is taken from Heraclitus’ Fragment number 51, which reads: They do not understand how what is born apart agrees with itself: struggling union, like that of the bow and the lyre. 1

The conflict between a possible emblem for poetry, the lyre, and another for history, the bow (with its arrow, of course), is dissolved in the formation of another emblem which unites them. What the bow and the lyre have in common is something Heraclitus calls palíntonos armonín. The translation of the term as “struggling union,” or even the Spanish one as multitenso co71

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ajuste, only captures one aspect of what the Greek wants to say. In either translation we lose the acoustic resonances, so to speak. We lose as well the reference to time and repetition suggested by the root palín, again. In any case, the main point is that both the bow and the lyre resolve an internal tension which is their very foundation, their raison d’être. It is well to recall that the harmony that such “resolution” provides is a conflictive harmony, even a violent one. Fragment 48 makes the internal tension of the emblem explicit. It reads: “Name of the bow: life. Work of the bow: death.” The tension is revealed at the level of language itself, for the Greek word for bow, biós, plays upon the word for life, bíos. But beyond the deathly play between bow and life, even within the very word for bow there exists a linguistic tension: biós, bow comes from the word bia, which in its literal sense means strained wood, wood subjected to violence. Therefore, in their very essence both the bow and the lyre struggle within themselves, in exactly the same way as poetry does for Paz. This kind of internal struggle is called by Heraclitus in Fragment number 8, kallísten armonían, “the most beautiful joining.” It is worth noting as well that Fragment 51, cited above, begins with a negative statement. Heraclitus says: “They do not understand how. . .” The incomprehensible and uncomprehended self-concordance of the bow and the lyre is itself a point of contention. It is not surprising that in the Heraclitus Seminar, Heidegger leaves the question hanging: “But where does the ‘most beautiful harmony’ belong? Is it the visible or invisible harmony?” (159). Only the saying, the logos, can not so much resolve as gather this division. Paz says: “El poema es la unidad que sólo logra constituirse en plena fusión de contrarios” (Arco 189). The poetic saying is double. And from its internal conflict, from its difference from itself, history emerges. It is nothing more than another failed attempt at reconciliation. Now then, the individual subject is constituted, according to Paz, precisely within this conflict. In his work, Paz gathers but does not necessarily reconcile all sorts of heterogeneous elements (from surrealism, existentialism, and structuralism to Indian and Hindu folklore) in order to formulate a paradigm of Latin American culture. The unity of these elements is based only on their internal differences. To offer just one example of the fragmented and heterogeneous tradition to which Paz belongs, let us consider a case from the Colonial period mentioned by Picón-Salas. 2 It is a very Baroque example. Just as many Indian texts were often translated into Castillian, during the Colonial period many Christian texts were translated into Nahuatl. More particularly, there is one “translation,” or better yet transliteration of the Pater Noster into hieroglyphic Indian writing. The text begins with the glyph for the word pantli (in Nahuatl a banner or flag of sorts) followed by the glyph for nochtli (in Nahuatl the cactus fruit or tuna) and so it continues on in this manner.

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The idea is that the Indian is supposed to read pantli nochtli phonetically, and not to see the images of the hieroglyph. A proper reading of the pictographic writing would of course produce pure gibberish, while the phonetic reading produces a distorted Latin. It is worth recalling that the majority of the Indians, even those who would have been able to “read” and recite the Pantli Nochtli, would have not been able to understand Latin in any case. However, it is precisely the fact that this new hybrid is incomprehensible that gives it both its sacred and its poetic power. As Deleuze and Guattari have said, ironically, in reference to the decay of Latin: We can understand the indignation that purists feel because the mass is said in French and Latin has been disinvested of its mythic function, they mourn the forms of ecclesiastical and scholastic power which work through Latin and are replaced by other forms. 3

In the transliteration, Latin is being put to uses that are only ecclesiastical or scholastic on the surface. Within, a beautiful harmony (or struggle) rages. What we have here is a true fusion of opposites: the beginning of a literary production that leads, almost naturally, towards that other Latin American who in France joined together an umbrella and a sewing machine upon an operating table. I refer, of course, to Lautréamont, whose influence on surrealism is well known. What is interesting to note is how the influence of surrealism on Paz forms a kind of circle which starts from and arrives in Latin America. Latin American identity is constituted in this mix of, so to speak, oil and water. The union of contraries does not produce a synthesis but rather it creates a series of masks. One of these masks is the celebrated pachuco pose examined by Paz at the beginning of Laberinto de la soledad. The mask, of course, hides and covers up a void, a lack. But this is a lack that Paz, at the time he wrote Laberinto, could still recuperate in an existentialist dialectic which he called “la dialéctica de la soledad.” Later on Paz will discover that even this dialectic could be nothing more than another mask. Even the selfdestructive agonism of the pachuco (which Paz, interestingly, compares to certain “nihilistic” aspects of post-war France) cannot be resolved in any kind of authenticity. “Gesto suicida,” says Paz, “pues el ‘pachuco’ no afirma nada, no defiende nada, excepto su exasperada voluntad de no-ser” (20). As we can see, for him the problem of identity is actually the problem of the lack of identity. Octavio Paz’s 1951 collection of prose poems, ¿Aguila o sol?, addresses itself particularly to this issue. The title is a reference to the Mexican expression that invokes chance before tossing a coin (heads or tails?). Mexican coins always have on one side the Aztec emblem of an eagle devouring a serpent upon a cactus tree and on the other side some celebrated profile or

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face. But the now extinct twenty cent coin used to have in the place of the head a rising, or setting sun behind the pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacán. Thus we have on one side the eagle and on the other the sun, which is metonymically transferred to all the other faces in all the other coins. It is interesting to note that in the Aztec tradition the eagle is also an emblem of the sun, as opposed to the tiger which is the emblem for earth. Therefore, ironically, in a transformation of Mallarméan chance, when Paz tosses a coin he invokes either the sun . . . or the sun. The first section of ¿Aguila o sol? entitled “Trabajos forzados,” offers us a vision of the poet engaged in a bloody battle with language. From whence to extract the poetic word? “El silencio está lleno de ruidos,” says the poet, “y lo que oyes no lo oyes de verdad. Oyes al silencio.” 4 Silence is the foundation of any language, the condition without which no utterance can take place. In a way, silence is language itself in all its purity. As did Mallarmé, Paz confronts the poetic question par excellence: How to express this primordial silence? The poet neither hears nor as yet utters a word, but he senses the existence and the passing of words, “de pronto sentí—no, no sentí: pasó, rauda, la palabra” (167). Language is like a physical presence. But it is a multiple presence, which intersects with the body and overwhelms its space. The poet, stretched out over that linguistic space confronts language as a “Jadeo, viscoso aleteo. Buceo, voceo, clamoreo” (168). The presence of language is like a buzzing of words. All these could verbs could be heard as nouns (a jading, a fluttering, a diving, a voicing, a clamoring), but they are also first person singular conjugations of the verbs. The poet and language are indivisible precisely in that they are so divided. They rhythmically cut into each other in a kind of aleteo (fluttering, but also flailing; recall aletheia, truth) of presence and absence. A process of difherencia is at play, wounding and passing on—leaving behind “heridas copulas.” Tentatively, Paz proposes to work directly on words, and gradually, he works them over, tortures them. An example: “A la palabra odio la alimento de basuras durante años, hasta que estalla en una hermosa explosión purulenta, que infecta por un siglo al lenguaje” (172). Writing is opening the the wounds of difference (difheridas). Writing is going out of oneself, destroying oneself. In the fusion of opposites, poetry leaves no room for any self whatsoever. The operation by which the poet tries to infect language is actually the process by which he discovers himself infected by the latter. Writing is exploding, opening up oneself to absence, to the void and the silence of language; it is throwing oneself towards the space in which there is as yet no world. The poet wants to create and be created by “Un lenguaje de látigos.” Paz says:

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Para execrar, exasperar, excomulgar, expulsar, exheredar, expeler, exturbar, excorpiar, expurgar, excoriar, expilar, exprimir, expectorar, exulcerar, excrementar (los sacramentos), extorsionar, extenuar (el silencio), expiar. (173)

If, as Lacan says, the subject is only constituted in language (moreover, in the language of the other), what this list of exorbitant words reveals is the aforementioned essential heterogeneity of being. The I is always constituted outside of itself, in a state of exile. The constitution of the self is only fashioned, or fictioned, by means of an absolute renunciation of the self. As everywhere in Paz, there are here echoes of Hegel. In Hegel the self is also renounced, but for the sake of absolute knowledge. As Kojève puts it in his introduction to Hegel: “the man who contemplates is absorbed by what he contemplates; the ‘knowing subject’ ‘loses’ himself in the object that is known.” 5 In Paz the situation is actually more complex. The self is lost not to knowledge but to the possibility of poetry. “Vaciado, limpiado de la nada purulenta del yo, vaciado de tu imagen, ya no eres sino espera y aguardar” (169). As opposed to the Absolute that can only come into being at the end of history, the emptied “yo” is nothing but a moment which awaits but cannot be. The subject is a constant joining and disjoining of the “yotúelnosotrosvosotrosellos” (174), which is chewed up into a single mass only to be torn asunder over and over. Poetry can insert temporality back into the question of history and reveal the end of history for what it is: “endlessly in death throws yet never dying” (Children 48). But the very awaiting of the emptied “yo” is analogous to the situation of the end of history. Listening to silence, the self is totally depropriated; he becomes, like history perhaps, “A being that endlessly suffers its own finitude” (Lacoue-Labarthe 212). Paz does not lament his condition; on the contrary, he recognizes that the existential situation is extatic. Waiting and silence are its modalities. But for the poet, writing as a means to extenuate this silence becomes, not a resolution of the problem, but a revelation of its implications. The poem “Encuentro” exasperates the situation of the divided self. “Al llegar a mi casa, y precisamente en el momento de abrir la puerta, me vi salir. Intrigado, decidí seguirme” (Obra 202). As the plot of the prose poem unfolds, we see the “yo” confront himself; and we see the other “yo” refuse to recognize himself. “No pretenda ningunearme,” he tells himself at one point. It does not take much straining to hear the echoes of the Hegelian dialectic of Master and Slave, to which Paz alludes and which he in a sense parodies. Hegel says: “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized.’” 6 The slave, if we recall Hegel, gains self-consciousness by recognizing (and hence obeying) the master while the master asserts his authority only by means of not recognizing the

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other—in Pazian terms, by means of “ningunear” its other, making him nobody. As Hegel puts it, self-consciousness “must cancel this, its other” (229). The master gains and asserts his freedom by risking his life in “battle” with the other; but the slave refuses to risk his life, for he finds that “life is as essential to [him] as pure self-consciousness” (234). The slave discovers his situation in the world and enters into a process of becoming by means of which he constitutes a future for himself; the master, closed up within himself, admits no change, and thus, he becomes fossilized in his authority. Ironically, the master, in refusing to recognize the otherness of the slave, comes to depend on the recognition of the latter to maintain his being, and thus does not achieve self-consciousness but rather “dependent consciousness” (236). The structure of Paz’s poem is clearly based on this schema. The two individuals, each asserting its “yo,” first have an argument, then a fist fight, and, finally, the narrator is thrown into the river. “Me sentí solo, expulsado del mundo de los hombres” (Obra 204). Without ever having been recognized, the self discovers its own solitude and at the same time gains consciousness of its own being. His ontological status is to doubt himself, and to wait. The poem ends with the following question: “¿y si no fuera él, sino yo. . .” (ibid). This is obviously a Hegelian discovery if there ever was one: “self-consciousness is the state of desire in general” (Phenomenology 220). But Paz gives it a twist. If the doubt could ever be resolved, their relation would be symetrical and the slave could eventually become a Master; that is to say, he could cease to know himself and thus cease to be. But the identity of this “yo” is only constituted in the radical uncertainty of not knowing whether he is master or slave. Ironically, he is a slave that does risk life, and that does not make him a master. This is merely a state of being always open to the other, and to the other’s blows. For Paz, poetry is this being open to the other. On a more specifically Mexican level, the poem “Mariposa de obsidiana” tries to recreate (or simply recognize) an autochthonous muse. This muse is loosely based on the Virgin of Guadalupe, who subsumes various Indian deities, among them Itzpapalotl (the butterfly of the title) and Tonatzin (a mother goddess). She represents the voice of all those who are never recognized. She is the eternal victim, so small, she says, that everybody used to confuse her with a speck of dust. “Yo soy la herida que no cicatriza, la pequeña piedra solar” (216). She gathers into herself both the indigenous tradition and the ontological position of the slave, which share in common a certain openness to otherness, that is, to being. At the end of the poem, Tonatzin tells the poet, “abrirás mi cuerpo en dos para leer las letras de tu destino” (ibid). We can see how Paz presents the problem of Latin American identity through a complex of ontological, sexual (vaguely incestual), and poetic relations. What is essential here is the relation between the notions of open-

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ness and of wound, which become the basis for any possible construction of a self (poetic or otherwise). However, the “Mexican” “yo” that Paz seems to be searching for is foreign even to this paradigm. Another poem from the collection, “El ramo azul,” shows us a man who is accosted by an Indian with a machete. The Indian threatens to pluck his eyes out because “es un capricho de su novia” to want a little bouquet of blue eyes. Just as he is about to pluck them he sees that the eyes of the man (white or mestizo, although Mexican) are not blue. The Indian simply, and very formally apologizes, excuses himself, and disappears. Again, what is highlighted is the problem of identity, and of the impossibility of defining it. Which is the self and which the other? Who is the Mexican, the Indian, the white man, or the mestizo? Who is the novia and who the muse? Who is the poet? How can we know? ¿Aguila o sol? The last poem in the collection is entitled “Hacia el poema.” It does not resolve the questions posed by the book, nor even promise to resolve them; rather, it simply reaffirms the crisis, the rift, the aporia. Like most of the other poems, the last one too states both the necessity of making a decision and the impossibility of doing so. For Paz, the problem of identity is hopelessly entangled in a web of poetic affirmations and denials. Poetry is neither the affirmation nor the denial of identity, it is not even the simultaneous affirmation and denial of identity, but rather a kind of “way out” of this entanglement. Paz defines the problem thus: “Encontrar la salida: el poema” (228). We must, however, think this “way out” differently. The rift is the opening, the exit out of the aporia, even while the rift is itself constitutive of the aporia. The subtitle of the poem is “Puntos de partida.” This implies more than merely starting points or points of departure. The word partida has a variety of meanings. To be sure, it refers to a beginning or departure, but it can also mean a game or a match, and, more importantly, a severing or a cut. To depart, partir, is both to leave and to cut a whole into smaller parts. Identity cannot simply be affirmed or denied for the simple reason that it is divided; it is already cut from the beginning. Identity is constituted in the play of identity, which means that there is no identity because, as long as there is play, it is the play of difference. Difference cuts up identity from within. And yet, this cut is the way to the poem, and the poem is the way out of the entanglement. What then does “hacia el poema” mean? Let us briefly sketch out Heidegger’s notion of “way” from his lecture “The Way to Language.” 7 The way is not at all a road that we ever follow, but instead it is precisely that which “allows us a view into the open togetherness of relations” (Way 113), that is, a view into what for Paz is the tangle of identity and difference. The way is the partida, the opening up of a way. Heidegger refers to the Alemanic dialect, and to the transitive verb wëgen, way-making: “Way-making understood in this sense no longer means to

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move something up or down a path that is already there. It means to bring the way . . . forth first of all, and thus to be the way” (130). To be on the way to the poem, Paz’s poet has to be already in the poem, to be cut by the poem, and to have taken his departure from the poem. These senses may be logically contradictory, but if we think the way along the lines of partida or of wëgen, we may be able to see that, in the complex of relations revealed through the poem, contradiction (merely one relation among many possible others) becomes practically irrelevant. Heidegger says: “Within this way, which belongs to the reality of language, the peculiar property of language is concealed. The way is appropriating” (129). What matters is not whether the poet has a coherent view of the world and of history, or whether he deals critically, reflectively with the crisis of identity. What matters is how the poet belongs to language (and viceversa) and how in this mutual belonging the world comes to be. The poet belongs to the way; the poet in a sense is the way. The way is appropriating. This means that the way, like the poem, is an event; the way is not simply there, it happens. Trying to think the way in terms of appropriation raises again (and again and again) the problem of temporality. Paz describes two moments on the way to the poem. First: El instante se congela, blancura compacta que ciega y no responde y se desvanece, témpano empujado por corrientes circulares. Ha de volver. (228)

Frozen time, or, as he will call it later, petrified time, is not a vision of time as eternity. In fact it is not a vision at all, for seeing needs the unfolding of time to see. The frozen instant is full of vibration and movement, although this movement is no longer perceptible. Frozen time is the revelation (or better, intimation) of the nothingness of time, of paralysis and of finitude. Frozen time puts an end to the play of identity and difference. And yet, in its very lack of responsiveness, in its very nothingness, time withdraws. The movement of time leaves nothing behind, and that nothing precisely, paradoxically, is the freezing of time. What freezes time is not the poetic word, it is its very own withdrawal. The withdrawal of time makes the way for being to come into its own. The way is appropriating, in a frozen time which vanishes, which “se desvanece.” Paz’s passage on time gives the impression of intermittence. The vanishing shall return, but it alternates with another moment which is also another vanishing. The second moment on Paz’s way to the poem is described as follows: “El tiempo se abre en dos: hora del salto mortal” (ibid). Time is pure division, and appropriation is a mortal leap. The way to the poem is not a going across this division but a dwelling within it as mortals. The Pazian “salto mortal” is not so much a Kierkegaardian absurd leap as it is a somersault that comes full circle but remains in place. Its place, however, is and remains the

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rift itself, the abyss. To be on the way to the poem is to let the nothingness of time and the otherness of language sound through the poem. Paz’s poet says: “nada mío ha de hablar por mi boca” (229). The poet will lose himself in the happening of the poem, and this loss is the event of appropriation. This is no longer a question as banal as that of the loss of personal identity. In the event of poetry the self’s only remaining role is grammatical: “los yo, tú, él, tejedores de tela de araña, pronombres armados de uñas” (228), says the poet. The tangle of identity is indeed an entanglement of language. Its many strands, personal pronouns being only one example of them, not only cannot be disentangled, they cannot even be cut through. These strands anticipate any attempt to sever them; they are so sharp that they even cut through each other, only to form new entanglements. Language is nothing that the poet can own. And yet, appropriation can happen. Along the way, and along the web, language sounds through the poet, constituting a variety of selves; language cuts the self up, divides him into I’s, you’s, and he’s, but it is through this process that mortals are appropriated to language. The poet belongs to language. And the poem is after all the way, but now we must think the way as event. The poem is what happens. At the end of “Hacia el poema,” Paz gathers together these various strands. He attempts to give us an image of the role played by the problem of identity in what he calls the eternal struggle between poetry and history: Cuando la Historia duerme, habla en sueños: en la frente del pueblo dormido el poema es una constelación de sangre. Cuando la Historia despierta, la imagen se hace acto, acontece el poema: la poesía entra en acción. (230)

Even though here Paz seems to be concerned with problems of history and cultural identity, the language of his own poem reveals a more fundamental ontological question. The fact that history and poetry are intertwined and entangled points to their being woven out of a more primordial set of relations: language. Paz is of course alluding to the surrealist project of letting the unconscious sound through. History speaks in dreams, and poetry becomes a pure (unconscious) act. Behind both stands an unknown and unknowable source. Paz calls it “surtidor de transparencias” (229), but it may just as well be language that speaks. Between sleep and wakefulness, between dreaming history and happening poetry, language, or the unconscious, or the open togetherness of relations speaks, shows, or reveals the questions dealing with being and temporality which are at the source of the poetical or historical “salto mortal.” Again the questions will not be resolved, merely opened up. This opening up is the way to the poem and this way is the event of the poem itself. The poem is heterogeneous, it comes from elsewhere. Heidegger concludes his lecture on “The Way to Language” by citing Wilhelm von Humboldt on the possibility of imparting “so different a form

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to language that it would turn into a wholly other, wholly new language.” 8 Perhaps Paz means nothing more than this when he calls for our being open to and listening to “the other voice.” 9 For poetry too is nothing but another way of listening, hence of belonging to language. But then, along with the romantic von Humboldt, Paz would be nothing but another child of the mire. 2. TAILS: POETRY, HYBRIDITY, THOUGHT The following readings will attempt to approach something along the lines of Paz’s critical, poetic thought. We shall offer two Chicano variations on a theme, or rather, continuations of a tail. Is it possible to think in a way that does not mobilize our standard logical, epistemological, and conceptual operations, but at the same time does not fall back on a romanticized mythical structure? Poetic thought is not an object that I will here submit to study, but rather, it is an event; the poetic, in poetry, is the preparation and awaiting in language of the possibility for such a happening. All thought is linguistic, which is not to say thereby that it is conceptual or logical; all poetry too is linguistic, which again is not to say that it must make sense in the traditional sense. It is to say, however, that poetry is in a relation to sense (and nonsense), and that it inhabits that realm. Language essentially is a hybrid of sense and nonsense, identity and difference. Poetry is an other language, an address that performs something other than mere communication. It would be absurd to try and define it here; I will simply trace some of its transformations. The topos of purity, has long been a poetic ideal for example. In the context of Latin America, which is by definition hybrid as well (Latin and American and neither and much more), invoking purity seems out of the realm of possibility. A mestizo poet like Vallejo, however, remains undaunted. “Pureza amada, que mis ojos nunca / llegaron a gozar: Pureza absurda!” 10 [Beloved purity, upon which my eyes never rejoiced: Absurd purity]. Purity is what cannot be inasmuch as there is language, and yet, it is language itself, which points towards purity as that which lies just beyond its grasp. Modernista poets had already confronted all sorts of paradoxes relating to ideals of beauty and purity and such. One direction of this line of thought would lead to Juan Ramón Jiménez’s notion of “poesía pura.” Vallejo is doing something different. On the one hand, “Deshora” is a poem of betrayed love, and hence the adjective of purity merely metonymically represents the beloved; but on the other hand, as the poem progresses, death and temporality become the focus of the meditation and the absurdity itself of the situation becomes more important than any presumed purity. “Absurdo, sólo tú eres puro,” [The absurd, only you are pure] he apostrophizes in Trilce LXXIII.

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Vallejo doesn’t merely constitute an absurd object of desire, he reveals the absurdity of objectivity and desire. The structure of the absurd is a paradoxical temporality. Trilce XIV ends with “Este no puede ser, sido. / Absurdo. / Demencia.” [This impossible being, havingbeen. Absurdity. Dementia.] Purity then is a kind of expired cannot be. The expression “no puede ser” must operate at at least two levels: first, it simply states the fact of an impossibility; second, it is a hollow plea, a performative which vainly attempts to change the facts and deny what is. What, then is? The poem does not merely present a past that never was; rather, it rigorously puts forth the notion that what comes into being does so radically as a has been. Poetry is the possibility of thinking through this absurd temporality, which conceptually makes no sense. Purity has been; poetry is untimely and impure, that is, put together from refuse and heterogeneity, like the identity of the mestizo. There is another approximation to the absurd and the untimely, both of which are keenly felt in Chicano culture. Chicano poet Alurista is on the borderline. His own poetic language attempts to situate itself somewhere between Spanish and English, between modernity and an idealized but also expired indigenous past. Unlike Vallejo, Alurista attempts to breath life into the expired by mobilizing a shamanistic, mythical poetic utterance. His universe, as Tomás Ybarra-Frausto points out, is made up of “new images and new vocabulary from the confluence of cultures that nurtures the Chicano experience, he sings of ‘the radiance of our quilted heritage.’ In his poems, pre-Cortesian images relate to barrio symbols. Culture heroes like Quetzalcoatl, Tizoc, and Zapata coexist with Pachucos, Vatos Locos, and contemporary pop culture stars like Jimi Hendrix.” 11 Alurista reappropriates the myth of Aztlán. Aztlán, according to legend, was the land to the North of Mesoamerica, from where the Mexicas migrated around the ninth century. It is thought to be geographically located in what is now the American Southwest, and has come to represent the originary homeland of the Aztecs. Much of Aztlán would thus be the land ceded by Mexico to the United States in the treaty of Gaudalupe-Hidalgo in 1948. It is a particularly rich imaginary for Chicano culture, which can thereby trace its roots not back to Mexico but, full circle, back to where at least a significant part of it already is. In 1969 Alurista was involved in formulating a Chicano document called “El plan espiritual de Aztlán,” which was a political, programmatic manifesto for recovering Chicano roots, identity, and dignity, as well as for mobilizing into political action. When published, the Plan opened with a “Poem in Lieu of a Preface,” by Alurista. It reads: “it is said that MOTECUHZOMA ILHUICAMINA SENT AN expedition looking for the NortherN mYthical land wherefrom the AZTECS CAME, la TIERRA dE AztláN, mYthical land for those who dream of roses and swallow thorns or for those who swallow thorns in powdered milk feeling guilty about smelling flowers about looking for AztláN” (Keller xvi). The poem connects the prac-

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tical with the mythical, even alluding to a brand of powdered milk, Carnation, as a symbol which ironically separates Chicano life of daily necessity from its more “authentic” reality elsewhere. The appropriation of the myth of Aztlán and the creation of its Spiritual plan raise the important problem of essentialism. Is Alurista merely reifying and moreover fetishisizing the past? How can one appeal to it, and put it to work for the here and now? A poem from his 1971 collection Floricanto en Aztlán literally attempts this: libertad sin lágrimas sin dolor and with pride la Raza nosotros we won’t let it freedom shall not escape us libertad en mano frente erecta we shall now are libres albedrío of our self assertion and our will to be men caballeros clanes tigres proud guerrero plumaje free like the eagle y la serpiente

The poem is unapologetically pedagogical and utopic. By a mere speech act the poet creates a community, instituting a “nosotros” which will bear the name la Raza. Its program: Obliterate pain and tears; wear liberty with pride. By being bilingual, the poem excludes from the “we” any non-Spanish or non-English speakers. But where is this Raza and how does it come first to be, and then to be free? The poem asserts that freedom is at hand and will not escape. But the mere assertion of its freedom does not necessarily make it so. Ironically, the image is one in which freedom is made captive, that is, in a way, nullified. Alurista is adapting to his poetry the Nahuatl notion of floricanto, which is the Spanish translation of the Nahuatl concept of poetry. However, the original concept, flower and song, or rather sungflower, had a wider field than our modern concept. Floricanto was a key part of a whole system of thought in which poetry was a source of knowledge, religion, and reality; it had the capacity to teach and to heal. In invoking floricanto in the

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modern context, Alurista is making an important gesture towards another modality of thought, but the poetic power to make and fashion a world is not in any sense actualized. The statement “we won’t let it” could be of course read as a sign of power, but also, like Vallejo’s “no puede ser,” it could be impotently trying to perform a denial of fact. The temporality of the poem is also worth noticing. Unlike Vallejo’s temporality, Alurista puts forth the reverse sign: “we shall,” future, becomes “now,” present, so that the now articulates the ungrammatical English (not “we shall be” but “we shall are”) with the Spanish (not “we are free” but “we are libres”). What we have here is the proclamation of a future that already is, rather than the invocation of a past that never was. In both at any rate it is the now, the articulation, the speech act itself that remains always in question. The hybrid expression “are libres,” which sounds colloquial, political, and almost non literate, is made to resonate with “albedrío,” an elegant, latinate, philosophical and highly cultured Spanish term for choice, judgement or arbitration. The poem lays claim to various heritages: nosotros, we are “men / caballeros,” interestingly enough, both gentlemen and knights, as in knights in shining armour, as in Conquistadores, perhaps; but we are also “clanes tigres / proud guerrero plumaje,” pre-Colonial and defeated warriors. Finally, the last simile tells us we are “free like the eagle / y la serpiente,” which ties us both to the Nahuatl deity of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, and, more immediately, to a symbol of Mexican identity, the emblem on the flag. This emblem also hearkens back to Aztlán, for Aztec legend says that the Mexicas, as they were migrating South, decided to settle in Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) when they saw an Eagle devouring a serpent and took that to be a sign of Quetzalcoatl. Like many utopias, it might very well be condemned to being an uncanny “no puede ser, sido.” Aztlán and floricanto function at two levels in Alurista. On the one hand they are part of a pragmatic project of unifying Chicanos, with an immediacy that applies to the now of the Chicano movement in the late sixties and early seventies. As an essential common denominator, Aztlán fails, but as a unifying metaphor, it becomes an important sign. Second, however, floricanto en Aztlán becomes the battlefield where heterogeneous languages and cultures encounter each other and hence a privileged site where differences can be, if not worked through, at least staged. Language is a syncretic hybrid par excellence, what Alurista does is produce a mestizaje de palabras, where signs don’t merely communicate but also, importantly, allow for chance miscommunication. Poetic language has at least two features. On the one hand, it purports to represent something, but on the other hand it staunchly resists representation. The poetic is precisely that which is not reducible to communication. Próspero Saíz’s poem “malinche” avoids the pitfalls encountered by Alurista. It addresses the question of identity but does not allow itself to get stuck

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there and does not fall into facile essentialisms and romanticisms. The poem sets up two poles, an I speaker whose locus of enunciation remains indeterminate, and a you addressee, that coalesces around the figure of la Malinche. The historical Malinche was Hernán Cortés’ lover and translator, a Tlaxcalan Indian who had been sold to slavery and whose service for the Conquistadores was invaluable. La Malinche is already a “loaded” symbol representing an icon of betrayal in Mexican culture, although she has recently been revindicated in the works both of new historicists and in particular Chicana authors. She is an ambiguous symbol, however, for she also represents a metaphorical mother of the mestizo race. She is either a victim or, if she has any agency at all, a traitor, a vendida; all of which, in the context of the Mexican, Catholic cults of the virgin and the mother, has led to an almost endless stream of bad psychoanalytic readings. More than literary cultural or historical figures, however, the two poles in Saíz’s poem are semantic, grammatical, and poetic functions. The poem starts by invoking her name, but splitting it into two lines: ma linche it is night the hour of our love the bed of dead leaves where i alone embrace you waits 12

The timespace of the poem is indeterminate, although it seems to want to locate itself at a moment before the conquest, or before, at any rate, some very important or very banal event, sex at any rate. The setting, then, is where the hour waits. The speaker here speaks from a place of radical alterity. The questions who, what, or where he is have no answer. Malinche is of course concretely located, but also rather disembodied as the the mothertraitor-india-vendida of myth. And yet, the poem has the form of a love poem. It is difficult to gauge the attitude of the poetic voice towards its object. It awaits the time of an embrace between “i alone” and “you”; but is the I a Spaniard, an Indian, or a mestizo? A Conquistador, a shunned lover/ brother, or the offspring? Obviously, all of the above, but how? The poem continues: your shame like mine is not a ficton it is a womb full of white pus and maggots and the sublime inquisitors must eat it all for your unfolding shame and purity.

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Shame is not new to the Malinche, of course, but it is worth noting that the shame invoked here is shared. It cannot be reduced to the shame of a betrayed male Indian, for that is one of dignified victimhood. The origin of la Raza is shame and abjection, but the poem refuses the facile condemnation that has been standard in the tradition. A notion of abject purity begins to emerge, one of sacrifice, to be sure, but unlike the Christian sacrifice, or even the dignified victimization of Cuahutemoc, for instance, which is very much in line with Christianity, this sacrifice will not yield a return. It will not be easily converted into meaning and community. Malinche’s womb is a rotting cadaver from whence la Raza comes, along with pus and maggots. But it is also a dish of shame and purity served up to all, conquistadores, inquisitors, and even the poetic I: i too will eat my portion now again as the brown thighs spread the pages of the night

There is a strange kinship between the Spanish inquisitors and the speaking (Indian?) voice. They both eat. The temporality of the event is also worth noting. The speaker will eat, in the future, but he does it now, in the present, and as a repetition of an again, from the past. More importantly, however, they both read. Malinche’s womb has become a sacred text. The temporality of consumption, or consumation, is beginning to simulate the temporality of reading. There is a strange kinship between the I and the Malinche as well, for the speaker offers himself as a thigh to be cut off, a page to be torn, a victim to be sacrificed, consumed, eaten, but most importantly, read. here sever my left thigh from my body and beat the brains out of the poets as the whitethick pus flows to the sea and the maggots sprout yellow wings

The “here” address echoes the legendary story of the captured Cuahutemoc telling la Malinche in the presence of Cortés to take this knife and take his life, an offer she herself refused, supposedly without looking him in the eye, but the sentence was nevertheless carried out shortly thereafter. In the tradition, la Malinche’s betrayal, like the here and the this on the knife, is apodeictic. The difference in Saíz is that he transforms the stoic dignity of a sacrificed Cuahutemoc into an unabashed willingness to share in the shame. It is all couched in terms of a violent and most undignified sexuality, which itself is couched in terms of the poetic utterance. bury the brains of the poets deep in your purple anus i will sing the hot jaguars twisting and clawing at our heat

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weave tall grasses devoured by the hungry yellow moon

The universe presented by this speech act is one in which the various poles become mingled. Images of decay and erotism are fused. The lovers become wild animals in a fatal embrace where organs and symbols are violently fused. The two bodies interpenetrate each other, weaving themselves into the very bed of dead leaves which awaits, only this time both of them, as woven grass, are further devoured, now by the moon. Is it death, sacrifice, conquest, sex, love or betrayal that the words present? Certainly, perhaps more importantly, it presents a process of textualization. It is a texts that the two figures can be woven, cut, tied, devoured, and read. A repetition ensues: ma linche it is night the hour of our love the bed of dead leaves crumbles

We are back where we started, but the bed no longer awaits, now it crumbles. It is a moment of post coitum, the aftermath of the conquest, and the beginning again of death. However, the writhing convulsions that have already taken place have not yet begun. They mark an event that, again, is structured like textuality, like Vallejo’s “no puede ser sido.” The bed is empty, Malinche is gone. Was she ever there? If so, what was she? MALINCHE your absence is hot as i salute my death

The play of presence and absence, of traces, hot or otherwise, is the structure of writing par excellence. It is also the structure of death. There follows in the poem a long section which constitutes the salute to “my death.” At one level, it is a description of the destruction of the Indies, and well on par with las Casas’ version, with graphic presentations of mutilation, mayhem, killing and torture. The poet moves about the desolate scenery “stepping over fly scorched decaying indian corpses / aya a terrible buzzing invades the head.” But the desolation seems to be caused more by Malinche’s absence than by the actual landscape. In a curious way, the landscape resembles the crumbled bed. Slowly, the I becomes identified with the destruction itself, both as its cause and its effect, as the destroyer and the victim. He says at one point, “i mutilated, remain a memory” and goes on to invoke the ever absent Malinche as witness: aya my aztec belly taut as a drumskin cannot be opened the hand the knife entered through the chest

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my heart has been ripped out by the roots and thrown out to the fierce northern wind

The utterance “aya,” which becomes a refrain in the poem, is a meaningless expression. It could easily be read as “ay,” a Spanish version of auch, but that makes it banal. It could also be read as “allá,” another deictic pointing to an elsewhere, and as “a ya,” something akin to oh now or oh already. But giving it meaning does it a grave injustice. The lines present us with an Aztec sacrifice. In that context, the mutilation can be recovered as meaningful. The problem is that aya, like the sacrifice, exceeds meaning. In the poem, the sacrifice is conflated with the conquest itself, something which can be justified since the conquistadores were often mistakenly equated with gods, Quetzalcoatl in particular, but which does not really explain anything about the event. Thus the context of the sacrifice is lost and what emerges is a kind of diaspora; the figure is dispersed throughout the continent, aquí y allá: aya my heart my apache head my navajo hands my chicano legs and feet my tired back my aztec torso aya all my parts go in search of you they ask each passing shadow where you are they ask each tree lake and mountain and desert too they ask the unborn child deep away looking to aztlan there standing in the land of white sands

But she remains absent. She who is called to bear witness does not come. The poem cannot be. In the general economy of sacrifice there should be no remains, everything should be trans-substantiated into meaning. Yet this sacrifice leaves meaningless corpses everywhere. She who can give them meaning does not come forth: aya my heart we search both night and day for you where are your remains

In a rather paradoxical turn, it seems that it is she, la Malinche, who has been sacrificed and fully consumed, and it is he who is condemned to bear witness. It is la Malinche that undergoes death and transfiguration, without reserve. The poem ends with her imagined metamorphosis (into bird, butterfly, or fly): spread your fragile wings and rise rise into the light of my night and remember my light remember our night and remember how we used to sing

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The night is where the poem started, waiting for love and destruction, waiting for conquest and consumation. It is towards that same night that la Malinche is exhorted to fly. At the end of the poem she is not yet there, at the place where they waited together, and yet she is asked to remember. The self and the other and the other other just cut into each other. In the temporality of the poem, no identity can be stabilized. Identity is constituted in the play of identity, which means that there is no identity because, as long as there is play, it is the play of difference. Difference cuts up identity from within. Only the moment of death, consumation, orgasm remains. Like Vallejo’s estruendo mudo it hides death. All else is noise, song, bulla, aya. The poem is what happens.

Chapter Six

Sun Stone Circling Back to the Threshold

1. FIRST TURN The most emblematic of Octavio Paz’s poems is Piedra de sol. Here Paz attempts to incorporate in a circle the whole history of the world. The circle and the poem are both a conceptual and a visual echo of the Aztec calendar, as if they were nothing but ripples emanating from it. At the same time, the poem is also a love poem, a process of self-reflection, and a meditation on the essence of time. The narrating voice confronts its own finitude and attempts to recreate its own identity by means of gathering from the past a series of privileged moments. It discovers that its identity is completely dependent on the (female) other to constitute itself, that the self only exists as conjunction with the other, and that in spite of this, the other only marks the finitude of the self. Finally, as with all of Paz’s poetry, this poem is a desperate attempt to transcend history, time, and even identity itself by means of a speech act: the poetic ejaculation. As many critics have pointed out, in the poem poetry overcomes linear temporality and recovers, by means of something called love, a more authentic circular kind of temporality which transcends time. 1 This short description of the more general aspects of Piedra de sol simplifies, almost to the level of banality, the main problems that the poem actually raises. It is true that at various points the text marks and highlights certain historical, ontological, and poetical questions, but it is quite a leap from this to assume from that that it pretends to transcend them. Piedra de sol confronts an implacable temporality that cannot be overcome. Yes, the poem emphasizes a circular structure in time, but the circularity of time does 89

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not imply only a cyclical regeneration. More than offering a solution (or escape) to the problematics of finitude, what it does is refer us to is a kind of Nietzschean eternal return. The poem shows the process by means of which poetry makes itself, not only within the clarity of language, but also in its complete opacity and in the absolute ambivalence which exists within it. The poem is written in 584 endecasillabic verses and repeats the first six at the end. The last line closes with a colon, which refers us to the beginning of the poem and a new reading. The number 584 refers to the number of days in the cycle of Venus, which is a both a morning and an evening star. Significantly, Paz has noticed the coincidence in the planet of the Aztec god Quetzalcoalt, the goddess of love, and Lucifer. Furthermore, the poem is divided in two by a date and place, “Madrid, 1937,” which gives the impression of establishing a kind of succession. In the very middle of the Sunstone, where the Aztec god sticks his tongue out for blood, lies an image of the Spanish civil war. However, it is impossible to determine whether the first part redeems the second or vice versa, or even which is the first and which the second. Some have read the first section as a distopia and the second as a utopia of sorts, beyond time and space, where love and the sexual act are able to overcome the contingencies of history. 2 The fallacy of this reading is obvious when we consider that the first part follows the second in the circular structure of the poem. The “first” part indeed appears to be a quest by the narrating voice to find its self and its other as well as the self in its other. There is a movement, disembodied at first, that gradually, through the remembrance and recognition of the female other, arrives at the construction of a consciousness of self. However, towards the end of the section, this newly found self is lost again in a series of memories of concrete places, scenes, and companions which tend to merge into each other. Among these, “Madrid, 1937” stands out as a turning point. In a sense, this date is not only a cutting point but also a starting point and a marking point, a punto de partida. In the “second” section, beginning with the precise marking of time and place, the voice clearly situates itself. However, the self is no longer constructed in terms of yo and tú, which had already degenerated into a vague alguien, but rather in terms of the plural versions of nosotros and ellos. Two lovers, which are both we and they, make love in the middle of a bombing attack and presumably escape into a more authentic realm where “no hay tú ni yo, mañana, ayer ni nombres.” 3 The section thus establishes its own movement, which leads towards an ecstatic temporality whose result is also the loss of any possible self. It ends with a plea to the other to think the self so that it can exist. The self is torn, but in the tearing there is a magic which gives life to a scene.

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The last lines of Piedra de sol, which also happen to be the opening verses of the poem, create a series of descriptions that seem to establish a kind of scene: un sauce de cristal, un chopo de agua un alto surtidor que el viento arquea, un árbol bien plantado mas danzante un caminar de río que se curva, avanza, retrocede, da un rodeo y llega siempre: (2)

The images presented here are interesting precisely because they are impossible. The two trees, made of water and crystal respectively, transmit, among other things, the idea of transparency. The poem will indeed go on to develop a notion of transparency which serves both as a kind of salvation from nothing and also as the very threat of nothingness. In these first few lines, it is worth noting that the crystal scintillates and the water flows, and these make possible the transparency of either dependent upon a play that is, at the very least, intermittent. The poem raises the question “¿llega?” And by answering “siempre” it places the notion of presencing in a different light. Among other things, Paz is raising certain essential questions about the relationship between poetry and being. At one level, he does this by establishing a dialogue with other poets. His water poplar, “un chopo de agua,” for example, besides being an intriguing poetic image, also possesses an intertextual dimension. The image gathers and transforms, among many others no doubt, a very particular metaphor from Juan Ramón Jímenez. In his collection La soledad sonora (1911), Juan Ramón writes: “La copla de agua es plata, / oro la charla del chopo. . .” 4 While Juan Ramón is playing with certain synesthetic effects to develop his notion of what later will be called pure poetry, Paz problematizes the role that the senses can play before any possible intelligence (or entelechy). A poem from Juan Ramón’s Animal de fondo is entitled “La transparencia, dios, la transparencia.” The Pazian notion of transparency, if it exists at all, is not divine but rather completely ambivalent. It does not give us the exact name of anything; on the contrary, it reveals the nothingness of names. 5 What is a poplar? What is water? What and who can see, or see himself through them? The image of the tree will not crystallize into a tree but will flow away and spill itself. “Chopo de agua” is of course an echo of “chorro de agua,” spurt, which would be the more “proper” metaphor, or at least the least abused catachresis. Already in a poem from ¿Aguila o sol? entitled “Himno futuro” (perhaps alluding to the yet to be written Piedra de sol) Paz had referred to a “chopo de luz,” and a “chorro de silencio” (113). The water poplar gathers both, along with Juan Ramón’s transparent “charla,” in order to highlight some of the

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difficulties in situating the tree (or the self) whether ontologically or epistemologically by means of a visual, reflexive, and/or critical paradigm. Piedra reads: presente sin ventanas, pensamiento que vuelve, se repite, se refleja y se pierde en su misma transparencia (14)

Transparency does not reveal what lies behind it. On the contrary, transparency becomes an abysmal nothingness. It is opacity that is. Paz does not contradict Juan Ramón; neither does he imitate him. However, on a textual level, his text establishes a sort of dialogue with an all too opaque tradition. This dialogue retakes, repeats, and reflects countless thematic and formal elements of the tradition and, at the same time, it translates, distorts, and counterstates them. Piedra de sol, like Espacio, for example, is a poem that at times reveals its universalizing aspirations. However, Paz, like Juan Ramón, founders in the aporias of the concrete. I said founders, and not necessarily fails, for the process of foundering is in some sense analogous to that of founding and of finding. The word in Spanish is encallar. The alternating process of encallar and desencallar is the way of poetic language itself. Note, for example, the purely fortuitous play on the word encallar, which hides silence within itself: callar. I briefly referred to Juan Ramón Jiménez, not in order to identify a source for Paz’s poetry, but simply to emphasize certain intertextual aspects of all poetry. Any line of Piedra de sol can be read in terms of allusions and discussions with other texts: Mallarmé, Machado, Eliot, to mention only a few. If we return to the first lines of the poem we will see that it opens with a play between stasis and movement. The phrase “un alto surtidor que el viento arquea,” suggests a fountain or source: “surtidor: chorro de agua que brota epecialmente hacia arriba.” 6 In other words, the poem suggests an origin which is inaccessible because in the wind that sways it; it does not remain still. The word surtidor comes from the Latin surtus from the verb surgere, to rise up. But it is also associated with saltus and sursum, jump and upwards respectively. Thus it implies not only a source per se, but also a source that jumps out of itself and tears itself apart in the jumping. Moreover, the verb surtir means to provide, give out, or allot (i.e., repartir). To allot is to apportion, and therefore to divide and distribute (partir y repartir). The origin departs and keeps itself apart from the beginning. The poem rises up from a divided origin and, like the source itself, it leaps (besides being a salto de agua, it is perhaps a salto mortal). The poem emerges from and is structured around the word surtidor, and Paz develops the metaphysical implications of the word. In ¿Aguila o sol? we have already seen a reference to the “surtidor de transparencias.” The transparencies in question

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will actually be delivered, the crystal willow and the water poplar being only two of their possible manifestations. What the surtidor delivers is, to put it in Heideggerian terms, duality. The poem gives itself, but in doing so it also apportions itself and departs from itself. The path through which this apportioning takes place may indeed be a circular path, but, more importantly, it is a sending or, more precisely, a destining. In his meditation upon Parmenides (Fragment VIII, 34–41), Heidegger gives particular attention to the Greek word Moira, allotment or apportionment, appearing in a subordinate clause in Parmenides’ text but nevertheless determining the thought in question. In what follows, I will attempt to relate Heidegger’s reading of Moira in Parmenides to my own reading of surtidor in Paz. Heidegger is primarily concerned with the relation between being, estín and thinking, noein, as well as with the enigmatic word tó autó, the Same, which relates the former two. Parmenides’ fragment reads as follows: Thinking (noein) and the thought “it is” (esti noema) are the same. For without the being in relation to which it is uttered (pephatismenon) you cannot find thinking. For there neither is nor shall be anything outside of being (parex tou eontos), since Moira bound it to the whole and immovable. For that reason, all these will be mere names (onoma) which mortals have laid down, convinced that they were true: coming-to-be (ginesthai) as well as passing away (ollysthai), Being as well as non-being, and also change of place and variation of shining colors. 7

I will not address all of Heidegger’s complicated argument of the ways in which Parmenides’ saying has been thought through Western philosophy. I will simply emphasize with him the importance of the “ways of hearing” by which we may belong to the “address of early thinking” (85). The question for thought is how we hear what addresses itself to us. In other words, the relation between thinking and being is articulated through the utterance (pephatismenon). The question is therefore a question of language. For Heidegger, “Speaking is of itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language that we speak” (Way 123). For Paz, “No basta la lengua para el canto. Hay que ser la oreja” (Aguila 113). Both are concerned with developing a notion of poetic thinking. Such a notion would no longer be representable; however, it can be heard, if we listen appropriately. For Paz, such hearing would be the utterance itself as poetic act, which does indeed gather thinking and being into the Same; for Heidegger, it would be laying the ground for and awaiting the event of appropriation (Ereignis), which may or may not come to pass in authentic hearing. In the West, philosophy has only been able to think the relation between being and thinking in terms of representation and thus Being itself, in being represented as a being, has been forgotten. The West no longer hears the duality. Being has become being able to be repre-

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sented. “What takes place at the beginning of Western thought is the unobserved decline of the duality” (Early 87). The ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings can no longer be thought, because thinking is now only thought in terms of representation and perception; and therefore, the ontological difference no longer is, for being has come to mean being perceived. Ironically, although this is a total mishearing of Parmenides, it actually does not in any way contradict what Parmenides said. For representational thinking, thinking and being are the same. However, this is what Parmenides’ saying utters: there is duality. For Parmenides, thinking and being are the same only because of the duality. When Parmenides says, “there neither is nor shall be anything outside being” he is not saying there is nothing besides beings or entities, but rather he says that everything that is is because it presences, and it presences because of the duality. To eón names the duality of beings in their presencing: beings come to be and pass away. At the origin of Western thought, the nature of temporality is already being thought as division and as the unfolding of the twofold. But this thought too came to be and passed away. Heidegger and Paz, each in his own way, prepare the way for thinking by trying to remain open to the hearing of the duality of presencing. Paz is hinting precisely towards such a notion of duality. His surtidor is agua que con los párpados cerrados mana toda la noche profecías unánime presencia en oleaje, (2)

The source emanates prophecies; the prophecies dispense a destiny. But what is this destiny (or rather destining)? Paz calls it a unanimous presence in the waves. But what does this say? If presence is a single, unanimous presence, how can it be in waves without being scattered? The word “presencia” could be read as the noun presence, but this only leads to logical contradictions and aporias. On the other hand, if we hear a conjugation of the verb to presence, we might note an intimation to a more primordial relation to the source and to temporality. “Unánime,” the one, the same, the single soul or movement presences in waves, it comes to be and passes away in a movement which is only one because it is twofold. By means of a “manar,” an abundant flowing chorro, and through a kind of luminous darkness (cf. the scintillating water vs. the closed eyelids), this is what the surtidor dispenses: the unfolding of being and thought (the Same) in a poetic (or prophetic) utterance. In Paz’s phrase, “unánime presencia en oleaje,” there resonates all of what Parmenides utters in the aforementioned clause, singled out by Heidegger: “since Moira bound it (being) to be a whole and immovable.” In his gloss on this clause, Heidegger says that Parmenides

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names the Moira, the apportionment which allots by bestowing and so unfolds the twofold. The apportionment dispenses [beschikt], (provides and presents) through the duality. Apportionment is the dispensation of presencing, as the presencing of what is present, which is gathered in itself and therefore unfolds of itself. Moira is the destining of “Being,” in the sense of eón [presencing]. Moira has dispensed the destiny of Being, to ge, into the duality, and thus has bound it to totality and immobility, from which and in which the presencing of what is present comes to pass. (97)

The “unánime presencia” is what comes to pass. It is bound to totality by means of the One in unánime, and it is bound to immobility by means of an echo (a false one no doubt) with “inánime.” Presencia gathers both stasis (when it is a noun) and movement (when it is a verb). The two trees of the opening lines of Piedra, we should recall, are joined by the surtidor into one: “un árbol bien plantado mas danzante.” And this one tree is both bound to immobility, bien plantado, and at the same time constantly unfolding itself, mas danzante. 8 The waves, then, whose source presumably would be the manantial or the surtidor or the apportionment, in short, the Moira, are the dwelling of the destining of being and thought and, for Paz, poetry. This dwelling is duality. Destiny is the presentation of difference. If the West has thought this only in terms of representation, that too is part of its apportionment. The decline of duality was going unnoticed already at the beginning of Western thinking. Its fate was already being allotted. The word fate, in fact, could also be a valid translation for Moira. And this is something that Paz’s word, surtidor, also shares with it. The word surtidor is associated with the word suerte, which may allude to a sort of Mallarméan chance; but, more to the point, it is also the word for fate. The English word “sort” is of course also associated with fate. When used as a verb it means, among other things, both to allot and to depart, but, more significantly perhaps, it is another word for way, path, or the Spanish camino. 9 Piedra de sol is a poem about the fate of presence, about fate as coming into presence, and about the way to (and of) presencing. It is not, however, merely about the fate of Western thinking. In using the Aztec calendar as paradigm for the poem, Paz introduces another duality to the unnoticed duality of the West, and thus further entangles the problematic of fate and language. Ometéotl, the god at the center of the sunstone is known as the god of duality. The surtidor is at the center of the poem as the sun is at the center of the calendar stone. In a sense, the two are the same, and yet in no way does one represent the other. For Paz, poetic thinking is an alternative to and even an escape from representational thinking. And poetic language, which is not necessarily tied down to representational language, opens up the way for thinking to complete its fate. The words surtidor and suerte, like the French word sortie, all come from the same latin verb surgere. 10 Not only does surtidor give out or dispense, it also

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gathers within itself both its fate and the exit from its fate. The very words that say duality are in themselves duplicitous. In the poem, the source becomes a river which will both guide our way and in fact be our way, and which is no doubt an allusion to Heraclitus. Fragment 12 of Heraclitus reads: “As they step into the same rivers, different and [still] different [étera kai étera] waters flow upon them.” 11 Paz’s river becomes an emblem of this sort of play. The movement of language is the movement of difference; it is what accounts for the heterogeneous within the homogeneous. In it, the same and other are fused, but only in a flow that never remains still. Here are Paz’s lines again: un caminar de río que se curva avanza, retrocede, da un rodeo y llega siempre:

The guarantee that the river will always arrive is no such thing, neither for the poet nor for the reader, because neither of them can know firstly, where it arrives, nor secondly, when. Such is the structure of destining. Thus, the poem begins (but can one still speak of beginnings?) its static movement, “un caminar tranquilo.” The phrase “un caminar” is repeated a number of times, insinuating that it is on the way towards the “unánime presencia.” The word caminar is of course the infinitive of a verb, but Paz uses it as a noun. He substantivizes the verb, so to speak, and thus turns the caminar into a camino, as the walking becomes itself a path. 12 Like the word surtidor, the word caminar, here associated with the river, speaks the duality of language. Caminar is another name for presencing. For Paz, poetic language is the way or the path, the caminar itself, by means of which thinking and being are related. Heidegger puts it as follows: “In one respect thinking is outside the duality toward which it makes its way, required by and responding to it. In another respect, this very ‘making its way toward. . .’ remains within the duality” (Early 96). Thinking is both outside and inside being, as duality, because it responds to the call of being and it “walks” towards it. This walking toward being is a movement of advancing to, turning back from, and circumventing the withdrawal of Being. The trajectory that Paz is retracing (“un caminar tranquilo / de estrella o primavera sin premura”) is the movement of a star—actually, a planet, Venus. The movement of Venus is already double: depending on its position in its planetary cycle and on the season on Earth, it appears to us either as a morning star or as an evening star, appearing either in the West or the East. But Paz adds another duality which is both inside and outside this duality: in the Nahuatl tradition Quetzalcoatl is identified with the same planet and has come to represent cycles of death and renewal. East and West, same and other, love and war are all conjoined in this gentle walking, but not as Venus

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and Mars but as Venus and Quetzalcoatl. For Paz, it is neither the beginnings nor the ends that matter, but rather the path itself between the two which traces a kind of hieroglyph that Paz calls the poem. Poetic thinking is thus the hieroglyph, as nothing other than a “making its way toward. . .” In his poem, Paz relates language and temporality in a way analogous to Heidegger’s relating of thinking and being. In the first three strophes of Piedra de sol, both the grammatical subjects and objects which the poem brings into presence remain indeterminate: un caminar entre las espesuras de los días futuros y el aciago fulgor de la desdicha como un ave petrificando el bosque con su canto (2)

There is no caminante (wanderer, but more literally, walker) but rather the caminar, the walking itself, is the subject of the preposition. The transparency invoked at the opening of the poem is here contradicted by the thickets of the future. Walking is writing, while the thickets are of course also the thickets of language. In an obvious reference to Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “Correspondances,” Paz also calls these “espesuras” “oh bosque de pilares encantados” (4). 13 The future may be as entangled as the past, but the writing of the poem “makes-way” through the entanglements, and enacts the movement of presencing. Paz recognizes that language is opaque and transparency an illusion. However, this does not mean that there is no light inside of language, but only that such light is blinding and is thus unable to give us a clear view, neither of time nor of things. In El arco y la lira, Paz had said, “Criaturas luminosas habitan las espesuras del habla. . . . En el seno del lenguaje hay una guerra civil sin cuartel” (35). Walking is somewhere in between. The flashes within language reveal an inner conflict; they are blinding to be sure, but they also open up a clearing where the concealment of language is revealed. According to Heidegger, language is essentially dense, but poetic language is the place where the density of language can be disclosed. Gerald Bruns says that “it is to be deeply regretted that Heidegger never gave a course on the question. . . . What is called Dichten?” 14 Had he done so he would have asked us to listen to the German word for poetry, Dichtung, which on one level simply mean that which is said, and to hear the pun hidden therein: dicht, impermeable, thick, or dense. Language neither is nor can be transparent; it neither reveals nor translates things themselves. And yet, thought makes-way through language. Poetic language, conceived by Paz as a kind of writing, is precisely what joins and separates, what reveals and conceals. It is in poetic language that thought and things are related, whether it be in a fusion or in a struggle.

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In the poem, then, the aforementioned path, the caminar, comes up against the luminous yet unclear “guerra.” The phrase “el aciago / fulgor de la desdicha” refers us not only to an unfortunate suffering in general but also to the relationship that there is between suffering and saying: desdicha can be an upside down saying, that is to say, an unsaying, un desdecir. One would be tempted to “translate” desdicha as unsaid and as Ungedicht. Poetic language would thus include within itself what undoes it. The simile “como un ave / petrificando el bosque con su canto,” compares this saying with song, but the song does not clear the thickets, on the contrary, it petrifies them. Poetic language functions as both foundation and glue (cemento y cimiento, to recall another poem by Paz): it is both the basis of the walking and what cuts off its path. The petrified forest probably contains countless allusions, but Paz emphasizes the effect of poetry, of song upon the trees. If we consider the thickets of language we can see that the unfolding of the poem is parallel to that which Heidegger finds in Georg Trakl’s “Ein Winterabend.” The last stanza of Trakl’s poem reads as follows: Wanderer tritt still herein; Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle. Da erglänzt in reiner Helle Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein. 15

We have already seen how Paz relates suffering and saying. Here we can note that suffering, pain, petrifies not the forest but the threshold. Still, Paz’s dense forest can easily be thought of as nothing but a proliferation of thresholds constituted between any given two trees. Paz’s poem sets up a kind of movement outward, into the open, the far, and, of course, the dark forest; even though because of its circular structure, the movement outward turns out to be a movement inward as well. Trakl’s poem, however, deals precisely with a homecoming, a return from the inhospitable out there toward the home. Heidegger’s reading of Trakl does indeed highlight both the departure and the return. The opening of the second stanza reads: “Mancher auf der Wanderschaft / Kommt ans Tor auf dunklen Pfaden.” 16 The threshold is ambiguous because while it separates inside and outside, it does not give any indication of the direction of any given crossing of the threshold. In the second stanza Heidegger hears a call to “more than a few” to come home. But those more than a few are precisely those who hear the call of apartness and thus go into wandering. “These mortals are capable of dying as the wandering toward death. In death the supreme concealedness of Being crystallizes. Death has already overtaken every dying” (Poetry 200). Only those who have wandered through “darksome courses” are called to the threshold, because, in a way, those very courses are the threshold. Since the wanderer (in Spanish, caminante) crosses

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the threshold in silence, what is the role of speech and saying? Moreover, what is the role of poetry and song? And what is the call and who does the calling? Heidegger will refer later on to “the peal of stillness” (207). Where does it come from? Poetic language does not represent, neither in Paz nor in Trakl, the essence of things. In effect, it does not even illuminate them. The Christian symbolism behind the bread and wine under the limpid light, for example, remains forever on the other side of the petrified threshold. Light, as the “aciago fulgor de la desdicha” in Paz again does not make anything visible but is instead a blinding light. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, in every poem there is “a primal calling which bids the intimacy of world and thing to come” (206). Everything happens between a saying and a stilling that together constitute the song. In both poets we see poetic language in search of itself, petrified, perhaps, in the middle of its quest. Poetic language is not singular, but rather it is that which, like the surtidor, the river, and the caminar differs from itself, that which depends on its internal otherness to be, that which separates, and, in the threshold of being, stops. In Spanish we would say: lo que separa y se para. Always on the way toward. . . Heidegger’s reading of Trakl’s poem comes in a lecture entitled “Language,” which is not so much about Trakl’s poetry as it is about the difficulties we have in trying to discuss language in general by using language. Heidegger wants to establish a discussion or dialogue (Gespräch) with the poem in order to “enter into the speaking of language” (Poetry 190); that is, in order to be in the neighborhood where language speaks and in that way perhaps to hear the speaking. This neighborhood is not exactly a place to which we can go, but rather, for Heidegger, the place in which we authentically belong and in which perhaps we already are. The neighborhood then is nothing but a threshold. Heidegger does not refer to our speaking, or Trakl’s, or even the poet’s (“mastery consists precisely in this, that the poem can deny the poet’s person and name” [195]), but rather, the speaking of language itself. When language becomes a subject for discussion, or an object of elucidation, it therefore becomes a representation of language, something language itself is not. When we talk “about” language we leave the threshold, we no longer hear the language we speak as we talk. In speaking to and listening to the poem, in short, in conversing with the poem, Heidegger simply sets himself the modest goal of hearing language speak. When we say language speaks that in no way implies that whatever it is that we hear is intelligible. On the contrary, when we hear the poem we (may) hear the call of otherness, but an otherness that is no longer subjective, an otherness that in fact destroys all possible intelligibility. Paz had said “oyes el silencio,” but listening to language we hear (or do we?) “hoy es el silencio.” Heidegger says: “Language speaks as the peal of stillness” (207). To authentically hear language we have to hear its difference as well as its unintelligibility.

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Unlike Trakl’s wanderer or Paz’s poet, Heidegger takes a step back from the silence, but only in order to let it be heard. As Véronique Fóti points out, “with one hand, so to speak, [Heidegger] welcomes and valorizes the upsurge of alterity and estrangement in poetry; but with the other (and almost by a sleight of hand), he fits this alterity into an onto-historical vision and seeks to contain its disintegrative power.” 17 We could perhaps paraphrase this by saying that, on the one hand, Heidegger recognizes the “source” of alterity, but, on the other hand, he tries to sort it out. The radical alterity that the poem reveals is akin to the “alien voice” which Heidegger had identified with the call of conscience in section II, 2 of Being and Time: “In conscience Dasein calls itself. . . . The call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me.” 18 The call of conscience is uncanny because it calls in silence, and yet, it is heard. The call attests to the groundlessness and thrownness of Dasein. Furthermore, the call of conscience announces an originary Being-guilty of Dasein. But what does this guilt consist of? “In the structure of thrownness . . . there lies an essential nullity” (331) which is the ground of inauthenticity. Dasein is guilty because in its thrownness it is the basis of this nullity. Paradoxically, Heidegger’s step back is necessary not so much in order to hear the call but rather because he hears the call. Again, there is an ambiguity here. Is the step back a step into the abyss or towards a ground? At the threshold, can we tell? Because they are both structured in terms of a calling, the voice of conscience as the possibility of being guilty is clearly related to the hearing of language speak in the poem. This relation can only be articulated in the neighborhood where one hears a calling. One can only hear a calling because one is open to this calling; in other words, because one cares. “Care itself, in its essence, is permeated with nullity through and through” (331). The calling comes from a nothing within. But is it a calling to come home or to wander out? And how are homecoming and erring related to Being-guilty? This is not necessarily a moral question, for Being-guilty is a going out into wandering which is in effect a coming into one’s own. “When Dasein understandingly lets itself be called forth to this possibility [guilt], this includes a becoming free for the call—its readiness for the potentiality of getting appealed to. In understanding the call, Dasein is in thrall to [hörig] its ownmost possibility of existence” (334). Needless to say, the nullity here in question is the nothingness of temporality. Coming into one’s own is going out to meet oneself. When we hear the call of conscience or when we hear language speak in poetry, if we heed the call, we choose ourselves precisely by letting go of ourselves: “Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care” (374). Temporality is ecstatic in that we are always ahead (or behind) of ourselves. Which means we can only hear the call of conscience by responding to it. The alterity was always already within the same. Thus we dwell in the threshold.

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Such is the disintegrative power which Fóti identifies. Paz hears it as well. Here is his “vision” of holocaust: son llamas los ojos y son llamas lo que miran, llama la oreja y el sonido llama, braza los labios y tizón la lengua, el tacto y lo que toca, el pensamiento y lo pensado, llama el que lo piensa, todo se quema, el universo es llama (26)

To be sure, the fire here named is tied, first of all, to a particular bombing raid of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, which is the setting of the second part of Piedra de sol. However, it comes at the end of a long list of dying “victims.” which include Cassandra, Moctezuma, Robespierre, Trotsky, and others. What Paz emphasizes is their incredulous “look,” their silent cries, and what he calls “los ayes, los silencios . . . el ruido obscuro” (ibid). The flames that engulf and consume everything are also precisely the very call of conscience. The word llama, flame, is a pun on the verb llamar, to call. “Llama la oreja y el sonido llama” could easily be translated as “the ear calls, and sound (itself) calls.” This points up an important problem: it is not speech, or the speaking organ which calls but the ear itself. Moreover, it is not a sound that calls but the withdrawal of sound: in the word sonido we can also hear son ido, sound gone. Listening calls; silence calls. No phenomenology of perception can account for the call of conscience. The passage gathers together references to all five senses: ojos (sight), oreja (hearing), lengua (taste), tacto (touch), and a few lines further, al fin humo (smell). All of them call, but, as llamas, all of them are also consumed in the calling. Moreover, so is the recipient of the call: “el pensamiento / y lo pensado, llama el que lo piensa,” which says “Thought, the thought, and he who thinks are flames.” Conversely, if we remember Heidegger’s dictum, “In conscience Dasein calls itself,” the line might also be saying: “Thought calls, what is thought calls, the thinker calls.” All we can say is that there is a calling, and that this calling consumes. And perhaps this is precisely what calls for thinking. Speaking of another poem by Trakl, Heidegger says: “Trakl sees spirit not primarily as pneuma, something ethereal, but as a flame that inflames, startles, horrifies and shatters us. Flame is glowing lumination. What flame is the ek-stasis which lightens and calls forth radiance, but which may also go on consuming and reduce all to white ashes.” 19 What calls is at the threshold, the threshold is the neighborhood, the neighborhood is the rift. The question involved in listening to the call, which is a listening to the speaking of language is none other than the question of death, not individual death, not even our death, although it is of course involved, but death in general, even mass death and extermination. The call places us at the threshold of the

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unthinkable, and yet it is a call to thinking. Like the call, poetry takes thinking apart. And thinking must, if it heeds the call, follow the path opened up by poetry. For Heidegger poetry remains open to hearing the unspoken and, in its openness, allows language to speak through. Poetic language is thus what speaks purely, in that through poetic language, language speaks. As I have already stated, all that Heidegger wants to do in his essay on Trakl is listen to the speaking of language. What is spoken purely is not a content—it is the poem. There is a “bond between what we think and what we are told by language” (194), and the poem, in speaking purely, will reveal something about this bond. The poem might in a sense be the bond, or at least, the threshold between the spoken and the unspoken, between thought and the unthought (and the unthinkable), and between thought and speech. In trying to reach the essence of language, Heidegger ends up with a tautology: Language is—language, speech. Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth. The two span a realm in which we would like to become at home, so as to find a residence, a dwelling place for the life of man.

Heidegger is clearly aware that saying that language is language says nothing, but that is precisely the point. “Language speaks as the peal of silence.” This might be the mere play of paradox, but it guides all of Heidegger’s thinking on language. The paradox says something essential about language, about the unspoken in language which poetry hears, and hence to which poetry belongs. Heidegger’s tautology ends up in an abyss that falls upwards. His thinking abandons the philosophical, hence metaphysical concept of ground in favor of a poetic letting go. His passage is almost a lyrical flight of the imagination: language speaks, we hear it, we fall up into a depth; we dwell in that depth. Trying to explicate the passage as one would a poem would ignore the movement of the passage, which actually enacts a passage itself: the passage of time. Because of time, things come into presence. And things come into presence in the world. The peal of silence names this presencing. When Heidegger says language is language he is also saying there is duality, there is time. Heidegger’s own lyrical language is a saying, a calling which asks us to hear the presencing. “Things bear world. World grants things” (202). Hearing this granting-bearing is dwelling in time; it is neither a falling down nor a surging up, but a remaining in-between, in time, in pure division. Time is the neighborhood, the threshold where things and world are intimate. “But neither are they merely coupled together. For world and things do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Thus the two traverse the middle” (ibid). To hear language speak is not to understand,

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but simply to dwell in the middle. As Fóti puts it, “What belongs to the interval cannot be appropriated but only inter-rogated” (26). To dwell at the threshold is to hear a call, and, perhaps, if you are a poet, to give the call a sounding, in other words, to call back. The thinker may follow the poet into the threshold, which turns out to be a petrified abyss. Piedra de sol is nothing but the incarnation of this static movement. The poem tries to depict a going away and a coming back, but in effect it shows the impossibility of both. The “movement” goes from the petrified forest toward the blinding light in the thickets of language, and finally to the threshold of the world, which comes into being only because of the dif-ference of the other. 20 The world is not so much “seen” as maintained in being thanks to an indeterminate look (neither mine nor the other’s): “una mirada que sostiene en vilo / al mundo” (2). The scene crystallizes in the luminous appearance of the other: “el mundo ya es visible por tu cuerpo / es transparente por tu transparencia” (ibid). This is the first appearance of the second person pronoun “tú.” The feminine other, tú, is the threshold incarnate, but also the threshold petrified. The pronoun organizes the passage, but the grammatical ambiguities of the passage are not clarified; on the contrary, they become more acute. The play between the visible and the invisible makes a determination of transparency impossible. If the world is made visible “por tu cuerpo,” does this mean through that body or by the agency of that body? What is the status of the preposition? Where is it positioned? What the tú reveals is not so much the world, but rather the possibility of an I, a yo, which before, inasmuch as it was only a caminar, remained merely a part of the world. The other allows for the conjugation of verbs, it thus sets the poem in motion. But, ironically, once the wanderer comes into his own, the identity of the other, the tú, becomes confused with the world. Is the other, then, a threshold into the world? Or perhaps out of the world? The wanderer is solidified, like the forest perhaps, thanks to the presence of the other. He is no longer a caminar but a self which: voy por tu cuerpo como por el mundo, tu vientre es una plaza soleada, tus pechos dos iglesias donde oficia la sangre sus misterios paralelos (4)

The wanderer seems to be underway. However, unlike Trakl, at least as Heidegger reads him, Paz’s wanderer seems to be heading towards communion rather than apartness. Desire pushes him towards an intimacy which is an ecstatic joining with the landscape, its people, and the beloved. For Heidegger, the site of poetic language is in apartness not communion; although the movement out traced by Heidegger in Trakl turns out in effect

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to be a movement in, a return, the decline turns out to be a new beginning. “This language sings the song of home-coming in apartness, the home-coming which from the lateness of decomposition comes to rest in the earliness of a stiller, and still impending beginning” (Way 191). For Paz the movement is opposite but symetrical. The communion with the other is an attempt at homecoming which in effect turns out to be a departure. The other constitutes the self in a mutual appropriation which reveals the presencing of the world. But at the same time, these “gifts” of the other are ambivalent. The self coming into its own thanks to the other is also coming into its own consuming closedness. The joining fails and Paz’s language sings of apartness in homecoming: ardo sin consumirme, busco el agua y en tus ojos no hay agua, son de piedra, y tus pechos, tu vientre, tus caderas son de piedra, tu boca sabe a polvo, tu boca sabe a tiempo emponzoñado, tu cuerpo sabe a pozo sin salida (12)

The body of the recently discovered beloved loses its transparency and becomes a world, at times inhospitable. It encloses the self in its own selfconsuming prison. The threshold has truly turned to stone. There is no way out (or in); everything is petrified. And yet, the phrase “son de piedra” opens up a way. It must be heard in at least two ways. On the one hand it says that the other, which is now a world, is petrified, and that it petrifies the self in the process. But on the other hand, the phrase is also a refrain, almost an incantation which repeats itself as the other’s body parts are listed and thus breaks the stony silence: “son de piedra,” could very well mean sound (or song) of stone. Heidegger says that “language is ambiguous. . . . We shall hear nothing of what the poem says so long as we bring to it only this or that dull sense of unambiguous meaning” (LP 192). Son de piedra is the openness of the threshold, the noise which allows for vibration. Paz’s poem is a way of sounding the stone for what remains unsayable. When we remember that the sun stone is a calendar, it becomes obvious that such sounding is, again, a revelation of time and temporality. The line “tu boca sabe a tiempo emponzoñado” drives the point home. The poet’s journey, whether outward into the open or inward towards the home, is a search for an authentic time. The poet’s quest is described early on as “busco sin encontrar, busco un instante” (6); but it later becomes “no hay nada frente a mí, sólo un instante” (10). The instant is both what blocks the way and the way out. But only if it is thought as pure division. Time, like the other, like language, is totally ambiguous. It is poisonous, and yet salutary; its movement both constitutes the self in the world that tears it apart. The self and the other cannot be fused, and yet in time they penetrate each other.

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Their interpenetration is pain, it is also the threshold. It is the pain that renders the self different from the other; it is also the pain that rends the self from the other. Pain is the “son de piedra” and also the “tiempo emponzoñado.” “Pain rends,” says Heidegger, “It is the rift. . . . Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates, yet so that at the same time it draws everything to itself, gathers it to itself. . . . Pain is the joining agent in the rending that divides and gathers. . . . Pain is dif-ference itself” (Way 204). Throughout Paz’s poem, the constellation yo-tú-mundo is never stabilized. Each element constantly differs from itself and continues on in its painful errancy and lostness. But, again, that is the point: “caminar” is actually “desvarío.” As Heidegger says, “The poetic work speaks out of an ambiguous ambiguousness” (Way 192). Finally, let us return to time. For Paz, as for Heidegger, in spite of whatever the poet might search for, communion, unity, authenticity, he will always remain on the threshold. “El poeta es un ser aparte” (Arco 190), says Paz. The reason for this apartness is poetic language itself. The saying of the poet suffers from a “dualidad última e irreductible” (ibid), and the allotment of the poet is to belong to this duality. It is because of duality that poetry is dangerous, it never says what it means. Such is “lo que se ha llamado la peligrosidad de la poesía” (ibid). However, even if reason can name (llamar) poetry dangerous, poetry still beckons (llamar) reason to its dangerousness. The path of thought is the path toward this mutual calling. This mutual calling is a kind of mutual appropriation. But this appropriation is also “the most extreme depropriation” (Lacoue-Labarthe 222). We are at the threshold, again, of the dialogue between poetry and thinking, a dialogue which can also be called a “dispropriating Gespräch” (Fóti 23). Appropriation and dispropriation interpenetrate each other; together they constitute the structure of an event. An event can only take place because of duality. In Piedra de sol there are two apostrophes that speak to the event. The first one, “before” the dividing date, “Madrid, 1937,” exclaims “oh vida por vivir y ya vivida” (12). The event is nothing but a passage between two notnows that have never been nor will ever be nows. The verse speaks of “life,” but that life has nothing to do with the speaker. In “vida por vivir,” the preposition “por” points both to a future and to an outside mediating agent. The phrase can be translated as “life to come” or as “life because of living.” Either way the speaker is alien to the life in question. In “ya vivida” we have another duality. The phrase says something like “life already lived,” but it also implies “ya vi vida,” “I have already seen life.” On the one hand there is a celebration of life for life’s sake as witnessed by the poet; on the other hand there is a lamentation of the passage of time which keeps life elsewhere. In either case, however, the poet remains apart. The second apostrophe comes after the date and during the raid. As the lovers are “united” in their lovemaking and thus able to ignore the outside world there comes an exclamation:

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“oh ser total” (18). Here the duality is more obvious. Is the line celebrating a consumated union or is it a prayer for one? It is impossible to determine. But what both apostrophes show is that the temporal movement of appropriationdispropriation, which is one and the same movement, constitutes an event. This event can be invoked, it can be remembered, or it can be awaited, but it cannot be grasped, and it cannot be stopped. What we have here is the juncture of time and space, the movement of différance. 21 In the “second” part of the poem Paz indeed seems to privilege space over time, almost as a way to escape from time or transcend time: “no hay tiempo ya, ni muro; ¡espacio, espacio, / abre la mano, coge esta riqueza. . . !” (20). But space can only lead back to time. The open hand of the other (which is space itself as well as the beloved tú here addressed) will only close itself around the poet. In the “first” part of the poem we have the following lines: el instante se abisma y sobrenada rodeado de muerte, amenazado por la noche y su lúgubre bostezo, amenazado por la algarabía de la muerte vivaz y enmascarada el instante se abisma y se penetra, como un puño que se cierra . . . (10)

To consecrate the instant, so to speak, Paz uses the metaphor of the hand. The opening hand spaces and the closing hand temporalizes. They are conjoined in the maintenance of the poem. Space holds time, but “sobrenada,” on top of nothing; and time abysses space, it opens it up to movement and falling. Later on we read: “caigo sin fin desde mi nacimiento / caigo en mí mismo sin tocar mi fondo” (30). Time and space are intimate; they interpenetrate each other. The instant is not a now, it is a threshold: the becoming space of time, the becoming time of space. “Nacer y morir: un instante” (155), said Paz in El arco y la lira. Life and death are conjoined at the threshold. We should not miss the Nietzschean overtones of the passage. In a reference to the philosopher, Paz said that poetry reveals “aquello que Nietzsche llamaba ‘la vivacidad incomparable de la vida’” (ibid). Here the poet speaks of a “muerte vivaz.” The phrase names the duality of presencing. In space, time turns back upon itself; in time, space comes full circle. What is “por vivir” is a “ya vivida” death. The only “ser total” is that which eternally returns. Beings come into presence at the threshold, where life is expropriated, where death is appropriated. The threshold might be the site of danger (amenaza), but it is also the site of the saving power, for the racket (algarabía) of death is also the noise of life. Trakl’s wanderer crossed the threshold in silence, Paz’s does so with an anguished scream. But this scream is only a “silencio que se cubre de signos” (28). Can we hear (or see) the

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difference? Nothing is at the center of both and there is nothing between them. This nothing is time; this nothing is pain. ¿no pasa nada cuando pasa el tiempo? —no pasa nada, sólo un parpadeo del sol, un movimiento apenas, nada, (ibid)

For Paz, the instant is incarnate in the blink of an eye. But nothing happens in the blink of an eye, or rather, almost nothing. In the blink of an eye, the self admits the other into its self-identity. 22 They both almost come into presence, but nothing happens. Presencing is duality: already and no longer. That is the structure of presencing: almost, apenas. A penas hardly names the threshold turned to stone. It also scarcely names the pain. 23 Paz’s poem heads for the “puerta del ser” (32), but it never gets there, or perhaps it is already there. In any case, it nearly makes it: “quiero seguir, ir más allá, y no puedo” (ibid). The poem cannot go beyond the threshold; it barely moves from the threshold, but that is the point. There is no threshold, there is only a neighborhood of pain. This neighborhood is the abyss of time, where the instant incarnate is torn apart from itslf: “se despeñó el instante en otro y otro” (ibid). All within a blink of an eye, which, upon opening, will see the shimmering “sauce de cristal” and “chopo de agua” and will thus have to blink again. Moira has allotted time, Moira has allotted pain. The poet of modernity can almost hear it resonating on the sun stone, “un movimiento apenas, nada.” 2. RETURN ON THE WAY TO A CONCLUSION: THE THRESHOLD OF SAYING In what follows, I would simply try to consider the problem of saying as sketched out in the opening lines of Paz’s poem “Solo a dos voces.” As we saw in Parmenides, thought and being are related in that they belong to an ambiguous same. Poetic saying opens the duality of the same. For Heidegger, language is the site where the event of being takes place. Furthermore, thought is fundamentally a listening to language, particularly poetic language. “When we listen to the poet and, in our own fashion consider what his renunciation says, we are already staying in the neighborhood of poetry and thinking.” 24 Or rather, we are almost there. For Paz, the way to the nearness of being is through a meditation which leads to “el olvido de todas las enseñanzas y la renuncia de todos los conocimientos.” (Arco 103). His way of listening to language is to hold his breath: “Pensar es respirar. Retener el aliento, detener la circulación de la idea: hacer el vacío para que aflore el ser” (ibid). They are both concerned with the same question: How to listen authentically to language? For in its very essence, the saying of language is soundless. However, this does not mean that either Heidegger or Paz have

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fallen into a kind of “mysticism;” rather, it means that they recognize that “the call to which we respond must let itself be known as a call, as a call directed at us but whose origin is autonomous from us.” 25 The origin of all saying is a hearing, a divided, articulated origin. This is what “Solo a dos voces” says/hears: Si decir No al mundo al presente hoy (solsticio de invierno) no es decir Sí decir es solsticio de invierno hoy en el mundo no es decir Sí decir mundo presente no es decir ¿qué es Mundo Solsticio Invierno? ¿Qué es decir? 26

In these few lines we find gathered (and placed in question) all of the main problems which guide the work of Octavio Paz. The problematic of Being, of the world, of the power of the word and of poetry are all interrelated in a kind of semantic constellation which the poem organizes and presents. At times, one illuminates the other, the other cancels out the third, or the last interpenetrates itself with the first. If we wanted to elucidate what these lines want to say, we would have to say something. That is to say, we would have to have in advance the answer to the question raised by the poem: What is to say? This is not to say that all saying is impossible, but rather that whatever it is that guides any saying is indeterminate. Poetic saying neither comes from the world, nor from, say, a place in time, but rather from what Heidegger calls apartness and what Paz calls “la otra voz.” This other voice is silent; it itself does not say. The poet, however, belongs to this unsaid. As Heidegger puts it: “The poet’s work means: to say after—to say again the music of the spirit of apartness that has been spoken to the poet. . . . The poet’s work is only a listening” (Way 188). Paz’s poem is an attempt to reenact, again and again, this listening. It plays with two typographies to simulate the two voices, but in effect neither of the two scripts can actually be the other voice, nor in fact even represent it. The listening in question cannot be said. In a way, what the poem does is point toward the status of any enunciation, which is, at the very least, a radically ambivalent status. Independently of the dialectical play between the sí and the no, the play between the sí (yes) and the si (without an accent, meaning if) nuances the

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poem and places it under the tone of the conditional voice. At a purely structural level, we could reread these lines and underline one of its possible logics. Ignoring for a moment the content (theme, subject, or object) of each grammatical unit, the poem can be sketched as follows: “Si decir no [a algo] no es decir sí. [entonces] decir [algo] [tampoco] es decir sí, [por tanto] decir [algo] no es decir ¿qué es . . . [algo]?” Which I translate as: “If saying no [to something] is not saying yes, [then] saying [something] is not saying yes [either], [therefore] saying [something] is not saying: What is . . . [something]?” I will soon fill in all these “somethings.” For the moment let us note that the structure of the poem itself carries us, by means of an implacable logic, towards an enigma and an interrogation; moreover, towards the questioning of the interrogation. The first clause of the syllogism simply tells us that to negate is not to affirm, that to reject the world (our first “something”; although it is not a thing) is not to accept it. The statement is simple enough, one cannot affirm and deny the same thing at the same time. But is the statement an affirmation or a negation? For Paz, poetry is precisely what tries to affirm and deny at the same time. And yet, as Nietzsche puts it, “We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any ‘necessity’ but only of an inability.” 27 Is Paz’s poetic statement a transcending of this inability? To say no to the world is to flee, to escape, perhaps towards an elsewhere: poetry. At least towards a certain kind of poetry, the kind of hermetic, escapist aestheticism which Paz seems to be attacking but which, paradoxically, he was himself often accused of writing. But no, what the poem here says is not no nor yes; it is a refusal of both. Is it a negation then? Rather, it is the recognizing of the aporetic status of the world, to which affirmation and negation are irrelevant. The poet hears a call to either affirm or deny, but he cannot place the call. It is worth noting that Paz gives us very specifically the date of the possible negation of the world: “hoy (solsticio de invierno).” Does this imply that saying no to the world tomorrow or yesterday would be a way of saying yes? Moreover, is it possible to say no to the present from a perspective that is not itself present? As we can see, the simplicity of the clause “si decir no no es decir sí” is purely apparent. Saying no to the present is trying to refuse a gift. But a true gift can no more be accepted than refused. A gift is not a thing but rather the presencing of beings in the world. What gives is time. And the poet belongs to time, rather than the other way around. The multiple variants and possibilities of the verb to say (decir) begin to make themselves felt. The second clause of the syllogism says something with respect to being: saying what today is in the world is impossible if today is Winter solstice, because in the other hemisphere of the world it is necessarily Summer solstice. Therefore, the second part of the clause vacilates: “no / es decir / sí.” On the one hand, if we hear the idiomatic or familiar sense of “es decir,” the

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phrase seems to be a mere clarification which, upon closer examination, turns out to be a complete change of opinion; but on the other hand the phrase also affirms beyond a shadow of a doubt the unity of opposites. Winter and Summer are conjoined today in the world in a saying yes and no at once, a saying which is precisely the solstice itself, the turning back. For actually the phrase “decir es solsticio de invierno” could simply be a definition of saying as such. Decir could thus be defined as turning back, going to the furthest extreme (the threshold of the hearing) and then returning. If we remember the syllogistic structure of the poem, we will see that the second clause is conditioned by the first, which produces the following oxymoron: “si decir no no es decir sí, no es decir sí.” The third clause of the syllogism turns to the world and says something about it. If the first examines the possibility (or impossibility) of saying no to the world, and the second one the saying of what is in the world, the third, instead, explores the possibilities of saying, not only what the world is, but of saying the world itself. As before, the only definition offered by the poem itself is a negative one: saying the world is not asking what the world is. All notions of space and time, place and date, world and solstice are put in question. The question, however, does not offer us an access to the world (or out of it); it does, nevertheless, reveal that there is a relation between saying and the world, that our access to (or escape from) the world depends, perhaps, on the nature of saying. Saying is the threshold. Can we escape hearing the question? How to say saying without saying? For Paz, poetic language is, not the transcendence of this aporia, but the saying of the saying itself. Only poetry is able to question and answer at once, to affirm and deny at the same time. But it does so in another voice, one which has nothing to do with abilities or necessities, the one we do not hear. We could perhaps say that the poem is, so to speak, on the threshold of sense. But in which direction? Being is not, it happens. Being presences in the world, but will never find itself in the world, for it inhabits language. Poetic language says no more than this. In its saying (sí o no, it does not matter) poetry inaugurates a world, it gives a present, and it constitutes a today (hoy). According to Vattimo, access to the originary world spoken by the poetic word is access to difference. “In order for the internal differences of the world to unfold (display themselves), in order for a world to take place (give itself), it is necessary that in some way the other of the world also take place.” 28 The world is articulated in language. But, as Heidegger says, “our relation to language is vague, obscure, almost speechless” (NL 58). This almost is the key, and it is, again, a penas. The poet almost hears language speak. The world resonates in silence. Paz’s poem differs from the world, but it also defers the world, and it carries it over to the “hoy (solsticio de invierno).” The solstice is the site of turning back. The poet’s saying is a turning. But where? Toward the world? Away from it? In effect, both. The world comes into presence in a saying that

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is really a turning. There is a relationship between language and the world and there is a relationship between language and the poet. This relationship is a mutual belonging, a mutual hearing, and a mutual saying; in other words an appropriating (or dispropriating) Gespräch. Language is the relationship between the poet and the world, and it happens at the threshold of a saying. Toward the end of “Solo a dos voces” a “voice” addresses the poet and silently tells him what it is that he says: . . . lo que olvidas, es lo que dices: hoy es solsticio de invierno en el mundo hoy estás separado en el mundo hoy es el mundo (160)

We cannot know what the authentic word is, at best, perhaps, we can almost hear it. Language speaks in the peal of stillness. Paz arrives at the threshold where this peal resounds, and, i spite of himself, turns back. But his turn is already structured by the solstice. The poet tries to maintain himself genuinely open to that otherness which never ceases to call. He almost makes it. Petrified, at the threshold, he thus remains separated. In the word “separado” there resonates what the poet knows: sé parado, frozen, stopped, standing, I know. We can know our own inauthenticity but that does not make us any more authentic. In this division, however, poetry can take place. The last line, “hoy es el mundo” (is it an affirmation?), should perhaps be inflected as a question: ¿Oyes el mundo?

Chapter Seven

On the Field of Representation

Borges once said that any artist creates his or her own precursors, since the work of art, if it is a true work, must by necessity modify the way we look at the past. 1 Some artists go further and modify the way we look at the world. After Marcel Duchamp, for example, the question of what constitutes an art object, let alone its precursors, can never be again taken for granted. Allow me to illustrate. Recently, the library where I work was being remodeled and the men’s bathroom was temporarily out of service. I was walking through the stacks and toward a hallway when, to my surprise, as I turned a corner I encountered, there, in the middle of the hall, a detached urinal, lying on its side, just lying there, useless, for all to see. Despite the construction work all around me, which should have given me a context, at that moment, it was impossible for me not to have an aesthetic experience. That urinal had much to reveal about the essence and origin of the work of art. It was not merely a found object, but rather, as Rrose Sélavy would put it, it was a true “objet dard.” 2 And this dart object had a definite sting to it. It hit you, it opened something up, it revealed something, in short, it called forth thinking. But how? By calling, by saying look at me, by asking what am I doing here, by setting up a Gespräch, a dialogue of sorts, between heterogeneous genres. By asking, in the world, questions related to art; by answering, in art, impenetrable questions pertaining to the earth. The urinal, in short, spoke, or, at any rate, I heard something. Ever since Duchamp we can find objects of all sorts, readymades galore in the various museums of the world, but they tend to remain silent. If they raise any questions, they nevertheless remain at best merely ontic (how did this carburator get here?), or at worst psychologistic (what could so and so have been thinking?). The question “is this art?” becomes merely a rhetorical question, devoid of any authentic meditation on what is (with emphasis on 113

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the being of the is) art. And yet a urinal? Found in a hallway? In a library? Can raise the question of being? Of art? How now? What is, anyway, the relationship between this particular receptacle and Duchamp’s? Is there some universal urinality that they share? And what would that have to do with art? In what follows I will speak of two figures, Octavio Paz and Marcel Duchamp, who have little or nothing in common except perhaps an ambiguous relationship to what we call modernism, and who, in their approach to art, have managed to transform the role of the critic. In the process, they have raised important questions around the problem of representation: What is the relationship between language and image? Between image and form? And, to put it in somewhat Nietzschean terms, between art and life? French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, in his own book on Duchamp, has shown the crucial importance that the artist’s project has for an understanding of the very idea of critique. 3 The act of thinking and speaking about art can no longer limit itself to “criticism,” although in a way it also cannot escape the limits that criticism as decision imposes on such activity. As Octavio Paz has said, also with respect to Marcel Duchamp, “Today we have criticism instead of ideas, methods instead of systems.” 4 Art itself must be criticism; similarly, criticism must be art. Does this mean that the critic should come up with “creative” interpretations? Yes and no. Criticism is not simply a matter of interpretation, certainly not of explication, but rather a very particular form of being with the work of art. Both criticism and art are modalities of thought, and it is here that the problem of their respective functions can be raised. For Paz, confronting modern art is confronting a heterogeneous space, a space that is not accessible to simple vision, mere intuition, or even complex phenomenology. An art critic must see the pictures between the lines of text, and read the text, which both frames and weaves through the pictures. Speaking of Picasso, Paz suggests that the “reality” represented in his work “es un más allá que no está antes ni después de nosotros sino aquimismo: es lo que está dentro de cada uno . . . el sexo, las pasiones, los sueños.” 5 Modern art belongs to what Paz has called a tradition of rupture. Yet, there is nothing modern about rupture itself. Rupture is what happens when any system confronts its own limits, tries to go beyond them and hence explodes them. Interestingly, the three figures that he singles out as exemplars for the exhaustion and then rupture of their tradition (and in a way, their world) are Sor Juana, Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Duchamp. In his passionate affirmation of negation and in his brilliant, clownish and erotic flamboyance, Picasso is like Lope de Vega; but in his total intellectual embrace of the negative, and in creating artworks which in negating themselves completely exhaust the genre, Duchamp is like Sor Juana. Sor Juana’s Primero sueño narrates an intellectual journey of the soul towards a vision of philosophical

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knowledge. But, as Paz points out, Sor Juana breaks the mold in various ways. First, she has no guide, no Virgil to her Dante. Second, she has no individuality; the journey is completely impersonal. But third, and most important, there is no revelation: “la visión se resuelve en la no-visión. . . . Suspendida en lo alto de su mental pirámide hecha de conceptos, el alma encuentra que los caminos que se le abrem son abismos y despeñaderos sin fin.” 6 Paz glosses the multiple operative meanings of the word “sueño” in the context of Sor Juana’s work. While most of them may not be applicable in today’s semantically more simplified world, they are important for what they reveal (or not) about the function of vision, revelation, truth, and aesthesis of the work of art in general. Sueño can have any of the following meanings, all of which are in a relation to revelation and concealment, but are variations from them: nightmare, pesadilla (enypnion, insomnium); apparition, aparición (phantasma, visum); enigma, enigma (oneiros, somnium); prophecy, profecía (horama, visio); oracular dream, sueño oracular (chrematismos, oraculum) (472,481). To these, Paz adds the colloquial meaning of dream, sueño “en el sentido de ilusión y vanidad” (497), which would apply, in a sense, to the very dream to understand knowledge and perception as such. This latter meaning has a way of becoming the dominant one whenever one is dealing with an epistemological or aesthetic system that has reached its limits. Language obviously effects a destabilization of both the vision and the understanding. A strange inversion takes place. The purely phenomenological seeing is placed on the text while the hermeneutic reading is superimposed on the image. But when the picture, image, vision, appearance is so radically plural and heterogeneous, we have something that goes beyond the mise-en-abyme effect. Of course there is a figurative play of mirrors, where there is nothing but more lines between the lines, but the confusion between what you see and what you say, between a line of text and a drafted line opens the “abyme” into a space that is no longer merely goemetrical, or at least not Euclidian. Sor Juana is related to the tradition of hermeticism, and, not surprisingly, she opens it up in very paradoxical ways. “En el siglo XX aparece una insólita prolongación de estas ideas: Marcel Duchamp” (489). The space of criticism and the space opened up by art are heterogeneous. But this does not mean that they thus cannot be articulated. It is only by ignoring the distinctions between the lines of vision and the lines of text that criticism can take place. For while the dream is silent about the image/text, line/line indeterminacy, the critic, even if only pointing out such indeterminacy, has already made a decision. “The pun,” as Octavio Paz tells us, “is a miraculous device because in one and the same phrase we exalt the power of language to convey meaning only in order, a moment later, to abolish it more completely” (Appearance 6). Artists like Duchamp take this “miraculous device” into the realm of vision and highlight the imbalance this produces, critics, on the

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other hand, tend to try and restore the balance and thus convey meaning only in order. To reveal is, in the end, not to veil. To reveal, however, is also to make novels, fables about our dreams, and, perhaps most importantly, to have a vivid imagination (both of which are meanings of novelar). Revelation and concealment, as Heidegger tells us, are part and parcel of the same process. Every unconcealment also always hides something, and every concealment also reveals. 7 In that it always points to itself, Paz’s “miraculous device” of the pun might very well reveal this mechanism. When a pun reveals two or more meanings, it conceals meaning in general and unconceals itself. Similarly, when something is concealed, what is unconcealed is precisely the very concealment. The site of revelation is its end, is background and its essence: to reveal is not to veil space, but to reveal is also to unfold in time, in diachrony—in relations about dreams that are not narrative. The time-space of the dialogue between knowledge and the soul in Sor Juana, like the timespace of the dialogue between literature and art in Paz, is fictitious. The pun conceals the hinge, which articulates time and space. And while it emphasizes the primacy of the visual, it also points up its limits. The discovery of fictional time in painting is both visual and textual. Moreover, it is also tactile, for it depends on an alternation which creates a weave that is too fast or too small for the eye (something akin to what Duchamp called “delay,” instead of painting 8 ). As Rosalind Krauss points out, “modernism solemnly legislated [rhythm] out of the visual domain, asserting the separation of the senses that will always mean that the temporal can never disrupt the visual from within, but only assault it from a position that is necessarily outside, external, eccentric.” 9 According to Octavio Paz, “Picasso has rendered our century visible to us; Duchamp has shown us that the arts, including the visual, are born and come to an end in an area that is invisible.” The philosophy of reflection, and the painting that would be its complement become opaque. Vision, by necessity, loses its primacy; the artist is no mere geometer who would or could represent it in proper proportion. To see or not to see? What emerges from reflection on art is a collection of ruins, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term: 10 a series of fragments which fail to form a unified whole, but which nevertheless point to the essential impossibility of any whole. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, “By this time, no doubt, fragmentation, spacing, exposition, piecework, and exhaustion have begun to arrive at their extreme limit.” 11 Duchamp forces us to confron the same loss of sense that Sor Juana “saw” in her sueño. From the Ptolemaic chosmos to fractal geometry there is only a peek. Having seen would only be a privileged position if the goal were to state the facts and measure the consequences. In the strict sense, to see or not to see is an irrelevant question. For art reveals the failure of geometry. The realm of the invisible continues to be articulated with the visible. The

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result of such articulation, like the unconscious affect, cannot be seen, but it can be felt, perhaps touched. Let us retrace, for a moment, some aspects of vision as it has been thought in the West. In “Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales saw. . . ,” 12 Michel Serres has shown how geometry emerged as a technique of measuring that which is inaccessible to touch. To measure is to align, to cover over. When Thales measured the pyramids by their shadows he used no ruler, thus he discovered a way to transfer units away from the immediate, graspable space. “Vision is tactile without contact.” 13 But since he was using shadows, because of the movement of the sun, he was also measuring time. In order for geometry to “work,” it became necessary to freeze time. Rhythm was forgotten and the ground for Platonism was set. Vision, as it was later thought, could only conceal the temporal, and tact was forsaken by theory. Thales “announces the philosophy of representation” (Hermes 91) which can measure and repeat anything visible, but which does not explain the fact that a shadow was cast. The shadow is ready at hand, available, it can be directly measured because it can be touched. The pyramid, however is unavailable yet occurrent. It is not ready at hand but it is present and intelligible in that it projects. In other words, we only understand the pyramid as present at hand, and its very presence at hand is what hides its being as being. It projects a shadow, we measure it, and promptly forget that a shadow was projected. We treat the pyramid as if it were transparent. This ideal of knowledge is, as Heidegger puts it, “a subspecies [of understanding] which has strayed into the legitimate task of grasping the presentat-hand in its essential unintelligibility.” 14 A knowledge is hidden in the opacity of the pyramid. This knowledge, and time, cannot simply be uncovered and displayed to sight, but they do return in the tale of history (of mathematics), i.e., in fiction. Fables of origin shed no light, yet they do open something up. The problems of geometry and of painting, of origins and of history, of vision and of touch (not to mention hearing) are all intertwined in a fabric that we can only call text. A number of painters, Duchamp, Picasso, have entered into this problematic and revealed (but can such a word still be used?) the various configurations of the play between the visible and the invisible. “A text,” Lyotard tells us, “is that which cannot be moved. The intervals which separate its elements [are but] projections on the sensible [of that which is not] . . . language.” 15 It is precisely in not being moved that the text is most portable. When we read, we read its spaces, or rather, its spacing. What do we see? Nothing, movement, time, figure. “Fiction, which is what makes a figure with a text, consists entirely of a play between intervals.” 16 To restate the problem in terms of geometry, let us simply refer to Serres’ discussion of Euclid’s definitions in Hermès V. 17 Euclid uses the terms semeion, grammé, and epiphaneia, for point, line, and surface respectively. Serres reminds us of the geometrical underpinnings of our thought by point-

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ing out the non-geometrical transformations the terms have undergone. A surface crisscrossed by lines and points is indeed a revelation, an appearance, or an apparition of signs—in other words, again, a text. What we call knowledge, moreover, at least since the Greeks, has been a problem not of thought but of equilibrium, epistemé. Let us then move to Duchamp who in his work opened up the possibilities of a thought, which is “precise but inexact” (Lyotard 22). As Octavio Paz has pointed out, Marcel Duchamp did not really have a philosophy of painting but rather thought of “painting as philosophy”: “it is not brilliance that he [was] after, but rigor” (Appearance 9, 7). More than anyone, Duchamp has shown the limitations of the visual field, and has attempted in his work to get away from what he called “retinal art.” His work emerges in the age of technology and is populated, thematically, by all the distopic visions of modernism. However, unlike the painting of de Chirico or the poetry of Apollinaire, Duchamp’s work recognizes the optical dimension in the essence of technology. His machines, or “antimachines,” as they have often been called, reveal nothing to the eye. According to Paz, “their function is more sexual than mechanical. They are ideas, or better still, relations” (Appearance 10). These relations, however, are not proportional, they are not quantifiable. According to Lyotard, Duchamp constructs “a geometrical machine functioning ‘in reverse,’ not to make commensurable, but to unmeasure” (93). Ever since Thales measured the pyramids, man has inhabited the realm of technique. “Different techniques give rise to other ones. . . . Technique is the origin of man, his perpetuation and his repetition” (Hermes 91). Duchamp’s era remains within the technological horizon. However, as Heidegger tells us, “technology is [also] a mode of revealing,” it arrives in the realm of aletheia, truth as unconcealment. 18 Duchamp’s technique both does and does not escape this quandary. As a technique of paradox, the only truth it reveals is that of its own concealment. Modern physics, Heidegger continues, has discovered “that its realm of representation remains inscrutable and incapable of being visualized.” 19 The retina, as Duchamp knows, will no longer do, neither in science nor in art. To remain attached to it is to be captured by the nihilism of the modern age. Duchamp’s work instead, as Paz puts it, “opens onto regions that are not bound by time or space” (88), at least not in a measurable, visible way. His objets trouvés or readymades, for example, are both a critique of art and a revelation of the instrumentality of the modern age: “everything that man has handled has the fatal tendency to secrete meaning” (24). Their origin and their destination are not within the visible realm, only their process, or rather, the traces of their “delay” are. Such delay is only knowable when yanked out of time, stabilized. The decontextualization of the readymades allows for no such equilibrium, no such epistemology. As Duchamp puts it, “Et qui libre?”

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Duchamp’s work has often been read as a series of speculations on the fourth dimension. 20 His major work, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, abandoned, “finally unfinished” in 1923, is what many thought was Duchamp’s farewell to retinal art altogether. In it, Duchamp raised all the major questions I have been trying to address here. I shall briefly sketch out a reading of the work. The Large Glass is, first of all, not in a state of equilibrium. It is divided into two incongruous sections: the realm of the bride above, a projection of four dimensional space onto the transparent two dimensional glass; and the realm of the bachelors below, a three dimensional projection of the bachelors, empty suits or malic moulds, in perfectly appropriate perspective. The question is how are the two realms articulated? How are they superimposed? And what is the relationship between them? First of all, the Large Glass is more than anything else a text. It is part of what Duchamp, developing new conditions for a language, called: “The Search for ‘prime words’ (‘divisible’ only by themselves and by unity)” (Essential 31). Every element in the Glass forms a singularity. There is no ‘background’ to the individual elements for, as the work is done in glass, the eye can literally see between the lines, and thus lose the sense of perspective. The work emphasizes the element of projection. Yet, while the bachelor realm is done according to the principles of construzione legittima, the realm of the bride has more in common with cubism. 21 In both cases, however, the transparent background adds a new dimension. The articulation between the two realms takes place at the horizon, where, we are told, the bride’s clothes lay crumpled. We see the horizon as a line, but it is a trace of a plane, which makes a line of sight from the bachelors to the bride impossible. Lyotard calls the horizon a “Paradoxical hinge. It marks both the separation of the top from the bottom and at the same time their symmetry and incongruence” (Lyotard 153). The so called “Handler of Gravity,” which was planned but never executed would have opened up passages between the two spaces. “Gravity and center of gravity,” says Duchamp, “make for horizontal and vertical in space3. In a plane2, the vanishing point corresponds to the center of gravity, all these parallels meeting [there] just as verticals meet at the center of gravity” (Essential 87). The Oculist Witnesses, on the right hand side of the bachelor machine, paradoxically both stabilize and destabilize the Glass. They direct the bachelor’s shots, which miss the bride, as well as the spectator’s gaze, which fares no better. Interestingly, the witnesses are etched into the glass, which means they are particularly perceptible by touch. Feeling, in a sense, guides vision, and the failure of vision, again, reveals time. The Glass confronts us with the problem of representation. Our failure is wanting to see (the) now. As Lyotard puts it, “The gaze comes always too soon” (198–9). But what does coming to see mean? Is a phenomenology of art possible? Let us take a step back and start again, this time, at “The Origin of the Work

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of Art.” Heidegger’s meditation on the work of art starts with a circular logic, which is almost, but not quite, tautological: “The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist.” 22 From “The Origin,” we can gather that there are at least two origins, which in turn originate from a third origin, namely art. But art is not an origin, for it is merely a word “to which nothing real any longer corresponds” (17). The origin, then, is multiple and complicated. It is a series of circles which circle back on themselves and which cannot be displayed, for they always fold back and return. For the moment let us say, although Heidegger does not himself say so explicitly, that the origin is a source, a spring, a movement, a jump. What jumps and from what ground? This is the topic of this study, and it remains to be seen. Heidegger’s circular logic is not vicious; it escapes tautology because in admitting a movement from the beginning, it allows for an element of heterogeneity. In other words, the origin of the work of art is heterogeneous with the work itself. The work is a thing, it is also a made thing, but the making itself of the thing is not its origin. The artwork is “allo agoreuei. The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory” (19–20). Heidegger shows how the West has thought the being of entities and finds basically three modalities in which things can be seen to appear. But according to Kant, says Heidegger, everything that is, whether it appears or not, is a thing. A thing is “whatever is not simply nothing” (21). There are mere things, there are equipment things, and there are artwork things. The list is by no means exhaustive; Heidegger is not giving us a classification or a taxonomy and he is not making absolute claims about the truth of their modes of thing-being. Heidegger’s statement is very problematic, and it goes to the crux of the matter, which Derrida in “Restitutions” identifies as being in dispute between Heidegger and art critic Meyer Schapiro. Schapiro points out that Heidegger is merely discussing these three modes of being as already posited. Derrida adds that it is not so simple. Heidegger, says Derrida, “is occupied . . . with removing the thing from the metaphysical determinations which . . . have set upon it [and these three modes are part and parcel of Western metaphysics], covering it over and doing it injury (Überfall).” 23 In thinking of the being of things the West has inherited the form-matter dichotomy and then applied it unthinkingly to all things. The form-matter distinction is one that is relevant to equipment things, which are made things, and hence it is a distinction that is related to craftsmanship and techné. We must be aware that when we think mere things as equipment denuded of its equipmentality we are doing a violence to the thing’s being, we are actually superimposing a mode of being upon the thing which may or may not pertain to it. As Derrida points out, these three modes are not without a certain violence “fallen upon (Überfall) the being-thing of the thing” (300). And Heidegger by no means exempts his own hermeneutic from this bind. These

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three modalities have more to do with how we try to think things than with how they are in truth; which is not to say that these modalities are false or have nothing to reveal. Quite the contrary, truth may happen in the process of thinking through things, equipment, or art works, but truth itself is not some thing that precedes our trying to think it through. Heidegger asks, “Are being and truth essentially related to each other?” 24 He returned often to this question. And while the answer on the surface would seem to be yes, the problem of thinking through that relationship is one that received many different and contradictory modulations. Truth is an event, the event of unconcealment not of the thing itself but of the fact that the thing was concealed. Every coming into presence is an unconcealment, and every unconcealment as such is an event. There is something other, intrinsic to the thing, although this may very well be a mere nothing, that is in effect the truth of the thing. Truth, then, is the revelation of concealment, Aletheia. But Aletheia is not a thing, it is not a being; neither is it an attribute of the thing, a characteristic somehow added to the thing. Aletheia happens. Truth happens as a letting an entity “‘be seen’ (apophansis) in its uncoveredness. The Being-true (truth) of an assertion must be understood as a Being-uncovering.” 25 I emphasize the present participle to underline the eventfulness of truth. The event of truth may happen in an assertion or, for our purposes here, in a work of art. But how does the being-uncovering happen in an artwork? Heidegger is very clear on this. “If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work” (Origin 36). This occurring is the play of revelation and concealment, a “movement” or, for lack of a better word, a “process.” Truth, as Aletheia is essentially temporal. In letting entities be seen as they essentially are it lets them be seen, so to speak, in passing. To use a spatial metaphor, we see things obliquely, sideways. In trying to thus think the being of things, equipment, and art works, Heidegger is simply trying to be attuned to the possibility of truth happening in this way, as unconcealment-concealment. Truth thus is a revelation which is also a dissembling, a simulation. The problem is that we can never tell exactly which is which. It belongs to the essence of truth to be fuzzy. In order, then, to get not so much to the truth of the work of art but to its origin, Heidegger tries to get to the ground of things, or even, underneath them. According to Heidegger, for the Greeks, the experience of the being of beings was the underlining core of things as hupokeimenon. “For them this core of the thing was something lying at the ground of the thing, something always already there” (Origin 23). The Roman-Latin translation of the term as subiectum did not carry along with it the corresponding Greek experience of the entity. Western thinking thus cannot discover what lies underneath. Latin must be content to adequate predicates to subjects, whereas in the Greek they were equiprimordial. As Derrida points out, “At the very moment

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when he calls us back to the Greek ground and to the apprehension of the thing as hupokeimenon, Heidegger implies that this originary state still covers over something, falling upon it, attacking it. The hupokeimenon, that underneath, hides another underneath” (Truth 291). The origin, as we can see, is multiple and complex. When Heidegger says “The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation” (Origin 23), he is positing yet another origin, a certain beginning of something, the root of rootlessness, so to speak. But this does not imply that there is an authentic ground beneath the inauthentic ground of the translation, for every ground is a covering over. The fundamental experience of the Greeks is perhaps already an experience of groundlessness, something which is twice removed, if you will, in the Latin translation. The question of truth thus again returns as a problem, that of the relationship between Abgrund and Aletheia. As Christopher Fynsk puts it, “the work of art achieves an identity founded on difference.” 26 So, besides standing upon the abyss of groundlessness, where does all this stand? Heidegger is trying to think the origin of the work of art. What, if anything, stands under that origin? What is the source of the origin? Things, we are told, are self-standing. Art works, like things, also stand by themselves. But that is not the case with tools. As things, they may indeed stand, but as tools, they are used. Their essence is to be utilized, and, in the process, to be worn out. In this sense, tools are what is closest to the Abgrund, and therefore, perhaps, to the origin. Hence, Heidegger’s meditation on the origin of the work of art begins with tools. “Equipment,” he says, “has a peculiar position intermediate between thing and work, assuming such a calculated ordering is permissible” (Origin 29). Heidegger is keenly aware that his own thought is here very close to calculative, instrumental thinking. Nevertheless, since the instrumentality of the instrument is part of the question he is addressing, he allows such a calculated ordering to be a kind of “heuristic device.” The artwork is an instrument that has no use. It belongs together with the thing in being a self-standing entity, and it belongs together with the instrument in being a made entity. This complex matrix is what allows Heidegger to try to get at the origin of the work of art by means of a meditation on the equipmentality of equipment; in other words, by means of the mediation of equipment. But we must remember that this matrix too is an origin in its own right. And so continues the complication and coimplication of origins. I would like now to return to Duchamp, but by a circuitous route. There is a famous (and crucial) passage in “The Origin of the Work of Art” where Heidegger arrives at his example of equipment, and, of course, of art. This is the passage where he discusses the “famous painting” of a pair of shoes by Van Gogh. Heidegger discovers a whole world in that pair of shoes, or rather, in that painting of a pair of shoes. The truth of this world, which, as Heidegger says, sets-itself-to-work in art, is permeated with a rural ideology of the

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soil and of rootedness. In firmly attaching the shoes to a peasant woman and the peasant woman, through the shoes to the earth, Heidegger’s language reaches new poetic (or some would say pathetic) heights. Heidegger throws all caution to the winds. The rigor of his caveats, say, about calculative thinking is now gone. As Derrida has pointed out, we find ourselves in a guided tour, first, in front of the painting in the museum, and then, as if by magic, out in the countryside witnessing the interaction of the earth and its peasants in their daily toil. And all this springing out of a pair of shoes. The origin of the art in question may in fact be the art of rhetoric, Heidegger’s rhetoric, which supplements what the painting leaves unsaid. Indeed, one could develop a de Manian type of reading of Heidegger in which his description of the shoes, painting, peasant, landscape, etc., could be seen as nothing but a narration of the failure of the painting to tell its story; this narration would also of course fail to tell the story of art’s failure and would thus become an allegory of its own failure. Which process would of course be nothing but truth setting itself to work. Paz confronts the following problem. He is attempting to develop a notion of critical art; not the simple question of art and society in which art’s revelation of the “true” or the “good” would make everybody a better human being, but art as a modality of critical thought. The models for critical art then emerge from a tradition that includes Aristotle (catharsis), Kant (enthusiasm), Hegel (sensuous presentation), Heidegger (the setting of the world to work), Sor Juana (the revelation of no revelation) and Duchamp (cybernetics of seeing). Does art, poetry, offer thought an alternative to the intellectual heritage claimed the above? Perhaps, and only perhaps, if we take the question of attitude, Stimmung, other than in a symbolic or figural sense, we could approach the question of repetition with a difference. I will not pursue this further, but instead, to conclude, I would like to offer my own allegory. I will simply re-describe Heidegger’s scene in the field of Duchamp’s world. I will try to play Heidegger in a different tone, turning his pathos, perhaps, into my own bathos. The question here is to try and think the equipmental character of equipment. To illustrate, we will choose an example of a common type of equipment, say, a urinal. Everyone knows what one looks like. For the purpose of visualization, let us choose a well known readymade by Duchamp, who found such objects several times. 27 What is there to see here? Everyone knows what a urinal consists of. If it is not a hole in the ground or a metal basin it will be ceramic, with or without a cover or a deodorant bar, with a center connected to a pipe, and a puddle of water at the bottom. Such gear serves to relieve oneself. Depending on the presumed users of the equipment (children, soldiers, airline passengers, top executives) matter and form will differ. Such description only confirms what we already know. The equipmental quality of equipment consists in its usefulness. But what about this

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usefulness itself. The passerby at the bus terminal relieves himself. Only here is the urinal what it is. It is more genuinely so the less he thinks about it or looks at it, or smells it, or is even aware of it. He stands and pees into it. That is how the urinal actually serves. As long as we imagine a urinal in general or simply look at the empty, unused urinal that merely stands there in its pedestal, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of equipment in truth is. From Duchamp’s work, we cannot tell where this urinal belongs. There are not even clods of “soil” or stains sticking to it that would at least hint at their use. A self-standing mingitoire and nothing else. And yet— From the dark opening of the worn inside the toilsome tread of numerous flushings stares forth. The rugged heaviness of the ceramic, the accumulated tenacity of the slow trudge (urinary tract infections, syphilis, the pain of countless micturations) the far spreading of the raw sewage. In the urinal vibrates the silent call of the earth. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining sphincters. Heidegger’s point is that the painting spoke; my point is that the readymade would tell a very different story. Like Heidegger’s, Duchamp’s era remains within the horizon of the metaphysics of modern technology. But technology, as Heidegger points out, is also a mode of revealing. Duchamp’s objets trouvés are both a critique of art’s power to “speak,” so to speak, and a revelation of the instrumentality of the modern age. Any phenomenology of art, any idea of pure aisthesis, belongs squarely within this horizon. Horizons, however, are circular. Or are they? “Everything man has handled has the fatal tendency to secrete meaning” (Appearance 24) It is not that we have lost meaning; we are meaning, but not in the sense of signification. The field of modern aesthetics is constituted as a field of representation, and as such, it ceases to be a field of aisthesis and becomes rather an epistemological field. If we follow Heidegger we can perhaps approach the neighborhood (outside the field) where literature, paintings, shoes and urinals may speak, but their secretions may be otherwise than meaning.

Notes

1. TURNS AND RETURNS, VUELTAS Y VUELTAS 1. Like the Spanish word “sentido,” the English “sense” carries both the meaning of meaning as well as of feeling and direction. 2. Octavio Paz, Obra poética (1935-1988), Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990, 163. 3. César Vallejo, Poesía completa, México: Ediciones Coyoacán, 1990, 314. 4. Leonardo Tarán, Parmenides: A Text with Translation, Commentary, and Critical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) 83. Fragment VIII line 16. 5. Jorge Luis Borges, “La esfera de Pascal,” Otras inquisiciones, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960, 13. 6. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, quoted in Alberto Moreiras, Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en América Latina, Santiago: LOM Ediciones/Universidad Arcis, 1999, 128. 7. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, 115. 8. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York: Vintage Books, 1979 10. 9. Kurt Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions, New York: Basic Books, 1962. 10. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, New York: Hill and Wang, 1986, 7ff. 11. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, 232. 12. Octavio Paz, Corriente alterna, México: Siglo XXI, 1978, 147. 13. Octavio Paz, Obra poética (1935-1988), Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990, 602. 14. Michel Serres, Hermès V: Le Passage du nord-ouest, Paris: Minuit, 1980, 165. 15. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure, Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. 16. Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et Turbulences, Paris: Minuit, 1977. 17. The splitting of the atom is a contradiction in terms. The atom is that which cannot be cut. The word atom derives from temno, to cut. To the same family belong the words time and temple, as well as teino, to have, to tend. “La crise scientifique est une crise de clôture” (Hermès V 147). Like the atomic world, the linguistic world is constituted in bifurcations, deviations, contradictions. 18. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 19. Octavio Paz, El mono gramático, in Obra poética. 20. Octavio Paz, Pasado en claro, in Obra poética.

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21. Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 84. 22. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. 23. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1972, 24. 24. Octavio Paz, “La búsqueda del presente,” in Vuelta, Jan 1991. 25. Eduardo Galeano, Memorias del fuego I: Los nacimientos. México: Siglo XXI, 1988. 26. Italo Calvino, “Games Without End,” in Cosmicomics, trans., William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968, 63. 27. Jorge Luis Borges, “El acercamiento a Almotásim,” in Ficciones, Barcelona: PlanetaAgostini, 1956, 45.

2. THE INHERITANCE OF THE LABYRINTH 1. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, Postdata, Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981, 235. 2. Cited in Enrique Krauze, “La soledad del laberinto,” Letras libres, Octubre 2000, 20. 3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 16. 4. A more proper term in English in this context might be “heritage.” The Spanish term “herencia” means both heritage and inheritance. We will use both almost interchangeably here, but on occasions, as above, we use “inheritance” to inflect the tone towards the economic and ethico-political structure of bequeathing rather than the more diffuse and abstract notion of belonging entoned by “heritage.” 5. Octavio Paz, Primeras Letras, ed. Enrico Mario Santí, Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988. 6. Cited in Paz, 9. 7. Jena-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Patricio Bulnes, Madrid, Arena 2003. 8. Joan Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid: Gredos, 1980–1991, 6 vols. 9. Diccionario de la Real Academia de la lengua española, 21st. ed. Madrid: Real Academia, 1992. 10. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 147. 11. See Claudio Lomnitz, “Times of Crisis: Historicity, Sacrifice and the Spectacle of Debacle in Mexico City, Public Culture, 15.1: 127–147. 12. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, New York: Norton, 11–12. 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1967. 14. Plato, Symposium, in, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. 15. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny.” 16. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 10–11.

3. FROM THE SUBJECT TO THE NEGATIVE AND BACK 1. Alain Badiou, Manifiesto por la filosofía, trans. Victoriano Alcantud, Madrid: Cátedra, 1990, 26.

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2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 3. Octavio Paz, “La búsqueda del presente.” 4. Patrick Dove, “Reflections on the Origin: Transculturation and Tragedy in Pedro Páramo,” Angelaki 6.1 (April 2001), 92. 5. See Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of the Chicanos, New York: Harper and Row, 1981. 6. Octavio Paz, Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, trans. Jason Wilson, New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999, 7. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 108. 8. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilismo y emancipación: Ética, Política, Derecho, ed. Santiago Zabala, Barcelona: Paidós, 2003, 46. 9. See Enrique Krauze, “La soledad del laberinto,” Letras Libres (Oct. 2000) 22. “Ver las cosas como son es en cierta manera no verlas . . . [hay que] ver poéticamente la realidad.” 10. “‘Cuando soñamos que soñamos está próximo el despertar,’ dice Novalis” Laberinto 12. 11. See Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge, 1991. 12. On the abject see Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; on the subaltern see Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 13. Ricardo Pozas, Juan Pérez Jolote: Biografía de un tzotzil, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1952. 14. Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz: Las palabras del árbol, México: Plaza y Janés, 1998, 79. 15. I have discussed the genre in my “Displaced Testimonies and Unavowed Testaments,” forthcoming. 16. Elena Poniatowska pointed out that in such forceful rhetoric, it is hard to find the little boy who cried in the middle of the room while no one answered. Palabras 191. 17. Robert Neustadt, “(Ef)facing the Face of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks in Chicano and Mexican Performance Art,” Studies in 20 th Century Literature, 25.2 (Summer 2001) 414. 18. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999 [1987], 25. Anzaldúa’s text is to a large extent a dialogue with and a refutation of many of the themes in Paz’s Laberinto. But like all refutations of Hegelian thought, she often ends up reiterating Pazian motifs instead of denying them. See my “Dialect Tics of the New Mestiza: Anzaldúa’s Unreserved Hegelianism.” 19. See Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo and the discussion in Chapter 5, below. 20. Octavio Paz, “La mirada anterior,” prologue to Carlos Castaneda, Las enseñanzas de don Juan: Una forma yaqui de conocimiento, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974, 22. 21. See Miguel León-Portilla, Visión de los vencidos: Relaciones indígenas de la conquista, 5th ed., México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1971. 22. It might be worth noting that in variant versions all the gods are sacrificed to move the sun, to no avail. “Ecatl (the wind god) kills the remaining gods, but still the sun does not move,” David Carrasco, The City of Sacrifice, Boston, Beacon Press, 1999, 81. When the wind finally manages to move the sun, it is no longer a consequence attributable to the sacrifice. 23. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 66.

4. THE ANCIENT QUARREL BETWEEN HISTORY AND POETRY 1. Octavio Paz, El arco y la lira, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1967, 185. See also, “Es Moderna nuestra Literatura,” OC 3, 62: “Because we did not have the Enlightenment

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or a bourgeois revolution—neither criticism nor guillotine—we did not experience the passionate and spiritual reaction against Criticism and its components components known as romanticism. . . . Our romantics rebelled against something they had never suffered from: the tyranny of reason,” cited by Ivon Grenier, From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom, Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 2. José Lezama Lima, “Recuerdo de lo semejante,” in Poesía completa I, Madrid: Aguilar, 1988. See also, Las eras imaginarias, Madrid: Fundamentos, 1971. See Brett Levinson, Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s “American Expresión,” Bucknell University Press, 1996. 3. Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, trans. Rachel Phillips, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974, 81. 4. Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, Paris: François Bourin, 1991. 5. Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: O, Las trampas de la fe, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982, 71. 6. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans., Anne Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 117. 7. Stephane Mallarmé, Igitur, in Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés, préface d’Yves Bonnefoy, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, 45. The English translation appears in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed., Mary Ann Caws, New York: New Directions, 1982, 93. 8. Stephane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés, in Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés, 426–7. A translation also appears in Selected Poetry and Prose, 124–5. 9. Quoted by Paz in El arco y la lira. 10. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959, 87. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Viking, 1954, 405. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 59. 13. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans., Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, 107. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans., Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1967, 20. 15. Cited in Paul de Man, “Lyric and Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 159. 16. Paul de Man, “Genesis and Genealogy (Nietzsche)” in Allegories of Reading, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 17. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 18. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight, 161. 19. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “History and Mimesis,” in Laurence A. Rickels ed., Looking After Nietzsche, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, 229. 20. “La consagración del instante,” is an essay from El arco y la lira, by Octavio Paz, 185–197; “The reality of the moment” is an expression used by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight, 162.

5. HEADS OR TAILS 1. This translation is taken from Heidegger/Fink, Heraclitus Seminar: 1966/67, University of Alabama Press, 1979. The standard Spanish translation reads: “No comprenden que lo distendido concuerda consigo mismo según multitenso coajuste, como el del arco, como el de la lira.” Los presocráticos, tr. Juan David García Bacca, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980, 1944, 243. A different English translation reads: “They do not understand how, while differing from (or: being at variance), [it] is in agreement with itself. [There is] a back-turning

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connection, tike [that] of the bow or lyre.” T.M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987, 37. 2. Mariano Picón-Salas, De la conquista a la independencia, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1944, 86. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature,” Mississippi Review, 1983 (Spring), 24. 4. Octavio Paz, ¿Aguila o sol? In Obra poética (1935–1988), Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990, 168. In the original editopn (México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1951) the section was called “Trabajos forzados,” forced labor, as that which would be imposed by a penal sentence. It might be worth recalling that the Spanish word “trabajo,” work, labor, comes from Latin tripaliare, which originally meant to torture by striking with three sticks (tres palos). See Corominas. 5. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 3. 6. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Tr. J.B. Baillie, New York: Harper and Row, 1967, 229. 7. Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 111–136. 8. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, Tr. George C. Buck and Frithjof A. Raven, Miami Linguistic Series 9 (Coral Gables, 1970) 55. Cited by Heidegger in On The Way to Language, 136. 9. Octavio Paz, La otra voz. Paz tells of how he told Breton that surrealism would never die out. “It will live a life apart (al margen); it will be the other voice.” Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, Tr. Helen R. Lane, New York: Seaver Books, 1983, 55. 10. César Vallejo, “Deshora,” Heraldos negros, en Obra Poética. 11. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979 118. 12. Próspero Saíz, The Bird of Nothing and Other Poems, Madison, WI: Ghost Pony Press, 1993, 11.

6. SUN STONE 1. I mention only a few of the critics which to a larger or lesser extent adopt this interpretation: John M. Fein, Towards Octavio Paz, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986; Pere Gimferrer, Lecturas de Octavio Paz, Barcelona: Anagrama, 1980; Ricardo Gullón, “Reverberations of the stone,” in Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. Kosrof Chiantikian, San Francisco: Kosmos 1980; Jason Wilson, Octavio Paz, Boston: Twayne, 1986; among others. Octavio Paz himself is not averse to this reading of the poem. 2. See for example John M. Fein, op. cit. 3. Eliot Weinberger, The Collected poems of Octavio Paz, New York: New Directions, 1987, 18. 4. Quoted in Donald Fogelquist, Juan Ramón Jímenez, Twane: Boston, 1976, 56. 5. Cf. Juan Ramon’s line “Inteligencia dame el nombre exacto de las cosas.” 6. Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española, vigésima edición (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1984). 7. Parmenides, Fragment VIII 34–41, quoted by Martin Heidegger in “Moira,” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrel Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, 1984, 79–80. 8. It might be interesting to compare this to Sartre’s description of the experience of the revelation of being as the presencing of the tree at the Jardin Publique in La Nausée. 9. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. 10. Sortir: du lat. sortiri, tirer au sort, ou du lat. pop. surctus, class. surrectus, de surgere, jaillir. Dictionaire de la langue française: Lexis, Paris: Larousse, 1986.

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11. T.M. Robinson’s translation. The Spanish translation by Garcia Bacca reads: “Aun los que se bañan en los mismos ríos se bañan en diferentes aguas.” See note 21. 12. Cf. Antonio Machado’s poem “Caminante no hay camino.” 13. The opening of Baudelaire’s poem reads: La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles; L’homme y passe a travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” in Les Fleurs du mal, Paris: Delmas, 1949, 22. 14. Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, 3. 15. Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe, 2 vols. ed Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar, Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1969. Heidegger reads this poem in “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 187–210. Hofstadter’s version translates the lines thus:Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold into stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown Upon the table bread and wine. 16. Wandering ones, more than a few Come to the door on darksome courses. 17. Véronique Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis, Sophia, Techne, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992, 14. 18. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 320. 19. Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem: A Discussion of Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work,” in On the Way to Language. On the relationship between spirit and flame in Heidegger see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 20. Paz tries to establish not a fusion but an intimacy with the other. Such intimacy is dependent on the dif-ference between the self and other who get carried away towards each other. Heidegger describes the intimacy between world and thing as follows: “Intimacy obtains only where the intimate divides itself cleanly and remains separate. In the midst of the two, in the between of the world and thing, in the inter, division prevails: a dif-ference,” “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 202. 21. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 129–160. The term “différance” gathers together the difference between the temporal deferring and the spatial differing in a mute “a.” Derrida calls differace a “sameness which is not identical.” Cf difherencia. 22. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 65: “As soon as we admit this continuity between the now and the not now, perception and non perception . . . we admit the other into the self-identity of the Augenblick; nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is duration to the blink, and it closes the eye.” 23. Jacques Derrida, “A peine,” in Mémoires for Paul de Man, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 24. Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, 85. 25. Gianni Vattimo, Introduzione a Heidegger (Rome: Laterza, 1985) 123. 26. Octavio Paz, “Solo a dos voces,” in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 152. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage, 1967, 279. 28. Gianni Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger i la ermeneutica, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983, 73.

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7. ON THE FIELD OF REPRESENTATION 1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka y sus precursores,” Otras inquisiciones, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960, 137–40. 2. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1975, 117. 3. J-F Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1990. 4. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990, 1978, 75. 5. Octavio Paz, “Picasso: El cuerpo a cuerpo con la pintura,” Vuelta (1977) 41. 6. Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: O, las trampas de la fe, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982, 496. 7. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 8. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Salt Seller), London: Thames and Hudson, 1973, 26: “Use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glass—but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass . . . a delay in glass as a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver.” 9. Rosalind Krauss, “The Im/Pulse To See” in Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, 63. 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 79ff. Benjamin refers to language as a decayed, fragmentary ruin. 11. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 123. 12. In Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. 13. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, 85. 14. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 194. 15. J-F Lyotard, Discours, Figure, Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1971, 60. 16. Ibid 61. Lyotard’s notion of figure is rather complex and involves a debate with Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is divided into figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix, none of which are visible as such, but only in their effects. See Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 17. Michel Serres, Hermès V: Le Passage du nord-ouest (Paris: Minuit, 1980) 165–174. 18. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 1977, 13. See also, “The Age of the World Picture,” 115–154 in the same volume. 19. Ibid 23. 20. For example by Lyotard in Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, or by John Golding in his Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, New York: Viking Press, 1972. 21. For a discussion of Duchamp’s use and transformations of perspective see Rosalind Krauss, “The Story of the Eye,” in New Literary History 21(Winter 1990)2: 284–298. 22. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 17. 23. Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 284. 24. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 261. 26. Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, 131. 27. Duchamp’s famous urinal, The Fountain, was originally signed by a certain R. Mutt, 1917, and was set to be shown at a New York exhibition by the “Society of Independent

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Artists,” whose stated purpose was to democratize art, and thus had a “no jury” evaluation process. A press account of the period reads: “When Mr. Mutt heard that payment of five dollars would permit him to send to the exhibition a work of art of any description or degree of excellence he might see fit he complied by shipping from the Quaker City a familiar article of bathroom furniture from a well known firm of that town.” Cited in William A. Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” in Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann eds. Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, 67–68. Nevertheless, the piece was rejected by the directors of the Independents, which led to Duchamp’s resignation from the Society.

Index

Acuña, Rodolfo, 127n5 Alurista, 81–83 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 127n18 Apollinaire, 118 Aristotle, 47, 48, 65, 66, 123 Bachelard, Gaston, 6–7, 9 Badiou, Alain, 31, 37, 38, 43, 126n1 Barthes, Roland, 6, 125n10 Bataille, Georges, 47 Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 61, 67, 130n13 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 116, 126n21, 131n10 Bennington, Geoffrey, 130n19, 131n16 Bergson, Henri, 66 Blanchot, Maurice, 53, 128n6 Borges, Jorge Luis, 4–5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 56, 113, 125n5, 126n27, 131n1 Bruns, Gerald, 97, 130n14 Cadava, Eduardo, 127n11 Calvino, Italo, 12, 126n26 Canfield, William, 131n27 Carrasco, David, 127n22 Connor, Peter, 127n11 de Chirico, Giorgio, 118 de Man, Paul, 5, 10, 63, 66, 123, 125n7, 126n21, 128n15, 130n23 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 59, 73, 127n7, 128n13, 129n3

Derrida, Jacques, 18–25, 37, 66, 120–122, 126n3, 128n17, 130n19, 130n21, 130n22, 130n23, 131n23 Dove, Patrick, 32, 127n4 Duchamp, Marcel, 10, 113–119, 122, 123–124, 126n22, 131n2, 131n3, 131n8, 131n27 Euclid, 9, 115, 117 Fein, John M., 129n1 Fogelquist, Donald, 129n4 Foster, Hal, 131n9 Fóti, Véronique, 100, 101, 102, 105, 129n1 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 26, 34, 126n12, 126n15 Fynsk, Christopher, 121, 131n26 Galeano, Eduardo, 126n25 García Bacca, Juan David, 128n1 Gimferrer, Pere, 129n1 Gödel, Kurt, 5–10, 125n8 Gracián, Baltazar, 57 Grenier, Ivon,4n1 Guattari, Félix, 73, 127n7, 129n3 Gullón, Ricardo, 129n1 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 11, 34, 36, 43, 57, 60, 65, 72, 77, 79, 93–95, 96–105, 107–111, 116, 117, 118, 119–124, 126n23, 128n1, 129n7, 129n8, 130n14, 133

134

Index

130n15, 130n17, 130n18, 130n19, 130n20, 130n28, 131n7, 131n14, 131n18, 131n22, 131n24, 131n25, 131n26 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 2, 20, 32, 38, 39, 47, 48, 54, 55, 57, 59, 62–65, 66, 75–76, 123, 127n18, 129n5, 129n6 Heraclitus, 71–72, 96, 128n1 Hofstadter, Albert, 130n15, 131n22, 131n24 Hofstadter, Douglas, 5, 6, 125n8 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 37, 57 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 79, 129n8 Jaspers, Karl, 6 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 80, 91, 92 Kamuf, Peggy, 126n3 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 59, 119, 123 Kojève, Alexandre, 75, 129n5 Krauss, Rosalind, 116, 131n9 Krauze, Enrique, 18, 126n2, 127n9 Kristeva, Julia, 127n12 Kuenzli, Rudolph, 131n27 Lacan, Jacques, 37, 75 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 66, 67, 68, 71, 75, 82, 105, 128n18 León-Portilla, Miguel, 127n21 Levinson, Brett, 128n2 Lezama Lima, José, 51, 128n2 Lomnitz, Claudio, 126n11 Lope de Vega, 114 López Velarde, Ramón, 57, 67 Lucretius, 9 Lyotard, Jean-François, 9, 37, 114, 117, 118, 119, 125n15, 131n3, 131n15, 131n16, 131n20 Machado, Antonio, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 92, 130n12 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 21, 53–57, 62, 69, 73, 92, 95, 114, 128n7, 128n8 Malraux, André, 20 Martín, Abel, 20, 21, 27 Michelet, Jules, 6 Moreiras, Alberto, 5, 125n6 Mutt, R., 131n27

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 22, 24, 28, 31, 37, 116, 126n7, 126n10, 126n16, 127n2, 127n11, 127n23, 131n11 Neustadt, Robert, 41, 127n17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 9, 12, 40, 46, 57, 58–69, 89, 106, 109, 114, 125n6, 126n13, 128n11, 128n12, 128n13, 128n14, 128n16, 128n19, 130n27, 130n28 Novalis, 37, 127n10 Parmenides, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 93–94, 107, 125n4, 129n7 Pascal, Blaise, 4–9, 53, 125n14, 125n16, 128n4 Paz, Octavio: ¿Aguila o sol?, 2, 73–79, 91–93, 129n4; El arco y la lira, 53, 56, 57, 60, 66, 71–72, 97, 105, 106, 107, 127n1, 128n9; Blanco, 7; “La búsqueda del presente”, 8, 11, 126n24, 127n3; Children of the Mire, 53, 58, 59, 64, 69, 75, 128n3; The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 129n3; Corriente alterna, 8, 125n12; Los hijos del limo, 53, 64, 69, 127n19; Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, 33, 127n6; El laberinto de la soledad, 15–28, 32–49, 57, 67, 68, 73, 126n1, 126n2, 127n9, 127n10, 127n18, 128n10; Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, 11, 118, 124, 126n22, 131n4; “La mirada anterior”, 38, 127n20; El mono gramático, 9, 125n19; Obra Poética (1935-1988), 125n2, 125n13; La otra voz, 79, 108, 129n9; Pasado en claro, 10, 125n20; “Picasso: El cuerpo a cuerpo con la pintura”, 114, 116, 131n5; Piedra de sol, 7, 89–107; Postdata, 16, 23, 126n1; Primeras letras, 20, 126n5; “Signos en rotación”, 7; “Solo a dos voces”, 107–111, 130n26; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, 53, 114, 131n6; Vuelta, 7, 8; Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad, 126n1 Picasso, 114, 116, 117, 131n5 Picón-Salas, Mariano, 72, 129n2 Plato, 4, 26, 46, 117, 126n14 Poniatowska, Elena, 38, 40, 127n14, 127n16

Index Pozas, Ricardo, 38, 127n13 Rickles, Lawrence, 128n19 Rimbaud, Arthur, 56, 57 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 7, 125n7 Robinson, T. M., 128n1 Saíz, Próspero, 83–88, 129n12 Sannouillet, Michel, 131n2, 131n8 Santí, Enrico Mario, 126n5 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 129n8 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 57 Serres, Michel, 9, 52, 117, 131n13, 131n17 Shakespeare, 3, 19, 24 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 53, 114, 115, 116, 123, 128n5, 131n6 Spivak, Gayatri, 127n12

135

Thales of Miletus, 117, 118 Trakl, Georg, 98–100, 101–103, 103, 106, 130n15, 130n19 Valéry, Paul, 44 Vallejo, César, 2, 80–81, 83, 86, 88, 125n3, 129n10 Van Gogh, Vincent, 7, 122 Vasconcelos, José, 67 Vattimo, Gianni, 36, 37, 110, 127n8, 130n25, 130n28 Weinberger, Eliot, 129n3 Wilson, Jason, 127n6, 129n1 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 81, 129n11